At the time, Kathy and I were dating and heading toward marriage. Rik and I and the other speechwriters would work into the night, then Kathy would join us for late dinners.
My best Carter speechwriting memories, ironically, are of the failed reelection campaign. I was on board Air Force One during that last exhausting week, when in one Saturday President Carter stopped at five different Texas cities, and then headed to Milwaukee and Chicago. We got to bed at about two in the morning only to be awakened two hours later with the word that the Iranian parliament had voted on what might be acceptable conditions for the release of our fifty hostages. On the way back to Washington, those of us bumped to the second plane were gleeful and starting to plan the second term. We assumed that the hostages were going to come home before the election and that Jimmy Carter actually was going to pull what the Republicans were calling his “October Surprise.”
It didn’t turn out that way. The Iranian conditions were still unreasonable, and the impression the voters got was that President Carter had been humiliated. When defeat came in an election-eve call from pollster Patrick Caddell, we on the staff endured it together. My departure from the White House took place at twenty minutes to noon on Ronald Reagan’s Inaugural day.
Opportunity would knock again soon. Early in 1981, Martin Franks, a young researcher at the Democratic National Committee, was named executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He and his boss, California congressman Tony Coelho, hired me to work for them behind the scenes with House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., the last Democratic leader to survive the Reagan landslide.
Within a few months, Tip’s administrative assistant resigned and the Speaker named me as his replacement. It had taken me a decade to rise from Capitol policeman to the top staff position on Capitol Hill. Administrative assistant to the Speaker: It was to be the greatest—and toughest—public service experience of my life so far. For the next six years I worked for a man who was a mountain of courage, history, and goodwill.
When the tension between President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill began to grow, I was one of those urging him to stand and challenge the White House. I think he liked that. Somewhere in his heart, he already had decided to fight. “I like the way you carry yourself,” he said, as a way to explain the trust he had placed in me.
Tip O’Neill was who he was long before I got there. All I did was convince him that he could go on television and say the things that he felt out loud. My job was to construct a counter-pulpit to the one in the White House. It turned out to be a wonderful tonic for Tip. I think he really enjoyed it, although he would much rather have spent those golden years as top kick to an activist Democratic president.
Nothing gives me a better feeling about the Hill than my memory from those six years with Tip of a Republican congressman crossing the floor to ask a Democrat he’d been debating what he had planned for the weekend and to say hello to his wife. That is the civil republic our Founding Fathers must have imagined all those years ago in my hometown of Philadelphia.
I respect men and women who take the risk to run for Congress. It takes guts. It’s all pass/fail. And it’s personal. You lose and you’re a loser. Your friends feel sorry for you and for the rest of your family. “Oh, they should have elected you,” people keep saying to you when you’re alone. It’s always there in your heart. It never goes away. Anyone who risks that kind of public rejection deserves respect.
And to those turned off by the fighting and shouting on Capitol Hill, let me offer a warning: The day we stop fighting, prepare yourselves for a new and dangerous form of government in this country. Democracy is, by nature, noisy. And as we saw in Florida, it doesn’t always work so well.
* * *
By 1992 I had been writing a syndicated column for the San Francisco Examiner for four years. To make my point, in a piece I wrote mocking the pathetic voter turnout in the spring primaries that had nominated Bill Clinton for president, I noted that just 15 percent of the adults in Michigan had bothered to vote on March 17. That was the same percentage of South Africa’s adult population that had voted in their national elections that same day. But in South Africa at that time only the whites were permitted to vote.
Swaziland, the country where I had served in the Peace Corps, was bordered by South Africa on three sides. As American volunteers living there, we were never allowed to cross that border. The apartheid government did not want men and women like us contaminating its society with our liberal attitudes on race relations. Within a few days of my arrival, in fact, a commentator on the SABC, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, attacked our contingent in Swaziland as “do-gooding intellectuals.” In a menacing tone he added that an earlier Peace Corps group had been kicked out of the country for getting involved in local politics. The truth was, the British had just given Swaziland its independence that September 1968. We were the first Peace Corps group to ever enter the country.
I believe that you only really pay attention to what you discover for yourself. Before coming to the subcontinent, my feelings toward South Africa were the usual mix. I knew that racial supremacy was wrong. At the same time, I couldn’t help but marvel at the spunk of those tough Afrikaner farmers who had built up the country and held out against the British in the Boer War.
However, one’s attitude quickly changes when one becomes, even in the slightest way, a marked enemy of such a country. For the entire two years we were nestled just across the border and denied entry to the nation that virtually surrounded us. The U.S. government did nothing in protest, no doubt fearing, correctly, that some of our group might cause trouble if forced to comply with the apartheid rules.
We couldn’t cross the border, but many South Africans came to Swaziland. Desperate for a ride, I once boarded one of the big South African buses that would occasionally lumber through the southern part of the country where I taught business to the local traders. The driver insisted that I take a seat in a small compartment up front. “No Europeans in the back,” he said, as he moved some cargo so I could have space to sit. I also got a good taste of the South African mentality watching the young white men arriving to spend drunken weekends with the Swazi bar girls. Many of my impressions of South Africa came from listening to the SABC on my shortwave radio and reading the Rand Daily Mail, which managed daily the feat of juxtaposing triumphs like Christiaan Barnard’s miraculous heart transplants with less upbeat matters such as the relentless enforcement of “immorality laws” banning sexual contact between whites and blacks.
My first glimpse of life within South Africa was the night my fellow volunteer Steve Hank and I spent in Johannesburg on the way home. Both film buffs, we went to see the movie Woodstock. What I didn’t realize until later was how much of the film had been edited for local consumption. What I did experience right away was the creepy feeling you get living as a white in a country where every day blacks have fresh reasons for hating you. You don’t know how horrible it is to go into a restaurant where only whites can go and to be served by black waiters until you’ve done it.
Twelve years later, I returned to Swaziland with my wife, Kathy. We were on a three-country tour of Africa with the United States Information Agency, giving lectures about how the media works in a free society. Back in the country where I had spent two years and had felt at home, I was stunned to confront for the first time local hostility toward America. The Swazi people with whom I had lived and worked had nothing bad to say about the United States—ever. The fact was that Swaziland was not a very political country from 1968 to 1971.
What a difference a decade had made! Meeting with some students at the university, I saw how much our country’s support for South Africa was costing us. Some of the young people were spouting the predictable Marxist line on U.S. foreign policy, and they had all the talking points.
“The first successful move against imperialism took place in 1917,” said one especially militant student from the back of the lecture hall.
“The whole of U.S. policy in Africa is dictated by economics.”
My attempts to explain that there was opposition to the Reagan administration’s policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa did no good. Afterward, when I asked the instructor to explain this particularly aggressive student’s story, he told me, “He was in jail for a year in South Africa.”
In 1985 I caught another inside glimpse into South African racial politics when U.S. congressman Bill Gray, a fellow Philadelphian, asked me to join a congressional delegation to the country. There was one stop on the trip that I will never forget nor fully comprehend. President P. W. Botha, the last of the die-hard Afrikaners, received us at his Indian Ocean retreat, known as the Wilderness. Located halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, it is a spectacular spot tucked between the mountains and the Indian Ocean. A sunny outpost of palm trees, red-bloomed hibiscus, and clean Dutch architecture, the peaks of the Great Karoo Mountains rising above and the deep blue sea beyond, the scene is direct from an artist’s easel.
And there we were—a U.S. delegation composed mostly of African-American congressmen, meeting in a seaside paradise reserved for whites. I think Botha had the idea that I, as a top aide to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was along to keep watch over our largely African-American group. He admonished his guests not to expect change overnight. Any reforms would have to be sold to the white voters. After all, he said, South Africa is a “democracy.”
Even more bizarre was the backdrop to the conference. Throughout the entire late-morning meeting I could hear the noises of white vacationing families waiting in line at the snack bar outside. It could have been the lunchtime scene at Ocean City, New Jersey, with kids and parents waiting for their hot dogs and hamburgers.
For the visiting American congressmen, lunch would be completely different.
After President Botha ended the morning meeting, we moved to a room upstairs. There we were greeted by a gigantic dining table attended by a cadre of black waiters each in a paisley costume and fez. For two hours we were treated to food, wine, and service redolent of the raj.
By year’s end, the U.S. Congress had passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over Ronald Reagan’s veto, slamming tough sanctions on South Africa. I favored the decision to cut off all U.S. investment, not in hope of smothering the South African economy but in hope that it would wake up the white government to reality. I may have been right. In 1989, a bitter and frustrated Botha suffered a stroke and was forced to retire by the young members of his Nationalist party who were ready to bite the bullet. Their leader was the visionary F. W. de Klerk, who replaced Botha and quickly legalized the African National Congress. He also released Nelson Mandela from his twenty-eight years of imprisonment and this prepared his country for democratic rule.
In 1994, ABC’s Good Morning America sent me to South Africa to cover the very first all-races election. I had won the assignment by convincing GMA executive producer Bob Reichblum that the language and cross-cultural skills I’d gained in Swaziland a generation before would make me the perfect correspondent.
When the ABC producers and I arrived in Johannesburg on the eve of the election, the white diehards had begun their bombing campaign. They started by detonating a bomb right outside the ANC headquarters.
It didn’t work. “Although they are scared,” local reporter Rich Mkhondo told me, “the bombing is actually encouraging people to vote.”
“I’ll be damned if the bombers are going to keep me from voting,” one woman told me.
A quarter-century ago, the world had just thirty democracies. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, viewed their future with pessimism: “Democracy is beginning to look like monarchy. It is the place where the world was, not where it is going. So America is not what countries are going to be like. For the rest of our natural lives we will be in a world in which there are very few of us and a great many of them.”
Fortunately, this was that rare occasion where the great Pat Moynihan turned out to be wrong. The world begins the twenty-first century with 120 democracies, including many with little or no history of self-government. South Africa, Bangladesh, Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Taiwan, South Korea, and many others all enjoy freedom of speech, the right to hold public meetings, and an independent media. Compare this to the 1970s, when even free multiparty elections were a rarity outside of Europe and North America.
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think democracy is the only way to keep a check on governmental power. You have to be able to turn the bums out from time to time. I think the United States should continue to share that hard-earned lesson. The more countries that hold elections, the fewer dictatorships the world will have to endure. The more true self-government, the more the world’s people will benefit from basic human rights. And countries with true freedom of expression, true freedom of religion, are generally inhospitable to warmongers. One of the highlights of 2001 was the decision at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec to limit participation to countries committed to free elections. As my friends in South Africa understood all too well, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”
Tip O’Neill
The voice on the phone was familiar, and it was angry, “I don’t mind you making a fool out of yourself, but you’re not going to make one out of me!” It was Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., the famous Democratic Speaker of the House I served during his six-year ideological brawl with Republican president Ronald Reagan. Two years into retirement his full-throttle partisan rage had locked onto a new target: me.
How in the world, he demanded to know, could I have said on CBS This Morning the previous day that Dan Quayle had earned more points than Lloyd Bentsen in the vice-presidential debate? Everybody knew Bentsen, the senior senator from Texas, had killed the young Indiana senator. What was I up to, saying such a ridiculous thing? What kind of game was I playing?
From the rough tone in his voice and the unusually early hour—it was barely eight on a Saturday morning—I quickly deduced what had happened. My old boss had just endured an entire night of gin rummy, with pals giving him relentless grief for the idiotic verdict “his guy” had delivered that morning.
If it had been anybody other than Tip I would have lined up my excuses. I had been honestly impressed with Quayle’s appearance. But I must have been crazy to score the debate on points when the only exchange anyone remembered was Bentsen’s roundhouse punch that came after Quayle had dared compare his own position in Congress to that of another senator running for national office back in 1960.
“I knew Jack Kennedy. I worked with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was my friend. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” Bentsen had sneered. I was a fool not to know that the networks would replay it again and again over the following days. Realizing that he had made his point, and remembering that it always was a mismatch between us, Tip ended his early-morning assault, switching his giant voice from growl to gruff: “How’s Kathy? What’s up with the family? Talk to you later.”
I was lucky to know and serve Tip O’Neill in what many felt was his finest hour as a Democrat, or more important, as an American leader. I don’t claim to be objective. I was there when the big, white-haired guy from the street corners of North Cambridge stood alone, reminding us all that when we ask God to bless America, we are not praying just for the young, the healthy, and the rich. When people ask me what it was like working for Tip O’Neill, and about the man himself, I think of a moment that has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, or with politics at all—except in the most personal sense of the word.
It was a snowy afternoon in March 1982. We were sitting, the Speaker and I, in one of those miniature Lear jets that corporate executives use to zip about the country. But the weather was anything but zippy. Through the window I could see the snow piling deep on the National Airport runway,
the wheels of the landing gear beginning to disappear, the glass on the windows starting to freeze, the image of the Air Florida disaster throbbing in my head. Just weeks before a plane taking off from this same airport with too much ice on its wings had never cleared the Potomac. That thought was with me when I caught the eye of the giant figure sitting in the plane’s backmost seat. I wondered what perversity of chance-taking had led him to take the seat farthest to the rear, making it all the more difficult for the little plane to get up off the snow.
“What are you worrying about?” issued from the face beneath the Irish tweed walking hat. I thought but didn’t say: “We’re about to fly this midget plane out into God knows what. Even if we’re lucky enough to take off, we could end up slipping through the ice of Lake Erie, never to be seen again!” And why were we taking this little out-and-back jaunt anyway? Because some freshman congressman from a working-class district near Detroit had asked Tip to speak for him, to liven up a couple of afternoon fundraisers that nobody back in Washington would ever hear of or care about—unless we didn’t make it back.
Really, what was I worrying about?
Some questions have no reasonable, much less polite, answers, especially when they come from the boss. Mumbling something about the “weather,” I tried to forget the powerful presence before me as I returned to the white-knuckled hell of that frost-covered porthole.
What was Tip O’Neill like to work for? That’s what he was like. I’m not saying he didn’t worry—he just didn’t let people see him do it, even as he was taking his “all politics is local” brand of leadership up into a little plane and doing battle with the gale force reality of early 1980s Reaganism.
Let’s not forget the circumstances back then. A conservative president had just come to town. Jimmy Carter was banished back to Georgia, his party routed. Ronald Reagan was charming the country with his affability while claiming a mandate for big Pentagon budgets and “supply-side” economic policies at home. Liberals, the few who still admitted to the label, sulked in bitter, humiliated silence. Except for one hulking white-haired guy who refused to quit.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 160