Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE DEATH OF A PRESIDENCY

  CHAPTER TWO STARTING OUT

  CHAPTER THREE STARRING RONALD REAGAN

  CHAPTER FOUR NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

  CHAPTER FIVE JOINING THE FIGHT

  CHAPTER SIX THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

  CHAPTER SEVEN RONALD REAGAN’S JOURNEY

  CHAPTER EIGHT THE RISE OF TIP O’NEILL

  CHAPTER NINE HERO

  CHAPTER TEN FIGHTING SEASON

  CHAPTER ELEVEN BATTLEFIELD PROMOTION

  CHAPTER TWELVE TURNING

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN SUMMIT

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN PARTNERS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN TIP AT THE TOP

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN DEAL

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN LEBANON AND GRENADA

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN VICTORY AND SURVIVAL

  CHAPTER NINETEEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

  CHAPTER TWENTY HURRAH!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE COMMON GROUND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO LAST BATTLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE LEGACY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT CHRIS MATTHEWS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Dedicated to the memory of:

  L. Kirk O’Donnell

  and

  Michael K. Deaver

  “There is nothing I love as much as a good fight.”

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  PREFACE

  Visitors to Washington are taken with its quiet grandeur. Just like they saw in the postcards, they witness the beauty of the Mall stretching from one horizon to the other. They see the Capitol itself up there on its hill, pay respects to the beloved Lincoln sitting high in his memorial, and gaze like children at the tall, clean obelisk honoring the city’s namesake.

  The truth is, no loud commerce or clanking industry disturbs the peace; no smokestacks darken the skies even in the distance. Tourists, generally speaking, are respectful rather than boisterous. Even the bureaucracy, busy along its daytime corridors, fails to shatter the stillness. Yet for all the statues and monuments loyally attesting to what’s gone before, Washington is very much a living city.

  And what makes it so is its jamboree of human voices engaged in discourse, debates, discussion, argument, compromise, leaks, gossip, criticism, and commentary, not to mention speechmaking. Undeniably the city’s signature output, it’s been this way since General Washington and Pierre L’Enfant together on horseback envisioned our new nation’s capital in the late eighteenth century. It’s a place where talking matters, and even more important, who’s talking to whom.

  Since the moment of its creation the city has been marked in every era by voices. Year in and year out, the questions they hurl into the air lie at the center of the American conversation, and this ritual of the voices is what animates our government.

  And always there come the responding questions from the country: Shall the people hold sway? Will the winning faction deliver on its promises? Will the losing faction give way? Will a divided electorate see a spirit of compromise? These are the recurring quandaries that separate action from stalemate, a working democracy from one seized by dysfunction.

  The framers of the American Constitution, who also made Washington the capital, established two great offices. One is the president of the United States; the other, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The role of the first is to lead the country; the province of the Speaker, through custom and his prerogative to set the House agenda, is to control the government’s purse strings. Not a dollar can be allocated that the Congress hasn’t guaranteed by law or specifically appropriated.

  This historic arrangement makes simple human bargaining a central task for the two leaders. The check-and-balance relationship between president and Speaker can either propel the government forward or not. Put plainly, they either talk, or they don’t. When they join in alliance, the government rumbles ahead. When their interests collide, something’s got to give. Either one side prevails, or a compromise is struck. Otherwise, the republic stalls.

  This means that, for the Constitution to work, the two must be open to the larger picture, to resist base obstructionism, to accommodate differences for the common good. Historically, this coupling of president and Speaker has been a tricky one that encourages a choreography both quick-footed and wary.

  I was witness, with eye and heart, to one of the most celebrated of these pairings. The time was the 1980s, the president was Ronald Reagan, and the Speaker was Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Both were Irish-Americans. Both men were larger than life. The former was a California conservative Republican, elected in a landslide. He arrived in Washington to his very first job there, walking into the White House on Inauguration Day 1981. The latter was a New England liberal Democrat, a hardened, blooded Washington veteran who’d entered the House of Representatives in 1953 and had spent the twenty-eight years since finessing and cajoling his way to the top of the Hill.

  The outsider and the insider: these two moved together in a remarkable, if sometimes rough, tandem. They argued mightily, each man belting out his separate, deeply cherished political philosophy—but then they would, both together, bow to the country’s judgment. Decisions were made, action taken, outcomes achieved. They honored the voters, respected the other’s role. Each liked to beat the other guy, not sabotage him.

  During this period, government met its deadlines. Members of Congress listened and acted. Debates led to solutions. Shutdowns were averted. What needed to proceed did, and America’s citizens were the beneficiaries.

  Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were definite political rivals. Just not always.

  People in politics, like everyone else, like to talk about how different things were in the old days. They point to the relationship between President Reagan and Tip O’Neill—old-school guys, only two years apart in age, who were so different yet not, on some level, that different—whose commitment to comity came out of their shared integrity. They disagreed on the role of government, knew it, admitted it face-to-face. But they put concentrated effort into trying to get along even as they challenged each other. Why, we wonder, can’t it be that way again?

  Why won’t our leaders work to accommodate each other, employing civility as they cooperate to accomplish goals in the country’s best interests? Why must we continue to suffer their relentless gumming up of the works? What in our national character, in the ways we choose to deal with one another and respect different viewpoints, has changed so since the days of Reagan and O’Neill? How can we win back the faith that our republic is working?

  Today we have government by tantrum. Rather than true debate, we get the daily threat of filibuster. Shutdowns are engineered as standard procedure. In place of hard-earned statecraft we witness new tricks of the trade. Presidents make “recess” appointments to end-run Senate consent. Tea Partyers in the House of Representatives act as if voting “Nay” constitutes twenty-first-century governance. Democrats in the Senate, for a while, refused to approve the annual budget—withholding consent to skip the embarrassment of admitting dire fiscal reality. Brinkmanship grabs today’s headlines even as public faith dies a little with each disappointing eleventh-hour deal.

  What’s to be done? I truly believe it doesn’t have to be this way. And the story I’m about
to tell of these two extraordinary figures will show you why. My goal is to bring you the true account of what took place. Our country is less in need of a myth than a real-life account of one imperfect leader dealing with another. It serves no purpose in this time of habitual conflict to spin a tale of happy harmony; far better to illustrate how two very different figures managed to make politics work.

  Ronald Reagan was dismissed by his enemies as a Hollywood lightweight, Tip O’Neill as a Tammany-style ward heeler. I refuse to add a third cartoon to those two. The credit for their civility goes not to their off-duty socializing and shared Irish stories: it was their joint loyalty to American self-government. Tip’s oldest son, an elected politician himself, put it best in a 2012 New York Times column: “What both men deplored more than each other’s political philosophy was stalemate, and a country that was so polarized by ideology and party politics that it could not move forward. There were tough words and important disagreements . . . yet a stronger commitment to getting things done.” They respected elections, accepted who had won, knew that duty came with office. It’s all true.

  I was there.

  “Jody’s a soldier.”

  Chief speechwriter Rick Hertzberg’s final salute to Jimmy Carter’s finest warrior. When all was lost, we still had to face the dawn.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DEATH OF A PRESIDENCY

  “Governor . . . there ain’t no tonight tonight.”

  —JODY POWELL, PRESIDENT CARTER’S PRESS SECRETARY, ELECTION EVE 1980

  When we switched from Air Force One to the presidential helicopter that election morning, I couldn’t help thinking about the vanquished candidate sitting right there ahead of me in Marine One. He looked so rigid as to be frozen, or even, as it gruesomely occurred to me at the time, to be in the early stages of rigor mortis. Yet at that moment, he was still the president of the United States and so, despite everything, was being briefed by staff on matters unrelated to the situation he was now having to face. Couldn’t such a business-as-usual exercise have at least been put off, if nothing else, for decency’s sake? As I’ve often told people over the years, that helicopter ride into Plains was like being inside a giant bird, one that was dying.

  As we headed low over the swirling grass, the reality of small-town Georgia suddenly came into view. Then a scratchy voice sounded over Secret Service chief Jerry Parr’s walkie-talkie: “Dancer’s on the ground.” Mrs. Carter was there, waiting. Plains was where they were from, and it was where they would soon be headed back. On the ground, I walked past the train depot where, four years before, Carter had appeared on the platform to be applauded and cheered after winning the presidency. Passing the little station building, through the window I glimpsed two people alone in the room—Jimmy and Rosalynn. He’d asked to tell her himself. Just the two of them were now standing there. The long journey he’d convinced her to take with him was ending in defeat.

  • • •

  There were those in the Carter White House who believed that Ronald Reagan—a popular governor of California who’d made his name and fame originally in the movies, and later on TV—was the “best” Republican candidate our man could face in his reelection campaign. To them, Reagan seemed a handsome, likable lightweight, reliant on feel-good rhetoric and upbeat platitudes. However, by the fall of 1980, with the race in full swing, the Carter staffers saw the exorbitant price of this mistake.

  For my part, I was about to experience from a punishing vantage point just how hard it was to beat Ronald Reagan.

  It’s not that there hadn’t been warnings from those who’d previously made the mistake of underestimating him. Former California governor Pat Brown, denied a third State House term in 1966 by a Reagan landslide, had dropped in at the White House back in the spring specifically to pass on those lessons he’d learned the hard way. “You’re going to say he’s an actor and it won’t work,” Brown explained to Carter communications director Gerald Rafshoon. “That he’s not really that smart and it won’t work; that he’s lazy and it won’t work.”

  What he was describing with earned exasperation was the difficulty of getting any contempt, scorn, insult, or even past position to stick to Reagan. Under attack, the man was a master. However, having seen him lose the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford only four years earlier, we knew Ronald Reagan wasn’t invincible. The trouble in the fall of 1980 was, he could well be something far worse: inevitable. The main asset any Republican candidate brought to this race for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was that he wasn’t Jimmy Carter.

  Reagan had already proved to be more than that. Beaten by George H. W. Bush in the Iowa Republican caucus in late January 1980, he rocketed back five weeks later with a decisive win in New Hampshire. There he not only disarmed the local voters but captivated the entire country when he sharply rebuked the moderator of the candidates’ debate who’d asked to have Reagan’s microphone switched off during a dispute. “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,” he reminded the fellow. Which was quite true—even if the man’s name was Breen, not Green—since the Reagan campaign treasury was indeed footing the bill for the event.

  It was the perfect moment for a man who’d picked and long perfectly played the role of a lifetime: the heroic citizen-politician. Yet his nifty retort up in New Hampshire also made for an homage to Reagan’s own Hollywood past, appropriating brilliantly a line from Frank Capra’s 1948 political drama, State of the Union. At the end of the movie, Spencer Tracy’s character, vying for the Republican presidential nomination, must also fight for his right to speak. “Don’t you shut me off, I’m paying for this broadcast,” he threatens.

  Still, despite such warnings as Pat Brown’s, Carter staffers continued to pin their hopes on Reagan securing his party’s nod. With his right-wing foreign policy, his old notions about making Social Security contributions “voluntary,” and his early crusading against Medicare, Ronald Reagan appeared a more obviously vulnerable target than a serious contender like Bush or Gerald Ford (had he jumped into the fray). Looking back, I’d have to say certain Carter people were in a state of denial as we watched this guy keep on coming.

  Reagan’s superbly delivered quip, however, wasn’t the only legacy of his New Hampshire victory. On the eve of that triumph he made the decision to reshape himself politically. Choosing a new campaign manager, conservative Irish-Catholic William J. Casey, who headed the OSS—the predecessor to the CIA—in Europe during World War II, he moved his base of operation off the West Coast. The man who spent his free time with the newly wealthy of Southern California was going gritty, forging a connection with the kinds of voters he’d not previously courted. Whatever roles Reagan had chosen to play in recent years, on and off the screen, he was now pushing further back into his life’s repertoire.

  It had been in 1940 that Reagan, then twenty-nine years old and only three years into his movie career, had been cast as George “the Gipper” Gipp in the film Knute Rockne—All American. It was the part of the stricken Notre Dame football hero whose famed deathbed words, “Win just one for the Gipper,” would years later rally Notre Dame to a comeback victory. It now offered the presidential hopeful an evocative nickname. It would be one that spelled votes.

  Forty years later, the surviving “Gipper” began aiming his campaign directly at those disaffected Democrats—the Irish and Italians and Polish-Americans, and other hardworking, proud, but frustrated citizens who just didn’t “get” Jimmy Carter, who were furious at the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, enraged at our flags being burned and trampled on by bearded militants from a place we didn’t want to hear about—who were more than ready to hear his message.

  Reinventing himself, Reagan was no longer the Hollywood guy, the hunk in swim trunks or jodhpurs. Instead, he’d morphed into if not quite an Irishman’s Irishman then certainly a recognizable fellow ethnic. He was entitled, of course, being descended on his father’s side from immigrants who’d left County Tipperary behind in the mid-nineteenth century. But it also a
mounted to more than that. Like the cowboy stars who became their characters—John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry—Reagan would smoothly sand over where reality began and scripts left off. Now he wore the aura of a Notre Dame hero, though one who’d never actually attended Notre Dame, and became a beacon to its “subway alumni” across the country. They, plus millions of other folks just like them, soon would be known by quite a different name: “Reagan Democrats.”

  Along with the other Carter speechwriters, I watched Reagan dominate the Republican convention that summer. You couldn’t help admiring a guy who would come up that summer with such a neatly confounding bait-and-switch as this: “The president lately has been saying that I am irresponsible. And you know, I’ll admit to that if he’ll confess he’s responsible.” What’s the answer to that? You only dig yourself in deeper with every attempt.

  And not only was Reagan, once anointed his party’s choice, putting the blame for the country’s seemingly sorry state on the man in the White House—which is standard operating procedure for any opposition candidate—but there was something about his reach that struck me as truly audacious. What he seemed to be implying was that everything wrong in the world was now the fault of Jimmy Carter. His taking such an approach forced his rival, for his part, to defend absolutely everything voters didn’t like—absolutely everything—beginning, not ending, with the humiliation of having our flag trampled on every night by scruffy, hateful Iranians.

  Reagan had a mischievous way of sticking Carter with this burden of all things bad. “Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done’? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work’? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this’?” He was forcing voters to imagine themselves as cheerleaders for a gridiron squad that again and again kept fumbling the pigskin.