Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  My grandest political job—the inspiration for this book—was in every way a dream one. Even now I still have trouble believing how incredibly lucky I was. It was in 1981 that I was hired to be administrative assistant to the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr.—better known as Tip—and soon found myself seated behind an imposing desk, suddenly more an insider in those marble hallways than I ever had fantasized.

  Here’s the story of how I got there.

  In the late winter of 1971, I found myself returning to the United States after living and working for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kingdom of Swaziland. Turning down posts elsewhere, I’d been seized by the allure of Africa, jumping at the chance to engage actively there in economic development. It was the Vietnam era and I saw volunteering for the Peace Corps as a positive role I could take on for my country in the world. I’d majored in economics at Holy Cross, had gotten a full-ride scholarship to the University of North Carolina for graduate school, where I had spent the winter of 1967–68 as a devout supporter of antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

  The notion of the Peace Corps appealed not only to my romantic idealism but my readiness to face a rite of passage. Who knows how these things are truly connected. My hunch is that the wild confidence I would now show—knocking on the doors of Capitol Hill offices where I knew no one—originated in that exhilarating period when I zipped around the back roads of southern Africa on a Suzuki 120, speaking my limited Zulu and trying to teach modern business methods to Swazi villagers at remote trading posts.

  During a break from my job in Swaziland, I made my way, often hitchhiking, up through East Africa, with assorted adventures along the way. It was during a trip on the overnight Rhodesian Railways train from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in old Mozambique to Bulawayo that I stayed up enthralled by Ted Sorensen’s memoir, Kennedy. I learned that he, at twenty-four, had been appointed, pretty much out of the blue in 1953, to be legislative assistant to the newly elected senator John F. Kennedy. Before this, the two hadn’t really known each other, but JFK’s hiring instincts proved impeccable. Sorensen, both as speechwriter and advisor, quickly revealed himself to be an indispensable player in his boss’s skyrocketing career.

  It was heady stuff, reading such a thrilling firsthand account of faraway Washington and a young man’s rise. On the other side of the world, I couldn’t help wondering how I could manage to follow in his footsteps.

  Along those lines I was greeted by a stroke of luck. A guy who had graduated before me from Holy Cross sent a letter describing his work for a United States senator in Washington. He told of being a “legislative assistant,” the same title Sorensen held with Jack Kennedy. He included a giant detail that would give me confidence—he lacked a law degree. Suddenly a bar had been removed.

  When I finished my Peace Corps tour and flew back to the United States there was snow on the ground. After a brief stop to see old friends down in Chapel Hill, I headed to Washington, D.C. There I began my quest for work in the Senate and House office buildings, and I had a ready answer for anyone asking what I wanted to be: “legislative assistant.” It was the challenge I was daring myself to undertake. Yet, as I’ve said, I had no connections. All I possessed in the way of strategy was the notion of working my strengths. But what were they?

  Since I’d just spent two years in Jack Kennedy’s Peace Corps and, before that, had graduated from Holy Cross, the grand old Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts, my first—I thought rather clever—idea was to make the rounds of the offices of every Irish-Catholic Democrat from the Northeast. Setting off earnestly, I spent a few weeks at this, focusing especially on members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. For a brief moment, I even had what looked to be the break of the century. A Foreign Affairs Committee member, an Irish-Catholic charmer, offered me a job at our first encounter. I was in! But then, a week later, to my disappointment, word from him reached me that “he couldn’t work it out.”

  At first this was simply puzzling. But eventually I would learn that the FBI had been even more interested in him than I was, looking to get from him answers about reputed underworld connections. One concern was the body of a loan shark discovered in his basement. Call me a softy, but I thought then, and I think now, that he had wanted to spare me his emerging troubles.

  With no other breaks coming my way, I can’t say I wasn’t getting discouraged, but I also wasn’t giving up. Having worked my way through the Northeast Irish-Catholic congressional roster and finding no takers, I now showed up one afternoon in the offices of Senator Frank Moss, a Democrat from Utah. His administrative assistant—who would be called a “chief of staff” in today’s Capitol Hill—made clear he liked me personally, as well as my Peace Corps experience, and not to mention my economics background. A former top aide to Senator Edward Kennedy and a devoted campaign lieutenant in Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, this fellow seemed to like my being Irish-Catholic as well as a Holy Cross grad from the Kennedys’ home turf.

  After setting me a task that served as a test, which I passed—it involved my explaining aspects of a murky tax law to an influential constituent—he came up with an offer of employment. My luck, it seemed, had turned. But the deal he came up with was far from what I’d envisioned. He explained that the only job he had available was that of a Capitol policeman. My face must have dropped. “It’ll pay for the groceries,” Moss’s assistant assured me, recognizing my disappointment.

  He was being practical, I realized, and it was, after all, a way in. So I said yes. The deal was, I’d spend the morning and early afternoon in the senator’s office answering letters, frequently important ones. I was also given assignments to write brief speeches to be entered in the Congressional Record. Come mid-afternoon, I’d race over to the Capitol Building. After donning my uniform and buckling on my holster—I carried a Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special—I’d report for duty. My shift finished at eleven. After three or four months doing this, I asked—insisted, really—to be made a full-time legislative assistant.

  “It was Africa, wasn’t it?” my County Antrim–born grandmom would later shrewdly observe, as she watched me adapt and begin my rise in the nation’s capital. She knew, and, as I said, so did I.

  I’d made the right decision. That brief period I spent working on the Capitol police force proved invaluable, giving me a perspective I’d not otherwise have known. I think that more so today, looking back. Most memorably, there were moments of absolute stillness, especially late in the evening, when the history of that extraordinary building was all mine. There were also encounters with colleagues I’ll never forget. A fellow cop, a West Virginian named Leroy Taylor, one night posed me a question: “Chris,” he said, “can you tell me why the little man loves his country?” As I wondered at the question itself, and why he was offering it, he explained it all with his answer. “Because it’s all he’s got,” he said softly.

  In truth, I wasn’t alone having this gig early on my resume. Like Senate majority leader Harry Reid and the great Boston columnist Mike Barnicle, I’m proud to say I got my start as a Capitol cop. There were numerous duties: the ordinary ones like helping tourists find their way and standing guard on the West Front, but also the extraordinary ones like standing watch, as I did one day, outside the office containing the Pentagon Papers.

  When, two years later, I left Senator Moss’s employ, he had sound advice to offer, and I listened to what he said without truly absorbing it at the time. “Maybe you should dip a little deeper into these political waters.” It was the surest kind of encouragement because it indicated the hopes he had for me. Later that year I was hired by Ralph Nader as one of four reporters covering Congress for the nonprofit Capitol Hill News Service, which he’d recently launched. It was my first time working as a journalist and one of the lessons I learned was that I liked investigating politicians a whole lot less than I honored their guts in running for office in the first place.

  And, against
the odds, running for office is just what I did myself after this. Here’s how it came about: I’d just read a column by Hugh Sidey in Time magazine describing a young fellow, someone not so different from me who was running for Congress in the Philadelphia suburbs. It seemed to me that if this Republican in his twenties could confront the GOP machine out on his turf, there was no real reason I couldn’t try to do the same against the old Democratic order on mine. Sure, it was a crazy long shot—Mr. Matthews Goes to Washington—but what you need to remember is that it was Watergate season back then and everywhere the political landscape was on the cusp of change. Maybe, just maybe, the voters in my home Philly district, where I’d grown up but where I knew nobody of political consequence, were ready for a dreamer like me.

  In the end—and it wasn’t a total shock—the incumbent Democrat won the primary. But my decision to run had risen out of a powerful impulse, and its effect on my life echoed powerfully for years to come. I received a rather respectable number of votes—23 percent, and this showing was, I think, a decent performance given the circumstances: the fact that I was an unknown, knew no one myself of any influence, and had no money to spend. My campaign had been propelled almost entirely by the enthusiasm and energy of close to four hundred teenaged volunteers I’d personally recruited. The theme I ran on, “the high price of political corruption,” was one to which they eagerly responded.

  All these great kids simply signed on after hearing me give impassioned speeches in high schools around the district. (I still have the red, white, and blue spiral notebook I used to record their names and Election Day assignments.) Defeated, but proud of what I’d accomplished, I returned to Washington to find I was considered a veteran of the political wars.

  Once back in D.C., I put in a brief stint working again for Frank Moss, who asked me now to write speeches for him. This was fine, as far as I was concerned—it was a lucky break. Next, Senator Moss took it upon himself to make an unexpected and even more generous gesture. Unbidden, he got on the phone to his old pal Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, who’d just been named chairman of the new Senate Budget Committee, and convinced him to name me a key staffer.

  Then, three years later, in 1977, came my biggest jump to date: from Capitol Hill to the White House. Richard Pettigrew, a former Speaker of the Florida House, had just been picked by Jimmy Carter to promote his plan to streamline the federal government. He now signed me on as a deputy. Carter had overseen a model reorganization when he was governor of Georgia, and it became a selling point in his presidential campaign that he would repeat the effort in Washington. My role at the President’s Reorganization Project was similar to the one I’d had on the Senate Budget Committee, which meant I spent my creative energies helping to convince the American public to buy into what we were doing. The idea was to make government, if not smaller, then more efficient. Its crowning achievement was its successful reform of the federal civil service. It was considered at the time—and ever since—to be one of the administration’s domestic triumphs.

  After two years working hard in this job for the Carter administration, I’d made friends throughout the Old Executive Office Building. One of them, Rick Hertzberg, Carter’s chief speechwriter, would one day in 1979 take me on his team. Though I was “no Ted Sorensen,” Rick argued, I wrote fast and knew my politics. What made the case for me was a unique opportunity in the presidential speaking schedule. Jimmy Carter was set to address the National Conference of Catholic Charities. My draft won me the job.

  So there I was, writing speeches for a president. It had actually taken only eight years, but much had happened and it seemed like a lot longer. The thought of doing this had once seized my imagination—and I’ve never forgotten the way it felt, traveling through the African night in that lonely train picturing my unknown future that lay so very far away.

  President Reagan is about to make his historic declaration: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  STARRING RONALD REAGAN

  “If you live in the river, you should make friends with the crocodiles.”

  —INDIAN PROVERB

  On November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president by a forty-four-state landslide. With the excitement behind him and the transition now under way, his focus narrowed. Like any newly elected president he now had to concentrate on his defining purposes. Above all, he needed to win passage of the sweeping economic plan that had anchored his platform. Among its bullet points: a 30 percent cut in individual income tax rates accompanied by aggressive slashes in domestic spending, this last to be offset by new defense appropriations. While concerned about the deficit, Reagan was emphatic: he would be driven even more forcefully by his vision of the military buildup on which he’d set his Cold Warrior’s heart. To achieve such goals, he understood that he’d have to be able to count, and dependably so, on Democratic votes in the House of Representatives, the deliberative body in control of all budgetary decisions.

  One thing was for certain, the mistakes of his predecessor provided a helpful blueprint—of what not to do. Jimmy Carter, a loner by temperament, had come to Washington detesting the city’s cozy ways, resisting the dinners and other lures of its established hostesses, angering the old leadership by his aloofness. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, by contrast, had every intention of enjoying their new city even as he made it his mission to “deliver Washington” from its reigning ideology. His plan was to charm rivals and potential allies alike.

  One powerful force at work in Reagan’s favor would now be the survival instincts of those in the other party. Every election has twin results. First, the victor is decided. Next, a directional signal for going forward is sent. Not only had the Republicans captured the U.S. Senate, at the same time picking up thirty-three seats in the House, they’d also clearly intimated what was coming next. “Get out of the way of this guy!” was the unspoken message that now taunted Democrats who’d held on to their seats; otherwise you might find yourself the next victim.

  The plain facts backed up the implied threat, and so the sitting Democrats understood the wisdom of embracing caution when dealing with the White House. Top members of the House, after all, had gone down in defeat that November, including stalwarts like Ways and Means chairman Al Ullman of Oregon and John Brademas of Indiana, the majority whip. If such high-profile Democratic members, with substantial reelection coffers, could be beaten, who, then, was safe? Wasn’t the shrewd move to ignore the leadership in Washington and look out for yourself back home? Wasn’t it Tip himself who lived by that rule of survival?

  Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, leader of the Democratic majority in the House was, by right and by duty, the responsible political officer. For half a century he’d forged a reputation for personal affability and partisan toughness. Yet the lesson learned in his first and only losing campaign—running for Cambridge City Council while still a Boston College senior—had never left him. On the eve of that defeat and while he was still smarting, a neighbor reproached him. Her complaint: he’d failed to “ask” her for her vote. It became axiomatic with him: don’t take anyone for granted and pay the strictest attention to your own backyard.

  From that moment on Tip O’Neill understood the extent to which voters’ individual feelings matter, to be neglected only at a candidate’s peril. In 1936, at the age of twenty-four, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, historically a Republican stronghold. For twelve years he endured the humiliations of minority status, but he’d finally had enough and set about putting together a statewide Democratic power network. Operating on the lesson he’d learned long ago from his father about the primacy of neighborhood concerns and personalities—“all politics is local”—he made it his watchword as he crisscrossed the commonwealth, recruiting candidates.

  So it was in 1949, joined now by a majority of newly elected legislators, that the Tip-built coalition took control of the Massachusetts House. Still in his thirties, he be
came the state’s first-ever Democratic Speaker. Four years later, when John F. Kennedy ran successfully for the Senate, Tip sought his seat in the U.S. House and won. Now it was 1980, nearly thirty years later, and his was the name to be reckoned with in Massachusetts political life. But, to his chagrin, he was forced to watch his home state—a Democratic bastion defended by his strong will, acquired savvy, and regular delivery of New Deal–grade pork barrel—go for Ronald Reagan.

  But just days after Inauguration Day 1981, O’Neill had offered his hometown newspaper a benevolent view of the president-elect. “We find him very charismatic . . . and he’s got a good political sense and he’s got a lot of experience,” he told the Boston Globe. “. . . Don’t undersell him. He’s a sharp fellow.” He was also lucky, Tip pointed out—an attribute that counts for a lot everywhere, and most certainly in electoral politics.

  Ever pragmatic, the Democrats’ leader recognized the challenge now facing him. He also understood the stakes. At this moment the problem wasn’t simply Reagan in the White House but the hard, inescapable fact of Republican control of the U.S. Senate. With another election just two years away, the Republicans might soon control both branches of Congress. The prospect of a grand realignment, Tip clearly understood, was exactly what the GOP was now relishing.

  Having owned Capitol Hill with only two short breaks since the New Deal, the Democrats, with the advent of Ronald Reagan and those riding his coattails, had, as I’ve said, every reason to be uneasy. At a post-election press conference, Tip opted for a tone of preemptive diplomacy, referring to Reagan as “the admiral of the ship.” The new president, he hoped, would be steering “the proper course” in “smooth” waters. The Speaker depicted his own party as having been hit by a “tidal wave.” Still he rejected obstructionism. “We will cooperate in every way.”