In opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake. Whether or not the Party should be outlawed, that is a matter for the government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent a hundred and seventy years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party—and I think the government is capable of proving that—then that is another matter. I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work. I happen to be very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight. I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.
It’s a statement that, delivered with respectful courtesy and a genial forthrightness, neatly claims its own ground. Ronald Reagan was taking a stand proclaiming full faith in democracy—and, along with it, his belief in the American people’s good judgment. It comes off without even a lurking shadow of partisanship or of politics as we normally think of them. Here was a man who’d been student body president in high school, who went on to deliver what he considered his maiden crowd-stirring political speech when just a college freshman. Sitting up there on Capitol Hill in 1947, responding to the House committee’s questions, he was no amateur. Acting had been the detour, as would become increasingly clear.
By 1954, that detour was offering precarious turns in the road. His agent, Lew Wasserman, had gotten him a two-week stand as emcee of a Las Vegas revue act. It had him cracking Irish jokes and playing straight man to the other performers. “It’s a long way down for Reagan from his box-office glory of 11 years ago,” ran a cruel item in the trade press.
Now came Wasserman to the rescue. Within weeks Reagan began his eight-year tenure presenting General Electric Theater; he was the half-hour anthology broadcast’s first and only continuing host. It would prove a huge career opportunity for him. Airing on Sundays at 9 p.m., EST, the GE-sponsored program featured a wide range of stars: James Dean, Jack Benny, Natalie Wood, Lee Marvin, Sammy Davis, Jr. Over the eight years it ran, the weekly guests represented a virtual Who’s Who of mid-twentieth-century show business. GE Theater was the way Americans growing up in the 1950s—Bill Clinton and me, to name just two—got to know and like Ronald Reagan.
And not only did he welcome us to GE every Sunday; Reagan also went to the road on its behalf. Traveling to hundreds of cities and towns by train, he became the company’s representative both to the outside world and to itself. A typical day might include a local press conference, a Chamber of Commerce lunch, and a civic association evening banquet, with a high school or college campus appearance in between, as well as sessions with General Electric employees in their offices and on their factory floors. “I am seen by more people in one week than I am in a full year in movie theaters,” is how Reagan chose to frame his remarkable new visibility. As of 1958 he was one of the most recognized figures in the country—not as an actor in a role but as Ronald Reagan himself.
Despite having been the public face of General Electric to millions of Americans—personally greeting and meeting, it’s estimated, at least a quarter of a million of them as he continuously toured—the relationship ended abruptly in 1962. What they had once seen as positive about Reagan’s rhetoric—his call to arms against big government at home and communism abroad—may have been viewed by corporate execs as impolitic. The larger factor was ratings. GE Theater, at one time the third highest rated show on all of television, was now fighting a long battle with Bonanza for its time slot.
In 1964 Ronald Reagan emerged fully into the open as a leader of the new conservative wing of the Republican Party. What brought him this increased prominence was a stirring stump speech he was tirelessly giving out on the Republican circuit in support of Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizonan who was then the GOP presidential candidate. Called “A Time for Choosing,” the Goldwater campaign paid to have it nationally televised the week before Election Day.
Social Security, he said, “is not insurance but is a welfare program and Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government.” Proclaiming that the country had “a rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan preached his beliefs with a fervor that had slowly but steadily been building deep inside him. “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” It was a speech he’d been polishing for years, and he meant it all, every single word and thought.
When Reagan ran for governor of California two years later and won a monumental victory, beating incumbent governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown by a million votes, he had turned himself into a singular political force to be reckoned with. Yet Democrats across the country, especially in Washington, would continue to question his legitimacy as a rising star—one with a bigger future than he’d ever had as a Warner contract player. They saw him more as a strictly California phenomenon, a West Coast punch line who’d never play beyond Sacramento.
Ignoring the million votes, they preferred to believe Ronald Reagan to be simply a good-looking, good-natured fellow who’d gotten his career from a screen test. Yet the signs indicating a different scenario had been there early on, as they are for most politicians—for anyone looking to see. Those who end up running for office can rarely hide the ambition in their youth.
His critics were ignoring a more basic fact. To denigrate Reagan’s profession—dismissing him as a fellow who’d played against a chimp or shilled for lightbulbs—was to miss a very big and obvious truth: people like actors and are fascinated by them. Pat Brown, a man whom voters had failed ever to be fascinated by, actually appeared in a televised campaign ad in which he’s seen warning a group of schoolchildren against the dangerous world represented by his opponent, the movie star. “I’m running against an actor . . . and you know who shot Lincoln, don’tcha?” It’s even more peculiar an attack if you consider the number of California voters connected to the movie business.
In reality, the political Ronald Reagan was playing a role he’d created himself: the outsider as representative of all the decent, honest people fed up with standard-issue politicians. “As a politician, he would always have you believe that he was a reluctant candidate—he became a governor, then president, only because people insisted they needed him,” his son Ron Reagan observed.
When accused of being poorly equipped by professional background to run the huge state of California, Reagan had blown off his detractors with one of those pronouncements he specialized in. “The man who has the job,” he countered, “has more experience than anybody. That’s why I’m running.”
The way Reagan came to perfect the role of citizen-politician can be seen at the climax of the speech he gave accepting the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. Just as he was about to leave the convention podium that July night in 1980, he appeared to go through a slight moment of indecision. “I have thought of something,” he said, briefly pausing, “that is not part of my speech and I’m worried over whether I should do it.” It was a brilliant moment of stagecraft. His listeners waited, curious. Now they were actively in the scene along with him, the audience that could not see the script on the card in front of him.
“Can we doubt,” he then asked, his voice ringing with purpose, “that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and o
ur own countrymen held in savage captivity.
“I’ll confess,” he went on, “that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest—I’m more afraid not to—that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.”
It was a moment, too, of transformation for Reagan. No longer the actor and foregoing the role of politician, he was now one of the people daring to speak against “them,” those who would challenge the right to pray at such a moment.
Ronald Reagan, not yet elected president, had gotten to precisely where he wanted to be in life.
His concluding words: “God bless America.”
Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., won fifty electoral contests in his long career. In 1952 he took John F. Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. House.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RISE OF TIP O’NEILL
“All politics is local.”
—THOMAS P. O’NEILL, SR.
Unlike Ronald Reagan, Tip O’Neill never faced poverty. When he was tapped for the annual “Horatio Alger Award,” the Speaker turned down the honor. “I’m not eligible,” the proud Irish-American told me to tell the association presenting it. “I wasn’t born poor.”
His father, Thomas Philip O’Neill, Sr., was the superintendent of sewers in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, responsible for 150 miles of municipal sewer lines. Powerful enough to be nicknamed “the Governor” in the neighborhoods, he commanded an army of employees, which meant a ready supply of patronage always at his disposal. If you did your chores for the local Democratic Party, that entitled you to a “snow button.” If you showed up wearing it the next time snow fell, you could be assured of a paying job clearing the streets. If you didn’t have the button, you were out in the cold.
Thomas Jr., his second son, though never without the comforts of a home, quickly learned how unfair life can be—and in profound ways. He was only nine months old when his mother died of tuberculosis. Without a wife to care for his three children—the O’Neill brood included an older brother and sister, William and Mary Rose—the father often needed to fob off the baby, especially, on relatives. Young O’Neill remembered being “passed from aunt to aunt,” and, as he was to recall, “it wasn’t a happy time.” The sadness didn’t end there. When his father married again, his home life failed to brighten. While he never voiced complaints about his stepmother, for young Tip her entry into the family quite clearly made for disappointed hopes.
But unlike Reagan, who, though popular and a joiner, was always alone in a crowd, O’Neill found warmth in his friends, and they in him. Unlike his future rival, Tip, when young, ran with a gang. In the company of his usual crowd of North Cambridge boys, he hung out daily at a storefront known as Barry’s Corner. Among the O’Neill pals of that era were “Red” Fitzgerald, “Frogsy” Broussard, “Moose” O’Connell, and others known by similarly colorful nicknames.
Tip’s own lifelong moniker derived from a nineteenth-century left fielder who’d played for the old St. Louis Browns, James Edward “Tip” O’Neill. The original “Tip” had nearly a .500 batting average, inflated by the rule back then of counting walks as hits. O’Neill would earn those many walks by tipping off one pitch after another until the pitcher couldn’t avoid missing the plate or throwing an easy one to hit. Obviously, among his gifts was simple, brute patience, a quality that comes in handy, especially in politics, where waiting your turn is more often than not the safest route to the top.
The kids at Barry’s Corner were townies and early in life instinctively understood the truth of what that meant. A little more than two miles down Massachusetts Avenue stood Harvard University, a citadel of privilege and prestige that could not have been further away had it been on the moon. Accepting the hard divide between town and gown, Tip O’Neill and his gang recognized their place in the scheme of things. That didn’t mean they liked it.
Many decades later the future Speaker would still be smarting from the humiliation he’d felt the summer he was a chubby fourteen-year-old with a job cutting grass and trimming hedges in Harvard Yard. “Up off your ass, O’Neill,” he recalled his crabby boss frequently yelling at him. “Off your ass!” He was warning the local kid he wasn’t going to get away with performing his job sitting down. He was supposed to be clipping away on his knees. The fellow seemed intent on putting the North Cambridge boy down, making sure he knew his place—and, not surprisingly, Tip took it personally. Would such an employer have talked to a Harvard student that way? Then again, would a Harvard student have been out there with his shears in the sweltering sun?
The fact that Tip realized the divide separating his world from the other didn’t mean the sharp reality of it didn’t rankle. As F. Scott Fitzgerald well knew—The Great Gatsby had been published just two years earlier—the most powerful aspirations arise from rejection, fueling the dreams of those born on the wrong side looking in. Here’s Tip’s own version of the classic outsider tale, a very specific memory of that summer when he was fourteen and working in a part of his hometown where he didn’t belong:
On a beautiful June day, as I was going about my daily grind, the class of 1927 gathered in a huge canvas tent to celebrate commencement. Inside, I could see hundreds of young men standing around in their white linen suits, laughing and talking. They were also drinking champagne, which was illegal in 1927 because of Prohibition. I remember that scene like it was yesterday, and I can still feel the anger I felt then, almost sixty years ago, as I write these words. It was the illegal champagne that really annoyed me. Who the hell do these people think they are, I said to myself, that the law means nothing to them? On that commencement day at Harvard, as I watched those privileged, confident Ivy League Yankees who had everything handed to them in life, I made a resolution. Someday, I vowed, I would work to make sure my own people could go to places like Harvard, where they could avail themselves of the same opportunities that these young college men took for granted.
If Ronald Reagan’s political course had been set, when he was a middle-aged man, in late 1940s Hollywood, by his distaste for the hard-left labor factions’ tactics as they struck the Hollywood studios, and also by his righteous indignation at the hefty bite the federal income tax took from his film earnings, Tip O’Neill’s epiphany had come when much younger. And it had lodged in him in a way that would create a different path. Taking a clear-eyed look at the landscape close to home, the teenaged Tip had viewed political power through a very different prism. His goal, he decided early in life, would be to stand against those who defended social and economic injustice.
A year later the still-adolescent Tip was engaged in politics as a volunteer, knocking on doors and handing out campaign literature for New York Democratic governor Al Smith. The first Catholic to be nominated to run for president, Smith was a man of the people, one whose working-class origins always informed his outlook. As a representative in the New York State Assembly, Smith had drawn national attention early in his career when he spoke out forcefully for workplace safety after the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Thus, when he led fellow Democrats in the fight against Herbert Hoover to gain the White House in 1928, Tip was a natural foot soldier for the cause. Though it turned out to be a lost one, it gave the eager young man a taste of the valiant, idealistic battles he hoped one day to wage.
Unlike his brother William, who’d left the environs of Boston for Holy Cross in central Massachusetts, Tip attended Boston College as a day student. It was one of those moments in life when a fortunate break more resembles a disadvantage, but for Tip O’Neill staying close to home made a lasting, enriching difference. By not following Bill to Worcester, he remained a neighborhood guy, never losing touch with his childhood buddies, the crew at Barry’s Corner. As a “day hop,” coming and going from classes across the Charles River, he was able to maintain his local identity and popularity. By staying regular in his habits, surroundings, and friends, he was able to sink his roots even deeper into the community where his paternal gra
ndfather, Patrick O’Neill, had first settled seventy years earlier.
We’ve seen how the young Ronald Reagan chafed under what seemed to him the petty tyrannies and claustrophobic scale of small-town Illinois life. Tip O’Neill, on the other hand, was a man at home, and at one, with his native environment. Cambridge was where he’d been born, where he’d grown up, and where he intended to make his mark. He couldn’t wait to get into politics on his own behalf.
While he was still a senior at BC, Tip ran unsuccessfully for the Cambridge City Council. What this meant in the short term was severe disappointment when he failed to win the seat. But for the long haul that first struggle Tip waged in the public eye left him indisputably wiser. Two maxims he heard at this time were to remain lifelong souvenirs of his maiden, losing race. The first was a signal—and, eventually for Tip, a signature—piece of advice imparted to him by his dad. According to Thomas Sr., his boy had stumbled for a simple reason: he’d failed to focus sufficiently on his own North Cambridge turf. “All politics is local,” the father pronounced firmly. It was less a reproach than a fact of life, a truth he’d expected his son instinctively to understand.
According to him, what Tip should have done, rather than spreading himself thin canvassing the entire district, trying to convince strangers of his worth, was first to lock in decisively the loyalty of supporters closer to home. Then, after that was accomplished, he could be free to head farther afield. “Local” meant his own natural constituency, comprising those citizens nearest in both geography and affinity, already well disposed to him and to his family, not needing to be sold on his value. The ideas, and ideals, embodied in the word local were to form his core philosophy when it came to political behavior.
Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Page 9
