Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  At this time, Representative Rostenkowski had imagined himself the likely next Speaker, especially since he already held the elective post of chairman of the Democratic caucus. However, by having acted the bully at LBJ’s bidding and then unwisely replaying his big moment for all it was worth, he was going to have to pay the price. Quite soon, he realized he’d gone as far as he was ever to get in the House leadership. When Albert himself became Speaker in 1971 and Louisiana’s Hale Boggs took the post of majority leader, this left open the party’s number-three leadership position of majority whip. Albert rejected Rostenkowski outright. To punish him further, and, obviously, to leave not the slightest doubt as to his vengeful purpose, he then recruited another congressman to run against Rosty for caucus chair, thus taking that job away from him as well.

  At this point the choice of a new Democratic whip came down to a decision involving two men: O’Neill and Hugh Carey of New York. Unfortunately for Carey, a pair of fellow Irish-Americans from the New York delegation failed to support him as they might have been expected to. Putting down the future New York governor by labeling him too “high hat” and too “lace curtain,” these two colleagues’ blackballing of Carey helped Carl Albert decide in favor of Tip O’Neill, awarding him the coveted position of majority whip in 1971.

  Then, in the autumn of 1972, a tragic stroke of fate changed everything. A plane carrying Hale Boggs and three others was lost over Alaska, crashing in the wilderness, the bodies never recovered. With the help of Boggs’s aide Gary Hymel and the endorsement of his presumed widow, Lindy, Tip O’Neill pulled ahead of the other candidates jockeying for the job to replace Boggs as majority leader. “You haven’t got an enemy in the place,” Florida congressman Sam Gibbons, the last to leave the field, told him.

  Now, having paid his dues for two decades, Tip soon revealed he had little interest in laurel-resting. At this point, the only person standing between him and assumption of ultimate power in the Democratic caucus was Speaker Carl Albert. Within a year, O’Neill, the new majority leader, showed his nominal leader who was boss.

  It’s a fascinating side story that probably not many people ever paid any attention to. It had all begun when, in August 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew found himself facing imminent indictment for extortion, tax fraud, and bribe-taking, among other counts, some of which had occurred back when he’d been a county executive and later the governor of Maryland. In an eleventh-hour gambit to try to save himself from the federal courts, he arrived at the Capitol with the intention of convincing the U.S. House of Representatives to assume jurisdiction, the same way they would for a president, hoping that he would avoid impeachment by the House and certainly removal from office by the Senate. Speaker Albert was ready to grant Agnew’s request and even had begun to set the judicial process in motion when Tip O’Neill, his second in command in the House, refused outright to consider going along. Quickly, Tip managed to shut down Albert’s efforts, thus killing Agnew’s last hope to avoid prosecution in the criminal courts.

  The majority leader would soon prove himself even tougher on Agnew’s boss. Once the Watergate burglary scandal and the subsequent revelations about Richard Nixon’s White House had spun out of control, Tip O’Neill became the chief engineer of the impeachment proceedings. Above the smoke of battle, Nixon himself would credit O’Neill as the man calling the shots that doomed his presidency.

  On August 8, 1974, the night before Nixon’s forced resignation, Tip’s old friend Jerry Ford—the Michigan congressman who’d been appointed vice president after Spiro Agnew had been forced to resign rather than serve a prison sentence—called him with critically important news: Nixon himself intended to resign the next day. At that moment he, Gerald Ford, would become the thirty-eighth president of the United States.

  The two longtime pals chatted, seemingly hating to end the conversation and savoring the extraordinary moment between them. “Jerry, isn’t this a wonderful country? Here we can talk like this and be friends, when eighteen months from now I’ll be going around the country kicking your ass in.” Once Ford granted a pardon to the impeached Nixon, Tip publicly denounced the decision, though, in private, he understood the judgment call and empathized with both men, each of whom he’d known for many years. “Although I thought the pardon was wrong, I didn’t want to send Nixon to jail either.” As he’d always said, he didn’t like seeing a fellow pol “go to the can.”

  Two years later, O’Neill took his final step to the Speakership. Having exerted pressure on Albert to give up the office, he won the departing Speaker’s go-ahead. With that in hand, he immediately began locking in his political base, asking friends, right to their faces, if they’d endorse him. Tom Foley, whom O’Neill would name majority whip, was in the Capitol room when O’Neill forged the phalanx of fifty or so members that would form his critical mass of support.

  I was in the room when Tip conducted the grand inquisition. He had this staged. The fire was low and there was some kind of music in the background. He would say to whomever it was, ‘I’m going to be a candidate for speaker. Do I have your support?’ You had one millisecond to answer that question. I mean millisecond. There couldn’t be any of ‘Well, let me see . . . ’ You either had the loyalty as an orgasm of support or you didn’t. The guy would say, ‘Absolutely, Mr. Speaker.’ The second test: ‘I don’t know who I’m going to have nominate me, probably Eddie Boland. But if I don’t ask Eddie, can I ask you to nominate me?’ ‘Absolutely, I’m honored.’ Tip was asking everybody whether they’d support him. He had about five standards. ‘Can I count on your vote?’ ‘Can I count on you nominating me if Eddie Boland can’t do it? I’m not asking yet. I just want to know if I can count on you to do it.’ ‘I want to have about fifty people supporting me for speaker. Can I count on you to sign on that line?’ ‘What about speeches? They have seconding speeches in the caucus for whoever’s supporting whomever for the speakership. Can I count on you to be one of these?’ ‘Oh, absolutely!’ And then out would come the hand, and the other guy had no choice but to take the hand and shake it. And Tip would say, ‘Well, that’s done,’ or something like that. And over in the corner behind the speaker, somebody was taking notes back there.

  He was carrying out the ritual of power he had been taught while still a senior at Boston College. He was doing what his father instructed him to do whenever seeking election. He was locking up his base. He was asking for his friends’ votes, face-to-face. And now he had the winning cards right there in his hands.

  The president and first lady back on the national stage. The country never knew how close it came to losing its elected leader. Seeing him now, healthy and on his feet, rallied America’s spirit: Ronald Reagan had once again given us a Hollywood ending.

  CHAPTER NINE

  HERO

  “The happy ending is our national belief.”

  —MARY MCCARTHY

  The remarkable way Ronald Reagan responded to John Hinckley’s attempt on his life just as his administration was getting under way marked a political turning point. Because of the courage and stoicism he demonstrated in the immediate aftermath—along with the wry quips he delivered so gamely in extremis—suddenly he was more than just a president. Now he appeared in the eyes of his fellow citizens as a full-blown hero.

  It was an unprecedented situation. But with the savvy that characterized its operations, the Reagan White House had no trouble recognizing the opportunity handed them. It had taken a would-be assassin’s bullet—an enormous price to pay, with the president’s recovery less speedy than the public was led to believe—yet at this moment, owing to his grace, literally, under fire, their man was all but unassailable politically.

  As a result, all obstacles to the agenda Reagan had been preparing to launch seemed puny, more like bad manners than Washington business as usual. His newly broad popularity appeared to guarantee Americans’ ready willingness to accept his leadership as he steered the country in the direction he believed it must go. They were rooting for
him as if he were an injured quarterback valiantly running for that touchdown: they felt he deserved the victory, and so were willing to hand it to him. For the opposing team, the Democrats—with Tip O’Neill their point man—it was nothing if not disheartening.

  Up until this game-changing historic moment, my relations with the Speaker—for whom I’d now been working two months—had been tangential. Gary Hymel remained the out-front guy dealing with the press, Kirk O’Donnell led on political strategy and foreign policy, Ari Weiss on domestic policy and relations with the committee chairmen, and Leo Diehl was the ever-alert sentinel, managing the flow of corporate lobbyists and defense contractors always seeking the Speaker’s ear.

  My responsibility, a job special to that moment in history, was to check the morning papers for Reagan targets of opportunity. Zeroing in, I’d confect a quotable line or two. But being outside Tip’s close circle meant I couldn’t really barrel in to force my ideas on him. Rather, I needed at this stage always to be patient, strategizing my best shot at introducing a new thought—or attitude—into the Speaker’s repertoire. As I gradually made my way into his political huddle, I sensed his growing alertness to my ideas, my gung-ho-ness, my eagerness to win. Like the kid who stands hopefully courtside as the bigger kids play basketball, I was running and catching the ball when it went out of bounds, earning my way into the game, waiting for someone to leave.

  A week after the assassination attempt, O’Neill explained in his daily press briefing that the Democrats in Congress were writing a budget to help the “struggling class” of Americans, those men and women stuck in the middle who’d be hit hardest by the 16 percent inflation rate reported by the Labor Department. It was a phrase I’d developed back in my days working for Edmund Muskie on the Senate Budget Committee. The problem of the right public tone to take in the coming battle against the Republican onslaught was already an obvious, and awkward, issue for Tip.

  “Well I expect that smiling radiance to be back at the White House for Easter,” he told the assembled reporters the next day at his morning briefing. “He’s a beautiful man, but I’m sorry he doesn’t agree with my political philosophy.” Knocking Reagan directly was understandably ill-advised; after all, the president had yet to be discharged from the hospital. Opting for a well-wishing approach befitting his status as Speaker, Tip was willing to add only the tiniest of digs—and a bland one at that. It made better sense to focus—for the moment, anyway—on the harm that was already being felt as a result of Reagan’s cuts. For example, young people back in his district—so the Speaker recounted somberly—had made clear to him how fearful they were that cuts in the student loan program would kill their chances of staying in college.

  The feelings Tip had for both the worried students and the recuperating Reagan were authentic, but, given his position, any concern for the president conflicted with his partisan role. He had a job to do, and despite what was happening now, he was well aware that a protracted fight lay ahead.

  What’s important to know about Tip O’Neill is that, after all his years serving there, he took a deep pride in being able to “read the House.” The problem now was that its members were hardly exempt from the powerful emotional spell cast by Reagan’s miraculous survival. For Tip’s troops, just as it was for the rest of the country, it wasn’t only President Reagan’s survival but also the jaunty fortitude he’d exhibited. His spirit had moved an entire nation, the world, really. In an atmosphere of such widespread admiration for President Reagan, how could the House of Representatives not be representational? The chamber over which Tip held sway was, in every way, the “People’s House,” and recognizing exactly what was happening, he realized, sensing the mood around him, that there was nothing to be gained by trying to deny their sentiments.

  Unfortunately, there were other instances where he was less well able to read a given situation. Since I worked with the O’Neill office, not truly within it, I didn’t initially realize what was afoot when Kirk O’Donnell asked me to set up a weeklong schedule of media events for the Speaker just before Easter. I obliged—only to learn what was really going on when a savvy reporter decided to ask an uncomfortable question.

  Wasn’t it possible, the Boston Globe’s David Rogers challenged Kirk—with me in hearing range—that this carefully orchestrated effort to showcase Tip’s on-the-job dedication was intended, in fact, to distract attention from the Speaker’s upcoming two-week trip to Australia?

  The lightbulb suddenly came on, and I realized, hearing Rogers, that what he was suggesting had been precisely the idea. I’d been made complicit in the business of spotlighting a heavy O’Neill presence in Washington, a pol’s trick that would allow him then to skip town. He’d engaged in the preemptive attention-getting as a way of not having his absence loom large when he flew off around the world. With Reagan about to be released from the hospital and the first House vote on his economic program due in May, there was every reason to expect the Speaker to be working round the clock.

  The plain fact was this: Tip had this trip planned for quite a while and was looking forward to getting a glimpse of life Down Under. No way would he forfeit a chance to visit the land of “The Wild Colonial Boy,” where so many Irishmen had journeyed—freely or not—before. He prized these annual springtime junkets, taken each year by him and a close-knit group of congressional buddies, usually to a faraway, alluring destination. He, Dan Rostenkowski, and what amounted to a regular band of fifteen congressmen and their wives—including Republicans such as Pennsylvania’s Joe McDade and Ohio’s Ralph Regula—planned them to carefully but not overly feature the necessary obligations along the way. They’d meet with foreign leaders and pose for ceremonial pictures, leaving time for eighteen holes in the afternoon, and they certainly saw no harm in it.

  Now, in early April 1981, they weren’t about to give up the perk, especially with what looked like a long and difficult battle ahead once they were back home again.

  Viewed against the old rules, O’Neill’s steadfast fealty to his fellow junketeers made solid sense. Those annual trips overseas were, in a way, like camp, where you saw the same friends every year and anticipated the experience. You ate and played together, were often confined to the close quarters of an airplane cabin, and otherwise hung out morning, noon, and night. Such circumstances tightly bonded the travelers. The inevitable golf days and onboard poker games cemented the men’s relationships, while the wives shopped, visited tourist attractions, and connected with each other in a way they couldn’t back in their ordinary lives.

  But, above all, what such trips—so often, and sometimes rightly, I admit, bashed in the press—can accomplish is the sort of outcome a journalist’s investigative report is unable to measure or assess. They create the wide back channels and spaces where the necessary horse-trading can take place, both always useful in the complex game of politics. But, in the end, the greatest advantage of these excursions is that they offer to these travelers recognition of the shared humanity of a precarious career.

  Appearance, though, is always what matters, especially when anyone’s looking. Political junkets, even in the best of moments, carry with them an air of the illicit, of at least a minor crime being gotten away with; still, most take place and no one’s the wiser. This time, too many people were watching, however, and Tip paid the price for being loyally—and stubbornly—unable to relinquish it.

  “We were back in Washington working,” dryly commented Billy Pitts, floor man for Republican leader Bob Michel, “and Tip was in Pago Pago.” The public relations fallout was disastrous. A network news broadcast showed the plane carrying the traveling members of Congress on the tarmac at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu. What viewers saw on their TV screens was the aircraft just sitting there on the landing field, its passengers refusing to leave the plane, apparently too embarrassed. Alas for Tip and his companions, the Republicans could have confected no better portrait of the Congress, and its top leader, adhering to the old rules. It was as if the Dem
ocratic Speaker had reenacted the Republican ad showing him in the car that had run out of gas—only this time it was a government airplane.

  Meanwhile, over at the White House, Reagan and his own men were moving steadily ahead with their planned onslaught on House members, regardless of where the Speaker was and what he was up to. Democratic congressman Tom Bevill from Alabama was in New Zealand with Tip when the call came from the White House, where the president was now back at work.

  “This is President Reagan. What time is it, and where are you?”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m in New Zealand,” Bevill replied, still uncertain what it could be about.

  “Have a good trip and when you get back to Washington, I want you to come in and see me. I want to sit and talk to you about the budget.”

  Reagan later told Ken Duberstein, one of his top congressional lobbyists, that when he learned it was 3 a.m. in New Zealand, he was tempted to announce, “This is Jimmy Carter,” and hang up.

  The next day, the president placed a second call, presumably at a more acceptable time of day, to the traveling House members. This time it was to O’Neill. “I’m having more luck with Demos. than Repubs.,” Reagan jotted in his diary that night. “Asked Tip O’Neill if I could address a joint session next week. He agreed.” He didn’t bother noting he’d caught his rival far from the political playing field.

  Democratic congressman Eugene Atkinson received his call from the president when he was on-air, doing a local Pennsylvania radio call-in show. It was the first time anyone in the country at large had heard the president’s voice since the assassination attempt. Atkinson, who would switch parties and declare himself a Republican six months later, agreed on the spot to support the president on the coming vote.