Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  But despite such a dogged methodology, with its relentless tracking down of congressional votes in every state, Reagan’s primary target of opportunity remained the South. If he could convince and count on those Democrats in Dixie who were willing to listen, he’d be assured of winning House passage of his overall spending and tax plan. When Tip returned from Australia and found himself facing the results of all those calls made from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue across so many time zones, even to the South Pacific, he freely admitted the “tremendous impact” the president’s intensive effort was having. In truth, he had no choice, since the clear evidence was all around him. Yet at that moment he was unwilling to take any blame for the situation, chalking up the surge instead to “the president’s popularity.”

  The White House push for votes was being overseen by Baker and Reagan’s full-time lobbyists Friedersdorf and Duberstein; already in high gear, they had a great deal to be pleased about. Now they and their fellow Republicans were about to be made even happier: Ronald Reagan, who’d been performing behind the scenes, was at last ready to step back in front of the audience eagerly awaiting him. The Speaker, in his daily meeting with reporters on April 28, the morning of Reagan’s televised speech, saw clearly what his reemergence would mean—to him, Tip O’Neill, to the Democratic Party, to the system and its ideals that he so long had valued. Americans, he knew, would rally to the healed and shining hero, simply because in their adulation they couldn’t understand what was coming and how it would affect them. The crowd, in short, would be responding to the highly satisfying sentiment of the moment, just as they did when singing the national anthem at a ballpark. How do you fight that?

  That day Tip chose to offer, in his press briefing, simply a confirmation of the plain reality: “Because of the attempted assassination, the president has become a hero in the eyes of the public,” he said bluntly. “Is that effective?” was the question he then asked, and answered himself: “I would have to presume it is. We can’t argue with a man as popular as he is.” He was facing the facts, at the same time as conscious of what was at stake as he’d ever been aware of anything in his life.

  That same night, Ronald Reagan took his place at the podium before a joint session of Congress. The packed-to-the-rafters audience sitting there in high anticipation offered him an ovation as he walked in, even before he’d said a word. It soon swelled into a tumult he would later describe as “unbelievable.” Only once it finally subsided did he begin to talk; his tone was humble, grateful, and affirmative. Speaking on behalf of himself and Nancy, he first told the crowd, “The warmth of your words, the expression of friendship and, yes, love, meant more to us than you can ever know. You have given us a memory that we’ll treasure forever. And you’ve provided an answer to those few voices that were raised saying that what happened is evidence that ours is a sick society.”

  He went on to describe how Americans of all ages had sent letters expressing their good wishes and concern over his progress. One, from a small boy in New York, Peter Sweeney, had especially pleased him and he read it aloud. Wrote the worried second-grader, “I hope you get well quick or you might have to make a speech in your pajamas.” Then, Reagan, ever the showman, paused before he finished with the child’s charming postscript, an ideal punch line: “P.S. If you have to make a speech in your pajamas, I warned you.”

  As they watched, the White House operatives had every reason to be thrilled. Their man had come to Capitol Hill—where not everyone was a friend—and been interrupted fourteen times, three of which were standing ovations, by swelling waves of applause as he spoke. But of all those approving outbursts, it was the third standing ovation that most moved Ronald Reagan himself. It was at that moment that forty Democrats rose to join the Republicans in endorsing his call for an historic shift in U.S. fiscal policy.

  “The old and comfortable way is to shave a little here and add a little there. Well, that’s not acceptable anymore,” Reagan declared. “I think this great and historic Congress knows that way is no longer acceptable.” He’d been taking a direct shot at the Democratic opposition’s attempt to propose an alternative to Reagan’s program, one that asked for far more modest cuts in spending and taxes. Not only was he dismissive of it, but when that sizable clutch of approving Democrats got to their feet to applaud, he took it as their renegade seal of approval. “It took a lot of courage for them to do that,” he wrote in his diary that night, “and it sent a shiver down my spine.”

  Tip O’Neill, his shock of bright white hair a beacon marking his presence on the podium behind the president, similarly registered what had just occurred. “Here’s your forty votes,” he whispered to Vice President George H. W. Bush, seated beside him. He knew only too well those conservative Democrats sitting up there in “Redneck Row”—their chosen seats high in the back of the House chamber—and what they were up to. He recognized that voting with the administration and not with their own party was the only way many of them would stand a chance of reelection in 1982 in their basically conservative districts. (Among them were Democrats whose ayes were always in question, and now a few would even change them for good.) Yet there were no surprises: Tip had already identified them on the scoreboard he’d been keeping. “This is only the first skirmish in the war. The war is the election of 1982 and we will win the war,” he was soon to declare, accepting the fact that the current battle was over. “You know a horse that runs fast doesn’t always run long.”

  Publicly, however, O’Neill’s response was gracious to the point of excess, as when he made his first comments to the press directly after the speech. “I was overjoyed to see the president looking so well,” he said. “Like all Americans, I am deeply and humbly grateful that so many prayers have been answered.” Calling Reagan “inspirational,” he pronounced the speech he’d just heard “even poetic at points,” saluting his performance as in every sense of the word presidential through his ordeal.

  But he also showed his mettle. He presented a sizable list of factual errors that the address had contained. Yet, even so, he was careful not to blame Reagan himself for the mistakes, instead pointing the finger at White House staffers. “It is unfortunate in the extreme that some of those who provided statistical information for this data did President Reagan a grave disservice,” he noted.

  While the language he used was careful, it was obvious to those who knew him that his frustration came from the heart. Even if he’d been expecting the worst from the Reagan economic recovery program, that didn’t make it any easier to witness so much that he’d cared deeply about and fought for so stoutly just tossed aside. More important, for Tip-watchers, the signs were there: he was becoming angry, even if he didn’t himself yet fully realize it.

  The next morning, weighing in once more, he was again first making sure to praise Caesar. “I have been saying all along that he is a great human being,” the Speaker reminded the press corps, “but I don’t think he appreciates what is in there. The vaccine program would be eliminated, colleges will close and a half million people will be denied the opportunity to go to school, many children won’t receive hot lunches.” And then he reiterated, “I don’t think he realizes that those are the things in the package.” It was a delicate balancing act—acknowledging Reagan’s off-the-charts popularity, and at the same time spotlighting the extent of the potential, and terrible, damage he saw being planned in his name.

  Then he managed to get off a nice shot: “All in all, I would like to remind you that Ronald Reagan was a Democrat himself not too long ago. I think he would have been at least as good last night reading our script rather than the Republican one.”

  The Republican effort to secure Democratic votes, as we’ve seen, was a marvel of efficiency and tireless effort. And, of course, their secret weapon was the president himself, his strength now recovered, and even more fired up than ever. Well accustomed to the discipline of many takes, stepping into his marks for each one, he played the role expected of him like the consummate professiona
l he was. “We stroked and we stroked and we stroked and we stroked and we stroked and we traded,” James Baker said, “and the president was very good at that, and willing to do it all day and all night.” One of his gotten prey was that same Tom Bevill whom he’d reached on the phone in New Zealand. Outside the South, he was able to woo Jerry Patterson of California, Donald Albosta of Michigan, Andrew Jacobs of Indiana, Tony Hall of Ohio, and Gus Yatron of Pennsylvania.

  Not surprisingly, there was a person standing firm who wasn’t being won over, and that was Tip O’Neill. What conservative Democrats, as well as other wavering ones, regarded as tolerable cuts, the Speaker viewed as assaults on people desperately in need. Hedrick Smith, then chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, recalls getting an urgent call from Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor. At that time the weekly breakfasts Sperling hosted at the National Press Club, featuring prominent newsmakers, were a Washington institution and with Tip O’Neill as the upcoming guest, he wanted to be sure the influential Smith planned to come.

  When the morning arrived, Tip didn’t let his audience down. He arrived loaded for bear, defiant in his refusal to abandon—or see abandoned—the many critical programs he’d fought for. What most struck Smith at the time—what he remembered best from that breakfast session—was Tip O’Neill’s visibly simmering rage as he drew for his listeners a vivid picture of those programs and services scheduled to be closed down. With his decades of experience as a people’s advocate, he could see that the citizens most harmed by the Reagan agenda would be those least able to protect themselves, and it was in order to be their protector that he, Tip O’Neill, had gone into politics in the first place.

  Unlike Tip, Ronald Reagan had been propelled into the position he now occupied by a different set of concerns, and had entered the political arena through a route that little resembled the Speaker’s. The president’s son Ron—a perceptive observer of his dad—later would identify certain habits of mind that greatly frustrated Tip in his dealings with the elder Reagan at this time, as he repeatedly came up against them. Explained Ron Reagan: “Tenderhearted and sentimental in his personal dealings, he could nevertheless have difficulty extending his sympathies to abstract classes of people.”

  In Washington terms, in the late spring of 1981, this meant that whenever Tip would try to illustrate for the president the harmful effects of this or that imminent cut by citing an individual case—for example, a young woman forced to leave college because Social Security survivors’ benefits had been eliminated—Reagan would quickly exhibit warm sympathy. What can we do to help this poor girl? Wanting to help out, he’d summon Ed Meese or another staffer to instruct them to go find the tuition money.

  The problem, Tip saw—and found impossible, really, to understand—was that while Reagan could be made to take interest in, and even genuinely seem to care about a particular situation, he remained unmoved if the same hardship story was multiplied into a million similar ones. According to Ron Reagan, the impression left by this failure of his father—whether through inability or willed disregard—to make the leap from the micro to the macro came off as “an obliviousness that was, understandably, taken for callousness.”

  Which is exactly how Tip O’Neill took it. Increasing his sense of frustration was the fact that he and the Democrats could be seen moving inexorably toward a loss. “Am I getting commitments? The answer is no, to be truthful. Have I got disappointments? The answer is yes,” he told reporters, speaking honestly. But when one asked if perhaps he’d turned into a metaphor for old-time, big-spending liberalism, he wrathfully put the questioner in his place: “The Speaker of the House is not a goddamned metaphor. God willing, I never shall be.”

  More and more, Reagan’s own personal lobbying was continuing—and it continued to pay off. “More meetings with Cong. These Demos. are with us on the budget and it’s interesting to hear some who’ve been here 10 years or more say it is their 1st time to ever be in the Oval Office. We really seem to be putting a coalition together.”

  The dilemma for Tip and the Democrats was immediate and ongoing. They were on a beach, an enormous tide was rushing toward them, and there was nowhere to look for safety. If they simply stood still, they’d be overwhelmed, and yet if they ran for it, they’d never attain the high ground again. “Support the president! That’s the concern out there, and Congress can read that,” he wearily told the press. “I’ve been in politics a long time, and I know when to fight and when not to fight.”

  Given the immense pressures of the situation, Tip began to find it hard to stay respectful. His every instinct now was to tweak Reagan, to try to find a way to land a punch. A week before the vote on the new White House–orchestrated budget he couldn’t resist a cutting remark, one that came off, unfortunately, as all too predictable. Taking aim at Reagan’s intellectual grasp of his own policies, he made a point of noting that the president had summoned Vice President Bush into a meeting with the congressional leadership to discuss the budget in order “to have someone explain it for him.” The crack accomplished nothing, but it undoubtedly made Tip feel better. He knew he was losing and he didn’t like it.

  On the morning of the budget vote, O’Neill, seeing defeat ahead, took the only stand he reasonably could and still maintain his dignity. It was also the only way he could prepare to move ahead as he would need to. “When the results are over and the headlines are proclaimed, we will have written the record for the American people. . . . If Reagan is able to win tonight the monkey will be off the Democrats’ back. The cuts . . . are the Reagan cuts.”

  On that day, May 7, the vote for the Reagan budget was 253 to 176. The president had won all 190 Republicans in the House plus 63 Democrats, a number far beyond those 40 southern conservatives who’d risen to their feet. Reagan was exuberant. “This was the big day . . . We never anticipated such a landslide. We felt we were going to win due to the conservative bloc of Demos but expected R. defectors so we might win by 1 or 2 votes. It’s been a long time since Repubs. have had a victory like this.”

  For O’Neill the defeat was painful. And he took it personally now. “An old dog can learn new tricks if he wants to learn new tricks. This old dog wants to learn,” he told members of the House, using a phrase I’d heard him say in the office. But his most forceful—and colorful—response came the next day, when, back at home and paying a visit to the Boston Globe, he found himself asked by one of the pressman, a North Cambridge fellow like himself, how things were going in Washington. His salty reply was perfect for the moment. “I’m getting the shit whaled out of me,” he informed the man.

  Otherwise, his public position and his fallback political strategy were one and the same for the time being. The idea was a simple one: don’t blame him or his party once the going starts to get rough. “From now on, it’s Reagan’s budget. From now on, it’s Reagan’s unemployment rate. From now on, it’s Reagan’s inflation rate. You can’t criticize the Democrats. It’s Reagan’s ball game.”

  Five days after its big victory, the Reagan team committed an unforced error, which had the effect of invigorating Tip. Richard Schweiker, the secretary of health and human services, released a proposal for radical cuts in early Social Security retirement benefits. For those who chose retirement at age sixty-two, instead of receiving 80 percent of the sum due them had they chosen to wait ’til age sixty-five, they would—if the Reagan administration had its way—now collect only 55 percent.

  O’Neill’s initial reaction was to follow the regular procedure for dealing with such a proposal, which meant allowing the House Ways and Means subcommittee to study it first. Then he thought again—and he got angry. Why roll over? What was being proposed was a travesty and he needed to speak out. Both his history and his conscience demanded it. “I’m not talking about politics,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about decency. It is a rotten thing to do.” The Democratic Party, he said, will “fight this thing every inch of the way.” It was “nothing but a sneak at
tack on Social Security.”

  At this point, when I heard about the Reagan Social Security plan, I could think only of my own dad and so I did what I could to encourage the Speaker’s anger. My sixty-one-year-old father, I knew, was planning on retiring early from his position as dean of the Philadelphia court reporters the following year. I knew he’d already announced his plans at work and would be unable to reverse them. I understood how vital their Social Security check would be to him and my mom, since they’d married young and worked hard raising five sons, sending them all to college. Inevitably there had been sacrifices all along the way, and they were looking forward now to taking it easier.

  At this moment, I was behind the scenes in Tip’s office, and, as I’ve said, not exactly working for him. But, because of my parents, I’m proud to take credit for the simple but heartfelt statement I wrote for the Speaker at the time.

  “A lot of people approaching that age [sixty-two] have either already retired on pensions or have made irreversible plans to retire very soon. These people have been promised substantial Social Security benefits at age sixty-two. I consider it a breach of faith to renege on that promise. For the first time since 1935 people would suffer because they trusted in the Social Security system.”

  At the White House, Jim Baker suddenly realized too late the horror of what was unfolding. “Whoever called Social Security the third rail of American politics got it exactly right,” he said, as he made sure the administration extricated itself from the mess it had just landed in. It had never been so clear before this moment that a war was about to be waged, and words would be the ammunition.