Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  Kirk O’Donnell, who’d quietly been supporting me all along in my quest to be named Gary Hymel’s successor, now offered the latest update: “Your stock is sky-high!” he told me, pleased. We both recognized that Tip—who enjoyed the predictable routines and rituals of his life and whose own political instincts didn’t urge an ongoing slugfest with an immensely popular president—had come around to our way of thinking. We all knew, too, that there were dissatisfied Democratic House members who felt the Speaker had been too obliging so far in his dealings with Reagan. A few had even been grumbling off the record to reporters, expressing their criticisms. Yes, even as each flinched clear of harm’s way himself.

  In retrospect, I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans themselves actually set the stage for the rise of Tip O’Neill back in the fall when they’d run those ads with the look-alike actor. By casting him as the true face of the Democratic scourge they were running against, they’d put him in the spotlight and rendered him unable to hide. Once the GOP identified the idea of “Tip O’Neill” as a target, the real one’s choices were clear: he could either be a sitting duck or else shoot back.

  The next time Tip and Reagan publicly tussled, from their opposite corners of Washington, was two days later, June 18. The issue: who decides how taxpayer monies are spent. Since Reagan’s budget framework had been overwhelmingly approved in the House of Representatives, he didn’t see why those same politicians should decide how it was put in effect. As far as he could tell, the numbers were brazenly being manipulated so there’d be no real spending cuts. David Stockman, his White House budget director, disgustedly accused the House committee chairmen of playing games. The “Politburo of the Welfare State,” he dubbed them, tarring them with a couple of brushes. Stockman would lampoon O’Neill as the “Hogarthian embodiment of the superstate he had labored for so long to maintain.”

  The president, out of patience with the tactics up on the Hill and wanting to put an end to it, now made a personal plea to Speaker O’Neill, requesting that all of the proposed Reagan cuts be considered in a single vote on the House floor. And if that weren’t enough, Reagan made clear to Tip that he wanted the White House itself to craft this bill, deciding to the penny what programs should be cut and by how much. The answer he got in reply was short and to the point. “Did you ever hear of the separation of powers? The Congress of the United States will be responsible for spending,” Tip parried. “You’re not supposed to be writing legislation.”

  Then, when Tip characterized Reagan’s proposed one-for-all bill as a power play, the president was ready. “I was a Democrat myself, longer than I’ve been a Republican, and the Democrats have been known to make a few power plays.” That reference to his former party affiliation—and his later sincere congratulations on Tip and Millie’s fortieth anniversary—signaled that he wasn’t yet waging all-out war. The Speaker suddenly relented and agreed to take a look at what his Democratic House chairmen had been up to.

  That night, in his diary Reagan offered a thoughtful take on the conversation that fully reveals his political street smarts.

  Called Tip O’Neill—there is no question but that games are being played. The Dem. dominated Committees have put together their plans for implementing . . . [the Reagan budget]. Some did alright but a number of them claimed savings by putting in unrealistic figures they knew would not hold up. For example one of them called for eliminating 1/3 of the P.O.’s [post offices] in the U.S. Now they know we’d have to ask for replacement of those which means their claimed savings doesn’t exist.

  Tip was blustery on the phone & accused me of not understanding the const.—separation of powers etc. I was asking only that he allow an amendment to be presented on the floor for correction of the phony comm. recommendations. He wont allow that of course. He is blocking our move to consolidate categorical grants into Block grants. Claims Cong. would be abdicating its responsibility. In truth Wash. has no business trying to dictate how States & local govts. will operate these programs. Tip is a solid New Dealer and still believes in reducing the states to admin. districts of the Fed. govt. He’s trying to gut our program because he believes in big spending.

  With the Reagan spending cuts set for a vote in the House a week later, on June 25, Tip persisted with his plan to have them handled separately, standing against the president’s determined push for a single yes-or-no. “Tip O’Neill is getting rough,” Reagan wrote in his diary two nights before the vote. “Saw him on T.V. telling the United Steel workers U. I am going to destroy the nation.”

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Tip’s dire prophecies weren’t enough to ward off a crushing defeat. In an extraordinary step, the House of Representatives voted to rebuff the Speaker and permit an up-or-down vote on the entire package of Reagan cuts. It was an unheard-of act of rebellion, stripping the Speaker of the House of his historic power to decide what the House votes on. While the vote was close—just seven votes—it would demonstrate for all to see that Ronald Reagan was calling the shots, even under Tip O’Neill’s own roof.

  But Reagan’s big victory wound up coming at a cost. With a strategy that insisted that his spending cuts all be included in a single bill, the White House encouraged a slapdash drafting process. Even in the final form in which it passed the House, the giant document continued to be an unedited catchall, one including such nongermane material as one Congressional Budget Office staffer’s phone number. However, far worse a calamity was the inclusion in there of a measure eliminating the Social Security minimum benefit. It meant that three million seniors, many of them in their eighties, would be stripped of their $122 monthly benefits. This would cause panic among the Democrats—and also among many Republicans, who voted for the Reagan bill—once they’d realized what they’d done. They understood only too well what a weapon their opponents the following year, in the 1982 elections, could make of this blunder.

  • • •

  On July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan made history by nominating Arizonan Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate Republican Court of Appeals judge and the first woman ever to be tapped, to the Supreme Court. Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill wholeheartedly approved, calling it “the best thing he’d done since he was inaugurated . . . the first time he’s turned the clock ahead during his administration.”

  And then Tip turned around and made an appointment of his own.

  The Speaker entrusted me with the job of helping him take on Ronald Reagan. It was a thrilling challenge.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BATTLEFIELD PROMOTION

  “I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes. I believe it because I lived it.”

  —TED SORENSEN, COUNSELOR

  I’d sensed it was coming. As I continued to hear encouraging reports from Kirk O’Donnell, I also saw how each morning the Speaker was regularly using the statements I wrote to open his press conferences. And that, of course, had been the idea from the start. What caused the delay naming his new administrative assistant was explained easily enough in Tip terms and made sense to anyone who knew him. As his son Christopher “Kip” O’Neill told me at the time, his father had to have a person in that critical job whom “he felt comfortable with.” I’d now met that test.

  I’d been waiting nervously outside his office when Tip called me in. It was late in the afternoon and he’d asked me to come by. Naturally, I was on tenterhooks. “I want you to have Gary’s press job,” he announced almost the moment I sat down. “I like the way you carry yourself,” he added warmly, by way of explanation. Even though I appreciated the compliment, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. That’s because what he just said had the same effect on me as back when I’d been offered the Capitol Police moonlighting job.

  In this case, I immediately assumed he was slotting me into a second-rung position, one where I’d be reporting to Kirk. Then, after a pause, he went on: “It’s a st
atutory position. It carries the rank and salary of administrative assistant.” In fact, this was it! The big one!

  As I got up to leave—feeling happy, fired up, and relieved all at the same time—I was already forgetting just about everything else my new boss had said, except that he’d promised we were “going to have fun.” The fact that he said that made me feel great, and I believed him. As far as I was concerned, we were going to enjoy ourselves just the way David did when he took on Goliath. Helping load the slingshot was going to be my job!

  Here’s what ran in the Washington Post.

  TIP TOP AIDE

  By Cass Peterson, Washington, July 9, 1981

  House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (D-Mass) has hired Christopher J. Matthews, a former Carter speechwriter and onetime aide to Senator Frank Moss (D-Utah), as his administrative assistant, replacing longtime aide Gary Hymel. Hymel was a key political aide as well as O’Neill press man, keeper of the gates, appointments secretary and King Solomon of space allocation.

  Be careful what you wish for, they say. Well, I’d gotten what I’d wanted: all I had to do now was deliver.

  From that afternoon on, I committed myself totally to the challenge I’d been recruited for. Standing at Tip O’Neill’s side as he endeavored to level the Reagan White House’s off-balance economic agenda was an honor, a responsibility, and a huge kick all at once. It was up to him not to let them get away with it—and each one of us on the Speaker’s staff understood the necessity for this, as did an equally committed band of other House members.

  Every morning when I pulled into my assigned parking spot by the East Front of the Capitol—where Jack Kennedy, among other presidents, had taken the presidential oath—and then sat down behind that big desk in the high-ceilinged room just across from the House chamber, it was a genuine high. At the same time, it was impossible not to remember my stint as a cop there in that building. Though it had been barely a decade earlier, it felt like a few lifetimes. Even fresher in my mind, though, were those two years I’d put in at the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. It had been an incredible experience writing speeches for a president, and then spending those last days and nights heading to Election Day crisscrossing the country on the campaign trail.

  That job, however, had come to an abrupt end on Inauguration Day, which meant I also had a personal issue with Reagan. Those of us on the Carter team had given the effort to defeat him everything we had—and then some—but we failed. Now it seemed as if I was being offered a second chance, and I intended to get it right this time around.

  One thing for sure: I didn’t want to miss out on anything that was happening, virtually minute to minute, in the Speaker’s office. Being there, keeping watch over the action and helping Tip to respond quickly when the circumstances demanded, soon turned into an obsession, or maybe even an addiction—from morning to night, right through the weekend and back to Monday again.

  The pattern was familiar. First, I’d been a junior legislative assistant in the morning, Capitol policeman in the afternoon. More recently I’d been an outsourced Speaker’s advisor in the morning, a Democratic campaign operative in the afternoon. Now I was corner man for Tip O’Neill in the morning, and later in the day his roving envoy on the House floor.

  Mornings were most important. From the minute I awoke until Tip’s daily press conference at quarter to twelve, one thing and one thing only was on my mind: making sure that when the Speaker walked down the hall to begin taking questions he was perfectly prepared for whatever might be thrown at him. In politics, nothing good ever comes out of the unexpected. It helped that Tip started each day as a vacuum cleaner for information. “Whaddaya hear?” was his invariable greeting to Kirk O’Donnell, Ari Weiss, and me as we sat there in his office.

  “Anything special out there?” He continued probing, looking around at us expectantly. “Anything I ought to know?” We understood we needed to be sharpest when it came to this last query, that it required us being his eyes and ears. If any tidbit of information happened to be floating around Greater Washington, the existence of which might affect him and his stewardship of the House, he counted on one of us to make him aware of it. We knew we had to come through with no excuses and that he was expecting us to deliver the goods.

  Not wanting to be caught off guard or unprepared in the day’s press conference was one part of the equation, but the other was that Tip also never wished to be surprised in his role as Speaker, as the leader of the United States House of Representatives. Though he trusted us and others on his staff, it was the rest of the world—that is to say, his world, of Capitol Hill and its environs—that could and did harbor trouble. He relied on us to distill the essence of every Sunday’s public affairs talk shows for him and to reduce the hot air spouted to the essential nitty-gritty he craved. Statements made on-air often required expert decoding—no pol ever went on Meet the Press or Face the Nation without packing an agenda—and those analyses we supplied as well. Then, too, if a Democratic colleague had been speaking against Tip or his leadership in the cloakroom, of course the Speaker had to know that. Somebody would always drop the dime, and thus one of us would hear through our networks who’d been dabbling in disloyalty or insurrection. Secrets were hard to keep even in so mammoth a building. “The walls have ears,” the Speaker would remind us ominously.

  Priding himself on his skills at reading the House, as I’ve said, he relied on us to help ensure his ability to do so. It was also imperative that each and every day he was on top of where all the legislative issues stood—which ones were headed to the floor, which were still in committee, which ones weren’t going anywhere. “Where’re we at on that, Ari?” he’d ask Weiss, who, though still in his twenties, appeared to have been born to this job. He was a prodigy who possessed the astounding gift, as I’ve said, of knowing the answer to any legislative question within minutes of arriving daily at his desk, right next to mine.

  Basically, there was a division of labor, and here’s how Tip described it in an interview with Hedrick Smith: “Ari Weiss was absolutely brilliant. Legislativewise, he was the fellow I followed. International and politics was Kirk O’Donnell. Local was Leo Diehl. The writer was Chris Matthews. I had four extremely able and talented people.”

  Before long we’d arrive at the question of what that day’s targeted statement—focusing on a topic of current interest—was to be. These “scripted” comments were always the centerpiece of his press briefing. I’d have suggestions ready to present, as to where we might go and what I thought would work, and then I’d pitch them to him. His reactions, when he approved, would vary from a sober approval to an appreciative chuckle. It was easy to know when he liked an idea. However, if he didn’t go along or wanted tweaks, he made it clear. “That’s not me!” he’d exclaim. Or else he’d instruct, “Drop that last line.” His was a self-protective, or maybe I should say self-defining, editing process: he knew who he was and he was simply sharing that knowledge.

  Once the brainstorming session was over, anyone watching would have seen me race down the corridor to my desk next to the Speaker’s ceremonial office. Once there, I’d knock out the daily statement we’d decided on as if a stopwatch were ticking off the seconds. What a kick it was to each day prove myself fast enough to knock out the Speaker’s statement so that it would be sitting there, neatly ready for him to pick up and read to open his meeting with the press.

  Once the Speaker had gone in at noon to “open the House,” the afternoons were mine to wander the floor. Such access to “the floor” of the House of Representatives was a grand perk, and before long I was familiar with its landmarks and its people.

  Just off the back row was a door leading to the Democratic cloakroom. There are four cloakrooms in the Capitol—one for each party off both the House and Senate chambers. Legendary multipurpose rooms, they’re where the serving pols go to snack, answer phone calls, or relax. In a corner was a fellow named Raymond, selling boiled hot dogs, tun
a sandwiches, chips, soda, and coffee, allowing members to dash in and grab a bite. In those days before cell phones, “Chez Raymond,” as we liked to call it in a mock French accent, stood off from the double row of old-fashioned telephone booths that were another of the room’s classic features.

  Entering from the House floor, the first person you encountered was the “Master of Phones.” The presider in the cloakroom, his job was facilitating communications between the leadership and the rank and file. It’s always his business to know as much as anyone ever could, especially with regard to what time the House was going to adjourn each week. He also somehow managed to keep track of the departure schedules for those Democratic members who left town on the weekends to head home to their families and districts. The Master of Phones looked out for them, ensuring they’d make whatever train or plane they were expecting to catch.

  Also there in the cloakroom were a few tables and a cluster of worn-in leather chairs, a pair of overstuffed couches, and a television. In the old days, some of the senior members would settle in comfortably to enjoy the classic black-and-white movies that came on at 4 p.m., eventually falling asleep for all to see. For his part, Tip O’Neill liked to claim one of those trusty armchairs and, cigar in hand, wait for members to come up and tell him what was on their minds. By making sure to stay tuned in like this, he was better able to “read” the House. The Speaker loved being there and available to listen.

  I was fascinated by the floor and its human geography, and soon familiarized myself with the different members, where they sat and with whom—and what these choices meant. It was easy to spot the cliques. Up in the back and hugging the center aisle, and therefore closest to the Republicans, was “Redneck Row.” That was home to the southern Democrats, the members who were the Speaker’s biggest worry; they were the conservatives who were now voting heavily for the Reagan program. Tip understood what their reasons were—backing of stronger defense and opposition to “big government”—but he was playing a waiting game, hoping they’d see the light and come home to the Democrats, to him.