Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  The speech he delivered swerved away from his ongoing war with Congress over spending and taxes. It was no time to hold up a scorecard on his economic program, which would end up doubling the national debt in his presidency. Instead, he offered an off-the-topic case for returning more than forty federal programs to the control of the country’s state and local governments. The “new federalism,” he called it. The Democrats, however, weren’t buying either the topic or its fancy moniker. Here’s how the Speaker responded at his daily press conference.

  Question: There has been some talk that the “new federalism” proposal is simply a diversionary tactic, to avoid discussing the economy. Do you think it is?

  Speaker: Did I think it was? Yes. He avoided the No. 1 issue at the present time, which is unemployment.

  It was Reagan’s proposed deficit, as evidenced in the budget he presented to the House in February for the upcoming year, that started the new round of fighting. “Met with bi-partisan leadership on budget then with Repubs. alone,” he recorded. “Then signed the bud. & sent it to the hill. Tip O’Neill still thinks I’m depriving the needy. Told the press I associate with the country club crowd. He plays more golf & I don’t.”

  The president, as Tip already knew, loved having a repertoire of horror stories of Democratic regulations and spending habits that he could pull out for every occasion. The trouble was his habit of casually blurring the edges between useful anecdote and established fact, a habit popular on the partisan luncheon circuit. These Reagan assertions—always vaguely plausible and always at the expense of liberal programs—drove Tip crazy: What about the Medicaid rule that hospitalized a young girl for a decade—at huge cost to the government—when her treatment could have been administered just as well at home? What about the rich kids in upscale suburbs receiving free school lunches? What about the well-off college students getting food stamps? There was simply no stopping him; the president was incorrigible when it came to his relish of such tales. For him they vividly, and believably, portrayed a world where Big Government and Bleeding Heart types were allowed to hold sway.

  Irritated anew by Reagan’s hard-line conservatism, Tip decided he’d had enough and felt justified in letting loose publicly. Accusing Reagan of turning his back on his origins, he claimed the president had “forgotten his roots.” Though he cultivated an average-guy image whenever he could, the Democrat argued, he spent too much time “associated with that country-club style of people.” The gloves were off at this—and Reagan took the opportunity for a hard jab in reply. “I’ve only played golf once since I’ve been president, and he’s an inveterate golfer, and I’m sure he must have to go to a country club to play golf.”

  The Speaker got off a well-placed punch of his own, accusing the White House of trying to sell the country a “Beverly Hills Budget.” It stuck. The phrase nailed Reagan squarely as a Southern California swell who preferred spending his evenings and weekends with multimillionaires. It was meant to sting and did. Meanwhile, the Reagan budget, with its proposed $90 billion–plus deficit, hit Reagan’s Republican allies with what amounted to sticker shock. “There is unrest among the troops over the budget problem,” he noted unhappily in his journal.

  Early in 1982, I started to keep my own record of my experiences in the trenches of Washington warfare. “Tomorrow we begin the long-run fight for the year.” I realized how decisive the year would be, with so much riding on it in the years to come. If Tip lost this election, there’d be no coming back.

  Then, two days later I noted: “President hit hard at press conference. Press treatment is cold; the President’s attempt to charm his way through rough moments ran very thin today. The best he could say about economic outlook was that there would be a return to normalcy sometime this year. We need to build argument that Reagan program is responsible for economic problems facing the country. I notice a growing consensus that the Democrats should pick up seats in the House this Fall.”

  What I’d seen was that the polls were starting to show a hard swing away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats as the “party of prosperity.”

  • • •

  Not long after, on a snowy afternoon in March, I got a personal sense of why Tip O’Neill enjoyed such genuine loyalty in the House. We were sitting, the Speaker and I, in one of those Learjets used by corporate executives. As we took off, I couldn’t stop thinking that just weeks before, an Air Florida jetliner, departing this same airport and with too much ice on its wings, had plunged into the Potomac River.

  With this recent tragedy on my mind, thinking of my wife, pregnant with our first child, and watching the wintry sky outside the window, I caught the eye of the giant man sitting in the plane’s backmost seat. I wondered what perversity of chance-taking led him to take the seat farthest to the rear, making it all the harder for that little aircraft to strain through the snow that had surrounded its wheels and still kept coming down hard. “What are you worrying about?” asked the face beneath the Irish tweed hat. Well, for one thing, I thought, the prospect of slipping through the ice of Lake Erie, never to be seen again. I mumbled something about “the weather” and began shunning eye contact in order to better attend full-time to the white-knuckled hell of that frost-covered porthole.

  Why, you must ask, as I certainly did that March afternoon, was he taking this trip on such a day? The answer is that he’d made a promise and was keeping it. Dennis Hertel, a young congressman from the Detroit suburbs, wanted the Speaker of the House on hand to bolster his credibility at a couple of fund-raisers. In the coming months I would often remember the trip on that Learjet in such terrible weather and see it as a metaphor for Tip’s fateful decision to face off with Reagan. It was as if up there in the media skies he’d been doing battle with the gale-force reality of early 1980s Reaganism. I’m not saying Tip O’Neill didn’t worry. I’m saying he didn’t let people see him worry even when everything he stood for was being jostled and thrown into the wind, even when his long, hard-fought-for career was at stake.

  “I was the lone voice out there crying—you might say whimpering—last year,” Tip admitted as the winds began to shift in his direction and he watched congressional allies who’d virtually abandoned him now come drifting back. “But I won’t be alone this year.” The reversal of fortune he was experiencing wasn’t a matter of poll numbers alone. It was also evidenced by the fact that, over in the White House, President Reagan was showing signs of badly needing his support.

  Only with the Speaker’s backing could the president secure the votes in the House he needed, the ones required for the difficult steps to cut the massive government deficit. Yet even as he was aware of his importance to the man in the White House, Tip wasn’t hopeful about a deal. Reagan, he said, had seen too many John Wayne movies and equated compromise with retreat. Tip’s own hard-line position was simple: there would be no reductions whatsoever in Social Security, and unless Ronald Reagan himself proposed it, no discussion, either. This dynamic laid the groundwork for one of the biggest battles between Tip and the Gipper.

  As stubborn as he was, Reagan was also in a corner. Not even the Great Communicator would find it easy to sell the public a budget with so large a deficit. He and his fellow Republicans had campaigned successfully on the argument that high deficits cause inflation and high interest rates. To stanch the red ink, he needed a deal. The problem was that the conservative Democrats who’d helped form the previous year’s coalition in the House and handed him his historic budget victories needed to rethink their defection. How could they stick with all this White House–endorsed red ink now that they were facing reelection?

  This was where the situation stood late in March just as cherry blossom season began. If Ronald Reagan were to get out of the crisis with some measure of his presidential dignity intact, the Democrats would have to come on board and help rescue him from the mast he was clinging to. That went double for any messing with Social Security.

  Despite Tip’s over-my-dead-body stance, the
White House ambition was to draw the Speaker into a deal that would make him a partner in any slashes, including the egregious ones. When it fell to Chief of Staff Jim Baker to make the initial approach, he set off for what he intended as a highly discreet meeting with Tip at the Speaker’s suburban Maryland residence. That it happened on Tip’s actual home turf, with the proud Baker traveling out to the Speaker’s modest condo, was a sign of the administration’s rising panic.

  Tip, who had no reason to keep the rendezvous secret, afterward let reporters in on just what had happened. Baker had come to him, he said, asking permission to meet with two key Democratic committee chairmen: Oklahoma’s Jim Jones of Budget and Illinois’s Dan Rostenkowski of Ways and Means. But he wasn’t telling the press everything; he knew what was actually afoot beyond the good manners. Baker’s appearance in his living room, and the elaborate courtesy that it spoke, was a message in itself. By carefully seeking Tip’s approval to schedule those meetings with his congressional colleagues, the White House was implying the Speaker’s imprimatur could be attached to the results.

  With such a scenario now being plotted around him, Tip was faced with a dilemma that lacked a simple solution. He knew if he refused such an extremely correct offer to allow those Democratic members even to discuss the red-ink problem, he would undoubtedly be made the villain of the piece. Therefore, he’d have to agree. At the same time, there was a giant hazard ahead that he couldn’t ignore.

  O’Neill saw the cunning that caught him in the Hobson’s choice. “He thought that Baker was the toughest political opponent he ever came across,” his daughter Rosemary recalled. The political reality guiding the Reagan forces was their need to rope in the Democrats. As Tip understood, the only safe route for the Republicans at this point, burdened as they were by the looming specter of monster fiscal humiliation, was to win political cover from his side. This meant securing his out-in-the-open partnership. Participating, however, would mean he’d have to personally agree to painful economies, most likely ones including cuts to Social Security.

  The White House request to meet with Jones and Rostenkowski, two Democratic colleagues more accommodating than he, demanded an equally shrewd response. O’Neill decided to agree to the proposed meetings with one caveat. The White House could have all the get-togethers they wanted with the moderate Jones and the deal-loving Rosty. However, as far as the Speaker was concerned, just one person would be representing him in budget talks. That was his ever-loyal chairman of the Rules Committee, Missouri’s Richard Bolling. And the White House had to accept it. Tip wanted a stand-in he trusted in any such dealings.

  Throughout these curtain-raising preliminaries to what, a few days later, would wind up as a ballyhooed face-to-face between Tip and Reagan, I never knew how far he was willing to go. Would he actually have agreed to cut Social Security benefits if the offer had struck him as fair? In Tip’s vocabulary, that would have been a bargain that, at minimum, raised taxes on the wealthy to match any cut in the social safety net. In the meantime, Bolling’s task, as Tip’s surrogate in the meetings Baker wanted, was to listen, discuss, probe for a deal, and, above all, protect the Speaker.

  My own attitude was to fight. “I think we should not compromise,” I wrote in my journal. “We should push the President hard and get what we can. Why should we give in on anything if Reagan doesn’t want to give in on Kemp-Roth?” This shorthand referred to Reagan’s signature 1981 tax cuts bill that had been jointly sponsored by New York congressman Jack Kemp and Delaware senator William Roth. That victory had defined the country’s direction, as dictated by Reagan’s agenda since the summer before, and its reality constituted the Democrats’ defeated position now.

  To push for even a partial repeal was asking Reagan to repudiate Reaganism. I could never see it happening. Quite frankly, I wasn’t even rooting for such a deal. My view was that, if Reagan, against all odds, could have been talked into concessions on the timing of his tax cuts, the Democrats would still be wrong to accept it. It was an unequal trade. Reagan would only be adjusting details of his tax cuts by a year or so. The Democrats would be betraying their fifty-year commitment to Social Security. For me, any Democratic deal that compromised that bond would never be as good as no deal at all.

  The Speaker realized it wasn’t that simple. There were moderate Democrats, he knew, ready to agree to an arrangement with the White House. They were letting it be known they were open to accepting a swipe at the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment in return for a partial delay in Reagan’s proposed three-stage cut in income taxes. I compared them, if somewhat indiscreetly, to the British prisoners of war in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Meaning, those guys were getting so involved in the intricacies of deal-making with the enemy that they forgot they were doing it primarily to save Reagan’s skin. After all, it was his administration, and he was the one faced with a greatly flawed budget he’d shoved into being and now needed badly to fix.

  One political case for buckling to the Republicans on the budget was that it would change the subject. The pollsters working for our side had issued a warning to the effect that whenever “the budget” became the headline in partisan debate, it benefited the Republicans. What the opposition party needed to focus on was “the economy.” Budget, as a concept, played up the Democrats’ reputation as big spenders. To speak of the economy, on the other hand, put the accent on the rising jobless rate. This argued for giving up legislatively on the budget, while keeping up the media drumbeat on what Reagan had done to the economy.

  When it came to how the public was viewing the protracted efforts over the budget, Reagan knew what we knew. As an actor he’d naturally never liked bad reviews, and as president he must have hated them all the more. Fed up with media talk about the worsening recession—“Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?” he asked sarcastically after watching a Bill Moyers documentary on its impact around the country. He badly wanted the national conversation off the “economy” and back to the “budget” fight. “I called Tip O’Neill,” he jotted in his diary. “I’m not sure he’s ready to give. Tip is truly a New Deal liberal. He honestly believes that we’re promoting welfare for the rich.”

  In early April, a day after the shock of lousy poll numbers—“I’m slipping badly,” he wrote in his journal—Reagan began making weekly Saturday radio addresses. These five-minute live broadcasts were designed to be a media magnet for the weekend. The Sunday newspapers habitually provide end-of-the-week analysis of the political scene. Reagan’s carefully scripted commentary often trumped the op-ed pages with the public. It was a masterful use of traditional media by an old pro. Radio was where Ronald Reagan had started, after all.

  It became my task—one I shared with my Senate counterpart; we alternated weeks—to enlist House members to sit in front of a radio mic and present the formal Democratic response to air after the president’s Saturday talk. I would discover to my dismay how many Democrats didn’t want to go head to head with Reagan, how only a few would agree to respond to him in real time. Overwhelmingly, those who stepped forward wanted to have their five-minute “responses” an hour after Reagan’s address written and ready the day before. Here’s a note in my journal for Saturday, April 17, 1982. It concerned the congressman Toby Moffett, who was willing to take the plunge despite extraordinary family circumstances. “Toby Moffett, his wife in labor from 8 AM this morning, is about to respond to Reagan’s radio address.” Looking back, I give the Moffetts—both of them—credit. Even under normal family circumstances, heading into a studio to talk back to a president with the whole country listening had to be stressful.

  As those spring days passed, the White House set up a situation that amounted to an ambush waiting for Tip to walk into it. If he didn’t participate directly in a budget deal that briskly trimmed Social Security payments, he’d be tagged an “obstructionist,” the very label he’d sacrificed so much to dodge the previous y
ear. To heighten the melodrama quotient, President Reagan would now motorcade to the Capitol, symbolizing the heroic “extra mile” he was willing to go in order to strike a compromise with the Democratic Speaker. After this bit of political theater, and depending on how Tip responded, the president would either applaud him for at last agreeing that Social Security needed cutting, or else lay into Tip if the Speaker held firm.

  So the two of them were about to go head-to-head, purportedly on Tip’s home turf. It would be a battle of wits, deciding who would come out the grand compromiser, who the roadblock. It would play to Reagan’s strengths as a showman but also to the Speaker’s proven ability once the pair of them were in the room together.

  O’Neill was a master of the backroom negotiation. He worked them all the same way. Each time there was a dispute within the caucus to be settled, he would summon all parties to his working office. There he would sit behind his giant desk, the one used by President Grover Cleveland, light up his cigar, and hear the arguments.

  He would never move from behind that desk while the arguments rose and fell. He was the judge, after all, and never in a rush to offer his verdict. My guess is that he liked it when the room grew hotter, stickier, closer. It wore down the contestants for his judgment, made them hunger for the fresh cold air of the Capitol they knew awaited them just outside those doors.