He had this other technique, which is so absurd as to not be believed: He would bellow loudest at the congressman he had decided well beforehand to support. This way, the loser would leave his office feeling that the Speaker saw his argument even if he did not end up siding with it. His prestige was that great, his cunning that sharp. After all, he knew these guys.
The Reagan people also liked to leave nothing to chance. Always a smooth operation that preferred no surprises, in this case they were careful to preemptively spin for the media the “real story” of the meeting about to take place. Reagan’s spokesman, Larry Speakes, authoritatively put out the word that ongoing negotiations between the two sides—the White House congressional liaison team and the House Democrats—had progressed to the point where it was now all over except for the cherry on top. Meaning, the presence of the two top guys, Reagan and O’Neill, was being required merely to sign off on the final deal. The “chief stumbling point,” Speakes explained, remained taxes, nothing else. His clear implication: whatever you may have believed up until now, Tip O’Neill is ready to swallow a cut in Social Security.
• • •
David Broder, the much-respected Washington Post columnist, saw the Reagan-O’Neill encounter that April as an historic matchup of men with differing philosophies but equal conviction.
After 45 years in public office, O’Neill is easily caricatured as a bumbling relic of the political past, a ward heeler who threatens harm to the Queen’s English every time he puts down his cigar and opens his mouth. Reagan, the movie actor and television host who took up a second career in politics as he was approaching retirement age, is just as easily caricatured as a lightweight charmer with a gift of gab but no talent for sustained leadership.
Each man has come to know the other’s caricature is a lie. O’Neill learned last year that Reagan is as tough as he is charming; and Reagan is learning this year that O’Neill can be as stubborn about his convictions as the president is himself. . . . But Reagan and O’Neill are not just stubborn Irishmen; they have convictions, and those convictions were forged a long time ago. Reagan is certain he did not become President of the United States in order to raise taxes. And O’Neill is equally convinced he did not become Speaker of the House in order to reduce anyone’s Social Security. . . .
For O’Neill, a rollback in promised Social Security payments is the first retreat from the promise of decent, dignified retirement that the sainted FDR made the cornerstone of the New Deal. . . . For Reagan, an increase in the tax rate contradicts the first principle of the philosophy he has preached since he left the Democratic fold, the belief that the only way to curb big government is to slow the torrent of taxes on which it feeds.
Despite what amounted to a journalistic benediction from Broder, the “Budget Summit” clearly seemed a setup. For one thing, the Speaker’s office was presented with the White House’s rules for the engagement, which, most significant, dictated that only principals were to attend the Capitol meeting, meaning no staff. Such an attempt at control made an absurdity of what was scheduled to happen, since staff experts, laden with their facts and figures, are standard operating procedure during such sessions when legislation is being finalized. In short, the Reagan people were practically telegraphing the fact that this face-to-face would have a great deal in common with David Stockman’s “woodshed.”
When I called Jim Baker to say that the Speaker wanted to bring Ari Weiss with him, he stood firm. “No staff,” he reiterated. At this point, I pointed out the obvious. “You’re staff!” It was a point Baker, with his mandarin sensibility, seemingly hadn’t taken in. He then attempted simply to brush aside the Speaker’s reasonable request while proposing we “be gentlemen about this.” In any case, when I told the Speaker of the rebuff, he was unimpressed. “I’m bringing Ari.”
President Reagan, one could deduce already, certainly wouldn’t be coming alone. When he arrived in the Capitol at the agreed-upon day and time, so did a full White House entourage. You’d think he was traveling to China. It was definitely not to be a quiet, out-of-the-way meeting to reconcile a budgetary stalemate. As I turned the corner to the Senate lobby that afternoon—the meeting was to be held in the President’s Room, just outside the Senate chamber itself—I saw a mass of reporters, held back by the stanchions. It was clear the White House media-meisters had something big in mind. To be fair, Reagan, too, had suspicions about what he might be walking into. “The D’s are playing games,” he’d written in his diary two days earlier. “They want me to rescind the 3rd yr. of the tax cut—Not in a million years!”
As I would learn later, the meeting began with Tip demanding a change in the seating arrangements. The place cards had him next to President Reagan, an unusual placement for two men about to begin tough bargaining. O’Neill’s first order of business was to take a chair directly across from the president.
Reagan tried breaking the ice with an Irish story:
Mary, suffering from morning sickness, is asked by a doctor for a “specimen.” Not knowing what he means, she goes to ask her neighbor Deirdre. When she gets back to the house, she’s got a black eye and bloody face. Her husband Michael wants to know what happened. “I stopped to ask Deirdre what a specimen was,” she replies. “So she told me to piss in a bottle. I told her to shit in a hat, and the fight was on.”
Tip was not to be charmed. “Mr. President, the nation is in a fiscal mess,” he began sternly. “Last year you were going to win on everything you put up. Now the economy is going bad. If we don’t have agreement there will be massive deficits. I know you people don’t like to hear it, but you’re just advocating trickle-down economics. Your program has failed, and you should take the lead in admitting it.”
“I’ve read that crap about my program,” Reagan shot back. Reaching into his cinematic memory, he tossed out a scene that seemed to fit. “We haven’t thrown anybody out in the snow to die. . . . It has not failed at all. It hasn’t even started yet.”
Meanwhile, out in the corridor, where I was positioned, I saw Lesley Stahl of CBS, whom I knew from my Carter days. She pulled me aside to say that the White House staff was putting out the word that the Democrats were the ones proposing to cut Social Security benefits. I went ballistic, furious that anyone would buy such a fiction and only too aware of its potential for real damage. When I delivered this news to the Speaker during a break in the “summit,” it confirmed his worst suspicions. What the White House foot soldiers were peddling in the hallway, I learned from him, was exactly what Reagan’s lieutenants were conniving to accomplish inside.
When he and the other Democratic leaders had walked into the room they’d found on the table a working paper, placed by the White House. It was labeled the “Bolling Proposal.” It was only then, when the Speaker and I compared notes, that we realized what the game was.
Also, who was winning. Dick Bolling, with Tip backing him, had apparently come around to giving Reagan’s people what they’d been looking for from the start. For his own reasons, Tip had allowed Bolling to counter the Republicans’ aggressive move on Social Security benefits with a smaller one, a slight (1 percent) cut in that year’s adjustment for inflation. The problem was, the Speaker had strayed perilously close to the abyss. By taking this step he’d left himself exposed to the charge that he, Tip O’Neill, was the one initiating it.
It was the White House overreach that saved him. The instant I told him what story they were pushing outside the meeting—that he, not Reagan, wanted to cut Social Security—his limited interest in cutting a deal was gone.
Their gambit had failed. They had attempted to mouse-trap too large a mouse.
When he reentered the room, O’Neill confronted Reagan with what I’d just passed on to him. Point-blank, he asked the president to state clearly whether he was the author of this move on Social Security or not. The moment of truth had arrived.
“Now, wait a minute,” came his reply. “This is the proposal that came from the Congress. It’s on
the table because you people put it on the table!” Burned before, Reagan was adamant. The only cut in Social Security he’d accept was one that came out of a compromise between the two parties on Capitol Hill.
That was Reagan’s answer. Tip was ready with his own: “We didn’t specify this cut in Social Security.”
The Bolling Proposal represented Tip’s good-faith effort to help Reagan reduce the federal deficit. He’d been willing to accept a minor delay in Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments. What he would not cooperate in was being played for a fool. Thus he walked away from what they were trying to do, and, by doing so, protected not just Social Security but himself.
The meeting ended with an odd episode. Out of nowhere, Tip’s lieutenant, Congressman Jim Wright of Texas, offered a trade. He asked Reagan to slash the final installment of his tax cut in half, from 10 to 5 percent, in exchange for a grab bag of spending cuts. Reagan’s response was not fit for a family newspaper. “You can get me to crap a pineapple,” he said, “but you can’t get me to crap a cactus.”
Once the meeting was adjourned and the White House press corps safely back home in the West Wing, Reagan’s aides went back to spouting their company line—it had been the Democrats themselves who’d proposed cutting Social Security. But no one was really buying it. The nation’s revered retirement program would remain for the Republicans a hovering albatross.
Still, the face-to-face hadn’t been a total failure. The two partisan leaders would always have fundamental differences, but the meeting’s impresario, Jim Baker, was surprisingly happy with their “chemistry.” The Speaker agreed. “I wasn’t any more of a stubborn Irishman than he was.” Asked whether he thought the White House had been setting him up, O’Neill refused to blame Reagan. “I would have to honestly say, in my opinion, that the president of the U.S. wasn’t any part of it, but I think there are wily minds around him, and that’s what they had in mind from the start.”
• • •
There were moments when, for all the public wrangling, the back-door cooperation could still surprise me. A very human example involved Mitch Snyder, well known in Washington, D.C., at the time as a militant, highly creative advocate for the homeless. Inspired by the radical former priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, whom he’d met in federal prison ten years earlier, Snyder had become a committed activist for the poor.
In the early months of 1982, Snyder embarked on a hunger strike that went on for sixty-three days, over two months during which he took nothing but water and lost fifty-seven pounds. Mitch was a grandstander, to be sure, but at the same time deadly serious. What he was starving himself in protest over was the recent naming of a nuclear attack submarine the Corpus Christi, Latin for “Body of Christ.” For a man now dedicated to pacifism, whose heroes were priests and who himself passionately lived the communitarian teachings of Jesus, it was an affront he couldn’t overlook, despite the fact that the U.S. Navy customarily named certain classes of vessel after American cities, in this case a well-known port town in South Texas. To Snyder, the choice of name was a blasphemy committed by the federal government and condoned by officialdom.
I was alerted to what was happening by a friend, the satiric journalist Nicholas von Hoffman. He urged me to get Tip O’Neill to intercede so that “this guy can go out and get a cheeseburger.” I had a thought, which began with the fact that the Speaker recently had spent the evening at the apartment of syndicated columnist Mary McGrory, who frequently threw informal dinners and liked to have a lively mix of guests. The party, I knew, had concluded with Tip, among others, standing around Mike Deaver, one of Reagan’s triumvirate of top advisors, as he played the piano. It occurred to me, remembering that, that Tip might be willing to call on Deaver to try to keep Mitch Snyder alive. When I explained the problem, Tip said okay, to go ahead and get the guy on the phone.
Deaver wasn’t in his office but returned my call later. When I explained about Snyder’s hunger strike and its motivation, he seemed irritated. Not only because I’d contacted him for such an odd-seeming reason—right when we were already embroiled in a lively partisan standoff—but because he seemed to have little patience for would-be martyrs like Snyder. “It doesn’t seem like a very good reason to kill yourself,” he commented dryly.
Thinking Deaver uninterested, unimpressed, and thus unwilling to help, I was, it turned out, wrong. Though Deaver had given me little reason to expect he’d take the matter right to the top, in fact, that’s exactly what he did. Within days after our conversation, it was announced that the latest nuclear sub in the U.S. Navy would now bear the name USS City of Corpus Christi, with Mitch Snyder accepting the deal.
Those of us who took part in this unusual rescue mission felt a reassuring glimpse of humanity as we regarded our opponents; they’d listened and made a difference. It happens that the day Mitch Snyder’s hunger strike was brought to an end was the very one on which President Ronald Reagan rode in that motorcade up to the Capitol to meet, summit-style, with House Speaker Tip O’Neill.
For Mike Deaver, his stint as Mitch Snyder’s savior would be a precursor of a late-in-life vocation. Soon after leaving the White House he’d come afoul of the law that governed lobbying. His required community service was to work with homeless people in the same building near the U.S. Capitol that housed Mitch’s shelter. This introduced Mike to a world he’d never known before. The man who once advised Ronald Reagan on image-building became a much-beloved counselor to the down-and-out. Through love and attention, he convinced dozens of homeless men to give up alcohol and better their lives. At his funeral, held in the National Cathedral, the great Johnny Mathis, whom he had also helped, sang “Amazing Grace.” But it was the quiet personal testimony of the men he had saved that made the most eloquent music.
As the Speaker once said to me, “You never know what’s in another man’s heart.”
When Reagan faced big deficit trouble in the summer of 1982, Tip O’Neill made the decision to back him up. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) was, for both men, a match of good government and good politics.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PARTNERS
“The future of this economy is now in the hands of Tip O’Neill.”
—SENATOR BOB DOLE
While they’d disagreed in their “summit” meeting, in the aftermath Tip continued to reserve final judgment on the president. Still reluctant to blame him for the harm resulting from his administration’s policies, Tip expressed it this way: “I don’t think he believes his program is hurting anyone because he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t realize the severity of his cuts. If he knew, they wouldn’t go that far.” As for Reagan, he had his own sense of his opponent, and it was one tempered with affection. According to Max Friedersdorf, “We would go in and want the president to fire back at him, say something nasty about Tip, and he would just laugh and say, ‘That’s just Tip being Tip. That’s just Tip.’ ”
In the early summer of 1982, nothing had changed, at least not with regard to these two American leaders and their disagreements over federal spending. Farther away, in the disputed Falkland Islands, the Argentine forces had just surrendered to the British. Iraq and Iran were still locked in a nasty war, and at the beginning of June, Israel invaded Lebanon. Inside the Capital Beltway, the battles involved only the weapons of political persuasion.
In fact, a writer for United Press International took the Falklands as a point of comparison: “It may be easier for the United Kingdom and Argentina to settle their dispute than for President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill to come together on a spending and taxing plan for the United States that satisfies both. It also is likely that if Reagan and O’Neill do find the basis for an agreement, there will be plenty of howling about it—including charges of betrayal—in Washington and elsewhere.”
However, there was a difference that needed to be acknowledged. Unlike the year before, the two sides had arrived at a rough political balance. The rise in unemployment—the April 19
82 jobless rate was the highest since before World War II—and the spiking federal deficit had pushed Reagan into the sort of tough corner unimaginable just months before. Those who had so celebrated his rise to power were suddenly looking at him with the sort of suspicion bestowed on every president when the economic numbers begin to go against him. Worse still, he was finding himself pummeled by his allies on the right, as not being sufficiently hard-nosed.
The fact was, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were in full command of the circumstances as the slide in public confidence continued. Recognizing, finally, that there was no chance whatsoever to pass his still hoped-for progressive budget, the Speaker gave halfhearted backing to a centrist fiscal plan devised by party moderates. Yet, even that option was brought down in a chaotic night on the House floor. Myself, I will never forget the sight of California’s archliberal Phil Burton, who clearly had been drinking heavily, going from member to member threatening him if he didn’t vote “Nay” on the Democrats’ budget.
“You can forget that fuckin’ judgeship,” he barked at a fellow Californian about to retire. Not everyone buckled, of course. With the face of a besotted Burton looming over him—imagine Harpo Marx in hell!—Henry Waxman stood his ground and voted with the party. “He’s trying to bring down the budget!” I appealed to the Speaker, who was circulating among the members. “What can I do?” he answered. “He’s drunk!”
Yet the loss on the budget vote had its silver lining. Now, as Tip had warned all along, the rising deficits were Reagan’s burden to carry, his red ink in the ledger. O’Neill’s Democrats, moreover, were showing new strength. While they didn’t pass their preferred budget, they cast 202 votes against a successful Republican budget, which finally prevailed, a considerable gain compared to the previous year’s 176.
As the best showing against Reaganomics since its champion had taken office, the latest vote appeared to signal a political uptick. But just as we were about to enjoy that possibility, a discouraging Wall Street Journal piece appeared. Worse for me, it was I who agreed to the Speaker’s being interviewed by one of the Journal’s Washington bureau reporters. “Like an aging prizefighter, he has been battered in the early rounds by President Reagan. So he is looking to the final bell—Election Day, November 2—to redeem his reputation.”
Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Page 19
