Yet fifteen minutes after the tense meeting in the West Wing, the president and the Speaker found themselves together again, reunited in a different corner of the White House. Reagan had invited Senate and House committee chairmen to be briefed in the State Dining Room on his annual budget. As the administration officials put on their dog and pony show, Reagan approached O’Neill. He’d just spoken to Budget Director Stockman, he told him, and wanted Tip to know that working jointly on a jobs bill with him wasn’t out of the question. “Dave tells me we’re really not that far apart,” the president offered reassuringly. When asked later what the two had been whispering about, Reagan replied they were “just two Irishmen plotting.”
Back at the Capitol, O’Neill reflected on his conversation with the president. “Whether this means a ray of hope, I don’t know.” He said they remained “very far apart” on a jobs bill.
Clearly, Reagan hoped to smooth matters between them. He quickly gave permission to Stockman and a group of other staffers to meet with O’Neill with an eye to working through their differences. “We stand ready to compromise,” Tip said. “We are Americans first and Democrats second. I truly believe that we have to stimulate the economy. We are interested in getting people back to work as quickly as possible. Next to Social Security, that is our No.1 agenda. You can’t stimulate the economy if you can’t put people back to work. That is how we’ve gotten out of every recession.”
But even as the first working session with Tip was about to take place, Stockman had a more pressing concern. Joked the Speaker, “I understand he’s getting married Saturday . . . When he goes on his honeymoon, he won’t be thinking about Tip O’Neill.”
Stockman got to the church on time—but not before first getting to the meeting with the Speaker. That very same day, after Tip had made reference to his impending nuptials, Stockman accompanied Jim Baker, Dick Darman, and Ken Duberstein to Tip’s office. There they reached agreement with O’Neill and his lieutenants on a $4 billion bill to create 125,000 jobs. While this made only a minimal dent in the unemployment rate, it allowed the Democrats to claim they’d made progress with the president, while at the same time giving Reagan and the Republicans a way to show they were sensitive to the country’s pain.
“When I met with President Reagan on January thirty-first, he promised that he would direct David Stockman to find areas where government spending could create more jobs,” the Speaker said on February 10. “The president has kept his promise. Today, Jim Baker and David Stockman brought me a number of immediate approaches for creating jobs and relieving the human suffering caused by the current economic situation.”
• • •
The week after coming to a deal with the White House on the jobs bill, Tip O’Neill got a new—temporary—job of his own. His cameo on an episode of Cheers, which would become one of the country’s best-loved and most popular TV series, propelled him to a new level of celebrity. When he agreed to lend local verisimilitude by strolling into that iconic Boston bar “where everybody knows your name,” it helped turn him into a household name.
Doing battle with Ronald Reagan on behalf of his fellow Americans, many of whom had no other champion, was helping to make him a folk hero. But folk hero or not, he still had to run for reelection himself in 1984, and in March he threw his hat into the ring for the seventeenth time. On the following day, the House passed that hard-fought-for jobs bill he and the president had managed to bring into being.
Reagan Diary: March 17
St. Patrick’s day. A shamrock tie from Margaret Heckler & one from Tip O’Neill. Lunch on Capitol hill as Tips guest. About 30 people including F.M. Barry & Ambas. O’Sullivan of Ireland. Tip is a true pol. He can really like you personally & be a friend while politically trying to beat your head in.
For Tip’s part, for the good of the country—especially its workers—he would wish Reagan the best with his economic program. “I always figured that—listen, I’m an American. I hope that it’ll work, like everybody hopes that it’ll work.”
Tip O’Neill suspected to the end that Reagan had launched the invasion of Grenada to distract from the terrorist attack on the marine barracks in Lebanon.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LEBANON AND GRENADA
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
As leaders often do, Ronald Reagan saw the world as a board game, where the winning side was the one gaining territory. In the post–World War II years, anyone could see the communists were the biggest winners in Eastern Europe, North Korea, then China, then in North Vietnam. If they weren’t stopped as they’d been in South Korea, or challenged bloodily as in South Vietnam, there was no saying they wouldn’t be at our very borders next. (After all, what about Cuba?) Those who subscribed to this thinking—I certainly did—had reason for a troubling worldview.
For a solid explanation, you need only look back to what Adolf Hitler tried to do and wound up perilously close to achieving. Yet there’d been a pivotal moment, an opportunity to put a check to his intentions. At the Munich Conference in 1938, when England and France lacked the resolve to stop the German chancellor from seizing the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland, their weakness turned into Hitler’s mandate. The global horror of Axis aggression proceeded from there. For Reagan, for his contemporaries, and for many in the generations after them, the word Munich was understood as code for any nation’s stepping back from the necessary toughness.
Ronald Reagan’s zealous anticommunism had been an integral part of his political makeup since the days when, as Screen Actors Guild president, he’d first encountered the hard left’s bullying ways and treacherous practices. During those postwar years in Hollywood, he’d gone head to head with hard-left union bosses, some of whom had direct Soviet ties. In the end he could only regard them as spreading evil, and from then on, he refused ever to regard any communists as trustworthy, on any level whatsoever.
He came to the presidency with views that had only grown harder over the decades. Yet that antagonism, born out of his personal experience with communism, had another side—one linked to the reverence in which he held his ideal of democracy. The American Way was the bulwark against the communist threat here in this country, he felt, and the truth of that was undeniable. As the 1950s began, he made his political odyssey past a fading acting career. Then with General Electric Theater he grew in determination as he traveled across time and geography to that extraordinary prize, the White House. All the while he saw the rising tide of global communism and spent his second career bucking it.
In the mind of Ronald Reagan, the Soviet system itself was through. America would prevail, of that he had no doubt. We win. They lose. Born of personal witness, his anticommunist narrative never faltered. Reagan was a man who knew exactly what he believed and was willing to trumpet it wherever there were listeners.
Speaking to members of the British parliament in London in June 1982, he appropriated a turn of phrase that had been first employed sixty-five years earlier by Leon Trotsky for the Russian revolutionary’s own, opposite purposes. His confident American tones resounding through the Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster, Reagan declared, “What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
Tip O’Neill was similarly a Cold Warrior, though without Reagan’s sense of ideology—meaning, his own ideology—as destiny. Equally repelled by the notion of communism, the Speaker regarded as key the unity inherent in our country’s very name: the United States of America. He resolutely held to the civic wisdom that reminds, “Politics ends at the water’s edge.” It had actually been a Republican senator, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg, who’d first put these word
s into the political phrasebook. “To me,” Vandenberg wrote in the early 1950s, “ ‘bipartisan foreign policy’ means a mutual effort, under our indispensable two-party system, to unite our official voice at the water’s edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world.”
Tip O’Neill had come up in politics during an era very different, of course, from the one in which he now was a senior figure. During his formative Washington years, he’d watched Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson follow the foreign policy line taken by President Eisenhower and his advisors at the same time as those men, in turn, were willing to accept the Democrats’ hegemony when it came to domestic affairs. However, like many Democrats, O’Neill had broken with “water’s edge” bipartisanship when it came to Vietnam.
After opposing the escalating U.S. involvement there, he was left, once we withdrew our forces, in an understandable quandary. For him, the possibility of “another Vietnam” now joined a tug-of-war with the prospect of “another Munich.” Even before Reagan attained the presidency or he the Speakership, Tip had worried Vietnam might wind up the operative model should the United States ever find itself tempted to engage in anticommunist excursions in our own hemisphere.
When it came to Central America, Tip had his own personal reasons to believe we’d end up fighting on the wrong side. In the mind of a man who’d grown up in working-class North Cambridge, U.S. involvement during the first half of the twentieth century in places like Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua had its origins in the arrogant might exerted by the United Fruit Company, at one time a Boston-based import giant with vast Central American interests. Tip blamed United Fruit’s internal meddling in the affairs of these countries for our military interventions in them in the 1920s.
“Why are we there?” the young O’Neill had asked Eddie Kelly, a marine who returned from Nicaragua in a wheelchair. “We’re taking care of the property and rights of United Fruit,” he recalled the young man’s answer. “Gunboat diplomacy,” to Tip O’Neill, was only another variant on the rich calling the shots and he wanted no part of it. “A few people made a great amount of money,” he said of the early-century troubles in Central America, “and we are responsible for it.”
In the first third of the twentieth century the United States had intervened in Nicaragua militarily. An occupation by American marines that began in 1912 didn’t end until twenty-one years later. It was then that a guerrilla group led by Augusto César Sandino successfully confronted both the local regime and the U.S. troops. But only three years later, Sandino himself was killed, and for the next four decades Nicaragua was ruled by the corrupt, authoritarian Somoza family. In 1979, a rebel group calling itself the Sandinistas forced out the Somozas.
Upon taking office in January 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to make his anticommunist stand in Nicaragua. Accusing the Sandinistas of collaborating with the Soviets and Cuba in efforts to overthrow the right-wing government in El Salvador—a nearby country separated from Nicaragua by a chunk of Honduras—the White House terminated U.S. financial aid to the country’s government. By year’s end, the president had escalated the battle, signing an order that gave arms, equipment, and money to an anti-Sandinista rebel group, known as the Contras because they were waging a contrarrevolución. Made up of several anti-Sandinista factions, the Contras had unified with the approval of the United States and had suddenly emerged to launch military attacks against the Nicaraguan government.
Angry Democratic reaction to the Reagan administration’s backing of the Contras led to the passage of the first Boland Amendment in December 1982. This was a measure sponsored by Congressman Edward Boland, O’Neill’s former roommate whom he had named chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It banned military support “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.” The Speaker said the White House’s backing of the Nicaraguan rebels would eventually lead to American troops going into that country.
• • •
In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Its goals were to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organization’s base of operations in southern Lebanon, eliminate Syrian influence there, and establish an alliance with a Christian-led government. The task at hand, forcing the PLO to leave the country, was accomplished quickly. President Reagan now agreed to send in U.S. troops as part of a multinational force, its purpose being to safeguard the Palestinians’ evacuation. Once this mission had been achieved, the American troops were sent back to their ships.
Then came a pair of horrors.
First, on September 14, Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese president-elect, was assassinated in his party’s East Beirut office. Two days later, approximately seven hundred Muslim civilians—many women, children, and elderly men—were massacred between September 16 and 18 in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. The attacks were linked to the Phalangist party of Bashir Gemayel; and revenge for his death was the obvious motivation. In the aftermath of these acts of violence, President Reagan made the decision to summon the marines back into the country to help maintain order with their presence.
The dangers inherent in this second deployment should have been obvious. These members of the American military were dispatched originally as a symbol to a region where symbols were synonymous with targets. They went in as peacekeepers where there was no existing peace to keep. Summoned to serve as the “linchpin” of a diplomatic effort to rebuild the Lebanese government, the marines’ presence quickly became a pretext for further violence.
Tip O’Neill gave President Reagan his backing on Lebanon policy from the outset. When talk first arose of sending the marines—for their initial appearance on the scene, to help oversee the evacuation of the PLO—he was openly positive. “If he asks my views,” he said, responding to a reporter’s question just before a White House briefing he was attending, “I will be happy to tell him through the years that I’ve always felt that if we had a bipartisan foreign policy the nation would be better off. I wait to see what the president has in mind.” He had the same reaction on hearing that Reagan intended the second deployment of the marines. “I would hope that the leadership on both sides could be unanimous,” he told the press.
As might have been anticipated, the return of the U.S. marines to Lebanon triggered a violent reaction. On April 18, 1983, the United States Embassy in Beirut was car-bombed. Sixty-three people were killed, including seventeen Americans. Afterward, the attackers were defiantly open about their motivation: Americans, get out! had been the message.
On August 29, the Lebanese civil war reignited. U.S. marines were drawn into firefights, with two killed and fourteen wounded. Democrats began demanding that the 1973 War Powers Act—which gave Congress the right to set constraints on a president’s ability to make war, a law that remains subject to dispute to this day—be invoked.
By September, it was obvious that the American military role in Lebanon had grown beyond its stated mission as a peacekeeping force. Increasingly, our marines there were seen as belligerents on the side of Israel and the Lebanese Christians, and thus as enemies of the Muslim communities. By October, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was warning Reagan that the Syrians and other enemies of the Christian-led government regarded the Americans in their midst as combatants. From offshore, American ships were pounding Muslim positions in the mountains, with U.S. marines in forward positions acting as spotters. Worse yet, they had been assigned to what essentially was guard duty at Beirut International Airport. This placed them in close proximity to a radical Muslim neighborhood, which the marines had nicknamed “Khomeiniville.”
The clock was ticking until the next wave of retaliation.
What was now clear was that the deployment to Lebanon fell under the provision in the War Powers Act’s category of troops placed in a situation “where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated.” That provision requires that the Congress approve any co
ntinued U.S. military involvement where U.S. forces face active hostilities. It is quite specific. Troops must be withdrawn within sixty days—ninety, if the president asserts he needs more time—unless Congress specifically authorizes them to remain in the war zone. The marines’ circumstances in Beirut clearly met the act’s standards of “imminent involvement in hostilities.” As Tip O’Neill put it, “The marines are being shot at and are firing back.”
However, despite the ongoing September fighting, the Democrats in Congress, led by O’Neill, refused to use the War Powers Act as a way to order the marines to leave. “We discussed showing a united front,” he reported after a phone conversation with Jim Baker. “We are in there with three other nations. . . . we want to work together for the betterment of world relations and peace. And if Syria, for any reason, thinks the parties of America are divided and they can just hang around till we pull out, I would say they are wrong.”
The Speaker was taking his cues from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Key members of that panel, unfortunately, lacked his wariness of foreign entanglements, his “no more Vietnams” mind-set. One member of the Democratic leadership who called it as he saw it was Tom Foley. “That country is coming apart,” he said at one backroom meeting I attended over the Lebanon resolution. “The only difference in whether we put those troops in is how many casualties we’re going to take.”
At this point, the Speaker pushed for a resolution that gave the president what amounted to a grace period of a year and a half before he’d have to go back again for further congressional approval to keep Americans on the ground in Lebanon. He was putting his leadership behind a committee-made policy, including the trade-offs and compromises that involved. Here was Tip’s defense of the time limit, just as I recall hearing it at the time: “If it were for six months, the Syrians would sit it out. If it were a year, it would be in the political sphere and at the height of the presidential campaign. So, eighteen months was the most favorable time.”
Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Page 24
