Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  “He broke international law. I don’t like that. I think he is wrong. To be perfectly truthful, he frightens me. I think he was looking for a reason to go there, and he found the opportunity last week. Whether it was right or wrong depends on the safety of our people. We can’t go with gunboat diplomacy. The marines did a tremendous job down there, but we can’t continue that route—going into Nicaragua and places like that. His policy is wrong and frightening. I sat silently by when it was going on, because I thought it was in the best interests of the men fighting down there.”

  Nonetheless, he avoided taking any jabs when it came to Reagan policy on Lebanon. “Nobody wants to cut and run. They want the safety of the marines. I think the average Member of Congress knows what our policy is in the Middle East. We fight for the protection of the people in that part of the world, and that means so much that there be peace over there.”

  The following week he announced the formation of a bipartisan fact-finding committee that he would send to Grenada. It would be cochaired by Tom Foley, the Democratic whip, and Wyoming’s Dick Cheney from the Republican leadership. Kirk and I were to go along. I was entrusted specifically with ensuring that California congressman Ron Dellums didn’t commandeer the headlines with his opposition to the invasion. The very last thing the Speaker wanted was to give the Republicans a chance to spin “the Democrats” as discrediting the president’s success in saving American lives.

  My recollection of St. George’s, the capital, is of a lagoon city straight out of Errol Flynn swashbucklers. British, quiet, and quaintly colonial, it appeared at the moment an unlikely hotbed of Marxist revolutionary sentiment. Clearly, the Grenadians had been glad to see the Americans. We overnighted at the Calabash, a grouping of small cottages stretched along a tree-lined beach. For dinner, we ate K rations and drank a very good white wine. And, given all the hype about the cache of weapons, I was unimpressed. The only guns on display were a pile of old rifles that could have been collected from any shed in Pennsylvania’s deer hunter country. As for the Cuban construction workers I saw squatting in an outdoor stockade, I felt only embarrassment for my country. What right did the United States have to mount an invasion and take those men prisoner? Was our incursion truly justifiable as a rescue mission?

  When I put that question to an American consular official over dinner in Barbados the next night, he was unequivocal. The issue was not about getting the medical students off the island. The coup leaders had made it clear every one of them was free to go. (The White House press room confirmed that two days before the invasion the Grenadian leaders had offered to allow the United States to come and retrieve them.) When I asked my dinner companion to explain the invasion, his answer was unforgettable. “There were other factors,” he said, poker-faced.

  Thinking what I’d just heard important information to return to Washington with, I approached Tom Foley and his cochair. My mistake was to believe this “fact-finding” mission actually involved finding facts, especially any that contradicted the intended salute to the U.S. invasion. When Cheney heard me question the Reagan administration contention that the students’ safety was its driving concern, he struck me as irritated and certainly dismissive. Looking back, it should not have surprised me. The mission was to support the president’s action, not assemble a bill of particulars opposing it.

  Whatever the Speaker thought at the time, the fix was in. When it came to Grenada, nobody wanted to fight a fight that was already won. After hearing from the Foley-Cheney committee, the Speaker went along with its finding that Reagan’s invasion of Grenada was justified. “But he better not try this again,” he added. (That is, the president had better not take my grudging okay for this strike into a communist-leaning country as license to repeat the show in Nicaragua.)

  Years later, Tip O’Neill would offer his own lasting verdict on the Reagan action of October 25, 1983. “Today I feel even more strongly that we should not have invaded Grenada. Despite what the administration claimed, the students were never in danger. None of the students trapped in the second campus of the medical school for nearly two days after the invasion were harmed, and neither were any of the American residents on the island. But over a hundred American troops were killed or wounded in that operation. And as far as I can see, it was all because the White House wanted the country to forget about the tragedy in Beirut.”

  It’s consistent with what I remember him feeling at the time. But Grenada was one thing, Lebanon another. The continued presence of American marines in Lebanon—a deployment he was on record as supporting—steadily grieved him. Tip was like a burn victim, and any touching of the wound was excruciating. I remember one day when Kirk and I were sitting in front of his desk and he suddenly asked if anyone on the Democratic leadership team had been against the sending of our troops into Beirut. “Chris was,” Kirk said, cutting through the powerful silence. He was being loyal to me, respectful of my opposition to the misconceived campaign—but I don’t think it made the Speaker all that happy to hear it.

  • • •

  The Speaker was, quite simply, in a bad mood. In a conversation with James Reston—one Tip and I both had believed was for “background” use only—he’d been frank about a number of issues. And particularly rough on the president, expressing his opinion that he didn’t think he’d seek a second term in 1984. Anyway, Nancy Reagan, he cracked to Reston, wanted to go back home and become “Queen of Beverly Hills.” It was this last comment that convinced me Tip, authentically, had believed his exchange with the veteran Reston was not for publication. That’s because he never ever, as long as I worked for him, took a shot at any member of any person’s family. And it was especially true of the First Lady, about whom he would never ever say a negative word. He was stricken.

  The moment he saw the quote in the Times, he immediately telephoned Mike Deaver, asking what he might do to make amends. Deaver’s advice was to send a handwritten letter, which he did. The Speaker understood that the bleak misery he felt over Beirut and the fix he’d gotten himself into by backing Reagan had nothing to do with the man’s wife, whom he admired. The trouble was, as David Rogers wrote in the Boston Globe, quoting a friend of the Speaker’s in the House, “Lebanon is eating his heart out.”

  Within a month of the Beirut attack, the unity of the Reagan team was in shambles. “President Reagan is facing growing political and military sentiment within his administration to remove U.S. Marines from Lebanon or to redeploy them soon to safer positions, officials said yesterday.” This lead in the Washington Post, reported by longtime Reagan-watcher Lou Cannon, revealed deepening discontent with the policy for which Reagan continued to cheerlead. One top presidential adviser, quoted by Cannon, identified Lebanon now as the administration’s “Achilles’ heel.” Chief of Staff Jim Baker and defense chief Cap Weinberger had both joined the let’s-get-them-out-of-there chorus.

  With the arrival of 1984, Tip O’Neill warned Reagan either to produce diplomatic gains in Lebanon soon or else face the consequences. The “status quo,” the Speaker insisted, had become unacceptable. By the end of January, Reagan himself was envisioning a shift. “We’re going to study a possible move of the Marines to the ships off shore,” he wrote in his diary, “but an Army force on shore to train the Lebanese army in anti-terrorist tactics.”

  Yet for the time being, Reagan stuck strictly, in public, to the administration line: the marines must stay. Three days after committing the shift in plans to his diary, there were news reports of a “hot” fight with the Speaker, during the course of which the president had insisted he would not let terrorists drive the United States out of Lebanon. “I tried to tell him the facts of life as I saw them,” O’Neill said afterward.

  Reagan was getting increasingly angry about the way he was being covered by the media. “Dropped in for a minute on the T.V. anchor men & women who were being briefed on tonites St. of The Union address. I cannot conjure up 1 iota of respect for just about all of them.” When he went on to deliver the
State of the Union, he carefully tried to brush off the subject of Lebanon. But the Speaker wasn’t letting him off the hook. “In a ten page speech,” Tip said, “he devoted only one paragraph, buried on page eight, to this vital subject. The president can try to bury the issue of Lebanon in his speech. But he cannot bury it in the minds and hearts of the American people.”

  The very next day, Reagan again addressed more fully in his diary what he’d neglected to deal with in his speech to Congress and the nation. “We took up the business of Beirut again with a plan for redeployment of the Marines but only after sending in Army training units who specialize in anti-terrorist measures.” His plan was to get the Lebanese president “. . . to ask for this change.” Meeting with Republican House members the next day for breakfast, he held to the administration position that removing the marines would be defeat. “I gave a little lecture on why we can’t bug out,” he wrote. “We’re trying to get the Israeli lobby which is very effective in the Cong. to go to work on how much Israel has to lose if Congress forces a withdrawal of our troops.”

  He was also giving thought to Lebanon’s effect on his reelection. “Campaign time is coming closer even though I have not actually said the words to anyone (except Maureen and Nancy) that I’ll run.”

  At this point, Tip was starting to get wind of Reagan’s actual intentions in the matter of the marines in Beirut. “One night, at a social event, I ran into a White House official who said, ‘Isn’t it great that the president is planning to bring home the marines?’ He must have assumed that I knew the decision had already been made, but it was news to me.” He certainly knew now! Still, it was an advantage he knew how to run with. “The next day I seized the initiative and came out with a statement demanding once and for all that the president bring the boys home. The president’s response was to try to make me the villain.”

  Which is to say that when the Democrats passed a resolution on February 1 that called for a withdrawal of the marines, Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes instantly went on the attack. The Democrats’ proposal, he sneered, “aids and abets” the enemy in the Middle East. I recognized an old communist-baiting phrase even if the guy who’d said it didn’t. The instant I heard Speakes’s comment, I called reporters at the White House. “Aiding and abetting is legal language for being a traitor,” I told ABC’s Sam Donaldson. I said that Speakes was engaging in “a new form of McCarthyism . . . Charlie McCarthyism.” Puppetlike, Reagan’s spokesman was speaking in Reagan’s idiom.

  Reagan himself now went straight for the Speaker, attacking Tip for refusing to defend a policy even the president had quietly abandoned. “He may be ready to surrender,” the president told the Wall Street Journal, “but I’m not.”

  Soon, however, the administration plan to pull out the marines was no longer a secret. Within the week, the White House announced they were being redeployed to the sea. The Journal itself chronicled the now public switch: “Only five days later, the president announced he would do just what he had so harshly criticized the speaker for advocating. Some observers believe the disarray may give the Democrats a potent election-year issue by damaging the president’s credibility just as he’s gearing up for his reelection effort.” Even more damningly, a former defense secretary was quoted as saying of Reagan’s team, “They are cutting and running . . . but they don’t want to admit it. They want to have it both ways.”

  Congressman Lee Hamilton, a Foreign Affairs Committee member who had supported the Lebanon policy, offered its best epitaph. “I don’t think there is much evidence that the military power we deployed off the coast of Lebanon had any effect on events, on the way political events were developing. I don’t find much evidence that military power helped accomplish our goals. As events wore on, they were not able to carry out a peacekeeping function. They were no longer perceived as neutral. Their only function had become one of defending themselves.”

  But the politics of the Lebanon disaster weren’t finished. Reagan continued to claim that Democratic opposition to his Lebanon policy had encouraged the terrorists. O’Neill was nastier still. “The deaths lie on him, and defeat in Lebanon lies on him and him alone.”

  It’s not hard to deny the bad blood that came out of it. Reagan was angry because O’Neill failed to stick with his policy. O’Neill was angry he’d been led to join it at the outset. Both were bitter, deeply and understandably so, that history—and their consciences—now marked them for the deaths of young patriots, all killed on a mission to which smarter, better leaders would have never sent them.

  Tip O’Neill joins ABC’s Charles Gibson on election night 1984 to see how correspondents get their early results. Gibson would later become the network’s top anchor. On the far right is O’Neill aide Jack Lew, the future secretary of the treasury.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  VICTORY AND SURVIVAL

  “I don’t need you when I’m right.”

  —TIP O’NEILL

  In February 1984, Tip O’Neill told Martin Tolchin, a reporter for the New York Times whom he’d long known, that he might retire at the end of the year if Reagan was defeated for reelection. He explained to Marty that he had wondered how it would be to serve as ambassador to Ireland for a Democratic president. However, if Reagan was reelected, the Speaker said, then he’d run for one more term.

  He would later dutifully list his reasons. First, there was the fear of hanging around too long, as he believed previous Speakers Sam Rayburn and John McCormack had done. Second, he was starting to think about spending more time with his family, whom he felt he’d shortchanged during his three decades of Washington politics. Finally, his sense of fairness to Jim Wright, waiting around for his job, came into play. Wright, after all, had been loyal and deserved his “day in the sun.”

  Separately and together, these were the seventy-one-year-old’s true emotions. “I could have stayed on indefinitely,” he would later remark, “but I had no great desire to end up as a tottering old congressman.” However, the Speaker realized almost immediately—soon after the Times photographer arrived at the office, to take a picture to run with the piece—that he’d made a pronouncement he might quickly regret. “See what happens when you make a casual statement when you think you are talking to a friend?” he confessed at that morning’s press session. “My wife said to me this morning, ‘We have been married for 43 years and have known each other for 50 years, and you have never had enough sense to keep your mouth shut.’ So I can’t say anything more than that. I love Jim Wright. He is a beautiful man. When I do leave, I would be very much disappointed if he were not elected Speaker.”

  Knowing from experience the justified ambition of a man elected majority leader, his words to us that same morning were less flowery. “I intend to be Speaker right up to the last day. If Jim Wright tries anything, I’ll cut his balls off.” He knew better than anyone how a majority leader can promote himself to de facto party chief while another man still sits in the Speaker’s chair. Nevertheless, he called Wright and apologized for the whole thing.

  O’Neill’s true rival, of course, was still sitting in the Oval Office. For both seasoned pols, 1984 would offer trials neither could have seen coming. What makes politics a learning profession is the need to master situations that elude prediction. That aspect of the game is precisely what makes politics so fascinating to the observer, so treacherous to the ungifted. Fortunately for Tip and the Gipper, their capabilities were perfectly matched to the tests ahead.

  O’Neill was a political retailer. His strengths were of the one-on-one sort: making and maneuvering friends, intimidating, bluffing, outnumbering—or outlasting—challengers. He knew everyone, knew their children, knew their problems, and, more often than humanly imaginable, cared. He would show he did by calling upon what seemed an encyclopedic stock of information he maintained about so many of the people he knew. He would remember the relative who was sick, which kid had gone to which college. It was a skill he’d finely tuned, and it was one based, as far as I could se
e, on the fact he simply thought such matters were important.

  Reagan was the wholesaler of the two. He had few friends, and saw his associates as largely interchangeable, if not outright dispensable. At one White House reception, he greeted one guest as “Mr. Mayor” only to discover he was a member of his cabinet. His son Michael had been treated to the same experience at his high school graduation. “Dad, it’s me,” he’d found himself saying.

  But if he focused on few individuals in particular, he was superb when it came to addressing the mass audience. That was the connection he never got wrong. When reaching out to his fellow citizens, he had no rival.

  Above all, he was convincing. The average guy out there had no way to grasp the craft this man brought to the presidency. Though Reagan was the fellow charged with running the U.S. government, when he bellyached about “the deficits,” he sounded just like your next-door neighbor. The country went for it. Again and again, speaking as the occupant of the White House, Reagan, adopting a scolding tone, would censure not just “deficits” but the government itself, as if he and it had no connection to each other. He could speak and act as if “Washington”—always a villain in his vocabulary—was a place where he only rarely, and then just by necessity, spent any time.

  In March 1984, as he was in the fourth year as the nation’s chief executive, I wrote an essay on Reagan for The New Republic. I argued that the role affected by the man now in the White House was very little different from that of the man who’d once hosted General Electric Theater. His great achievement, in both instances, was to position himself as existing in a previously unidentified space. As president, where he looked out from was a “unique point—previously uncharted—between us and government.”