Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  If you thought about it, the Ronald Reagan we were getting in the 1980s strangely resembled the 1950s version. Back then, just as now, he was handsome, upbeat, and, above all, persuasive. “Here at General Electric,” he would declare convincingly as we sat there in our living rooms, “progress is our most important product.”

  Yet that “here” didn’t mean a factory somewhere, one of those buildings where assembly lines turned out GE products. “Here” was the “host’s” chair, located in a mysterious dimension between not just his listeners and the actual corporation, but also between it and him. I’d grown up with that Ronald Reagan, and I came to recognize that if the old one and the new one blurred together for me, there was a reason. On occasions such as when he stood on the West Front of the Capitol beseeching the Congress to produce a constitutionally mandated “balanced budget”—an accounting reality that he, Ronald Reagan, president of the United States, had never once felt the need to send to the Congress—I couldn’t help feeling a bit of déjà vu.

  Tip O’Neill gloried in being a man of government, believing he could do good for people because that’s what he’d chosen to be. The downside was that he’d never match Reagan’s ability to connect with the American public at large, and, unfortunately, in the election year of 1984, neither did his preferred candidate for president.

  • • •

  Like Tip, Walter Mondale—a former two-term Minnesota senator and then for four years Jimmy Carter’s vice president—was quite capable of connecting to individuals. He was even better, though, with groups. When speaking in public, he’d developed a knack for appealing to agglomerations of people by homing in on the parts that made up the whole. For example, he would reach out to a packed fund-raising dinner with such comforting embraces as “standing shoulder to shoulder with labor,” or “giving teachers the resources they need and then getting out of the way,” or a strong applause line backing the State of Israel. As he went warmly and knowingly on, cycling through the familiar litany of Democratic interests, different clusters of tables would loudly applaud. The folks sitting at them knew he was talking straight to them.

  The problem was, rarely did he ever manage to hit a note in 1984 that caused an entire banquet hall to roar in excitement. As the candidate anointed by the Democratic establishment to run against Ronald Reagan, he operated under a severe handicap. Unlike the man he hoped to dethrone, he was able to offer neither a fresh message nor a manner that could thrill his entire party, much less a majority of the American electorate. He simply didn’t operate like that. What he operated like was the steward of various interest groups that he was, tending to each according to each’s wants. When urged to display independence, his response was instinctive: “Why would I want to fight with our friends?”

  This isn’t to say he wasn’t popular. The elected Democrats in Congress and around the country saw him as their brother in arms, a guy who’d worked his way up “through the chairs” as they had. In his case, he’d worked in the 1948 Senate campaign of Hubert Humphrey, served in the army, then attended law school on the G.I. Bill, stayed active in home-state politics, and wound up himself a senator, arriving in Washington in 1965. A native of tiny Ceylon, Minnesota, he’d been loyal to every mentor and patron along the way, including Jimmy Carter. He would be equally faithful to the Democratic interest groups, especially the big labor unions, if elected president. His problem was that the world at large knew this, including those who thought the interest groups had enjoyed too much clout for too long already. The same world at large believed it was time for the Democrats to have a candidate free of the musty rooms where candidates swore fealty to the groups before they cut their deal with the voter.

  Senator Gary Hart—born Gary Hartpence, he’d shortened his name in his twenties—was such a candidate. Eight years younger than Mondale, but also more stylistically youthful in manner and appearance, he hailed from Colorado. That made him a man of the West, an idea that carried a certain romantic resonance in American public life, and though he’d managed the presidential campaign of leftish George McGovern, he carried the brand of a moderate independent. He was the fresh, outdoorsy breeze that could just possibly blow the septuagenarian Republican out of the White House. Where Mondale would be asking the voter to retrace his or her steps and admit they’d taken the wrong path in 1980, this less familiar face could say it was simply time, once again, to move forward.

  In full candor, that’s how I looked at the Democrats running in 1984. But it was not the way my boss did. Tip O’Neill liked political regulars. And it would cost him. When the big upset arrived, it came early. Even though it only involved Hart’s coming in a distant second in the Iowa caucuses, the Coloradan suddenly was in position as the Mondale alternative, which is precisely what many Democrats were looking for. In the buzzword of the day, he then “slingshot” himself from Iowa to a convincing victory over the former veep in New Hampshire.

  Now came the big test, on 1984’s Super Tuesday, March 13, when nine states held contests. Going in, the Mondale people understood their man was hovering, politically, at death’s door. Fortunately, the not-quite-deceased had Bob Beckel, a clever troubleshooter, working on strategy. Beckel, writing the story his way, put out word to the media that if his candidate, who was Jimmy Carter’s vice president, tanked in Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia, he was finished. Now, on that Tuesday, there were, as I said, nine states voting, including large ones like Florida and Massachusetts. Beckel’s genius was to make it seem, just as he intended, that it was all about that one southern state. Losing Georgia would be the knockout punch Mondale dealt to Hart.

  Beckel then filled Washington’s Capitol Hilton ballroom to the rafters for the Mondale victory party. Calling in every chit he had out, he instructed lobbyists, contributors, and job-seekers alike that it was “show up, or else.” To make the crowd appear even bigger, he used the old Kennedy advance man’s tactic of shrinking the room itself. “We threw up a partition that made the room a third the size of the ballroom. You couldn’t move in the fuckin’ place.” He wanted that crowd of meal tickets already in position at ten o’clock when NBC began its hourlong network special coverage of Super Tuesday.

  Beckel’s ruse worked. Though Mondale lost six of the nine contests that day—Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Washington—and won only in Alabama, Georgia, and Hawaii (also in American Samoa), he hogged the coverage. Hart’s actual dominance mattered little. Mondale’s ace operator had spun it so brilliantly. If losing Georgia spelled defeat, then winning it spelled victory. It was that simple. And so, a few minutes after 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Bob Beckel announced the great news to a crowded ballroom on live NBC television. To the viewers at home, what they saw was indistinguishable from a Mondale victory party. The next morning, when Beckel appeared on Today, host Bryant Gumbel congratulated him. “Yup,” Bob beamed, “it’s the comeback of the year.”

  But the old tricks went only so far. They couldn’t make Walter Mondale the candidate to beat Ronald Reagan in 1984. The main issue wasn’t that he came across, as he put it, as “official” that spring, as he warded off the lanky, mop-haired Hart, but that the economy was turning itself around. From its height in late 1982, the country’s unemployment rate had cascaded three points. And as the numbers were going down, the country’s mood was heading up. Things were looking brighter and people were beginning to feel it. All it would take now would be a Reagan campaign that seized the advantage of that percolating national feeling. All the Mondale people could rely upon, thematically, was the invocation of past eras and past pain.

  As the primary season wore on, Mondale’s electioneering—a slog if ever there was one—demanded that Democrats wear a happy face. But it was hard. Especially for such staunch old liberal Democrats as the Speaker. Young voters, in particular, weren’t buying his candidate. Tip could see this and didn’t like it a bit. He’d observed how, at home in Massachusetts, Hart had been the one drawing the younger crowd
s. “I think it will be right down to the wire. Hart is the frontrunner, and he will have to make sure there are no soft spots in his armor, because he will be attacked from every angle. I had hoped we could get everything out of the way . . . so we could go for the common enemy—the fitness of the president to run the government . . . his complete lack of knowledge with regard to foreign affairs.”

  Tip was not a happy man. The economy was now working on behalf of the Republicans. The Democrats lacked both a coherent message and a charismatic candidate able to forge one. “We have the Boston Marathon and there is a place called ‘Heartbreak Hill.’ Mr. Mondale is going up that hill.” The Speaker could see that the odds of limiting Ronald Reagan to a single term were beginning to lengthen.

  O’Neill’s resentment toward Reagan was growing, no doubt increased by the president’s enhanced election-year standing. There’d been the usual niceties, like the House singing “Happy Birthday” after Reagan had finished delivering the State of the Union. “Well, he still calls me on the telephone, and we talk,” O’Neill told a reporter in January who asked about their relations. “That is the way it should be. Our party is the adversaries of those who run the government. We are expected to criticize. Some of us do and there are others out there who should do it more often.”

  In late February, he tried a different sort of explanation for the often seesawing relationship. “On St. Patrick’s Day, I will probably have lunch with him. That is how democracy works. I go to France and Italy, and the majority never speaks to the minority. I can argue with Bob Michel and he can say severe things about me—and we play golf on the weekend. I go with Silvio Conte and play bridge with him. You can disagree, but still be friendly. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  What didn’t go away, and what only got worse as time passed, was the way O’Neill remained haunted by Beirut. In April, when Reagan took unfair partisan aim at the Democrats by citing the deployment they’d agreed to, O’Neill ripped back with a haymaker, saying only one person bore responsibility for the dead marines, and that was “the president of the United States.”

  After this exchange, a hard-line Reagan supporter sent a letter of complaint to the White House. “I must not be too bright,” it began. “You and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill have a few disagreements—but when you are shown together whether on TV or in a photo there is always a feeling of camaraderie, arms around each other, smiling faces. Yet this man O’Neill (and I realize you both are of Irish extraction) holds you responsible for the deaths of 260 of my people—Americans!”

  The writer went on to add a postscript. “I think what I’m trying to say, Mr. President, is I can’t stand seeing Speaker O’Neill continually do what he does to you and you turning the other cheek.”

  Reagan’s handwritten response was attuned to the writer’s keen partisanship. “I don’t think you’ve seen me embracing or being embraced by Speaker O’Neill recently. And yes I find some of his personal attacks hard to forgive. He’s an old line politico. Earlier in my term and before recent events he explained away some of his partisan attacks as politics and that after 6 p.m. we were friends. Well that’s more than a little difficult for me to accept lately.”

  May was not a good month for O’Neill. Depressed by the Democrats’ divisive primary battles, dismayed by the Reagan comeback, he now faced an assault from across the aisle in the House. Led by Newt Gingrich, a firebrand from Georgia, Republican backbenchers had organized a sly series of daily assaults on the Democratic Party foreign policy record. Each evening, after the House’s official business was completed, Gingrich’s merry band of ideologues took the floor to make use of a legislative time slot known as “Special Orders.”

  Previously, what went on in these “Special Orders” involved less-than-scintillating readings-into-the-record having little to do with issues any broader than, say, showing support for a chrysanthemum festival back home. However, Newt Gingrich’s insurrectionist zeal had led him to see opportunity where others registered only tedium. The new, insidious use he made of the previously snoozeworthy “Special Orders” was simple: get in there and dump on the Democrats. And since there were members remaining on the floor to speechify, the C-SPAN cameras, as always, were recording their monologues as if they were normal House debate. What the viewers at home couldn’t see, however, was the row after vacant row of seats in the chamber. Everyone had gone home. It was truly an empty House.

  You had to hand it to Gingrich. The escapade was simple, diabolical, and for his revolutionary purposes, effective. Tip, of course, was incensed. What got to him more than anything else was that Gingrich was playing to those unoccupied benches while vigorously attacking the national security records of a host of Democrats, including Massachusetts congressman Edward Boland, Tip’s career-long pal. “The camera focused on Gingrich, and anybody watching at home would have thought that Eddie was sitting there, listening to all of this,” O’Neill would later recall. “Periodically, Gingrich would challenge Boland on some point and then would step back, waiting for Eddie to answer. But Boland had left hours ago, along with everybody else in the chamber.”

  Fed up with the fact that this phony-baloney theater currently under way in his own front yard, Tip O’Neill decided to take action. The solution was as simple as the original inspiration. He directed that the House television cameras, which were under his control, begin panning the chamber. It was a true “gotcha” moment, and one of Gingrich’s guys, Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, having been passed a note, suddenly understood they’d been unmasked. He now faced the ignominy of admitting right there on live television that the audience at home could now see there was no one in the House chamber but him. The contrivance of using the “Special Orders” to assault the Democrats’ foreign policy record was being exposed in real time.

  Naturally, the Republicans were testy. Yet, in the ensuing floor debate over the episode, it was the Speaker who, truly furious, lost control of his temper. Dropping his gavel, he left the Speaker’s chair and ran down to the floor. He had something he wanted to say to Newt Gingrich, in particular, in defense of his fellow Democrats, and nothing was going to stop him. “You challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I have ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”

  Alerted by his floor assistant Billy Pitts that the Speaker had just ignored the House rules on personal attacks, Minority Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi demanded that what O’Neill had just said be “taken down.” In House-speak, that meant that Tip’s righteous blast be struck from the Congressional Record. Of course, he’d meant every word of it. “I was expressing my views very mildly, because I think much worse than what I actually said.”

  O’Neill’s street-corner response to Gingrich had larger consequences. The Speaker of the House, provoked beyond what he could bear, had done the little-known Georgia congressman an immeasurable favor. Suddenly Gingrich had a startlingly higher profile. As Billy Pitts would point out, Tip had just made Gingrich a “household name.”

  Also around this time, the Speaker found he had another unanticipated problem on his hands: me. For whatever reason—ego, career restlessness, whatever—I began causing him trouble he didn’t need. I mentioned that article I’d written for the New Republic in which I described what I saw as Ronald Reagan’s enduring identity as America’s “national host.” Not content to stop there, I then contributed a Sunday piece to the Washington Post in which I discussed the president’s fondness for cinematic imagery, and also his playing to the hilt the Mr.-Reagan-Goes-to-Washington bit. As I earlier pointed out, too, he’d snatched Spencer Tracy’s “Don’t you shut me off; I’m paying for this broadcast” from State of the Union, transforming it to “I am paying for this microphone” in the 1980 New Hampshire primary debate.

  I had a lot of fun putting the article together—since I am, as anyone who knows me will attest, a passionate movie buff—but I should have had the basic common sense to withdraw it the very second a Post editor told me that, whe
n it ran, it’d be paired with one from a writer holding political views quite different from my own. As it turned out, the contribution that appeared in counterpoint to mine was a brutally satiric attack on Tip comparing him to—it still hurts to remember, I admit—W. C. Fields.

  On Monday morning, Kirk alerted me that he’d heard from the Speaker’s son Kip. Not surprisingly, the dueling pieces in the Sunday Post had not gone over well with the family. Here’s my journal entry that night.

  Monday, May 7—

  Worst day. TPO mad as hell, tear ass at me for setting him up W Post.

  “A half dozen people called me & asked me how I could let some guy . . . Just to get your name in the paper you let them humiliate me, just for a few bucks. If you want to do that, we don’t want you here. The next time you write something like that clear it with us.”

  But the true worst was yet to come. For reasons that are easy to understand but difficult to defend, I’d allowed a number of magazines to write about my role with the Speaker. Initially, they had no effect, seeming not to cause a bother.

  Then they did.

  “You running for something?” Tip wanted to know after a small profile ran in the Washingtonian, the city’s glossy monthly. But that was just a preview. The true blowup came when a new national men’s magazine, M, featured yours truly as the one calling the shots in the Speaker’s office. “Everyone in Washington who is anyone knows how Christopher Matthews guides the Speaker of the House.”

  “Guides.” Where was I going to hide? And for how long? What’s more, it quoted me saying the Speaker “hates” Reagan, a choice of word I recalled having self-corrected instantly to “resents.” I’d merely been trying to temper the writer’s over-the-top notions of the pair’s collegiality. I believed that anyone reading the piece needed to know that the differences between O’Neill and Reagan were both real and heartfelt. However, such a convoluted excuse would have done me no good with O’Neill, even if I tried to offer it. The whole episode was a brutal lesson in excessive hubris. As Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire, later a columnist of the New York Times, put it, “I’ve been right and I’ve been paranoid, and it’s better being paranoid.”