Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  Wednesday May 30

  • Worst day—

  • TPO attacks me for the M article

  • Said I made him look bad

  • “ ‘Hated!’ When did you ever hear me say I hated Reagan?

  • “Do you think you came up with Social Security issue?

  • “I’ve got more political sense in half my ass than you have in your whole body. Do it again and I’ll get rid of you.”

  And so went my attempts to win publicity and start a writing career while still on the job with the Speaker of the House. Forced to look back on these days, I can only wonder at my brashness and the man’s forbearance. Nobody’s perfect but, with all his anger, Tip O’Neill had the capacity to understand and let it go. A short while later, I managed to get a better expression of Tip’s view of Reagan in a Post “Style” section column.

  Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Reagan are Irishmen of a different green. Their running battles have not exactly been brawls, but they have been testy affairs at times. O’Neill likes to explain to Europeans that American political anger subsides at 6 p.m. When O’Neill was in Ireland on April 29, he publicly stated he would be opposed to any demonstrations against Reagan on the president’s recent trip to the home sod. Or as his press aide Chris Matthews puts it, “Tip believes in condemning the sin, not the sinner.”

  When I brought that item into the Speaker’s back office and sat there alongside him, waiting for his reaction, I was glad to hear and see him laugh. “Penance,” I said by way of explanation. He shook his head. No—he made clear in an instant—everything was already okay between us. A year later, Martin Tolchin would deliver a major piece about my role. “Whether or not Mr. O’Neill is the most partisan member of Congress, as many believe, Mr. Matthews is just about the most partisan of Congressional aides,” his piece in the New York Times asserted. “The speaker acknowledges, moreover, that he has had to reign him in on occasion.” The Speaker had no trouble at all with it. “It’s all about the timing,” was Kirk’s verdict.

  • • •

  For President Reagan, the 40th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy would serve as an important symbol for his reelection campaign. In a speech broadcast from France and timed to be seen live on Today, Good Morning America, and the other TV morning shows, the president paid glorious tribute to the men, many now seated before him, who’d landed beneath the Normandy cliffs on June 6, 1944. Like millions of others, Kathleen and I watched the intensely moving broadcast. Though I was engaged full-time in a heated contest against the political Reagan, I once again was witnessing his special magic.

  Refusing to act the warrior himself, his admiring and evocative praise of those who had been warriors now set him in a special place. He seemed to me at that moment the one person I knew of who could so convincingly conjure up the spirit of such a harrowing, glorious historical challenge that his own countrymen had met so perfectly.

  • • •

  Now it was time to take him on. The Democrats, led by Walter Mondale, were headed to their convention in San Francisco. What the ticket needed was what the nominee needed but didn’t have. Buzz. Sizzle. Pizzazz. Tip O’Neill, who would be chairing the convention, knew just where to find it. “Sure I have a candidate,” he said early in May. “Her name is Geraldine Ferraro, she’s from New York, she’s a Catholic, she’s been an effective member of the House, and she’s very smart.”

  Tip had been grooming the congresswoman from Queens for years, pushing her for top jobs in the House leadership. When other members complained about her ambition, O’Neill had his quick answer. “Sure she’s pushy. That’s what it takes in this business.” When reporters called, I figured he wanted me to trumpet his endorsement of the Queens congresswoman.

  “She has a lot of political moxie,” I told the Associated Press. “The Speaker feels she would add to the ticket dramatically.” With the Times, I went further, saying Ferraro would be the perfect foil in debate with Reagan’s vice president and running mate, George Herbert Walker Bush. “She looks very classy, very familiar, whereas he’s a red-and-green belt type guy who’s a bit aloof.” I pitched her as representing the populist, ethnic, big-city values of the crucial blue-collar voters who, four years earlier, had turned away from the party. Just possibly, Geraldine Ferraro could bring back the Reagan Democrats—the Notre Dame subway alumni—to the party of their roots.

  After acquiescing to O’Neill’s call for him to select Ferraro, Mondale turned and asked the Speaker for a favor. He wanted him to agree to stand down as the Democrats’ leading spokesman. Otherwise, every day that Tip was featured on the evening news attacking Reagan, he, Fritz Mondale—the actual candidate—wouldn’t be. That’s what he told him. The former vice president very clearly felt himself in the position of attempting to command the spotlight from underneath Tip’s extralarge shadow. Unfortunately, any spotlight can be dangerous if and when you happen to make a mistake.

  Conventions are always chaotic and exhausting, yet also exhilarating, and this one was no different. Also, I sometimes think that political parties are the most energized, the most galvanized, and have the best times when the going is roughest. However, in the end, the sole unforgettable moment came when Mondale called for a tax increase. “I was sitting in a broadcast booth with Dan Rather,” the Speaker would recall, “and I couldn’t believe my ears. It was a terrible mistake, which played right into the hands of the Republicans. It gave Reagan the opening he was looking for, and allowed him to use his favorite line on the Democrats: ‘There they go again, tax and spend, tax and spend.’ ”

  After Labor Day, after the campaign began in earnest, Tip started to show publicly his concern at the Democratic nominee’s passivity. He called on Mondale to stop letting himself “be punched around” by the president, to “stop acting like a gentleman and come out fighting, to come out slugging.” And Mondale did seem to start showing his teeth. In the first debate that fall, in Louisville, Kentucky, he in fact scored a clear victory over Reagan—and the public couldn’t fail to miss what had happened.

  “People in the White House tend to get old mighty quickly,” O’Neill rubbed it in a few days later. Worse was the Wall Street Journal headline: IS OLDEST U.S. PRESIDENT NOW SHOWING HIS AGE? REAGAN DEBATE PERFORMANCE INVITES OPEN SPECULATION ON HIS ABILITY TO SERVE. Jim Baker, obviously shaken, felt worried enough to release copies of his boss’s most recent medical report. If tests were any measure, the man sitting in the Oval Office remained “mentally alert.”

  Far more telling was this on-the-record observation by Howard Baker, the Senate Republican leader. “If the point of this is to get an inside view, you got more of that tonight than I’ve ever seen in public with Ronald Reagan.”

  Having watched Mondale attack his administration’s record with such relish, Reagan, now the incumbent, was forced to take stock. “I never realized how easy it is to be on the other side,” he’d later admit. “Well, the debate took place & I have to say I lost. I guess I’d crammed so hard on facts & figures,” he confessed in his diary. “I guess I flattened out—anyway I didn’t feel good about myself.”

  But the lurking age issue was the serious question, and it wasn’t going to go away. “Another disastrous performance,” Reagan later wrote to himself, “could send Nancy and me packing, headed back to the ranch for good.” He’d even heard one television correspondent refer to the matter of the seventeen years he had on his Democratic rival as the “senility factor.”

  But, from the start of the next debate, held in Kansas City, Reagan came prepared with one of those easy utterances he seemed to have been born to let fly. He’d used it before, had been counseled by debate advisor Roger Ailes to ready it now, and so had only to await his cue. When the chance to say it arrived, it came as a question directed to him about his ability to deal with suddenly escalating situations, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. After assuring the reporter who’d asked—and, of course, the tens of millions watching—that he felt up
to the job, Reagan offered his beaut of a reply. “I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

  Even Mondale chuckled. I have to think he knew his campaign’s one brief, shining moment—that first debate, when he’d been able to overpower his opponent—would be forgotten in the cascades of laughter at what Ronald Reagan had just said.

  Soon after, the course of the election stopped being in real doubt. The GOP ticket was going to walk away with the big chunk of the Democratic vote Tip O’Neill knew it needed to prevail. Out on the campaign trail, where the president was in his element—he’d perfected the whistle stop during those years of crisscrossing the country for GE—Reagan was thrilled to have the loyalty of blue-collar workers, “voters traditionally allied with my former associates in the Democratic party.”

  The Speaker, too, was leaving Washington regularly, to do his part supporting both Mondale-Ferraro, along with other embattled Democratic candidates. But when away from the Capitol, he’d encounter, though far less happily, the same voters the president had. One day, while in New Jersey campaigning for Mondale, he met a woman employee at a sausage factory. “I love Mr. Reagan,” she informed the Speaker. And then, with some indignation, asked, “Why don’t you leave him alone?”

  Closer to home, but unknown to Tip—as well as to those of us looking out for him—trouble now was brewing. A group of those Watergate babies elected to Congress a decade earlier had started to get restless, and, foreseeing the Democratic losses facing them—including a large number of seats in the House—they were meeting secretly. They’d begun discussing what had previously been unthinkable—a change at the top. The talk tended toward a coup d’état, one that would challenge the leadership if November went as disastrously as feared. Whether that would include the Speaker himself was never spelled out.

  My first inkling of what was up came by way of a hometown guy, Philadelphia congressman William Gray. I was at my desk in the Speaker’s rooms when he found me and laid it on the line. There were members plotting against the leadership, and Bill, concerned, named several names. I refused to believe it. It came out of nowhere, as far as I was concerned, and seemed unthinkable. It marked the one, rare time when we, the people around him, whom the Speaker relied upon for intelligence, let him down. All those days of asking, “Anything I ought to know?”—and we’d failed to catch any telltale signs of a rebellion in the ranks.

  It was the voters themselves who wound up saving the day. While the president won forty-nine states—carrying a quarter of the Democrats who voted—his party gained just fourteen seats in the House, losing two in the Senate. The American public had re-embraced Ronald Reagan but held back when it came to his policies. “Well 49 states, 59% of the vote & 525 electoral votes,” a defiant Reagan noted. “The press is now trying to prove it wasn’t a landslide or should I say a mandate?”

  But while the mixed message delivered by the electoral results dampened the confidence of the congressional plotters, it didn’t stop them. The Speaker had put his weight behind Walter Mondale—an old-fashioned liberal of his own stripe—for the party nomination, and now he had to pay a price. Who’s to say that a younger, lesser-known westerner like Gary Hart might not have given the aging Californian in the White House a real fight? Mondale had failed to, and that was what mattered. The defeat meant that Tip would now have to fight and win the battle his candidate had lost.

  It turned out that two camps were arraying themselves against the Speaker that November. First, there were the conservative Democrats. Led by Texas congressman Charlie Stenholm, the guys on “Redneck Row” had been joined by moderates in the party from other regions of the country. The usual crew of twenty-nine had grown to seventy-five.

  The second camp was this crowd elected in 1974 and 1976, drawn into politics by the drama of the Watergate era and the promise of a different Washington. From either the suburbs or urban middle-class areas, these members weren’t part of the old Democratic machines. They were more likely to flaunt their independence. While the old breed, like Tip, Rosty, and New York’s Charlie Rangel, was bonded to the folks back home by tribe and tradition, this crowd was more into change and reform. What they loved most was hanging out to discuss policy, especially “new ideas.”

  However, the characteristic they shared dearly with the old breed was a desire for more influence. They knew they’d have to wait decades to get the prized chairmanships. But that was the old way, and it wasn’t good enough. What they wanted was to be heard— and heard now.

  For Tip, this meant waging a war on two fronts. The first call I got from him was an instruction to keep him out of the newspapers. There’d been a moment, when he’d been out there fighting Reagan—after we’d talked him into accepting the spotlight—that he’d decided he might have been occupying too much of it. “I don’t have to be on the front page every day,” he’d kidded me back then.

  This time around, he was deadly serious. If the hopes of those taking aim at him were so focused on his “image,” Tip O’Neill was determined that it be a nonissue as he now went about the business of destroying those hopes.

  The assault he planned on the first faction, the party conservatives, accomplished in true backroom style, was artful and old-school perfect. Its initial stage involved skillfully taking on those previously nonaligned individuals who’d joined up with the conservatives; he intended to peel them away, one at a time. He went to a member from Alabama who immediately swore his allegiance, and then, from that guy, heard of a Georgian who didn’t feel he was getting enough attention. Next, he learned that a congresswoman from Maryland hadn’t been allotted even a single slot to appoint a youth from her district to the minor but desirable patronage position of House page. Having won reelection several times, she wondered why her rising seniority hadn’t been recognized. Tip saw to it she was immediately satisfied on this score. And so forth.

  Tip and Leo Diehl went about the task at hand systematically, discovering each member’s beef, and then figuring out the best method to resolve it. Charlie Stenholm saw what was happening and backpedaled, abandoning the rebellion he’d begun. “I found out that even some of my friends would not support it.”

  That left the other malcontents to deal with. But their yearning for regime change all of a sudden seemed to have lost steam. One day, Dick Gephardt of Missouri, its recognized leader, requested a sit-down with the Speaker. When Tip asked him just what it was he and his crowd wanted, his visitor explained that it was a matter of process. They didn’t want Tip’s head; they just wanted his attention. That’s all.

  So much for the revolution. The demands of the new-breed cabal now came down to all the various factions of the House joining together in a “Speaker’s Cabinet,” which would meet with the leadership and top committee chairmen on a regular basis to share in the big decisions of the day. Fine, O’Neill agreed. However, he set a giant condition. He, the Speaker, would get to select the members who’d be representing the various factions—the Young Turk crowd, the more conservatively inclined southerners, African-Americans, etc.

  Each and every one he picked was, naturally, a trusted Tip ally.

  Thus, the Speaker’s Cabinet started its weekly sessions. For the spot, Tip chose his Capitol hideaway down the hall from his working office. It was a room without windows, encased in the thick marble of the Capitol’s East Front. We met there on Wednesdays for breakfast, sitting around a square made up of several tables. The fare was heavy: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried potatoes, hot biscuits. What I recall about those mornings, more than anything else, was the mass fatigue of that bunch of well-fed politicians, up early and now wondering what, exactly, they were doing there. Dan Rostenkowski and Energy and Commerce chairman John Dingell were the outliers when it came to that very question: why do I have to sit through this?

  They didn’t have to wait for long. I think it was the third week of this peculiar exercise
that the electricity went off in the Capitol, right in the middle of the eggs and bacon. Sitting together, there in the total darkness, surrounded by all that marble, the full absurdity of the occasion sunk in. While someone went for candles, the Speaker, Rosty, Dingell, and the other old-line chairmen just sat there. They might have muttered under their breath a bit, but they didn’t have to. Their refusal to stand up and leave was their response. This wasn’t our idea, they were signaling, but we’re being good soldiers. You wanted us; here we are. Now what?

  Eventually, the lights came back on, but the Speaker’s Cabinet never met again.

  • • •

  When Inauguration Day arrived, on Monday, January 21, 1985, it was far too wintry, with the temperature hovering near to zero, to hold the oath-taking outside. The decision was made to move the swearing-in to the Rotunda of the Capitol. It proved a cozy ceremony. Though I’m six foot three, I remember having to stretch to see over people’s shoulders as, once again, Ronald Reagan took the oath.

  “In my fifty years in public life,” Tip O’Neill said in salute to the president at lunch afterward, “I’ve never seen a man more popular than you are with the American people.” O’Neill, himself, had won a measure of similarly genuine recognition from the other side. “For Republicans,” said Congressman Bob Walker, a Republican fire-breather, “he has become a polarizing figure, seen as an old-fashioned liberal wielding power dictatorially. But some Democrats see him as a kind of folksy figure who is making certain that the Democratic Party philosophy gets a fair hearing within government.”

  Neither Ronald Reagan nor Tip O’Neill would ever again have their names on a ballot. At ages seventy-four and seventy-two, they knew, despite their victory and survival, this was right and fair. They had both been visited by their political mortality.