Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

by Chris Matthews

  If you have had a difficult time fathoming the Speaker’s actual view of the other man, join the club. When he wrote about Reagan, he would offer up comments that ran from deeply impressed—“as beloved a leader as this nation has ever seen”—to grumpy, calling him “the worst” president he had served under. He called him “out of touch” but also possessing “tremendous powers of friendly persuasion.” He’d talk about what an “agreeable man” Reagan was and speak of the “pretty good friendship” they kept up despite the disharmony of their philosophies.

  To me, their personal agreeability was as natural as their political antagonism. Had Tip and the Gipper been on the same side, meeting at fund-raisers and after-hours dinners, they would have gotten along swimmingly. Where they did meet was on the fighting line between liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, and that made all the difference.

  What makes my case is how proud Tip was to work with Ronald Reagan when the two could find common ground—like on Social Security and bringing peace to Northern Ireland and on this historic 1986 tax reform bill.

  Yes, it was a victory he could proudly share. “After the vote, I was struck by how much could be accomplished when the president and the Speaker, coming from opposing parties but working together, could agree on specific legislation,” Tip explained. “Only a few months earlier, none of the lobbyists had given tax reform a chance. . . . This was one case where leadership made all the difference.”

  Reagan and O’Neill saw the fight in Nicaragua from different histories. For the president it was the Cold War, pure and simple—the Soviets and their Cuban allies were trying to expand the communist presence in the hemisphere. For the Speaker, the U.S. support for the Contras was yet another example of “gunboat diplomacy,” of the United States trying to impose its will on the weaker countries to the south.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  LAST BATTLE

  “There are two kinds of success: initial and ultimate.”

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Back in the 1980s, when you entered the members’ dining room of the Capitol on Tuesday through Thursday mornings, you were invariably greeted by a familiar quartet of faces. First, at the table nearest the door you’d see Bob Griffin, Tip O’Neill’s Boston College buddy, employed by the Chrysler Corporation as a lobbyist. His breakfast companion, as predictable as the dawn, was Leo Diehl, indispensable to the Speaker as an ally since their early days together in the Massachusetts legislature.

  At a table closer to the swinging kitchen doors would be the second predictable morning duo I remember so well. One of them was Eddie Boland, who for twenty-four years had roomed with Tip before he stopped his weekly commutes back and forth from Cambridge and brought Millie to Washington to live. Boland’s tablemate was fellow Bay State congressman Joe Early, of Worcester. Years later I would be reminded of these two Black Irishmen mumbling grimly to each other when I overheard two Old Gaelic speakers in the rural Cork bar where Michael Collins had his last meal.

  Tip’s ex-roommate was more substantial than he seemed. The son of Irish immigrants who’d settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, Edward Patrick Boland never in his political life had lost an election and would eventually represent his district for thirty-six years before retiring. A World War II vet, he’d marched in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King. A bachelor until the age of sixty-one, he then married Mary Egan, the president of the Springfield City Council, with whom he had four children. He and Tip had entered Congress the same year, 1953, and Boland’s long friendship with the now Speaker—as the New York Times put it in his obituary when he died in 2001—was “a touchstone of his career.”

  Tip knew Boland as well as he knew any man and trusted him enough to make him chairman of the new Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The main mission of this committee was to keep a congressional eye and ear on what the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the intelligence community were up to, at which point it would then decide, discreetly, what to do with that information. When forming the committee, the Speaker had explained that he, himself, hated those occasions when he’d needed to be briefed by the Agency. It placed him, he said, in the position of being either accomplice or whistle-blower, and the truth was, he wished to be neither. Instead, with this new committee up and running, his good friend Eddie could take on the responsibility he preferred to abdicate—and thus Boland found himself joined in the last great partisan debate of the Cold War.

  Ronald Reagan had, as I explained earlier, revealed an early interest in Central America. Seeking an edge as he sought the Republican presidential nomination back in 1976, he’d decided to make a battle cry of his opposition to ceding U.S. ownership of the Panama Canal. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it.” It was the simple truth, at least as he saw it, and he repeated it again and again to wild cheers while on the stump across the country. Beginning with his upset victory in that year’s North Carolina primary, his Canal cri de guerre was nearly enough to steal the GOP nomination that year from incumbent President Gerald Ford.

  When he took office in January 1981, Reagan looked to what he saw as U.S. vulnerabilities in Central America and quickly moved to put his muscle where his rhetoric had been. The newly elected President Ronald Reagan’s first target for action was Nicaragua, where the leftist Sandinista regime had grabbed power in 1979. President Carter had given the new government financial aid to discourage it from forging ties with Moscow. The aid continued even when the Sandinistas began supporting left-wing rebels in neighboring El Salvador. Upon taking office, Reagan signaled an abrupt change in this existing U.S. policy, cutting off every dollar going from Washington to Managua.

  By year’s end and still not satisfied with the punishment he was meting out, the president ordered arms, equipment, and money sent to the Contra forces opposing the Sandinistas. However, it was only a matter of time before the presidential action provoked a response from the Democratic-controlled Congress. The result was that in December 1982 the Congress passed the first Boland Amendment, which prohibited the use of U.S. funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.”

  In October 1983, the United States invaded Grenada. At the same time, the White House, despite the Boland Amendment, continued, covertly, to provide support for the Contras fighting in Nicaragua. Reagan’s lieutenants managed to justify it with a pair of loopholes they’d spotted in the bill’s language. For one, there was nothing in it specifically preventing wealthy U.S. allies—ones especially reliant on our goodwill and security support—from demonstrating their gratitude. Once hints had been dropped revealing how important the Contras were to the Reagan administration’s worldview, Saudi Arabia, for example, could be especially generous.

  The second loophole spotted by the Reagan people dealt with the phrasing of the Boland Amendment. It proscribed using funds for the purpose of “overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” They simply denied this was their purpose even if it was the purpose of the Contras themselves. While it could be seen as hairsplitting of the worst kind, it was justification enough in the anticommunist cause.

  In January and February 1984, shockingly, the Nicaraguan harbors were mined, damaging local fishing boats, a Dutch dredger, and a Soviet tanker, among other vessels. Initially the Contras took credit. Two months later, David Rogers of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that it was the Central Intelligence Agency that had masterminded it. More stunning was the fact that the operation had been run out of Reagan’s National Security Council. A young marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver North, had encouraged the use of the mines. Later, one of the planners would be quoted as saying, “The whole thing was a fiasco.”

  The exposure of the CIA’s embarrassing role in the incident was no deterrent for the president, whose commitment to getting rid of the Ortega government was unswerving. “There is a totalitarian government now in Nicaragua. And the Nicaraguan government is supporting and providing ammunition and weapons
to the guerrillas in El Salvador, who are trying to overthrow a government that was duly elected by the people,” he said at a luncheon of prominent Republican women. “Well, we’re supporting people who are fighting for democracy and freedom and those people who shut off that aid are supporting a totalitarian dictatorship in Nicaragua.” It was now the company line. “Man, if you weren’t hard enough in your support for the Contras,” a senior aide said, “you were a commie.”

  Equally strong in his feelings on the subject, Tip O’Neill labeled the president’s phrasemaking on the subject of Nicaragua “demagoguery.” Here was Tip, without irony, sizzling Reagan with the same branding iron his rival had used at the outbreak of their ideological range war.

  Jim Baker was starting to worry. “If Congress says you can’t give aid to the contras,” he pointed out at a national security briefing that summer, “you’d better be careful about going out and getting it from third countries.” But while he and Mike Deaver were nervous about the administration’s Central American excursions, the instigators remained gung ho.

  In October 1984, a second Boland Amendment became law. It was designed to plug the loophole, banning the U.S. intelligence agencies from funding the Contras for whatever purpose. It stated that “during fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense or any other agency or entity involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose of which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual.”

  Then, a week later, the story broke that the CIA had passed on to the Contras a handbook on assassinations. “It is possible,” it instructed, “to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges . . . police and State Security officials.” The CIA-authored manual also advocated the triggering of Sandinista violence against antigovernment critics. In this way, “martyrs” useful for purposes of Contra propaganda would be created.

  According to a White House aide, Reagan knew nothing of the manual. O’Neill, however, went right for the source. “It is nothing short of outrageous that the C.I.A. should do this,” the Speaker declared at his press conference the next day. He called for Reagan’s CIA director, William J. Casey—the man who’d chaired his presidential campaign—to quit. “I say it’s time Mr. Casey should leave his job. I want him out of there.” He pointed out that if the CIA chief remained agency head, “then it shows the president condones his actions.”

  After November, Ronald Reagan was flush with the forty-nine-state victory that had affirmed his personal popularity. And so, buoyed with new confidence, he began early in 1985 to push for $14 million in “humanitarian” aid to the Contras in the form of food, medicine, and clothing. Framed as part of what was called a “Central American Peace Proposal,” this initiative pitted him against the Speaker once again. “Have learned Tip is asking Demos to vote against aid to the Contras,” he had jotted in his diary, “as a farewell gift to him since he’s retiring in 86.”

  On the day of the speech, Reagan recorded that O’Neill was “bad mouthing” the proposal. “Indeed Tip sounds irrational.” Passionate is the word I’d have used for Tip’s efforts at this time to thwart Reagan. “The president of the United States, and I hate to say this,” the Speaker charged, “but I don’t think he’s going to be happy until he has troops, our boys, in Central America.” Tip tried hard to change Reagan’s thinking, going so far as to suggest he look at a gruesome recent Newsweek photo of a man, his throat slit, lying in an open grave, ostensibly the victim of a Contra death squad. The president would not be swayed. “I saw that picture and I’m told that after it was taken, the so-called victim got up and walked away.”

  But this round went to the Democratic opposition. Despite determined White House lobbying, Reagan’s idea for aid to the Contras met with enough resistance that it was beaten—narrowly—in the House. The failure drove Reagan to new heights of indignation. “Tip has engineered a partisan campaign to hand me a defeat,” he committed to his diary, “never mind if it helps make another Cuba on the American mainland.”

  President Daniel Ortega now made a startling gesture that upped the stakes. After watching Reagan fail in his dramatic effort to support the antigovernment rebels violently attempting to depose him, the Nicaraguan set off on a pilgrimage to Moscow. There he hoped to secure a promise of significant economic aid. It was a way of thumbing his nose at Reagan—and the United States, generally. And by acting the supplicant in this way, he handed the White House ample reinforcement for its vision of his country’s status as an all-out Soviet client. When Ortega got to the Soviet Union, however, Gorbachev greeted him warmly, but didn’t agree to a specific amount of aid. Moreover, he appeared to deride his guest for continuing to believe in an imminent U.S. invasion of his country, which he saw as crying wolf.

  Thanks in large part to Ortega’s poorly timed mission, the House reversed itself on Contra aid that June. Where it had voted to give no aid in the spring—not even the requested “humanitarian” kind—it now followed the Republican-led Senate in approving $27 million for food, medicine, and clothing to the Contras. It was roughly double what it had rejected just two months earlier.

  Tip blamed Daniel Ortega’s blatant play for Moscow’s patronage for the House’s change of mind. “When that happened it was only a matter of time before the House would rally behind President Reagan and vote with him to fund the Contras,” he would write. But what he saw was the United States on a slippery slope to another Vietnam. “He is not going to be happy until he has our Marines and our Rangers down there for a complete victory. He can see himself heading a contingent down Broadway with paper flying out of the windows and a big smile on his face, kind of a grade-B motion picture actor, coming home the conquering hero.”

  The national debate over Nicaragua was heating up. The media had begun reporting stories of Contra acts of violence clearly at odds with the White House version of their patriotic activities. Earlier in the year, Reagan had paid tribute to the Nicaraguan rebels as national heroes who might well be deemed “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.”

  The final struggle in the Reagan-O’Neill battle over Nicaragua came in 1986. It was ignited when the president asked Congress for $100 million in largely military aid to the Contras. “We send money and material now so we’ll never have to send our own American boys,” he told a group of Jewish leaders invited to the White House. “If we don’t want to see the map of Central America covered in a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders, we must act now.” In equally inflammatory language, up on Capitol Hill, Tip O’Neill made the case against this escalation in U.S. military involvement. “Tomorrow, we face another Tonkin Gulf vote,” he said, referring to the 1964 resolution in which Congress had approved greater American expansion into Vietnam. “I don’t want our kids dragged in.”

  O’Neill’s concern was based on fact. The week before that vote, Time described how U.S. troops had been conducting maneuvers in Nicaragua’s neighbor Honduras. “A $30 million network of air bases, intelligence posts, radar stations and other installations has been built.” The story went on to say that engineers from Fort Bragg had parachuted into the country to construct a 4,700-foot landing field less than twenty-five miles from the Nicaraguan border.

  After closing the floor debate on Contra aid with a powerful rebuttal, O’Neill broke with tradition—the Speaker of the House ordinarily doesn’t vote—and cast a dramatic “Nay.” So did the House majority. “You can appreciate how hard I’m working against the President’s program,” he wrote to a friend well before the White House proposal for military aid to Nicaragua was defeated. “I believe his policies are absolutely immoral. It appears he won’t be happy until American troops are in Central America fighting for what he believes is the ultimate testing ground between the Soviets and our government.”

  The statement released by
President Reagan described the loss as a “dark day for freedom.” He continued to argue that his fellow citizens must regard the Contras as noble “freedom fighters” committed to beating back the evil communists. “The American people have begun to awaken to the danger emerging on their doorstep. And one day, in the not-too-distant future, that awareness will come home to the House of Representatives. We are gaining ground. We are winning converts. The next battle will bring us the victory this just and good cause rightly deserves.”

  But Tip O’Neill, too, had his motives for the Nicaragua fight. He had an aunt, his mother’s sister Ann, to whom he was especially devoted and who’d been, all her adult life, a nun. Her religious name was Sister Eunice and, as an early member of the Maryknoll order, she was part of a tradition that had sent women overseas for decades, to places ranging from Korea to Bangladesh, from Manchuria to the Sudan. Since the 1950s, the Maryknoll Sisters had established missions in a new region, having become aware of the needs of the Central American poor. Sister Eunice herself had died in 1983, at the age of ninety-one.

  Because of his aunt’s community and because of the testimonies he heard—often privately, as a result of his openness to her world—Tip O’Neill was attuned to a Nicaraguan reality distinctly at odds with the one Ronald Reagan insisted upon. “Over and above the briefings I get,” Tip had explained to his regular press contingent in 1984, “I have nuns and humanitarians who tell us that the people in the villages of Nicaragua do not know what communism is. But they know they are living a better life—with food and health care—for the first time.” He could not forget what he’d heard.