Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  As the best showing against Reaganomics since its champion had taken office, the latest vote appeared to signal a political uptick. But just as we were about to enjoy that possibility, a discouraging Wall Street Journal piece appeared. Worse for me, it was I who agreed to the Speaker’s being interviewed by one of the Journal’s Washington bureau reporters. “Like an aging prizefighter, he has been battered in the early rounds by President Reagan. So he is looking to the final bell—Election Day, November 2—to redeem his reputation.”

  The Speaker, quite reasonably, wasn’t happy with this portrait of himself as a guy on his way out. Nor was he happy with me. In fact, he was irked enough that, later the same week when I happened to mention the name of a respected CBS correspondent, his displeasure came through loud, clear, and recriminatory: “Is he another one of your asshole media friends?” (“Asshole has become one of TPO’s big words lately,” I duly noted in my journal.)

  I wanted to tell him that I’d let that reporter—and others—in because my job was to help him become what he could become, and the only way to do that was to be publicized. And the only way to do that was to let people write about you. And the only way to let them write about you was to let them take shots at you. This is the only way to become a figure in American politics. You can’t customize it. You cannot come in and tailor it. All you can do is go in, allow reporters to see who you are, and let them make their own judgments about you. It’s a distillation, not an accumulation. You can have twenty brickbats thrown at you, and what matters is what comes through. And what would come across, eventually, was who he was: a big guy with a good heart and a lot of guts.

  Fortunately, Kirk O’Donnell appreciated my situation and, as a veteran observer of Tip’s moods and idiosyncrasies, was able to offer a bracing consolation. “Around him, you’re expected to bat a thousand!” One of the downsides of having the Speaker think I was a media “expert” meant that if anything went wrong, I must have done it on purpose. Take my word for it: Tip’s team in those tense, high-stakes days was a place neither for the amateur nor the sensitive soul.

  At the same time I was learning—and learning to accept—three of my boss’s discernible aspects. One of them was Santa Claus: you had a problem, he’d do anything for you. The second was Black Irish. Skeptical of motive, this Tip was always ready to suspect the worst. Third was politician. Fortunately for the planet—and me—the first and third of these comprised the working Tip O’Neill coalition. All he wanted was to do good, to win, and, despite all his denials, be liked.

  It was at this time that Tip made a rare appearance on Face the Nation. Joan Barone, then the weekly program’s producer, begged me to get him to agree to come on. In favor of it, but knowing Tip’s reluctance to do the Sunday rounds, I suggested she ask her father, Walter Shorenstein, to make the request for her instead. Knowing how fond the Speaker was of her dad, a deep-pocketed, generous Democratic fund-raiser from San Francisco, I thought the ploy would work, and it did. As I’d guessed, Tip couldn’t say no to his old pal and, when the time came, he made a special point of prepping seriously for his appearance. It happened to be the weekend of the Democrats’ big midterm convention in Philadelphia, which, obviously, was Joan’s reason for wanting him that Sunday.

  As he always did, Tip brought Ari Weiss, his indispensable aide, along to brief him on legislative issues. However, Ari, observant in his Judaism, was unable to travel on the Sabbath and come to Tip’s hotel. The briefing, as a result, was held where he was staying, with Tip traveling to him. It was an incident I considered characteristic of my boss, and one of the things I liked best about him. Here he was, displaying his respect for a young staffer’s religion, at the same time showing the humility of his need for that young man’s counsel. Then he went on television and knocked Reagan’s block off. “When I see him he says, ‘My program is working, I’m not hurting people.’ Well, it’s not and he is.”

  The starting day for Reagan’s second-stage 10 percent tax cut was the first of July. To mark the occasion, the Senate Republican Conference got wildly creative and ordered a seventeen-foot “World’s Record Apple Pie” to display on the grounds of the Washington Monument. “It’s time for the doubters to eat humble pie,” declared Senator Roth of Delaware, opening the ceremonies on the historic National Mall. Before him stood several hundred people waiting patiently to get their metaphoric slice of America’s new economic bounty.

  Unfortunately, the festival of Republican success did not proceed as its organizers had anticipated. The day before, I’d phoned Mitch Snyder, the local homeless advocate who’d staged the dramatic hunger strike over the naming of the Corpus Christi. When I told him what the Republicans were planning, he seemed interested in attending.

  Here’s how the New York Times covered the event so optimistically scheduled as a GOP celebration:

  As the Senator spoke, four men dressed in pillow-stuffed coats and wearing signs identifying themselves as “Reagan’s Millionaire Friends” pushed their way through the crowd of several hundred people. Before anyone could stop them, they leaped into the pie, stomping and squishing the apples and shouting, “It’s all mine, It’s all mine.”

  Momentarily stunned, staff members of the Senate Republican Conference who had worked hard to arrange the event, sprang to the defense of their pie, leaping into the apples and attempting to drag out the offenders. By the time the Park Police showed up, almost everyone involved was covered with goo.

  “All the local news shows played it big,” I wrote gleefully in my journal that night. “The Committee for Creative Non-Violence vs. the Republican Senate Conference, TWA, Holiday Inn, Pepsi Cola, the Heritage Foundation. On some of the TV news programs it came off as if the demonstration was the purpose of today’s event. It was not clear at all that the pie was to celebrate a tax cut.”

  • • •

  Now came more street theater. Just two weeks after the pie-soaked melee, President Reagan himself showed up on the Mall. It was a sweltering Washington Monday and he was there to cheerlead at a rally staged by his canny White House showmen. In yet another attempt to turn the nation’s attention from his proposing the largest federal deficit to date, the pastry metaphor had been abandoned in favor of what the president termed a “people’s crusade.” Standing in front of a crowd of roughly five thousand tourists and government workers—not to mention a goodly contingent of Republican National Committee staffers—he was loudly demanding that lawmakers approve an amendment to the Constitution requiring the federal budget be balanced, penny by penny. Commented House majority leader Jim Wright, “It’s like the saloon keeper demanding that everyone take a vow of total abstinence.”

  I managed to pull together a modest-sized protest on the other side of the Capitol to coincide with the Reagan-led spectacle. It featured Democratic stalwart Claude Pepper, the eighty-one-year-old congressman from Miami who was the country’s best-recognized advocate for seniors. The old New Dealer called the proposed constitutional amendment a “sneak attack on Social Security.” That night on the evening news, the Pepper-led rally of a hundred or so people nearly won the attention of the significantly larger gathering on the other side of the Capitol. In my journal I noted happily how the coverage we got must have galled “the White House people who did so much to put the day together and had so much to work with.”

  Not completely satisfied with that success, I had the idea to plan a Democratic rally on August 4, the one-year anniversary of Congress giving its final approval of the Reagan economic program. My notion was to stage an event focusing solely on the jobs issue—the July unemployment rate had hit 9.8 percent—and away from the budget one. To ensure the most attention, I decided to hold it at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the highly unusual hour of 4 a.m. The battle cry would be “Wake up, Mr. President!” This way we’d be playing not just to the mounting jobless number but also to the White House occupant’s reputation for keeping gentleman’s hours when it came to his workday.

  The Associate
d Press reported on the 200 members of the steel and autoworker unions who picketed the White House:

  Marching on the sidewalk under light provided by television news crews and White House floodlights, the demonstrators chanted slogans that called for more jobs and reversals in administration economic policies.

  “I don’t think we expect the President of the United States to come out to the fence and say good morning, but what we’re trying to say is that both the president and country ought to wake up to what’s going on,” said Kenny Kovack, a steel lobbyist and organizer of the noisy but orderly demonstration. . . .

  Betty Robinson, another union lobbyist who helped organize the demonstration, said the idea for the 4 a.m. rally came from the office of House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr.

  My lone concern in planning the event was that the tired, angry workers might speak badly of both political parties. To keep things warm toward our side, I’d asked several Democratic members of Congress from Pennsylvania and Maryland to greet the protesters at 5:30 a.m. with coffee and donuts. Among them was the Speaker’s close pal Jack Murtha, already then a multitermer from southwestern Pennsylvania, who seemed to relish the odd occasion.

  The “Wake Up, Mr. President” demonstration was also covered on the morning news shows on NBC, CBS, CNN, and on radio throughout the morning. It would also make the evening news that night. Steve Delaney, reporting on Today, commented, “It’s hard to come up with a new idea, but the Steelworkers and the UAW did it.”

  “Ten-strike!” yelled Congressman Murtha to Tip as the Speaker arrived in the office at his normal hour. “Is this one of yours?” my boss then asked, turning to me. I would take that question over any other form of praise—and the truth was, it carried with it an emotion he rarely expressed: wonder.

  Despite this success, the fun and games were nearing their end. It was time for action, not theater. Democrats now held the high ground on the “economy” for the basic reason that the country was continuing its downward economic spiral. What both sides agreed on was the need to shrink the towering deficit being forecast for 1983. Moreover, steps needed to be taken to convince the money markets that the U.S. government was on the job, willing to take those corrective measures now so critical not only to the country’s fiscal health but to its international financial standing.

  Stung to find himself in such a dire predicament, Ronald Reagan was desperate for a rescuer to appear. That knight in shining armor turned out to be Bob Dole, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Dole, an old-time fiscal conservative, crafted a bill made up of loophole-closers, tax hikes on cigarettes, telephone bills, medical expenses, travel, investment income, as well as well-hidden business taxes. Reagan’s insistence on referring to this piece of legislation as a tax “reform” bill was entirely disingenuous. Purely and simply, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) as devised by Dole and his committee—with the help of Jim Baker and David Stockman—was intended to raise $99 billion in additional federal revenue over the next three years.

  Ronald Reagan now saw this tax increase—marked, for public relations value, daintily just below $100 billion—as the sole option for quieting the fears of the public. So did Tip O’Neill and for a similar reason: for the good of the country. Both saw the sacrifices. For Reagan, it meant joining with Democrats to raise taxes; for O’Neill it meant rescuing a Republican administration in an election year.

  Tip and Reagan each now faced intraparty challenges. On the Democratic side and disagreeing with the Speaker, there were numerous lawmakers who saw no reason to join forces to help prevent Reagan from heading over the abyss. As far as they were concerned, the deficit problem he faced was entirely of his own making. He’d wanted the big tax cuts . . . and got credit for them from the public. He’d wanted the big defense buildup . . . and got credit for that, too. Now, ran the Democratic thinking, since he’d wanted them so badly, why shouldn’t he also get the credit for the fiscal dilemma brought on by his policies, including the fast-rising unemployment numbers?

  Tip well understood their concerns but saw matters differently. For one thing, he already had heard whispers of a Republican campaign theme that, during the run-up to Election Day, would anoint him again as the obstructionists’ poster boy. Steve Roberts of the Times, in fact, had recently mentioned to me that he’d learned in his reporting of a GOP TV campaign already in the works. The Speaker also lived with the inescapable fact that Reagan’s personal popularity was hardly tarnished despite the presence of his fingerprints clearly spread across the administration’s achievements to date. “Every time I ask someone, ‘Do you like the president?’ they say, ‘Yes.’ ”

  As the House vote on the fate of TEFRA drew close, my own thinking, sitting there in the Speaker’s office, centered on what positioning most benefited the Democrats. “If it fails,” I wrote in my journal, “the focus shifts to the fiscal crisis in Washington. As long as the focus remains on the economy, the Democrats have the economy.” Keeping that in mind, our only choice was to push as hard and as skillfully as we could to make the tax increase a bipartisan effort.

  For his part, Reagan backed TEFRA by managing to convince himself, as I said, that it was a “reform” bill, not a tax hike. Even his diary notes refer to the measure as a “tax bill,” never a tax increase. Call it cognitive dissonance. But with government deficits heading through the roof, he, Ronald Reagan, being the government’s chief executive, had to get TEFRA passed in the House and knew it.

  For Tip O’Neill, this was a crucial moment. In raw political terms, it was time for the kill. He could let Reagan sink in his own soup. He could not lift a finger to help him pass this tax “reform” bill. He could let the deficits just grow and grow with nothing done to stop them, all the time the public and the markets watching. But he chose not to.

  Instead, he jumped into the void and went to work helping Reagan out of the very tight spot he’d gotten himself into. Tip, too, was for TEFRA—for the pragmatic reason that the deficit needed to be cut. But the Speaker was experienced enough in the ways of Washington, however, to be able to spot the downside of doing the right thing.

  So Tip also set conditions. Number one, Reagan himself needed to be out there pitching the tax bill. The brainchild of Bob Dole and clutched at by the president, it should be up to the fellow for whom it did the most to take to the hustings and try to sell it. It was primarily the Republicans, Tip and the Gipper both knew, who would prove the hardest to sell.

  “I want him to use that smiling countenance and sweet-talking voice of his and be hard-knuckled with his Republicans along the line just as he did last year,” Tip asserted. Everyone in Washington knew how Ronald Reagan now seized Dole’s offered lifeline, even if he wanted to call it something it wasn’t. Certainly, Tip did. “Senator Dole has shown the wisdom to produce a tax bill that will at least begin to correct the excesses of the 1981 tax bill. It is time for the president himself to show the same courage and the same wisdom. It is time for the president himself to face economic reality. It is time for the president himself to fight for the tax bill.”

  The Speaker’s second condition was this: he wanted a majority of House Republicans voting for the bill. He was willing to send out his posse to help the economy—and Ronald Reagan—but they weren’t going to be the lone riders. “The Republicans are not for any tax bill, so there is a problem. Some of my people are asking why they should vote for a tax bill when it is a Republican recession. If his own party doesn’t want to vote for it, why should we? But we have to help bring deficits down.”

  A week before the vote, Reagan found himself getting it from both sides. One particularly unwelcome critic was the Buffalo congressman (and former Bills quarterback) Jack Kemp. This was the very man who’d done much to popularize “supply side” economics in the late 1970s. He championed the belief that Republicans should make lower marginal tax rates, not deficit reduction, their primary goal. But now Kemp was calling the most famous convert to “supply side
” onto the carpet. “Met with Jack Kemp (alone) & then in leadership meeting. He is adamant that we are wrong on the tax increase. He is in fact unreasonable. The tax increase is the price we have to pay to get the budget cuts.” If only to himself, the president is finally admitting that he, Ronald Reagan, is backing an increase in taxes.

  Nothing is simple in such tricky situations. As the right was laying into their hero Ronald Reagan for what they see as turncoat behavior, Tip O’Neill was starting to get impatient with the man he thinks he had a deal with, who’s not living up to his end of the bargain. “There is a rumor,” the Speaker teased the press, “that the White House people don’t want him to go on TV. But, if he doesn’t, he will have problems.” In other words, if he can’t go out there and be Ronald Reagan, what’s the point?

  When it was announced that the president asked for a prime-time slot to explain to the nation his support for the bill, I suggested to the Speaker that he name Tom Foley, No. 3 in the Democractic leadership and a respected intellectual from Spokane, Washington, to give the response.

  Tom had long been a friend to me, one who always backed what I was doing, and when he got the word, he asked me to write what he would say. Unfortunately, as soon as he had my draft in his hands, his verdict was that it was too tough. I’d let my enthusiasm get the better of my judgment, Foley persuaded me. I’d taken too partisan a tone for the occasion. The beginning I’d come up with knocked pretty much every aspect of Reagan’s presidency to date, and only after that did I get into the business of pushing for the new tax bill. The speech had been a lot of fun to concoct, I have to admit, as I imagined it being heard by millions of fellow Americans. Tom’s advice was to skip the nasty preamble and keep it simple. The president says we need this tax bill and the president is right.