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

  I can remember exactly when the fight started between him and Reagan. It was an afternoon in June 1981. For months, the Speaker had been getting himself used to the idea that he’d become more than Speaker of the House: He was the country’s last standing Democrat. The Republicans had the White House. They had the Senate. Only the House blocked the Reagan Revolution’s victory parade. Only the Speaker had the stature and the pulpit to challenge the popular president’s policies. But it was not until that particular June afternoon that the full reality of Tip O’Neill’s late-career role would become crystal clear to him, to Reagan and to the country.

  A crowd of us was sitting in the Speaker’s office when the decision was made. The president had just said at a nationally televised press conference that the Speaker of the House was guilty of “sheer demagoguery” for questioning the fairness of his program.

  It was ABC-TV’s agent provocateur, Sam Donaldson, who had lit the match.

  “Tip O’Neill says you don’t know anything about the working people, that you have just a bunch of wealthy and selfish advisers,” he said to the president, as Reagan headed for the door.

  That ignited it. Suddenly the debonair Reagan returned to the microphones. “I think it’s sheer demagoguery,” he said, “to pretend that this economic program is not aimed at helping the great cross-section of people.”

  “Demagoguery!” As the news wires raced with the president’s attack and the evening news programs prepared their stories, the target stood in his office, deciding how to handle it. He listened to the arguments for letting Reagan’s remark pass and to those who urged a partisan counterpunch. As always, the big man from Massachusetts went with his instincts. “I’m going up to the gallery,” he said. At that, he went into the bathroom, combed his hair, and straightened his tie. He then left the sanctuary of the Speaker’s office behind, took the elevator to the Capitol’s third floor, walked into the radio-TV gallery, and said what he, as the Speaker of the House, thought of what he had just seen and heard on television.

  What he said to the network cameras was not really about the party. Instead he focused on the relationship between his job and Ronald Reagan’s. After all, he was the elected Speaker of the House of Representatives and that office deserved a certain respect from the head of another branch of government. He was there now to insist on that respect.

  While nonpartisan in substance, O’Neill’s rejoinder could not have been more partisan in effect. By challenging Reagan’s offhand comment about “demagoguery,” he was hitting the new president where he was the weakest, in his appreciation of governmental institutions. He said that he, the Speaker of the House, would never accuse a president of the United States of being a “demagogue.” “I assume in the future,” O’Neill said, that the president would show “the same respect for the speakership.” Then he brought out his big guns. “The Reagan program speaks for itself,” he told the cameras that tense afternoon. “It is geared to the wealthy.”

  Just as Tip O’Neill had heard the fighting words in Reagan’s remark about “sheer demagoguery,” the other man felt the return fire. A few minutes after O’Neill’s words about the new kid on the block lacking respect for the speakership, Reagan was on the phone with him, pleading for peace, and soon the White House staff had an announcement to make: What the president had said did not reflect on the Speaker.

  Right.

  That’s how it all started. Reagan had taken a swing at Tip O’Neill. When the day ended, the Speaker was not only still standing, but taller than ever. He, the country’s top-ranking Democrat, had questioned not just the cuts in Social Security and student loans but the partisan motives that drove them. He had stood up to Ronald Reagan one June afternoon in 1981 and the other guy had blinked.

  The real Reagan-O’Neill fight was over policy, not protocol. Reagan saw Social Security cuts as a budget savings. Tip saw them as a wound inflicted on the working family that depends clearly on its monthly check. Reagan saw the double-digit jobless rates of his first term as a necessary damper on inflation. Speaker O’Neill saw the faces of the unemployed in those rising numbers.

  Waging almost nightly war on the evening news, as he came to do, was not Tip O’Neill’s natural field of combat. He was a backroom pol and proud of it. He was a street corner guy who made his friends and deals one at a time, face-to-face. When it came to press relations, he preferred dealing with print guys he had known for years. He liked the familiar, ink-stained old world of friends you trusted and enemies you didn’t, where you talked to some reporters and stiffed the others. He never got used to the world of independent (and therefore unpredictable) journalists who, depending on the circumstances, would as easily praise as demolish you.

  I used to have to beg him to do interviews, and each time I did risk it my butt was on the line. He always assumed that the reporter was a pal of mine. Why else would I so willingly risk the boss’s wrath? I desperately wanted to tell him that I had let the reporter in because my job was to help him become what he could become, and the way to do that was to be publicized. And the only way to be publicized was to let people write about him. And the only way to let them write about him was to let them take some shots at him.

  That is the only way to become a figure in American politics. You cannot 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.

  Tip made the adjustment—and at a time in life when most men are past retirement. “An old dog can learn new tricks,” he said to me one day in his office, and that’s just what he did. The fellow who had won the speakership of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, election to Congress seventeen times, election to the U.S. speakership five times by going one-on-one with people, adjusted himself to the camera, the lights, and even to the makeup.

  And what came across was what he was: a big guy with a good heart and a lot of guts.

  The late Kirk O’Donnell, Tip’s counsel and political strategist, was always there with me. He was, to use the Speaker’s own fond and proud salute, “hard as a rock.” In a world of scaredy-cats and bullshitters, Kirk was a man of courage and heart, especially for the big fight.

  I learned a lot of old-style politics working for Tip O’Neill: how to get a meeting over with by keeping the door closed, the thermostat up, and the cigar lit; how to settle a fight in that crowded room by blasting the guy you actually agree with (it makes those on the other side feel good, even if they don’t get their way). But I also learned that to win an ongoing battle you need two things: guts and something to believe in. At a time when many in his party were buckling to Reagan’s popularity, he kept his values. At a time when his fellow Democrats checked the weather reports before flying, he went anywhere a friend needed help. He was a leader with the nerve to fly into the most treacherous winds with only his prayers and principles to carry him.

  For me, part of the fun of working for Tip O’Neill was to catch that Irishness of his. It often came as a surprise, with an odd remark, like his reference to the U.S. Senate as being the “home to the idiot sons of the rich.” Or when he said that the wealthy would have to “pay through the nose” for a new Reagan defense proposal. Hearing him come out with a comment like that would have Kirk and me sweating for hours. But such over-the-top candor is also what made the Speaker’s daily press conferences not only a delight to attend, but dangerous for a reporter to skip.

  Tip O’Neill knew who he was. “That’s not me,” he said when I drafted a statement attacking Reagan’s big deficits. He knew he wasn’t a budget balancer and he wasn’t going to pretend. His finest lesson to all political gladiators both of Left and Right is that one doesn’t always get to pick one’s ground. Tip would have much preferred to serve as Speaker under an activist, liberal, Democratic president like Walter Mondale. He would have loved to get b
ills through to help more poor kids go to college, gotten health protection for working families, put more people to work. But that role wasn’t in the cards he was dealt. It was his fate to be the one raising the banner of “fairness” in the face of a very popular conservative president. I doubt that anyone could have done a better job. Then again, I can’t think of anyone less objective than myself to make that judgment.

  In the years after Tip’s retirement from the speakership I would call him up for lunch and we’d go to his favorite table at the Palm. As always, it was a thrill to be with him, as one of his pals. I remember our last lunch. He was having trouble walking and asked to lean on my shoulder as we walked the few short blocks. We were talking about the upcoming Boston College game with Notre Dame. He didn’t think they’d be able to pull a second upset in two years. (They did!) It was during one of those last lunches that he told me the story of what a young flight attendant had recently said to him. He had just gotten on the plane and she was asking him to buckle up. As she assisted him with his belt, she said, “I hear that somebody important will be on this flight.”

  He looked at me squarely across the table and said, “Chris, it goes away.”

  At this year’s White House Correspondents Association black-tie dinner some guy who’d apparently had too much to drink yelled out to me that “Tip O’Neill is spinning in his grave.” He kept saying it, all the time with the dull stare of a car bomber on his face. He was referring, it can be assumed, to my failure to back the Democratic party line.

  My response? I did not go into political journalism and commentary to speak for my old Democratic boss any more than I went into politics to speak for my Republican parents. I think, write, and speak for myself. People need to know, and they should, that what they get from me is, right or wrong, left or right, entirely and completely me.

  What would Tip O’Neill have said about Clinton’s conduct? I would bet he’d have played the good soldier. He would have pointed to the jobs created on his watch, the stronger economy, the greater opportunities for working families. And in regard to the desecration of the Oval Office, I think Tip would have probably expressed his sympathy for Mrs. Clinton and the president’s daughter, Chelsea. But he would have been biting his tongue. Anyone who believes Tip O’Neill would have condoned Clinton’s behavior didn’t know the man and doesn’t appreciate his legacy.

  What would Tip think about some of the other things I say on Hardball or write in my column? One thing you can bet on is that he would have let me know, most likely early in the morning.

  Of course, the most famous image of my old boss may be the one from when he appeared on Cheers. He and George Wendt are sitting at the end of the bar with mugs in hand. I like the scene because it shows how a politician, if he’s true to his principles and roots, can become something of a folk hero.

  That young stewardess was right.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Truth

  Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

  RONALD REAGAN

  The truth hurts. I think the hardest and best reporting occurs when you come back with the story that is neither expected nor well-received. Usually, those stories are ones that deal with subjects both vital to our society and deeply divisive.

  Race relations is surely the most important of such areas. Myself, I don’t trust what people tell pollsters about race. I think it’s one topic that is immune to public candor.

  For example, polls often fail to stop the resistance of white voters to black candidates for office. When he ran for California governor, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley got better numbers from polled voters than he did in the actual balloting. So did former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, a man whose apparent double-digit edge practically evaporated on election day.

  Ever wonder why this country has no black U.S. senators, no black governors? I’ve spoken to hundreds of Fortune 500 corporations and national trade associations over the years and enjoyed their company. Would someone tell me why these conventions and meetings have so few African Americans?

  Race, without question, is the San Andreas Fault in American society. Folks are just plain afraid to be straightforward about the situation for fear that the answers will be used against them.

  I say we’d be better off if we admitted out differences. We’ll also be better off when white people open their hearts to voting for black people for higher office and when the Republicans once again contest the Democrats for black votes. Richard Nixon got about a third of the black vote in 1960; George W. Bush got about 3 percent in 2000.

  A poll taken by The Washington Post in 2001 shows that most white people believe that blacks have it as good in this country as they do. Seven out of ten white people agreed with the statement: “African Americans have more or about the same opportunities in life as whites have.” This reminds me of another poll that showed just one African American in three believing that O. J. Simpson killed his ex-wife, Nicole. In both cases, pollsters are posing questions of fact and getting back answers of attitude.

  Ever watch an NBA game and notice that the players are mostly black but nearly 100 percent of the seats within one hundred feet of the court are filled with whites? Ever go anywhere and not see the whites in the better seats, the better houses, the better jobs?

  It reminds me of the Groucho Marx line, “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” I ask you to look behind that Washington Post poll measuring white perceptions of black opportunity. The truth is, white people know there’s discrimination in this country: they just prefer not to admit it, a luxury denied to those regularly experiencing discrimination. I believe they refuse to acknowledge it for the same reason that blacks refuse to admit O.J. killed Nicole: It wouldn’t look good.

  There is no doubt that affirmative action is an important tool to use in correcting the continuing fallout of our racial past. With regard to “reparations,” an idea that waxes and wanes, I believe what Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, that the price for slavery was paid in full with the blood of those six hundred thousand men killed in the Civil War.

  Science

  Vice-President Dick Cheney urged America in 2001 to kill the loose talk about alternative energy sources. We should accept as an enduring fact of life that if we want heat, light, or to move something, the real options are oil, gas, coal, or nuclear.

  Just two days later top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle took the same defeatist line against missile defense. We should accept as an enduring fact of life that if Russia or China or Iraq ever lobs an ICBM our way, he implied, the best we can do is lob one back.

  Both positions were based not on science but on partisan ideology.

  The Right—and Dick Cheney is clearly a man of the Right—has no real problem with a society dependent on extracting fossil fuel as fast as our SUVs can guzzle it. He regards the traffic jam heading for the nearest shopping mall as no more than the joyous clog of commerce.

  The Left, for reasons I find hard to fathom, takes the same unthoughtful approach toward efforts to develop an American defense against nuclear missiles. Such thinking is especially out of character for the Democratic party. After all, it was FDR who rammed through the Manhattan Project in time to end World War II without costing this country a million lives on the beaches of Japan. It was Jack Kennedy who launched the Apollo program that put a man on the moon in 1969, several years ahead of JFK’s original schedule.

  “I don’t know how you support the deployment of a program that doesn’t work,” Daschle said of missile defense. But what both he and Cheney are really saying is that they can live with the world we have. Democrat Daschle is comfortable relying on a global web of arms control protocols. Cheney, an oilman out of Wyoming, is comfortable in a world dependent on fossil fuels.

  What makes both issues so worthy of serious debate is that we need a better, cleaner, safer world. The one we have needs fixing, and defending the status quo isn’t the way to accomplish that.

  We rightly
mistrust the sight of politicians telling us what cannot be done in realms where they are far from expert. Let’s get real. Just as politics is beyond the competence of most professors, so is science beyond the competence of most politicians.

  Abortion Rights

  In 1976, Senator-elect Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that we would one day argue more over values than over economics. “If the day comes when we don’t have the economic problem and all we can think about is religion, you may long for the age of the general strike. You can compromise on wages. There are moral issues that do not allow compromise and accommodation, and those can be hugely divisive.”

  Though we still debate tax cuts, the fight over values is growing more ferocious each year. In the abortion rights debate, despite the heat it continues to generate, there is never any genuine dialog. One of the reasons is that each side has become so insulated that it only speaks in its own vocabulary.

  People on one side refuse even to speak the word abortion. Instead, they talk about “choice.” Are we talking Pepsi or Coke? In a further burst of fuzziness, they speak of “reproductive” rights. Who are they kidding? Has anyone talked of stopping people from reproducing? If you want to protect abortion rights, you shouldn’t be afraid of saying so. If you don’t even like using the phrase “abortion rights,” I only ask that you consider why.

  On the other side, we find a different kind of linguistic disconnect. If you believe abortion is “murder,” then what should be the punishment for the woman who seeks one? Life imprisonment? Ten years? Ten minutes?