Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (13 page)

Thomas Jr., his second son, though never without the comforts of a home, quickly learned how unfair life can be—and in profound ways.
He was only nine months old when his mother died of tuberculosis. Without a wife to care for his three children—the O’Neill brood included an older brother and sister, William and Mary Rose—the father often needed to fob off the baby, especially, on relatives.
Young O’Neill remembered being “passed from aunt to aunt,” and, as he was to recall, “it wasn’t a happy time.” The sadness didn’t end there. When his father married again, his home life failed to brighten. While he never voiced complaints about his stepmother, for young Tip her entry into the family quite clearly made for disappointed hopes.

But unlike Reagan, who, though popular and a joiner, was always alone in a crowd,
O’Neill found warmth in his friends, and they in him. Unlike his future rival, Tip, when young, ran with a gang. In the company of his usual crowd of North Cambridge boys, he hung out daily at a storefront known as Barry’s Corner. Among the O’Neill pals of that era were “Red” Fitzgerald, “Frogsy” Broussard, “Moose” O’Connell, and others known by similarly colorful nicknames.

Tip’s own lifelong moniker derived from a nineteenth-century left fielder who’d played for the old St. Louis Browns, James Edward “Tip” O’Neill. The original “Tip” had nearly a .500 batting average, inflated by the rule back then of counting walks as hits. O’Neill would earn those many walks by tipping off one pitch after another until the pitcher couldn’t avoid missing the plate or throwing an easy one to hit. Obviously, among his gifts was simple, brute patience, a quality that comes in handy, especially in politics, where waiting your turn is more often than not the safest route to the top.

The kids at Barry’s Corner were townies and early in life instinctively understood the truth of what that meant. A little more than two miles down Massachusetts Avenue stood Harvard University, a citadel of privilege and prestige that could not have been further away had it been on the moon. Accepting the hard divide between town and gown, Tip O’Neill and his gang recognized their place in the scheme of things. That didn’t mean they liked it.

Many decades later the future Speaker would still be smarting from the humiliation he’d felt the summer he was a chubby fourteen-year-old with a job cutting grass and trimming hedges in Harvard Yard. “Up off your ass, O’Neill,” he recalled his crabby boss frequently yelling at him. “Off your ass!” He was warning the local kid he wasn’t going to get away with performing his job sitting down. He was supposed to be clipping away on his knees. The fellow seemed intent on putting the North Cambridge boy down, making
sure
he knew his place—and, not surprisingly, Tip took it personally. Would such an employer have talked to a Harvard student that way? Then again, would a Harvard student have been out there with his shears in the sweltering sun?

The fact that Tip realized the divide separating his world from the other didn’t mean the sharp reality of it didn’t rankle. As F. Scott Fitzgerald well knew—
The Great Gatsby
had been published just two years earlier—the most powerful aspirations arise from rejection, fueling the dreams of those born on the wrong side looking in.
Here’s Tip’s own version of the classic outsider tale, a very specific memory of that summer when he was fourteen and working in a part of his hometown where he didn’t belong:

On a beautiful June day, as I was going about my daily grind, the class of 1927 gathered in a huge canvas tent to celebrate commencement. Inside, I could see hundreds of young men
standing around in their white linen suits, laughing and talking. They were also drinking champagne, which was illegal in 1927 because of Prohibition. I remember that scene like it was yesterday, and I can still feel the anger I felt then, almost sixty years ago, as I write these words. It was the illegal champagne that really annoyed me. Who the hell do these people think they are, I said to myself, that the law means nothing to them? On that commencement day at Harvard, as I watched those privileged, confident Ivy League Yankees who had everything handed to them in life, I made a resolution. Someday, I vowed, I would work to make sure my own people could go to places like Harvard, where they could avail themselves of the same opportunities that these young college men took for granted.

If Ronald Reagan’s political course had been set, when he was a middle-aged man, in late 1940s Hollywood, by his distaste for the hard-left labor factions’ tactics as they struck the Hollywood studios, and also by his righteous indignation at the hefty bite the federal income tax took from his film earnings, Tip O’Neill’s epiphany had come when much younger. And it had lodged in him in a way that would create a different path. Taking a clear-eyed look at the landscape close to home, the teenaged Tip had viewed political power through a very different prism. His goal, he decided early in life, would be to stand against those who defended social and economic injustice.

A year later the still-adolescent Tip was engaged in politics as a volunteer, knocking on doors and handing out campaign literature for New York Democratic governor Al Smith. The first Catholic to be nominated to run for president, Smith was a man of the people, one whose working-class origins always informed his outlook. As a representative in the New York State Assembly, Smith had drawn
national attention early in his career when he
spoke out forcefully for workplace safety after the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Thus, when he led fellow Democrats in the fight against Herbert Hoover to gain the White House in 1928, Tip was a natural foot soldier for the cause. Though it turned out to be a lost one, it gave the eager young man a taste of the valiant, idealistic battles he hoped one day to wage.

Unlike his brother William, who’d left the environs of Boston for Holy Cross in central Massachusetts, Tip attended Boston College as a day student. It was one of those moments in life when a fortunate break more resembles a disadvantage, but for Tip O’Neill staying close to home made a lasting, enriching difference. By not following Bill to Worcester, he remained a neighborhood guy, never losing touch with his childhood buddies, the crew at Barry’s Corner. As a “day hop,” coming and going from classes across the Charles River, he was able to maintain his local identity and popularity. By staying regular in his habits, surroundings, and friends, he was able to sink his roots even deeper into the community where his paternal grandfather, Patrick O’Neill, had first settled seventy years earlier.

We’ve seen how the young Ronald Reagan chafed under what seemed to him the petty tyrannies and claustrophobic scale of small-town Illinois life. Tip O’Neill, on the other hand, was a man at home, and at one, with his native environment. Cambridge was where he’d been born, where he’d grown up, and where he intended to make his mark. He couldn’t wait to get into politics on his own behalf.

While he was still a senior at BC, Tip ran unsuccessfully for the Cambridge City Council. What this meant in the short term was severe disappointment when he failed to win the seat. But for the long haul that first struggle Tip waged in the public eye left him indisputably wiser.
Two maxims he heard at this time were to remain
lifelong souvenirs of his maiden, losing race. The first was a signal—and, eventually for Tip, a signature—piece of advice imparted to him by his dad.
According to Thomas Sr., his boy had stumbled for a simple reason: he’d failed to focus sufficiently on his own North Cambridge turf. “All politics is local,” the father pronounced firmly. It was less a reproach than a fact of life, a truth he’d expected his son instinctively to understand.

According to him,
what Tip should have done, rather than spreading himself thin canvassing the entire district, trying to convince strangers of his worth, was first to lock in decisively the loyalty of supporters closer to home. Then, after that was accomplished, he could be free to head farther afield. “Local” meant his own natural constituency, comprising those citizens nearest in both geography and affinity, already well disposed to him and to his family, not needing to be sold on his value. The ideas, and ideals, embodied in the word
local
were to form his core philosophy when it came to political behavior.

The second lesson Tip absorbed was the result of a scolding he received the day before the election from a certain Mrs. Elizabeth O’Brien, who lived across the street from the O’Neills and was far from satisfied with the way the “Governor’s boy” had comported himself during the campaign. She explained she was going to vote for him
even though he’d never personally come to her seeking support
.
“Tom, let me tell you something: people
like
to be
asked,
” she informed him, surprised, as his father had been, at his ignorance. Happily, Tip was a quick learner and didn’t need to hear either of these adages a second time.

In 1934 Tip was given a thrilling opportunity, one offered for purely local reasons. Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, who’d grown up not far from the O’Neill family and knew them, had been private secretary to Franklin Roosevelt since 1920.
A year after she’d gone
to work for the then—and ultimately unsuccessful—vice presidential candidate, FDR suffered the polio attack that left him paralyzed, unable to walk.

Despite this enormous handicap, he achieved what can only be called an extraordinary political comeback over the next decade, even though his enemies and rivals had regarded him as definitively sidelined. In 1932 Roosevelt ran for the presidency and won.
Now Tip, thanks to Miss LeHand, who knew of the young man’s political interests and ambitions, and that he’d campaigned for FDR as he had for Al Smith, found himself invited to Washington to meet her boss. When he got to the White House and was ushered into his hero’s presence, he was stunned to see him seated in a wheelchair. “I was so shocked that my chin just about hit my chest,” he later wrote.

Tip felt honor-bound to keep the president’s secret. It was an early political confidence, of the highest order, but Tip perceived it also as a matter of personal respect on his part. The meeting, along with the trust the president had placed in him, left an indelible impression and contributed significantly to the formation of his ongoing political loyalties.

In 1936, having absorbed the earlier lessons of defeat, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature. He was twenty-three and, already at that early age, in exactly the place he was meant to be. That he entered politics and would make his life there certainly came as no surprise to one of the nuns who’d once taught him. She later told an interviewer:
“Tom was never much of a student. But he was always popular and a leader even then. He led the boys’ debating team and always won. Tom could talk you deaf, dumb and blind.”

From the beginning, Tip based his political service on the primary needs of the citizens around him, whose lives he understood. Better still, he understood the dignity of those lives, and believed in
that dignity. As a result, jobs, for him, were an all-important factor of the human equation, and, as such, the responsibility of an elected public servant. There was never any question in his mind that government could—and should—put people to work. He’d seen the connection between the two clearly ever since he’d spotted his first snow button. Winter created the jobs: government made sure the right people got them.

Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, New England was increasingly losing ground when it came to holding on to large-scale employers. The once widespread and prosperous regional textile industry had moved to cheaper territory below the Mason-Dixon Line, followed there by the shoe factories. A campaign slogan of “work and wages” was incentive enough to compel worried voters to back any Democratic candidate promising them. Yet Tip O’Neill, the freshman state representative from Cambridge, as concerned about jobs as he possibly could be, was also now revealing a concern for issues beyond the parochial ones that had guided him there in the first place.

One of these new concerns he now weighed in on was the importance of fighting any encroachment against our civil liberties. In his first months at the State House, young O’Neill made his name—for better or worse, you’d have to say—by siding with those casting votes to repeal a law mandating a loyalty oath for teachers. A politician taking this side of the argument would be seen in some precincts merely as an alert civil libertarian, while in others such a suspect position would not only elicit scorn but also likely draw the all-purpose epithet
communist.
Confident of the rightness of his position, however, Tip was willing to suffer the townie contempt at the same time as he earned the approval of his old nemeses, the Harvard Square types. At the next election, he won by an even larger margin.

In 1941, Tip married Mildred Ann Miller, a Somerville girl and
high school classmate whose father was a streetcar operator, and whisked his bride off to New York for their honeymoon.
He’d timed the wedding to occur on a particular weekday, one he considered special but for reasons having nothing to do with connubial love and everything to do with what was happening in New York the very next night. Tip would take his new wife of just twenty-four hours to the Polo Grounds to see Billy Conn fight Joe Louis in front of a crowd of fifty-four thousand people, a contest that’s now the stuff of legend. In the thirteenth round, “The Pittsburgh Kid” had the champion on points, but then foolishly went for a knockout. It was he who got kayoed, instead. Afterward Conn famously quipped to a reporter, “What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be thick?”
Resuming their honeymoon, Tip and Millie headed the next day for Atlantic City.

Over the next five years Tip worked earnestly at his job, making his way up the Democratic ladder in the state legislature, storing up credit in the party as he did so. The universe in which he labored each day was an orderly one, with set rules, based on a code of behavior understood and agreed upon by all: you served your time in lower offices, worked your way
“through the chairs” to head up a committee, knowing that you could, if fortune looked favorably, rise beyond the normal ranks to a privileged position such as a seat in the U.S. Congress. Still, everyone realized that such rewards could never come your way until you’d
“worked your way up through the vineyards.”