Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (17 page)

The problem, Tip saw—and found impossible, really, to understand—was that while Reagan could be made to take interest in, and even genuinely seem to care about a particular situation, he remained unmoved if the same hardship story was multiplied into a million similar ones. According to Ron Reagan, the impression left by this failure of his father—whether through inability or willed disregard—to make the leap from the micro to the macro came off as “an obliviousness that was, understandably, taken for callousness.”

Which is exactly how Tip O’Neill took it. Increasing his sense
of frustration was the fact that he and the Democrats could be seen moving inexorably toward a loss. “Am I getting commitments? The answer is no, to be truthful. Have I got disappointments? The answer is yes,” he told reporters, speaking honestly. But when one asked if perhaps he’d turned into a metaphor for old-time, big-spending liberalism, he wrathfully put the questioner in his place: “The Speaker of the House is not a goddamned metaphor. God willing, I never shall be.”

More and more, Reagan’s own personal lobbying was continuing—and it continued to pay off.
“More meetings with Cong. These Demos. are with us on the budget and it’s interesting to hear some who’ve been here 10 years or more say it is their 1st time to ever be in the Oval Office. We really seem to be putting a coalition together.”

The dilemma for Tip and the Democrats was immediate and ongoing. They were on a beach, an enormous tide was rushing toward them, and there was nowhere to look for safety. If they simply stood still, they’d be overwhelmed, and yet if they ran for it, they’d never attain the high ground again. “Support the president! That’s the concern out there, and Congress can read that,” he wearily told the press. “I’ve been in politics a long time, and I know when to fight and when not to fight.”

Given the immense pressures of the situation, Tip began to find it hard to stay respectful. His every instinct now was to tweak Reagan, to try to find a way to land a punch. A week before the vote on the new White House–orchestrated budget he couldn’t resist a cutting remark, one that came off, unfortunately, as all too predictable. Taking aim at Reagan’s intellectual grasp of his own policies, he made a point of noting that the president had summoned Vice President Bush into a meeting with the congressional leadership to
discuss the budget in order
“to have someone explain it for him.” The crack accomplished nothing, but it undoubtedly made Tip feel better. He knew he was losing and he didn’t like it.

On the morning of the budget vote, O’Neill, seeing defeat ahead, took the only stand he reasonably could and still maintain his dignity. It was also the only way he could prepare to move ahead as he would need to. “When the results are over and the headlines are proclaimed, we will have written the record for the American people. . . . If Reagan is able to win tonight the monkey will be off the Democrats’ back. The cuts . . . are the Reagan cuts.”

On that day, May 7, the vote for the Reagan budget was 253 to 176. The president had won all 190 Republicans in the House plus 63 Democrats, a number far beyond those 40 southern conservatives who’d risen to their feet. Reagan was exuberant.
“This was the big day . . . We never anticipated such a landslide. We felt we were going to win due to the conservative bloc of Demos but expected R. defectors so we might win by 1 or 2 votes. It’s been a long time since Repubs. have had a victory like this.”

For O’Neill the defeat was painful. And he took it personally now. “An old dog can learn new tricks if he wants to learn new tricks. This old dog wants to learn,” he told members of the House, using a phrase I’d heard him say in the office. But his most forceful—and colorful—response came the next day, when, back at home and paying a visit to the
Boston Globe,
he found himself asked by one of the pressman, a North Cambridge fellow like himself, how things were going in Washington. His salty reply was perfect for the moment.
“I’m getting the shit whaled out of me,” he informed the man.

Otherwise, his public position and his fallback political strategy were one and the same for the time being. The idea was a simple one: don’t blame him or his party once the going starts to get rough.
“From now on, it’s Reagan’s budget. From now on, it’s Reagan’s unemployment rate. From now on, it’s Reagan’s inflation rate. You can’t criticize the Democrats. It’s Reagan’s ball game.”

Five days after its big victory, the Reagan team committed an unforced error, which had the effect of invigorating Tip. Richard Schweiker, the secretary of health and human services, released a proposal for radical cuts in early Social Security retirement benefits. For those who chose retirement at age sixty-two, instead of receiving 80 percent of the sum due them had they chosen to wait ’til age sixty-five, they would—if the Reagan administration had its way—now collect only 55 percent.

O’Neill’s initial reaction was to follow the regular procedure for dealing with such a proposal, which meant allowing the House Ways and Means subcommittee to study it first. Then he thought again—and he got angry. Why roll over? What was being proposed was a travesty and he needed to speak out. Both his history and his conscience demanded it.
“I’m not talking about politics,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about decency. It is a rotten thing to do.” The Democratic Party, he said, will “fight this thing every inch of the way.” It was “nothing but a sneak attack on Social Security.”

At this point, when I heard about the Reagan Social Security plan, I could think only of my own dad and so I did what I could to encourage the Speaker’s anger. My sixty-one-year-old father, I knew, was planning on retiring early from his position as dean of the Philadelphia court reporters the following year. I knew he’d already announced his plans at work and would be unable to reverse them. I understood how vital their Social Security check would be to him and my mom, since they’d married young and worked hard raising five sons, sending them all to college. Inevitably there had been sacrifices all along the way, and they were looking forward now to taking it easier.

At this moment, I was behind the scenes in Tip’s office, and, as I’ve said, not exactly working
for
him. But, because of my parents, I’m proud to take credit for the simple but heartfelt statement I wrote for the Speaker at the time.

“A lot of people approaching that age [sixty-two] have either already retired on pensions or have made irreversible plans to retire very soon. These people have been promised substantial Social Security benefits at age sixty-two. I consider it a breach of faith to renege on that promise. For the first time since 1935 people would suffer because they trusted in the Social Security system.”

At the White House, Jim Baker suddenly realized too late the horror of what was unfolding. “Whoever called Social Security
the third rail of American politics
got it exactly right,” he said, as he made sure the administration extricated itself from the mess it had just landed in. It had never been so clear before this moment that a war was about to be waged, and words would be the ammunition.

On the same day, May 12, 1981, House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill announced that Gary Hymel, who’d been his administrative assistant during his years as majority leader and now Speaker, was leaving. In the statement announcing his departure, Tip said it wouldn’t “be easy to find someone to replace Gary . . . his shoes will be hard to fill.”

I don’t recall exactly the moment when I started to get my hopes up the Speaker would pick me for the job. But it was what I wanted.

“Courage for some sudden act, maybe in the heat of battle, we all respect; but there is that still rarer courage which can sustain repeated disappointment, unexpected failure, and shattering defeat.”

—A
NTHONY
E
DEN ON
W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL

Once I’d begun working closely with Tip O’Neill, I found myself struck by the enduring commitment he felt. A complicated man, his political strength lay in the belief system he’d long adhered to, which was a simple one. In Tip’s mind, government was there to make better lives for those governed. And the fact that he stuck to this conviction, willing to be on the “wrong” side when the country was tilting in the other direction, was, I believe, a particularly fine moment in American heroism. There is more than one sort of heroic behavior, and they don’t all look the same.

In his daily life as a working politician who’d risen to a pinnacle of power, Tip O’Neill knew all the moves, could wheel and deal shrewdly, apply pressure as needed, put a word in the right ear. He understood most keenly the ways of those making the laws. In his world, seniority, procedure, and tradition were honored, while rewards and punishment needed to be fairly rendered. Always underpinning his visible actions was his less visible passion, making him a traditionalist ripe for leading a righteous rebellion.

The following
Time
magazine analysis gives a sense of the criticism that began to be leveled at O’Neill once he’d lost the budget battle.
“At that moment, it was clear that the nation’s most powerful Democrat had been badly, perhaps even fatally, wounded,” Robert Ajemian wrote in mid-May. “It was obvious that he still had an emotional hold on the House. But the hold is loosening now, and it looks very much as if the job Tip O’Neill has worked a lifetime for is offering challenges he cannot meet.”

Further adding to the unhappiness that
Time
piece created around the office was the feeling that Ajemian, a reporter considered a pal by Kirk O’Donnell, had betrayed a trust. Granting access is always risky—the power of the press ultimately belongs to he who holds the pen—and we all knew it, but that didn’t make it any better. Or Tip any less angry. The truth is, he was already coping with enough.

An observer could see that the table had been turned. Suddenly Tip O’Neill, the veteran liberal, found himself in a position like that of Ronald Reagan back in the 1960s when his own party had little interest in hearing what he had to say. Through his early politician years, Ronald Reagan’s name had been associated with his party’s out-of-the-mainstream right, the hard-line admirers of Barry Goldwater—both conservative and libertarian—who marched to their own ideology.

During the Nixon years and after, out of step with Gerald Ford and other centrist Republicans, Reagan remained a Goldwaterite. Never taken quite seriously, he managed to find his national popularity only when conditions—the high inflation and interest rates of the late 1970s, the taking of the hostages in Tehran, the seeming weaknesses of Jimmy Carter—aligned the stars for him. Watching Tip in the late spring of 1981, he may even have been reminded of his own time in the wilderness. Ronald Reagan knew only too well what it felt like to be in ideological disrepute.

Fresh from his stunning victory in the Congress, Reagan was now about to look backward, though not to his days as a GOP outsider. Instead, he was headed to Notre Dame as president of the United States. He arrived on campus to deliver the class of 1981’s commencement address as the Gipper, the embodiment of an ideal he’d portrayed on-screen in a role that had come to define him. It was life imitating art imitating life, and to make this even clearer, Pat O’Brien, Reagan’s old pal and the top-billed star of
Knute Rockne—All American,
was also to get an honorary degree that day. And so a Hollywood reunion also took place in South Bend on that Indiana afternoon.

Fifteen thousand spectators had turned out, all aware of the historic nature of the event. Reagan was the fifth president to present a speech to Notre Dame graduates, yet the first who’d ever portrayed one of their own.
“I’ve always suspected that there might have been many actors in Hollywood who could have played the part better,” Reagan told his enthralled listeners, “but no one could have wanted to play it more than I did.”

Recognizing not just Ronald Reagan’s symbolic worth to Notre Dame, but also the value of that connection
to him,
the school now awarded the man standing there on the dais two distinct honorary memberships in its Monogram Club for athletic achievement:
one for himself as president and another as a stand-in for the late George Gipp. Having once so movingly acted the part of Gipp, Reagan acknowledged that the nickname had been passed on to him.
“Now, today I hear very often, ‘Win one for the Gipper,’ spoken in a humorous vein,” he told the crowd. “Lately I’ve been hearing it by congressmen who are supportive of the programs that I’ve introduced.” Then, after waiting for the laughter to die down, he got serious.
“For too long government has been fixing things that aren’t broken and inventing miracle cures for unknown diseases,” he explained. It was his well-wrought theme, now perfected after decades of experience. “Indeed,” he went on reassuringly, “a start has already been made. There’s a task force under the leadership of the vice president—George Bush—that is to look at those regulations I’ve spoken of. They have already identified hundreds of them that can be wiped out with no harm to the quality of life. And the cancellation of just those regulations will leave billions and billions of dollars in the hands of the people for productive enterprise and research and development and the creation of jobs.”