Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (19 page)

The president, out of patience with the tactics up on the Hill and wanting to put an end to it, now made a personal plea to Speaker O’Neill, requesting that all of the proposed Reagan cuts be considered in a single vote on the House floor. And if that weren’t enough, Reagan made clear to Tip that he wanted the White House itself to craft this bill, deciding to the penny what programs should be cut and by how much. The answer he got in reply was short and to the point.
“Did you ever hear of the separation of powers? The Congress of the United States will be responsible for spending,” Tip parried. “You’re not supposed to be writing legislation.”

Then, when Tip characterized Reagan’s proposed one-for-all bill as a power play, the president was ready.
“I was a Democrat myself, longer than I’ve been a Republican, and the Democrats have been known to make a few power plays.” That reference to his former party affiliation—and his later sincere congratulations on Tip
and Millie’s fortieth anniversary—signaled that he wasn’t yet waging all-out war. The Speaker suddenly relented and agreed to take a look at what his Democratic House chairmen had been up to.

That night, in his diary Reagan offered a thoughtful take on the conversation that fully reveals his political street smarts.

Called Tip O’Neill—there is no question but that games are being played. The Dem. dominated Committees have put together their plans for implementing . . . [the Reagan budget]. Some did alright but a number of them claimed savings by putting in unrealistic figures they knew would not hold up. For example one of them called for eliminating
¹
/
₃
of the P.O.’s [post offices] in the U.S. Now they know we’d have to ask for replacement of those which means their claimed savings doesn’t exist.

Tip was blustery on the phone & accused me of not understanding the const.—separation of powers etc. I was asking only that he allow an amendment to be presented on the floor for correction of the phony comm. recommendations. He wont allow that of course. He is blocking our move to consolidate categorical grants into Block grants. Claims Cong. would be abdicating its responsibility. In truth Wash. has no business trying to dictate how States & local govts. will operate these programs. Tip is a solid New Dealer and still believes in reducing the states to admin. districts of the Fed. govt. He’s trying to gut our program because he believes in big spending.

With the Reagan spending cuts set for a vote in the House a week later, on June 25, Tip persisted with his plan to have them handled separately, standing against the president’s determined push for a single yes-or-no.
“Tip O’Neill is getting rough,” Reagan
wrote in his diary two nights before the vote. “Saw him on T.V. telling the United Steel workers U. I am going to destroy the nation.”

In the end, it didn’t matter. Tip’s dire prophecies weren’t enough to ward off a crushing defeat.
In an extraordinary step, the House of Representatives voted to rebuff the Speaker and permit an up-or-down vote on the entire package of Reagan cuts. It was an unheard-of act of rebellion, stripping the Speaker of the House of his historic power to decide what the House votes on. While the vote was close—just seven votes—it would demonstrate for all to see that Ronald Reagan was calling the shots, even under Tip O’Neill’s own roof.

But Reagan’s big victory wound up coming at a cost. With a strategy that insisted that his spending cuts all be included in a single bill, the White House encouraged a slapdash drafting process. Even in the final form in which it passed the House, the giant document continued to be an unedited catchall, one including such nongermane material as one Congressional Budget Office staffer’s phone number. However, far worse a calamity was the inclusion in there of a measure eliminating the Social Security minimum benefit.
It meant that three million seniors, many of them in their eighties, would be stripped of their $122 monthly benefits. This would cause panic among the Democrats—and also among many Republicans, who voted for the Reagan bill—once they’d realized what they’d done. They understood only too well what a weapon their opponents the following year, in the 1982 elections, could make of this blunder.

• • •

On July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan made history by nominating Arizonan Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate Republican Court of Appeals judge and the first woman ever to be tapped, to the Supreme Court. Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill
wholeheartedly approved, calling it
“the best thing he’d done since he was inaugurated . . . the first time he’s turned the clock ahead during his administration.”

And then Tip turned around and made an appointment of his own.

“I still believe that the mildest and most obscure of Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes. I believe it because I lived it.”

—T
ED
S
ORENSEN
,
C
OUNSELOR

I’d sensed it was coming. As I continued to hear encouraging reports from Kirk O’Donnell, I also saw how each morning the Speaker was regularly using the statements I wrote to open his press conferences. And that, of course, had been the idea from the start. What caused the delay naming his new administrative assistant was explained easily enough in Tip terms and made sense to anyone who knew him. As his son Christopher “Kip” O’Neill told me at the
time, his father had to have a person in that critical job whom “he felt comfortable with.” I’d now met that test.

I’d been waiting nervously outside his office when Tip called me in. It was late in the afternoon and he’d asked me to come by. Naturally, I was on tenterhooks. “I want you to have Gary’s press job,” he announced almost the moment I sat down. “I like the way you carry yourself,” he added warmly, by way of explanation. Even though I appreciated the compliment, I couldn’t help but be disappointed. That’s because what he just said had the same effect on me as back when I’d been offered the Capitol Police moonlighting job.

In this case, I immediately assumed he was slotting me into a second-rung position, one where I’d be reporting to Kirk. Then, after a pause, he went on: “It’s a statutory position. It carries the rank and salary of administrative assistant.” In fact, this was it! The big one!

As I got up to leave—feeling happy, fired up, and relieved all at the same time—I was already forgetting just about everything else my new boss had said, except that he’d promised we were “going to have fun.” The fact that he said that made me feel great, and I believed him. As far as I was concerned, we were going to enjoy ourselves just the way David did when he took on Goliath. Helping load the slingshot was going to be my job!

Here’s what ran in the
Washington Post
.

TIP TOP AIDE

By Cass Peterson, Washington, July 9, 1981

House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (D-Mass) has hired Christopher J. Matthews, a former Carter speechwriter and onetime aide to Senator Frank Moss (D-Utah), as his administrative assistant, replacing longtime aide Gary Hymel. Hymel
was a key political aide as well as O’Neill press man, keeper of the gates, appointments secretary and King Solomon of space allocation.

Be careful what you wish for, they say. Well, I’d gotten what I’d wanted: all I had to do now was deliver.

From that afternoon on, I committed myself totally to the challenge I’d been recruited for. Standing at Tip O’Neill’s side as he endeavored to level the Reagan White House’s off-balance economic agenda was an honor, a responsibility, and a huge kick all at once. It was up to him not to let them get away with it—and each one of us on the Speaker’s staff understood the necessity for this, as did an equally committed band of other House members.

Every morning when I pulled into my assigned parking spot by the East Front of the Capitol—where Jack Kennedy, among other presidents, had taken the presidential oath—and then sat down behind that big desk in the high-ceilinged room just across from the House chamber, it was a genuine high. At the same time, it was impossible not to remember my stint as a cop there in that building. Though it had been barely a decade earlier, it felt like a few lifetimes. Even fresher in my mind, though, were those two years I’d put in at the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. It had been an incredible experience writing speeches for a president, and then spending those last days and nights heading to Election Day crisscrossing the country on the campaign trail.

That job, however, had come to an abrupt end on Inauguration Day, which meant I also had a personal issue with Reagan. Those of us on the Carter team had given the effort to defeat him everything we had—and then some—but we failed. Now it seemed as if I was being offered a second chance, and I intended to get it right this time around.

One thing for sure: I didn’t want to miss out on anything that was happening, virtually minute to minute, in the Speaker’s office. Being there, keeping watch over the action and helping Tip to respond quickly when the circumstances demanded, soon turned into an obsession, or maybe even an addiction—from morning to night, right through the weekend and back to Monday again.

The pattern was familiar. First, I’d been a junior legislative assistant in the morning, Capitol policeman in the afternoon. More recently I’d been an outsourced Speaker’s advisor in the morning, a Democratic campaign operative in the afternoon. Now I was corner man for Tip O’Neill in the morning, and later in the day his roving envoy on the House floor.

Mornings were most important. From the minute I awoke until Tip’s daily press conference at quarter to twelve, one thing and one thing only was on my mind: making sure that when the Speaker walked down the hall to begin taking questions he was perfectly prepared for whatever might be thrown at him. In politics, nothing good ever comes out of the unexpected. It helped that Tip started each day as a vacuum cleaner for information. “Whaddaya hear?” was his invariable greeting to Kirk O’Donnell, Ari Weiss, and me as we sat there in his office.

“Anything special out there?” He continued probing, looking around at us expectantly. “Anything I ought to know?” We understood we needed to be sharpest when it came to this last query, that it required us being his eyes and ears. If any tidbit of information happened to be floating around Greater Washington, the existence of which might affect him and his stewardship of the House, he counted on one of us to make him aware of it. We knew we had to come through with no excuses and that he was expecting us to deliver the goods.

Not wanting to be caught off guard or unprepared in the day’s
press conference was one part of the equation, but the other was that Tip also never wished to be surprised in his role as
Speaker,
as the leader of the United States House of Representatives. Though he trusted us and others on his staff, it was the rest of the world—that is to say, his world, of Capitol Hill and its environs—that could and did harbor trouble. He relied on us to distill the essence of every Sunday’s public affairs talk shows for him and to reduce the hot air spouted to the essential nitty-gritty he craved. Statements made on-air often required expert decoding—no pol ever went on
Meet the Press
or
Face the Nation
without packing an agenda—and those analyses we supplied as well. Then, too, if a Democratic colleague had been speaking against Tip or his leadership in the cloakroom, of course the Speaker had to know
that
. Somebody would always drop the dime, and thus one of us would hear through our networks who’d been dabbling in disloyalty or insurrection. Secrets were hard to keep even in so mammoth a building. “The walls have ears,” the Speaker would remind us ominously.

Priding himself on his skills at reading the House, as I’ve said, he relied on us to help ensure his ability to do so. It was also imperative that each and every day he was on top of where all the legislative issues stood—which ones were headed to the floor, which were still in committee, which ones weren’t going anywhere. “Where’re we at on that, Ari?” he’d ask Weiss, who, though still in his twenties, appeared to have been born to this job. He was a prodigy who possessed the astounding gift, as I’ve said, of knowing the answer to any legislative question within minutes of arriving daily at his desk, right next to mine.

Basically, there was a division of labor, and
here’s how Tip described it in an interview with Hedrick Smith: “Ari Weiss was absolutely brilliant. Legislativewise, he was the fellow I followed. International and politics was Kirk O’Donnell. Local was Leo
Diehl. The writer was Chris Matthews. I had four extremely able and talented people.”

Before long we’d arrive at the question of what that day’s targeted statement—focusing on a topic of current interest—was to be. These “scripted” comments were always the centerpiece of his press briefing. I’d have suggestions ready to present, as to where we might go and what I thought would work, and then I’d pitch them to him. His reactions, when he approved, would vary from a sober approval to an appreciative chuckle. It was easy to know when he liked an idea. However, if he didn’t go along or wanted tweaks, he made it clear. “That’s not me!” he’d exclaim. Or else he’d instruct, “Drop that last line.” His was a self-protective, or maybe I should say self-defining, editing process: he knew who he was and he was simply sharing that knowledge.