Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (21 page)

Throughout this difficult and discouraging period, what kept Tip O’Neill strong was, as I’ve said, his unswerving commitment to the role of government as a force for good in its citizens’ lives. It was his firm conviction that he was
acting
on his beliefs—just as Ronald Reagan was. He felt that the Reagan program would ultimately fail. He believed the economy would worsen and that the victor of 1981 would end up punished by the voter in 1982.

I could only respect my new boss for his toughness in sticking it out. Every day he arose to face the abuse he knew would be hurled at him. He was a politician out of step with the times and he was willing to live with that fact. Yet he also held this unexpected natural advantage. What I came early to realize was that this big, overweight guy with his shock of white hair had the goods in a way we just hadn’t been seeing. The truth was, many people
liked
his looks. What was the Speaker of the House
supposed
to look like, anyway? Yes, he was an editorial cartoonist’s delight—and never more so than in those tough summer months of 1981—but what was written on his face, his character, was unmistakably genuine.

Tip himself would frequently worry about his appearance, and just as frequently say so. But, as the weeks passed, what I began to see was how great he looked, how special, how unlike any other
person. He was Tip O’Neill, and he looked exactly like who he was. As Republican Bob Dornan of California once said, if Martians came into the House chamber they’d know instantly who the leader was.
David Rogers, an astute Tip-watcher on the
Boston Globe,
had this to say about the veteran politician from North Cambridge: “Whatever carping comes with any defeat, the political facts are that no Democrat today commands more affection in the House than O’Neill or is in any position to challenge him as Speaker.”

The problem was the timing, which seemed to be running against him. As the summer of 1981 drew to an end, the national verdict was decisive. Reagan had rolled up the score, victorious on the three big votes—the budget, the spending cuts, the tax cut—and O’Neill had won none. Columnist George F. Will, falling back on what was fast becoming a cliché, dismissed Tip as “a cartoonist’s caricature of urban liberalism on its last legs.” He predicted O’Neill was in his last term as Speaker.

Congressman Charlie Wilson was, as usual, more colorful. A Democrat from southeastern Texas, he was known for the zest with which he approached both whiskey and women. Considering Reagan’s successes in enacting his programs and his own fellow Democrats’ seeming inability to stand in his way, Charlie succinctly summed up the political situation’s potential for serious disaster as he saw it:
“I sure as hell hope that sonofabitch doesn’t come out against
fucking
.”

“It’s the long road that has no turning.”

—I
RISH PROVERB

By August 1981, Ronald Reagan had proven his legislative might. Victorious in every test of strength so far, he was about to bring to bear the full force of his presidential punch.
“Learned the Air Controllers will probably strike Mon. morning,” he noted in his diary over the weekend of July 31. “That’s against the law. I’m going to announce that those who strike have lost their jobs & will not be re-hired.”

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, known as PATCO, had a history of calling job actions—a slowdown in 1968, a mass “sick-out” in 1970—in order to force the government to the bargaining table. Since air traffic controllers served in the Federal Aviation Administration, such tactics were the PATCO leadership’s
way to evade the law banning strikes by government employees. In 1980, the union had become more aggressive, protesting its differences with President Jimmy Carter by refusing to endorse him for reelection, instead giving its eleventh-hour backing to a Republican, Ronald Reagan. Now they were going further, violating not just their contract but federal law.

On August 3, 1981, PATCO’s members made good on their threat and walked off the job. Their demands involved workplace rules, pay scales, and a shortening of their high-pressure workweek to thirty-two hours. A further requirement on the table called for excluding PATCO from the rules governing the rest of the civil service. What justified this audacity was the union leaders’ calculation of their bargaining position. They timed the strike to coincide with a peak airline traffic period. Would any president dare to incur the anger of travelers who’d booked their flights and would now be forced to forgo not just planned departures, but in many cases, their family vacations as well?

Sitting in the Oval Office, President Reagan was ready, unwavering in his intention to stand firm. For the past three decades he’d had a decidedly low tolerance for what he saw as union arrogance and troublemaking. Having prepared a plan of action, he now carried it out with ruthless confidence.
“The strike was called for 7 A.M. I called the press corps together in the Rose Garden & read a statement I’d written yesterday. I included in it a paragraph from the written oath each employee signs—‘that he or she
will not strike against
the U.S. govt. or any of its agencies.’ I then announced they would have 48 hrs. in which to return & if they don’t they are separated from the service.”

Two days later, with the PATCO membership refusing to return, Reagan fired the 11,345 controllers who were disregarding his back-to-work order. Much worse, he went on to ban them for life
from federal service in
any
capacity. That, however, was not the end of the punishment. In a final blow, the administration acted to decertify PATCO. Once the recognized union of the air traffic controllers, it now did not exist.

Reagan’s swift action and near-dictatorial command of the moment sent out shock waves, and not just through organized labor. Seven thousand commercial flights had to be canceled the first day. But by breaking PATCO, he showed in a single executive judgment call how different he was from his recent predecessors. This first-year president’s take-no-prisoners stance also carried a clear message that was missed by no one on either side of the ideological fence.
Future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, a supporter, applauded Reagan’s toughness, pointing out that the precedent Reagan was setting would empower corporate employers around the country facing contentious labor disputes to act similarly.

On Capitol Hill, Tip O’Neill’s reaction was layered. Publicly, he showed sympathy for the strikers, reminding listeners that Reagan’s “two-fisted” leadership style also was the mark of a man unwilling to compromise. The Speaker called the mass firings yet another “result” of the new economic order now being advanced in the country. He threw out a sarcastic jab as well, reminding labor leaders inclined to wonder that PATCO had chosen the wrong party to do business with. “That’s what happens to a union that supported the president of the United States. That is what is going on. The same thing is happening to the people out there who supported the president. They are
really
getting it.” If you’d thought voting against Jimmy Carter and for Ronald Reagan was in your own best interest, Tip was saying, it was time to think again.

When he was commenting more privately, around the office to staffers, Tip was forced to acknowledge the political muscle Reagan was displaying—and not just domestically. A massive contributor to
both parties, Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland, was an influential international agribusiness figure to whom every senior politician paid attention. With multimillion-dollar deals that took him frequently to Moscow, he enjoyed regular contact with highly placed officials there. That summer, returning from the Soviet Union, he reported to Tip that the Soviet top brass had shared with him their healthy respect for the new president. The Russians, he said, credited Reagan, in contrast to his predecessors, with the strength of will to qualify him as a true leader.

• • •

As invincible as Reagan seemed that August, there were also trouble signs, certainly the kind a seasoned political watcher might have spotted. David Stockman, his budget director, had informed him he needed perhaps a half trillion dollars in
additional
spending cuts over the next years if he didn’t want to see the federal deficit balloon further.
“If these numbers were out,” Reagan retorted, “Tip O’Neill would be wearing a halo.” By the time he got to his diary to record his thoughts, though, the president sounded more upbeat. “We have our work cut out for us. Our goal of balancing the budget by ’84 is doubtful. I’m still optimistic that we do it.”

Whatever the numbers seemed to call for, there was one program Reagan no longer had any intention of messing with: Social Security. The White House remembered the politically scarring push to cut early retirement benefits back in May. The House of Representatives had just voted overwhelmingly to restore the minimum $122 payment, another Social Security issue that had shown itself to be potential political poison. At the same time, the Speaker continued to bear down on Democratic colleagues who’d shown any inclination to pose further threats to America’s millions of beneficiaries.

This included those who, with the best of intentions, foresaw future problems with the system if it wasn’t fixed. When Texan Jake
Pickle, the Democratic chair of the Social Security subcommittee, began work on a reform measure, Tip simply moved to stop him in his tracks. To accomplish this maneuver, he called on Missouri Democrat Dick Bolling, a loyalist and chairman of the Rules Committee, which controlled when and how legislation got to the House floor. “Jake, we are all proud of your work,” Bolling told Pickle, “but I want to say one thing. As long as I am chairman of the Rules Committee there won’t be any Social Security legislation in this Congress.” The decree had come directly from Tip O’Neill himself.

Reagan, never a slow learner, was now prepared to keep his hands, too, off the country’s most cherished program.
“I’m withdrawing Soc. Security from consideration & challenging Tip & the Dems.,” Reagan wrote in his diary on September 23, “to join in a bipartisan effort to solve the fiscal dilemma of S.S. without all the politics they’ve been playing.” With the 1982 midterm election season soon kicking into gear, Reagan, intending to neutralize the issue, announced the creation of a Social Security commission the purpose of which would be to address the system’s financial health. There would be fifteen members: five chosen by the president, five by the Speaker, and five by the Senate majority leader, Howard Baker. It seemed the very essence of a Washington solution, this burying of an issue in another layer of bureaucracy, even if a bipartisan one at that.

But the truth for Reagan in this case was that he’d pretty much handed the issue over to the opposition. He could see no way to reclaim it to his advantage. If the failed May proposal to penalize early retirees and the June vote to eliminate the minimum Social Security benefit weren’t enough, Reagan’s own history of pushing to make the system “voluntary” in the 1960s had left a trail of cookie crumbs for the hungry Democrats, who’d have no trouble following it all the way to the Oval Office.

Suddenly came a tragedy—and all such horrific events arrive with no warning—that shocked the country: the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Two days after the PATCO strike was called, President Reagan had welcomed the Egyptian leader to the White House for what he saw as highly successful meetings.
“I’m encouraged that between us maybe we can do something about peace in the middle east,” Reagan jotted down the night before Sadat’s departure.

The deadly attack took place as Sadat was reviewing a Cairo military parade that annually celebrated the Egyptian army’s crossing of the Suez Canal during the 1973 Israeli war. The assassin was an Islamic extremist serving in the Egyptian military.
“It’s hard to describe the shock & sorrow . . . ,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night. “Even though their visit was short we discovered we had a deep feeling of friendship for them. Maybe it has to do with a state visit. You start out with knowledge of each other & immediately get into the problems you mutually want to solve.”

The afternoon the world learned of the assassination, I went with the Speaker to the National Cathedral. There we honored, in a hastily scheduled prayer service, the Egyptian leader who’d made peace with Israel, now slain on account of that extraordinary act. I remember well the Call to Prayer echoing through the Gothic nave of the mighty sanctuary. In the aftermath of Sadat’s death at the hands of a fundamentalist fanatic, to be sitting there amid the Christian prayers gave me a great deal to think about.

For four years, I’d served Jimmy Carter, the man who in 1978 at Camp David had brokered the historic deal between Sadat and Menachem Begin, Israel’s hard-nosed prime minister. Now I was working for Tip O’Neill, an Irish-American Catholic, mourning a Muslim who’d made the ultimate sacrifice as a result of what he’d dared to do. The mood in the cathedral seemed to me to embody a
commitment to interreligious affection I could not have previously imagined. It was a moment when I have to say I experienced a feeling of being with my new boss in just the right place.