Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (26 page)

Their gambit had failed. They had attempted to mouse-trap too large a mouse.

When he reentered the room, O’Neill confronted Reagan with what I’d just passed on to him. Point-blank, he asked the president to state clearly whether he was the author of this move on Social Security or not. The moment of truth had arrived.

“Now,
wait
a minute,” came his reply. “This is the proposal that came from the
Congress
. It’s on the table because
you people
put it on the table!” Burned before, Reagan was adamant. The only cut in Social Security he’d accept was one that came out of a compromise between the two parties on Capitol Hill.

That was Reagan’s answer. Tip was ready with his own: “We didn’t specify this cut in Social Security.”

The Bolling Proposal represented Tip’s good-faith effort to help Reagan reduce the federal deficit. He’d been willing to accept
a minor delay in Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments. What he would not cooperate in was being played for a fool. Thus he walked away from what they were trying to do, and, by doing so, protected not just Social Security but himself.

The meeting ended with an odd episode. Out of nowhere, Tip’s lieutenant, Congressman Jim Wright of Texas, offered a trade. He asked Reagan to slash the final installment of his tax cut in half, from 10 to 5 percent, in exchange for a grab bag of spending cuts. Reagan’s response was not fit for a family newspaper.
“You can get me to crap a pineapple,” he said, “but you can’t get me to crap a cactus.”

Once the meeting was adjourned and the White House press corps safely back home in the West Wing, Reagan’s aides went back to spouting their company line—it had been the Democrats themselves who’d proposed cutting Social Security. But no one was really buying it. The nation’s revered retirement program would remain for the Republicans a hovering albatross.

Still, the face-to-face hadn’t been a total failure. The two partisan leaders would always have fundamental differences, but the meeting’s impresario, Jim Baker, was surprisingly happy with their “chemistry.” The Speaker agreed.
“I wasn’t any more of a stubborn Irishman than he was.” Asked whether he thought the White House had been setting him up, O’Neill refused to blame Reagan. “I would have to honestly say, in my opinion, that the president of the U.S. wasn’t any part of it, but I think there are wily minds around him, and that’s what
they
had in mind from the start.”

• • •

There were moments when, for all the public wrangling, the back-door cooperation could still surprise me. A very human example involved Mitch Snyder, well known in Washington, D.C., at the time as a militant, highly creative advocate for the homeless. Inspired by the radical former priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, whom he’d
met in federal prison ten years earlier, Snyder had become a committed activist for the poor.

In the early months of 1982, Snyder embarked on a hunger strike that went on for sixty-three days, over two months during which he took nothing but water and lost fifty-seven pounds. Mitch was a grandstander, to be sure, but at the same time deadly serious. What he was starving himself in protest over was the recent naming of a nuclear attack submarine the
Corpus Christi,
Latin for “Body of Christ.” For a man now dedicated to pacifism, whose heroes were priests and who himself passionately lived the communitarian teachings of Jesus, it was an affront he couldn’t overlook, despite the fact that the U.S. Navy customarily named certain classes of vessel after American cities, in this case a well-known port town in South Texas. To Snyder, the choice of name was a blasphemy committed by the federal government and condoned by officialdom.

I was alerted to what was happening by a friend, the satiric journalist Nicholas von Hoffman. He urged me to get Tip O’Neill to intercede so that “this guy can go out and get a cheeseburger.” I had a thought, which began with the fact that the Speaker recently had spent the evening at the apartment of syndicated columnist Mary McGrory, who frequently threw informal dinners and liked to have a lively mix of guests. The party, I knew, had concluded with Tip, among others, standing around Mike Deaver, one of Reagan’s triumvirate of top advisors, as he played the piano. It occurred to me, remembering that, that Tip might be willing to call on Deaver to try to keep Mitch Snyder alive. When I explained the problem, Tip said okay, to go ahead and get the guy on the phone.

Deaver wasn’t in his office but returned my call later. When I explained about Snyder’s hunger strike and its motivation, he seemed irritated. Not only because I’d contacted him for such an odd-seeming reason—right when we were already embroiled in a lively
partisan standoff—but because he seemed to have little patience for would-be martyrs like Snyder. “It doesn’t seem like a very good reason to kill yourself,” he commented dryly.

Thinking Deaver uninterested, unimpressed, and thus unwilling to help, I was, it turned out, wrong. Though Deaver had given me little reason to expect he’d take the matter right to the top, in fact, that’s exactly what he did.
Within days after our conversation, it was announced that the latest nuclear sub in the U.S. Navy would now bear the name USS
City of Corpus Christi,
with Mitch Snyder accepting the deal.

Those of us who took part in this unusual rescue mission felt a reassuring glimpse of humanity as we regarded our opponents; they’d listened and made a difference. It happens that the day Mitch Snyder’s hunger strike was brought to an end was the very one on which President Ronald Reagan rode in that motorcade up to the Capitol to meet, summit-style, with House Speaker Tip O’Neill.

For Mike Deaver, his stint as Mitch Snyder’s savior would be a precursor of a late-in-life vocation. Soon after leaving the White House he’d come afoul of the law that governed lobbying. His required community service was to work with homeless people in the same building near the U.S. Capitol that housed Mitch’s shelter. This introduced Mike to a world he’d never known before. The man who once advised Ronald Reagan on image-building became a much-beloved counselor to the down-and-out. Through love and attention, he convinced dozens of homeless men to give up alcohol and better their lives. At his funeral, held in the National Cathedral, the great Johnny Mathis, whom he had also helped, sang “Amazing Grace.” But it was the quiet personal testimony of the men he had saved that made the most eloquent music.

As the Speaker once said to me, “You never know what’s in another man’s heart.”

“The future of this economy is now in the hands of Tip O’Neill.”

—S
ENATOR
B
OB
D
OLE

While they’d disagreed in their “summit” meeting, in the aftermath Tip continued to reserve final judgment on the president. Still reluctant to blame him for the harm resulting from his administration’s policies, Tip expressed it this way:
“I don’t think he believes his program is hurting anyone because he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t realize the severity of his cuts.
If he knew, they wouldn’t go that far
.” As for Reagan, he had his own sense of his opponent, and it was one tempered with affection. According to Max Friedersdorf,
“We would go in and want the president to fire back at him, say something nasty about Tip, and he would just laugh and say, ‘That’s just Tip being Tip. That’s just Tip.’ ”

In the early summer of 1982, nothing had changed, at least not
with regard to these two American leaders and their disagreements over federal spending. Farther away, in the disputed Falkland Islands, the Argentine forces had just surrendered to the British. Iraq and Iran were still locked in a nasty war, and at the beginning of June, Israel invaded Lebanon. Inside the Capital Beltway, the battles involved only the weapons of political persuasion.

In fact, a writer for United Press International took the Falklands as a point of comparison:
“It may be easier for the United Kingdom and Argentina to settle their dispute than for President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill to come together on a spending and taxing plan for the United States that satisfies both. It also is likely that if Reagan and O’Neill do find the basis for an agreement, there will be plenty of howling about it—including charges of betrayal—in Washington and elsewhere.”

However, there was a difference that needed to be acknowledged. Unlike the year before, the two sides had arrived at a rough political balance. The rise in unemployment—the April 1982 jobless rate was the highest since before World War II—and the spiking federal deficit had pushed Reagan into the sort of tough corner unimaginable just months before. Those who had so celebrated his rise to power were suddenly looking at him with the sort of suspicion bestowed on every president when the economic numbers begin to go against him. Worse still, he was finding himself pummeled by his allies on the right, as not being sufficiently hard-nosed.

The fact was, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were in full command of the circumstances as the slide in public confidence continued. Recognizing, finally, that there was no chance whatsoever to pass his still hoped-for progressive budget, the Speaker gave halfhearted backing to a centrist fiscal plan devised by party moderates. Yet, even that option was brought down in a chaotic night on the House floor. Myself, I will never forget the sight of California’s
archliberal Phil Burton, who clearly had been drinking heavily, going from member to member threatening him if he didn’t vote “Nay” on the Democrats’ budget.

“You can forget that fuckin’ judgeship,” he barked at a fellow Californian about to retire. Not everyone buckled, of course. With the face of a besotted Burton looming over him—imagine Harpo Marx in hell!—Henry Waxman stood his ground and voted with the party. “He’s trying to bring down the budget!” I appealed to the Speaker, who was circulating among the members. “What can I do?” he answered. “He’s
drunk
!”

Yet the loss on the budget vote had its silver lining. Now, as Tip had warned all along, the rising deficits were Reagan’s burden to carry, his red ink in the ledger. O’Neill’s Democrats, moreover, were showing new strength. While they didn’t pass their preferred budget, they cast 202 votes against a successful Republican budget, which finally prevailed, a considerable gain compared to the previous year’s 176.

As the best showing against Reaganomics since its champion had taken office, the latest vote appeared to signal a political uptick. But just as we were about to enjoy that possibility, a discouraging
Wall Street Journal
piece appeared. Worse for me, it was I who agreed to the Speaker’s being interviewed by one of the
Journal
’s Washington bureau reporters.
“Like an aging prizefighter, he has been battered in the early rounds by President Reagan. So he is looking to the final bell—Election Day, November 2—to redeem his reputation.”

The Speaker, quite reasonably, wasn’t happy with this portrait of himself as a guy on his way out. Nor was he happy with me. In fact, he was irked enough that, later the same week when I happened to mention the name of a respected CBS correspondent, his displeasure came through loud, clear, and recriminatory: “Is he another one
of your asshole media friends?” (“Asshole has become one of TPO’s big words lately,” I duly noted in my journal.)

I wanted to tell him that I’d let that reporter—and others—in because my job was to help him become what he could become, and the only way to do that was to be publicized. And the only way to do that was to let people write about you. And the only way to let them write about you was to let them take shots at you. This is the only way to become a figure in American politics. You can’t 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. And what would come across, eventually, was
who he was:
a big guy with a good heart and a lot of guts.

Fortunately, Kirk O’Donnell appreciated my situation and, as a veteran observer of Tip’s moods and idiosyncrasies, was able to offer a bracing consolation. “Around him, you’re expected to bat a thousand!” One of the downsides of having the Speaker think I was a media “expert” meant that if anything went wrong, I must have done it on purpose. Take my word for it: Tip’s team in those tense, high-stakes days was a place neither for the amateur nor the sensitive soul.

At the same time I was learning—and learning to accept—three of my boss’s discernible aspects. One of them was Santa Claus: you had a problem, he’d do anything for you. The second was Black Irish. Skeptical of motive, this Tip was always ready to suspect the worst. Third was politician. Fortunately for the planet—and me—the first and third of these comprised the working Tip O’Neill coalition. All he wanted was to do good, to win, and, despite all his denials, be
liked
.