Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (30 page)

Kirk O’Donnell had a favorite political maxim, which I’ve quoted before—
you make your breaks
. We would prove that rule in the final days of the 1982 midterm campaign. With the entire House of Representatives, and a third of the U.S. Senate, up for reelection, we now did what was absolutely mandatory if we were going to prevail. We came up with a way to put the red-hot Social Security issue front and center, where it couldn’t be missed.

As I said, it was a break we’d made in the final week before America went to the polls. I’d been working to make good use of what appeared a highly exploitable leak from the White House. Word was that the Reagan people might use the congressional “lame duck” session following the election to attempt once again to downgrade the role of Social Security as it was known and loved. This was obviously worth every second I could put into following up the truth of it, and I was highly motivated, wanting to be careful to pitch it to the right person for a thoroughgoing follow-up.

I decided on the
Post’
s Spencer Rich, who often wrote about government agencies. As I tried to convince him to run with the story, I wound up listening as he asked me to help find a mass letter sent out by the National Republican Congressional Committee, one that discussed Social Security. I steered him to Eric Berkman, a House Democratic staffer who I knew could get ahold of anything, and who had contacts even in the White House.

On the Wednesday before the election, Spencer called and said he’d received the Republican mailing from Eric and was intending to go with the story for Thursday. Incredibly, that
GOP fund-raising letter he now had his hands on included a questionnaire that suggested ways Congress might reform Social Security. It invited contributors to vote on several options for fixing Social Security. It promised the votes would “let the [bipartisan] Commission know . . . how you want Social Security reformed before they finalize their report.” Ballot choice No. 1 was to make the system “voluntary.”

Eureka.

Could Reagan still claim he’d since changed his mind, that he
no longer held such a position? Not anymore. Here was a promotional mailing from his very own party that starkly implied otherwise. It was the Thursday morning before the election. I called Kirk, who said we should instantly get out a statement from Tip demanding that the president “repudiate” the mailer. I reached the Speaker up in Cambridge. When he phoned back from his first stop that morning, I gave him the news. “We got a break on Social Security,” I reported happily.

The Speaker’s stern rebuke to the president, calling for him to disassociate himself from the GOP mailing, made the UPI wire immediately, which in turn triggered the TV networks. The key was, here was Tip pinning the campaign committee’s goof on Reagan himself, making it hard to blame anyone else. That afternoon, as Air Force One arrived in Casper, Wyoming, the press jumped Reagan, demanding he answer the Speaker. The story led the networks’ news programs that night as the top item. From that moment on, our job was to keep Social Security alive and burning as the central, overriding issue through Election Day.

Now there was no more prelude. Our mighty efforts were either going to be rewarded . . . or not. Walking to the Speaker’s office the day before the election, I’d suddenly recalled how, back in 1980, CBS had led its election eve news broadcast by focusing not on the tough battle coming to a close but on the fact that it was the first anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis. I remembered how it had hurt.

Two years later, on another election eve, my mood was different. This time around, Tip O’Neill’s assault on Ronald Reagan and his party’s problem with Social Security was the lead story on the
CBS Evening News
. The tables had been turned.

• • •

Tip O’Neill enjoyed a plate of beef stew as the returns began coming in, receiving the election results in his back office. I watched him savor each incoming phone call bringing good news: the young House members he’d been worried about had come through safely and were reporting in.

There’d also been scores to be settled that got taken care of. During the campaign, an arrogant young Republican congressman from Long Island had attacked the Speaker as
“big, fat and out of control, just like the federal government.” At one point, he’d gone so far as to
pin a
REPEAL O’NEILL
campaign button right on President Reagan’s lapel.

“I wouldn’t know him from a cord of wood,” the Speaker insisted, pretending to be unbothered. The House, after all, was a very big place, and this guy wasn’t one of his own. But the devoted Leo Diehl felt otherwise. He’d been with Tip through every election since 1936 and had no intention of permitting the offender to go unpunished. The next thing the Democratic hopeful in that district, Bob Mrazek—who hadn’t stood much of a chance before—knew was that large contributions were flowing into his campaign treasury from unexpected sources. Diehl had quietly alerted the Speaker’s friends that a certain disrespectful Republican needed to be taught a lesson.

“For a while there, I had no idea where we would get the money we needed to run a decent campaign,” Mrazek would recall. “Then, out of nowhere, three weeks before election day, the money started pouring in, from Chicago, from
everywhere
.” The icing on the cake of election night, 1982, was Mrazek’s win. Leo was triumphant. “I think the ‘Repeal O’Neill’ kid got repealed.”

Albert Hunt, then of the
Wall Street Journal,
would write: “The one clear winner election night was Thomas P. O’Neill. He had suffered
more than any other political leader in the past two years. But his strategy . . . paid off on election night.”

As the election results rolled in, Tip couldn’t help declaring, “It’s a great night for the Irish.” He’d fought the election on three issues: the recession, Social Security, and “fairness.” His tactics had paid off. After two years of intense frustration and unwilling accommodations, he’d retaken effective control of his beloved House, picking up twenty-six seats.
“We don’t want anyone to eat crow,” he declared once it was all over. “The country is in too tough shape for anything of that nature.” Instead, the Speaker called for “bending” on the part of both Democrats and Republicans. “And so we will extend to him the hand of cooperation to see, whether in the best interest of America, we can turn this unemployment around,” he said.

The evidence of what took place the next morning appears, unadorned, in my journal: “November 3—We won!”

• • •

Later that month, the
New York Times
columnist James Reston wrote this about Tip and the Gipper. It would prove an excellent testament of the new political order that emerged from the 1982 election. Reston, a world-renowned journalist, had just turned seventy-three.

They are an odd couple, but they have some things in common. Both know they don’t have the votes in the new Congress to put over the programs they prefer. Both are coming to the end of a long political journey. The Speaker will be 70 on Dec. 9, and the President will be 72 next Feb. 6.

What they also have in common is an important chance to do something together in these next two years for the defense of the nation at home and abroad. The Speaker wants to leave behind a Social Security system that will endure, even if he has to
amend its benefits, and the President probably wants to depart in peace and get control of both the economy and the nuclear arms race.

Together, they might even do it, and being Irish, they might even try.

“Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.”

—G
EORGE
F. W
ILL

It was Kirk O’Donnell, the Speaker’s counsel, who gave me a way to see how to operate effectively in the political arena. Over the years, the rules of action I first heard from him have evolved and grown into my own everyday primer. From the start I grasped their simple, practical wisdom. They deserved to be at the core of any working pol’s personal handbook—that is, if he knows what’s doing.

It was Kirk who had the smarts to dub Social Security the “third rail” of American politics. He was certainly right, of course—and this brilliant image had a very specific meaning for him. As a kid growing up in Boston, Kirk had been taken from an early age on the old MTA, only to be haunted by those scary signs that warned,
NO
TRESPASSING. DANGER THIRD RAIL.
The prospect of the horrific fate he might suffer should he fall onto the tracks gave him nightmares he never forgot.

During the 1982 election, Kirk’s imagined nightmare had become the Republicans’ own. The Democrats had made sure of it. But another of Kirk’s great expressions—which is the key to understanding what next happens—is one I’ve already mentioned (when it equally applied). “Always be able to talk,” he liked to say. And that’s what the two parties started, slowly, to do.

Following the midterm elections, and the gratifying Democratic triumph, I began to sense a positive shift in our dealings with the Republicans on Social Security.
“If we are truly to avoid a disaster,” the Speaker had said even before the election, “both sides have to give a little.” November behind him, the calendar now pointed to mid-1983, when the Social Security fund faced its due date.
“The old-age trust fund is already operating at a deficit,” the
Washington Post
had reported the previous month, “and will be able to get through to next July only by borrowing from Medicare.”

Reagan, viewing the same deadline, saw a deal with the Democratic Speaker as a way to silence “Social Security” as the Democratic battle cry in 1984. For this, he was ready to pay a price. Just as he’d been willing to accept a tax increase in 1982, he was now prepared to allow another breach in his no-tax firewall. To stanch the bleeding in the Social Security system, he would make a second compromise: if a hike in the payroll tax that every worker contributes to the retirement fund was essential to a deal, he was ready to do it.

On January 3, the
Washington Post
reported the following:
“Administration sources have suggested that Reagan is signaling his willingness to consider tax increases as part of a bailout, while O’Neill apparently has sanctioned a compromise proposal that
postpones benefit increases for three months.” The rough basis for a deal was now on the table: Democrats would get an increase in the payroll tax, while Republicans would get their downward modification of benefits.

Around this time, I shared my optimism with Ken Duberstein, one of the top Reagan lobbyists. Later I worried I’d been so candid. The fact is, I
was
optimistic about what direction we were headed in—after the strong Democratic showing at the polls—and I was in no mood to keep it secret. It was easy to see that in the coming round both sides had strong reasons to be open to deal-making.

Reagan’s people, especially Jim Baker, were eager to have Social Security be a nonissue as the 1984 campaign started to get under way. Once again, an election had produced two kinds of verdicts, depending on which side was receiving it. The most recent contest for voter loyalties had told the Republicans they needed to call it quits when it came to targeting Social Security as a way to reduce the federal deficit. For Tip O’Neill and the Democrats, the message was, “Never be blamed for hurting the system.” Both parties needed to keep Social Security sound. That meant making adjustments in the present to assure its solvency for future generations.

Back in September 1981, President Reagan had created the bipartisan, fifteen-member National Commission on Social Security Reform. It was chaired by Alan Greenspan, known, at that time, for having been the Ford administration’s head of the Council of Economic Advisers. The group was preparing a report expected to be ready at the very end of 1982, but, as January 1 approached, the struggling commission asked for and received an extension, which made it now due on January 15. That fell amid Congress’s annual two-week break between swearing-in day and the onset of legislative business. It was the period when the Speaker and his pal Dan Rostenkowski
enjoyed splitting their time between Palm Beach and Palm Springs, giving paid lectures to corporate retreats and playing golf.

Because it was during the break, it was a date that would find me out of the country, for I’d been fortunate enough to be offered another opportunity to visit Swaziland, this time with Kathleen and our six-month-old, Michael.

The United States Information Agency ran a regular lecture series, which sent “American Participants,” people from various backgrounds, to meet with their counterparts in other countries. They asked whether I’d like to do a quick trip to Swaziland, Zaire, and Nigeria during the two-week hiatus. Once I’d been given the word I could bring Kathleen, then a reporter for ABC’s Washington affiliate, I jumped at the chance.