Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (32 page)

But not for long. An event in the suburban town of Bedford, Massachusetts, called for him to sit down with a clutch of high-tech executives. There he managed to quickly ring down the curtain on the excellent scene staged earlier in Dorchester. “I realize that there will be a great stirring and
I will probably kick myself for having said this,” he explained to the businessmen listening, “but when are we all going to have the courage to point out that . . . the corporate tax is very hard to justify?” Here was Reagan reverting to those out-of-office years when he could freely express, through columns and speeches to businessmen, his view of the universe. It was an old argument believed by businessmen that corporate taxes were double taxation.

Back in Washington, the president’s incursion onto his home turf got Tip’s attention. After the cozy photo op in the pub, his adversary had morphed back from kindly Dr. Jekyll into the more familiar Mr. Hyde. And Tip was quick to note the transformation.
“On the same day the president sat down to drink with the workingmen of Boston—and I have no complaints about that—he showed his heart was still in the corporate boardroom.”

Reagan had known it was coming:
“Well, I said yesterday I’d be kicking myself. I have.” A few days later it was O’Neill doing the kicking. The top leaders of both parties in both houses had been invited to the White House—the president was preparing to deliver his new budget to them—and Tip chose the moment to go on the
attack. In a verbal brawl that lasted nearly forty-five minutes, the Speaker attacked the president for failing to take action to deal with the country’s highest unemployment since before World War II.

Reagan:
God damn it, Tip, we
do
care about those people.

O’Neill:
It’s easy to say that you care but you aren’t willing to do anything
about
it.

In his diary that night, the president narrated the fight.
“Tip & I got into a donny brook—I really had my dander up. The worst of it was Tip didn’t have the facts of what is in the budget—besides he doesn’t listen.” Jim Wright, who was in the room, called it
“the toughest going-over I’ve ever heard a president subjected to.”

Yet fifteen minutes after the tense meeting in the West Wing, the president and the Speaker found themselves together again, reunited in a different corner of the White House. Reagan had invited Senate and House committee chairmen to be briefed in the State Dining Room on his annual budget. As the administration officials put on their dog and pony show, Reagan approached O’Neill. He’d just spoken to Budget Director Stockman, he told him, and wanted Tip to know that working jointly on a jobs bill with him wasn’t out of the question. “Dave tells me we’re really not that far apart,” the president offered reassuringly. When asked later what the two had been whispering about, Reagan replied they were
“just two Irishmen plotting.”

Back at the Capitol, O’Neill reflected on his conversation with the president.
“Whether this means a ray of hope, I don’t know.” He said they remained “very far apart” on a jobs bill.

Clearly, Reagan hoped to smooth matters between them. He quickly gave permission to Stockman and a group of other staffers to meet with O’Neill with an eye to working through their differences.
“We stand ready to compromise,” Tip said. “We are Americans first and Democrats second. I truly believe that we have to stimulate the economy. We are interested in getting people back to work as quickly as possible. Next to Social Security, that is our No.1 agenda. You can’t stimulate the economy if you can’t put people back to work. That is how we’ve gotten out of every recession.”

But even as the first working session with Tip was about to take place, Stockman had a more pressing concern. Joked the Speaker,
“I understand he’s getting married Saturday . . . When he goes on his honeymoon, he won’t be thinking about Tip O’Neill.”

Stockman got to the church on time—but not before first getting to the meeting with the Speaker. That very same day, after Tip had made reference to his impending nuptials, Stockman accompanied Jim Baker, Dick Darman, and Ken Duberstein to Tip’s office. There they reached agreement with O’Neill and his lieutenants on a $4 billion bill to create 125,000 jobs. While this made only a minimal dent in the unemployment rate, it allowed the Democrats to claim they’d made progress with the president, while at the same time giving Reagan and the Republicans a way to show they were sensitive to the country’s pain.

“When I met with President Reagan on January thirty-first, he promised that he would direct David Stockman to find areas where government spending could create more jobs,” the Speaker said on February 10. “The president has kept his promise. Today, Jim Baker and David Stockman brought me a number of immediate approaches for creating jobs and relieving the human suffering caused by the current economic situation.”

• • •

The week after coming to a deal with the White House on the jobs bill, Tip O’Neill got a new—temporary—job of his own. His cameo on an episode of
Cheers,
which would become one of the country’s
best-loved and most popular TV series, propelled him to a new level of celebrity. When he agreed to lend local verisimilitude by strolling into that iconic Boston bar “where everybody knows your name,” it helped turn him into a household name.

Doing battle with Ronald Reagan on behalf of his fellow Americans, many of whom had no other champion, was helping to make him a folk hero. But folk hero or not, he still had to run for reelection himself in 1984, and in March he threw his hat into the ring for the seventeenth time. On the following day, the House passed that hard-fought-for jobs bill he and the president had managed to bring into being.

Reagan Diary: March 17

St. Patrick’s day. A shamrock tie from Margaret Heckler & one from Tip O’Neill. Lunch on Capitol hill as Tips guest. About 30 people including F.M. Barry & Ambas. O’Sullivan of Ireland. Tip is a true pol. He can really like you personally & be a friend while politically trying to beat your head in.

For Tip’s part, for the good of the country—especially its workers—he would wish Reagan the best with his economic program. “I always figured that—listen, I’m an American. I hope that it’ll work, like everybody hopes that it’ll work.”

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

As leaders often do, Ronald Reagan saw the world as a board game, where the winning side was the one gaining territory. In the post–World War II years, anyone could see the communists were the biggest winners in Eastern Europe, North Korea, then China, then in North Vietnam. If they weren’t stopped as they’d been in South Korea, or challenged bloodily as in South Vietnam, there was no saying they wouldn’t be at our very borders next. (After all, what about Cuba?) Those who subscribed to this thinking—I certainly did—had reason for a troubling worldview.

For a solid explanation, you need only look back to what Adolf Hitler tried to do and wound up perilously close to achieving. Yet
there’d been a pivotal moment, an opportunity to put a check to his intentions. At the Munich Conference in 1938, when England and France lacked the resolve to stop the German chancellor from seizing the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland, their weakness turned into Hitler’s mandate. The global horror of Axis aggression proceeded from there. For Reagan, for his contemporaries, and for many in the generations after them, the word
Munich
was understood as code for any nation’s stepping back from the necessary toughness.

Ronald Reagan’s zealous anticommunism had been an integral part of his political makeup since the days when, as Screen Actors Guild president, he’d first encountered the hard left’s bullying ways and treacherous practices. During those postwar years in Hollywood, he’d gone head to head with hard-left union bosses, some of whom had direct Soviet ties. In the end he could only regard them as spreading
evil
, and from then on, he refused ever to regard any communists as trustworthy, on any level whatsoever.

He came to the presidency with views that had only grown harder over the decades. Yet that antagonism, born out of his personal experience with communism, had another side—one linked to the reverence in which he held his ideal of democracy. The American Way was the bulwark against the communist threat here in this country, he felt, and the truth of that was undeniable. As the 1950s began, he made his political odyssey past a fading acting career. Then with
General Electric Theater
he grew in determination as he traveled across time and geography to that extraordinary prize, the White House. All the while he saw the rising tide of global communism and spent his second career bucking it.

In the mind of Ronald Reagan, the Soviet system itself was
through
. America would prevail, of that he had no doubt. We win. They lose. Born of personal witness, his anticommunist narrative
never faltered. Reagan was a man who knew exactly what he believed and was willing to trumpet it wherever there were listeners.

Speaking to members of the British parliament in London in June 1982, he appropriated a turn of phrase that had been first employed sixty-five years earlier by Leon Trotsky for the Russian revolutionary’s own, opposite purposes. His confident American tones resounding through the Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster, Reagan declared,
“What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

Tip O’Neill was similarly a Cold Warrior, though without Reagan’s sense of ideology—meaning,
his
own ideology—as destiny. Equally repelled by the notion of communism, the Speaker regarded as key the unity inherent in our country’s very name: the United States of America. He resolutely held to the civic wisdom that reminds, “Politics ends at the water’s edge.”
It had actually been a Republican senator, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg, who’d first put these words into the political phrasebook. “To me,” Vandenberg wrote in the early 1950s, “ ‘bipartisan foreign policy’ means a mutual effort, under our indispensable two-party system, to unite our official voice at the water’s edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world.”

Tip O’Neill had come up in politics during an era very different, of course, from the one in which he now was a senior figure. During his formative Washington years, he’d watched Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson follow the foreign policy line taken by President Eisenhower and his advisors at the same time as those men, in turn, were willing to accept the Democrats’ hegemony when it came to domestic affairs. However,
like many Democrats, O’Neill had broken with “water’s edge” bipartisanship when it came to Vietnam.

After opposing the escalating U.S. involvement there, he was left, once we withdrew our forces, in an understandable quandary. For him, the possibility of “another Vietnam” now joined a tug-of-war with the prospect of “another Munich.” Even before Reagan attained the presidency or he the Speakership, Tip had worried Vietnam might wind up the operative model should the United States ever find itself tempted to engage in anticommunist excursions in our own hemisphere.

When it came to Central America, Tip had his own personal reasons to believe we’d end up fighting on the wrong side. In the mind of a man who’d grown up in working-class North Cambridge, U.S. involvement during the first half of the twentieth century in places like Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua had its origins in the arrogant might exerted by the United Fruit Company, at one time a Boston-based import giant with vast Central American interests. Tip blamed United Fruit’s internal meddling in the affairs of these countries for our military interventions in them in the 1920s.