Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (35 page)

My recollection of St. George’s, the capital, is of a lagoon city straight out of Errol Flynn swashbucklers. British, quiet, and quaintly
colonial, it appeared at the moment an unlikely hotbed of Marxist revolutionary sentiment. Clearly, the Grenadians had been glad to see the Americans. We overnighted at the Calabash, a grouping of small cottages stretched along a tree-lined beach. For dinner, we ate K rations and drank a very good white wine. And, given all the hype about the cache of weapons, I was unimpressed. The only guns on display were a pile of old rifles that could have been collected from any shed in Pennsylvania’s deer hunter country. As for the Cuban construction workers I saw squatting in an outdoor stockade, I felt only embarrassment for my country. What right did the United States have to mount an invasion and take those men prisoner? Was our incursion truly justifiable as a rescue mission?

When I put that question to an American consular official over dinner in Barbados the next night, he was unequivocal. The issue was not about getting the medical students off the island. The coup leaders had made it clear every one of them was free to go. (The White House press room confirmed that two days before the invasion the Grenadian leaders had offered to allow the United States to come and retrieve them.) When I asked my dinner companion to explain the invasion, his answer was unforgettable. “There were other factors,” he said, poker-faced.

Thinking what I’d just heard important information to return to Washington with, I approached Tom Foley and his cochair. My mistake was to believe this “fact-finding” mission actually involved finding facts, especially any that contradicted the intended salute to the U.S. invasion. When Cheney heard me question the Reagan administration contention that the students’ safety was its driving concern, he struck me as irritated and certainly dismissive. Looking back, it should not have surprised me. The mission was to support the president’s action, not assemble a bill of particulars opposing it.

Whatever the Speaker thought at the time, the fix was in. When it
came to Grenada, nobody wanted to fight a fight that was already won. After hearing from the Foley-Cheney committee, the Speaker went along with its finding that Reagan’s invasion of Grenada was justified. “But he better not try this again,” he added. (That is, the president had better not take my grudging okay for this strike into a communist-leaning country as license to repeat the show in Nicaragua.)

Years later, Tip O’Neill would offer his own lasting verdict on the Reagan action of October 25, 1983.
“Today I feel even more strongly that we should not have invaded Grenada. Despite what the administration claimed, the students were never in danger. None of the students trapped in the second campus of the medical school for nearly two days after the invasion were harmed, and neither were any of the American residents on the island. But over a hundred American troops were killed or wounded in that operation. And as far as I can see, it was all because the White House wanted the country to forget about the tragedy in Beirut.”

It’s consistent with what I remember him feeling at the time. But Grenada was one thing, Lebanon another. The continued presence of American marines in Lebanon—a deployment he was on record as supporting—steadily grieved him. Tip was like a burn victim, and any touching of the wound was excruciating. I remember one day when Kirk and I were sitting in front of his desk and he suddenly asked if anyone on the Democratic leadership team had been against the sending of our troops into Beirut. “Chris was,” Kirk said, cutting through the powerful silence. He was being loyal to me, respectful of my opposition to the misconceived campaign—but I don’t think it made the Speaker all that happy to hear it.

• • •

The Speaker was, quite simply, in a bad mood. In a conversation with James Reston—one Tip and I both had believed was for “background” use only—he’d been frank about a number of issues.
And particularly rough on the president, expressing his opinion that he didn’t think he’d seek a second term in 1984. Anyway, Nancy Reagan, he cracked to Reston, wanted to go back home and become “Queen of Beverly Hills.” It was this last comment that convinced me Tip, authentically, had believed his exchange with the veteran Reston was not for publication. That’s because he never ever, as long as I worked for him, took a shot at any member of any person’s family. And it was especially true of the First Lady, about whom he would never ever say a negative word. He was stricken.

The moment he saw the quote in the
Times
, he immediately telephoned Mike Deaver, asking what he might do to make amends. Deaver’s advice was to send a handwritten letter, which he did. The Speaker understood that the bleak misery he felt over Beirut and the fix he’d gotten himself into by backing Reagan had nothing to do with the man’s wife, whom he admired. The trouble was, as David Rogers wrote in the
Boston Globe
, quoting a friend of the Speaker’s in the House, “Lebanon is eating his heart out.”

Within a month of the Beirut attack, the unity of the Reagan team was in shambles. “President Reagan is facing growing political and military sentiment within his administration to remove U.S. Marines from Lebanon or to redeploy them soon to safer positions, officials said yesterday.” This lead in the
Washington Post
, reported by longtime Reagan-watcher Lou Cannon, revealed deepening discontent with the policy for which Reagan continued to cheerlead. One top presidential adviser, quoted by Cannon, identified Lebanon now as the administration’s “Achilles’ heel.” Chief of Staff Jim Baker and defense chief Cap Weinberger had both joined the let’s-get-them-out-of-there chorus.

With the arrival of 1984, Tip O’Neill warned Reagan either to produce diplomatic gains in Lebanon soon or else face the consequences. The “status quo,” the Speaker insisted, had become unacceptable.
By the end of January, Reagan himself was envisioning a shift. “We’re going to study a possible move of the Marines to the ships off shore,” he wrote in his diary, “but an Army force on shore to train the Lebanese army in anti-terrorist tactics.”

Yet for the time being, Reagan stuck strictly, in public, to the administration line: the marines must stay. Three days after committing the shift in plans to his diary, there were news reports of a “hot” fight with the Speaker, during the course of which the president had insisted he would not let terrorists drive the United States out of Lebanon. “I tried to tell him the facts of life as I saw them,” O’Neill said afterward.

Reagan was getting increasingly angry about the way he was being covered by the media.
“Dropped in for a minute on the T.V. anchor men & women who were being briefed on tonites St. of The Union address. I cannot conjure up 1 iota of respect for just about all of them.” When he went on to deliver the State of the Union, he carefully tried to brush off the subject of Lebanon. But the Speaker wasn’t letting him off the hook. “In a ten page speech,” Tip said, “he devoted only one paragraph, buried on page eight, to this vital subject. The president can try to bury the issue of Lebanon in his speech. But he cannot bury it in the minds and hearts of the American people.”

The very next day, Reagan again addressed more fully in his diary what he’d neglected to deal with in his speech to Congress and the nation.
“We took up the business of Beirut again with a plan for redeployment of the Marines but only after sending in Army training units who specialize in anti-terrorist measures.” His plan was to get the Lebanese president “. . . to ask for this change.” Meeting with Republican House members the next day for breakfast, he held to the administration position that removing the marines would be defeat.
“I gave a little lecture on why we can’t bug out,” he wrote. “We’re trying to get the Israeli lobby which is very effective in the
Cong. to go to work on how much Israel has to lose if Congress forces a withdrawal of our troops.”

He was also giving thought to Lebanon’s effect on his reelection. “
Campaign time is coming closer even though I have not actually said the words to anyone (except Maureen and Nancy) that I’ll run.”

At this point, Tip was starting to get wind of Reagan’s actual intentions in the matter of the marines in Beirut.
“One night, at a social event, I ran into a White House official who said, ‘Isn’t it great that the president is planning to bring home the marines?’ He must have assumed that I knew the decision had already been made, but it was news to me.” He certainly knew
now
! Still, it was an advantage he knew how to run with. “The next day I seized the initiative and came out with a statement demanding once and for all that the president bring the boys home. The president’s response was to try to make me the villain.”

Which is to say that when the Democrats passed a resolution on February 1 that called for a withdrawal of the marines, Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes instantly went on the attack. The Democrats’ proposal, he sneered, “aids and abets” the enemy in the Middle East. I recognized an old communist-baiting phrase even if the guy who’d said it didn’t. The instant I heard Speakes’s comment, I called reporters at the White House.
“Aiding and abetting is legal language for being a traitor,” I told ABC’s Sam Donaldson. I said that Speakes was engaging in “a new form of McCarthyism . . . Charlie McCarthyism.” Puppetlike, Reagan’s spokesman was speaking in Reagan’s idiom.

Reagan himself now went straight for the Speaker, attacking Tip for refusing to defend a policy even the president had quietly abandoned.
“He may be ready to surrender,” the president told the
Wall Street Journal
, “but I’m not.”

Soon, however, the administration plan to pull out the marines was no longer a secret. Within the week, the White House announced they were being redeployed to the sea. The
Journal
itself
chronicled the now public switch: “Only five days later, the president announced he would do just what he had so harshly criticized the speaker for advocating. Some observers believe the disarray may give the Democrats a potent election-year issue by damaging the president’s credibility just as he’s gearing up for his reelection effort.” Even more damningly, a former defense secretary was quoted as saying of Reagan’s team, “They are cutting and running . . . but they don’t want to admit it. They want to have it both ways.”

Congressman Lee Hamilton, a Foreign Affairs Committee member who had supported the Lebanon policy, offered its best epitaph. “I don’t think there is much evidence that the military power we deployed off the coast of Lebanon had any effect on events, on the way political events were developing. I don’t find much evidence that military power helped accomplish our goals. As events wore on, they were not able to carry out a peacekeeping function. They were no longer perceived as neutral. Their only function had become one of defending themselves.”

But the politics of the Lebanon disaster weren’t finished. Reagan continued to claim that Democratic opposition to his Lebanon policy had encouraged the terrorists. O’Neill was nastier still.
“The deaths lie on him, and defeat in Lebanon lies on him and him alone.”

It’s not hard to deny the bad blood that came out of it. Reagan was angry because O’Neill failed to stick with his policy. O’Neill was angry he’d been led to join it at the outset. Both were bitter, deeply and understandably so, that history—and their consciences—now marked them for the deaths of young patriots, all killed on a mission to which smarter, better leaders would have never sent them.

“I don’t need you when I’m right.”

—T
IP
O’N
EILL

In February 1984, Tip O’Neill told Martin Tolchin, a reporter for the
New York Times
whom he’d long known, that he might retire at the end of the year if Reagan was defeated for reelection. He explained to Marty that he had wondered how it would be to serve as ambassador to Ireland for a Democratic president. However, if Reagan was reelected, the Speaker said, then he’d run for one more term.

He would later dutifully list his reasons. First, there was the fear of hanging around too long, as he believed previous Speakers Sam Rayburn and John McCormack had done. Second, he was starting to think about spending more time with his family, whom he felt he’d shortchanged during his three decades of Washington politics. Finally, his sense of fairness to Jim Wright, waiting around for his
job, came into play. Wright, after all, had been loyal and deserved his “day in the sun.”

Separately and together, these were the seventy-one-year-old’s true emotions. “I could have stayed on indefinitely,” he would later remark, “but I had no great desire to end up as a tottering old congressman.” However, the Speaker realized almost immediately—soon after the
Times
photographer arrived at the office, to take a picture to run with the piece—that he’d made a pronouncement he might quickly regret.
“See what happens when you make a casual statement when you think you are talking to a friend?” he confessed at that morning’s press session.
“My wife said to me this morning, ‘We have been married for 43 years and have known each other for 50 years, and you have never had enough sense to keep your mouth shut.’ So I can’t say anything more than that. I love Jim Wright. He is a beautiful man. When I do leave, I would be very much disappointed if he were not elected Speaker.”