Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (37 page)

The writer went on to add a postscript. “I think what I’m trying to say, Mr. President, is I can’t stand seeing Speaker O’Neill continually do what he does to you and you turning the other cheek.”

Reagan’s handwritten response was attuned to the writer’s keen partisanship. “I don’t think you’ve seen me embracing or being embraced by Speaker O’Neill recently. And yes I find some of his personal attacks hard to forgive. He’s an old line politico. Earlier in my term and before recent events he explained away some of his partisan attacks as politics and that after 6 p.m. we were friends. Well that’s more than a little difficult for me to accept lately.”

May was not a good month for O’Neill. Depressed by the Democrats’ divisive primary battles, dismayed by the Reagan comeback, he now faced an assault from across the aisle in the House. Led by Newt Gingrich, a firebrand from Georgia, Republican backbenchers had organized a sly series of daily assaults on the Democratic Party foreign policy record. Each evening, after the House’s official business was completed, Gingrich’s merry band of ideologues took the floor to make use of a legislative time slot known as “Special Orders.”

Previously, what went on in these “Special Orders” involved less-than-scintillating readings-into-the-record having little to do with issues any broader than, say, showing support for a chrysanthemum festival back home. However, Newt Gingrich’s insurrectionist zeal had led him to see opportunity where others registered only tedium. The new, insidious use he made of the previously snoozeworthy “Special Orders” was simple: get in there and dump on the Democrats. And since there were members remaining on the floor to speechify, the C-SPAN cameras, as always, were recording their monologues as if they were normal House debate. What the viewers at home couldn’t see, however, was the row after vacant row of seats in the chamber. Everyone had gone home. It was truly an empty House.

You had to hand it to Gingrich. The escapade was simple, diabolical, and for his revolutionary purposes, effective. Tip, of course, was incensed. What got to him more than anything else was that Gingrich was playing to those unoccupied benches while vigorously
attacking the national security records of a host of Democrats, including Massachusetts congressman Edward Boland, Tip’s career-long pal. “The camera focused on Gingrich, and anybody watching at home would have thought that Eddie was sitting there, listening to all of this,” O’Neill would later recall. “Periodically, Gingrich would challenge Boland on some point and then would step back, waiting for Eddie to answer. But Boland had left hours ago, along with everybody else in the chamber.”

Fed up with the fact that this phony-baloney theater currently under way in his own front yard, Tip O’Neill decided to take action. The solution was as simple as the original inspiration. He directed that the House television cameras, which were under his control, begin panning the chamber. It was a true “gotcha” moment, and one of Gingrich’s guys, Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, having been passed a note, suddenly understood they’d been unmasked. He now faced the ignominy of admitting right there on live television that the audience at home could now see there was no one in the House chamber but him. The contrivance of using the “Special Orders” to assault the Democrats’ foreign policy record was being exposed in real time.

Naturally, the Republicans were testy. Yet, in the ensuing floor debate over the episode, it was the Speaker who, truly furious, lost control of his temper. Dropping his gavel, he left the Speaker’s chair and ran down to the floor. He had something he wanted to say to Newt Gingrich, in particular, in defense of his fellow Democrats, and nothing was going to stop him.
“You challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I have ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”

Alerted by his floor assistant Billy Pitts that the Speaker had just ignored the House rules on personal attacks, Minority Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi demanded that what O’Neill had just said be “taken down.” In House-speak, that meant that Tip’s righteous
blast be struck from the
Congressional Record
. Of course, he’d meant every word of it.
“I was expressing my views very mildly, because I think much worse than what I actually said.”

O’Neill’s street-corner response to Gingrich had larger consequences. The Speaker of the House, provoked beyond what he could bear, had done the little-known Georgia congressman an immeasurable favor. Suddenly Gingrich had a startlingly higher profile.
As Billy Pitts would point out, Tip had just made Gingrich a “household name.”

Also around this time, the Speaker found he had another unanticipated problem on his hands: me. For whatever reason—ego, career restlessness, whatever—I began causing him trouble he didn’t need. I mentioned that article I’d written for the
New Republic
in which I described what I saw as Ronald Reagan’s enduring identity as America’s “national host.”
Not content to stop there, I then contributed a Sunday piece to the
Washington Post
in which I discussed the president’s fondness for cinematic imagery, and also his playing to the hilt the Mr.-Reagan-Goes-to-Washington bit. As I earlier pointed out, too, he’d snatched Spencer Tracy’s “Don’t you shut me off; I’m paying for this broadcast” from
State of the Union
, transforming it to “I am paying for this microphone” in the 1980 New Hampshire primary debate.

I had a lot of fun putting the article together—since I am, as anyone who knows me will attest, a passionate movie buff—but I should have had the basic common sense to withdraw it the very second a
Post
editor told me that, when it ran, it’d be paired with one from a writer holding political views quite different from my own. As it turned out, the contribution that appeared in counterpoint to mine was a brutally satiric attack on Tip comparing him to—it still hurts to remember, I admit—W. C. Fields.

On Monday morning, Kirk alerted me that he’d heard from the Speaker’s son Kip. Not surprisingly, the dueling pieces in the Sunday
Post
had not gone over well with the family. Here’s my journal entry that night.

Monday, May 7—

Worst day. TPO mad as hell, tear ass at me for setting him up W Post.

“A half dozen people called me & asked me how I could let some guy . . . Just to get your name in the paper you let them humiliate me, just for a few bucks. If you want to do that, we don’t want you here. The next time you write something like that clear it with us.”

But the true
worst
was yet to come. For reasons that are easy to understand but difficult to defend, I’d allowed a number of magazines to write about my role with the Speaker. Initially, they had no effect, seeming not to cause a bother.

Then they did.

“You running for something?” Tip wanted to know after a small profile ran in the
Washingtonian
, the city’s glossy monthly. But that was just a preview. The true blowup came when a new national men’s magazine,
M
, featured yours truly as the one calling the shots in the Speaker’s office. “Everyone in Washington who is anyone knows how Christopher Matthews guides the Speaker of the House.”

“Guides.” Where was I going to hide? And for how long? What’s more, it quoted me saying the Speaker “hates” Reagan, a choice of word I recalled having self-corrected instantly to “resents.” I’d merely been trying to temper the writer’s over-the-top notions of the pair’s collegiality. I believed that anyone reading the piece needed to know that the differences between O’Neill and Reagan were both real and heartfelt. However, such a convoluted excuse would have done me no good with O’Neill, even if I tried to offer
it. The whole episode was a brutal lesson in excessive hubris. As Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire, later a columnist of the
New York Times
, put it, “I’ve been right and I’ve been paranoid, and
it’s better being paranoid
.”

Wednesday May 30

• Worst day—

• TPO attacks me for the M article

• Said I made him look bad

• “ ‘Hated!’ When did you ever hear me say I hated Reagan?

• “Do you think you came up with Social Security issue?

• “I’ve got more political sense in half my ass than you have in your whole body. Do it again and I’ll get rid of you.”

And so went my attempts to win publicity and start a writing career while still on the job with the Speaker of the House. Forced to look back on these days, I can only wonder at my brashness and the man’s forbearance. Nobody’s perfect but, with all his anger, Tip O’Neill had the capacity to understand and let it go. A short while later, I managed to get a better expression of Tip’s view of Reagan in a
Post
“Style” section column.

Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Reagan are Irishmen of a different green. Their running battles have not exactly been brawls, but they have been testy affairs at times. O’Neill likes to explain to Europeans that American political anger subsides at 6 p.m. When O’Neill was in Ireland on April 29, he publicly stated he would be opposed to any demonstrations against Reagan on the president’s recent trip to the home sod. Or as his press aide Chris Matthews puts it, “Tip believes in condemning the sin, not the sinner.”

When I brought that item into the Speaker’s back office and sat there alongside him, waiting for his reaction, I was glad to hear and see him laugh. “Penance,” I said by way of explanation. He shook his head. No—he made clear in an instant—everything was already okay between us. A year later, Martin Tolchin would deliver a major piece about my role.
“Whether or not Mr. O’Neill is the most partisan member of Congress, as many believe, Mr. Matthews is just about the most partisan of Congressional aides,” his piece in the
New York Times
asserted. “The speaker acknowledges, moreover, that he has had to reign him in on occasion.” The Speaker had no trouble at all with it. “It’s all about the timing,” was Kirk’s verdict.

• • •

For President Reagan, the 40th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy would serve as an important symbol for his reelection campaign. In a speech broadcast from France and timed to be seen live on
Today, Good Morning America
, and the other TV morning shows, the president paid glorious tribute to the men, many now seated before him, who’d landed beneath the Normandy cliffs on June 6, 1944. Like millions of others, Kathleen and I watched the intensely moving broadcast. Though I was engaged full-time in a heated contest against the political Reagan, I once again was witnessing his special magic.

Refusing to act the warrior himself, his admiring and evocative praise of those who
had
been warriors now set him in a special place. He seemed to me at that moment the one person I knew of who could so convincingly conjure up the spirit of such a harrowing, glorious historical challenge that his own countrymen had met so perfectly.

• • •

Now it was time to take him on. The Democrats, led by Walter Mondale, were headed to their convention in San Francisco. What
the ticket needed was what the nominee needed but didn’t have. Buzz. Sizzle.
Pizzazz
. Tip O’Neill, who would be chairing the convention, knew just where to find it.
“Sure I have a candidate,” he said early in May. “Her name is Geraldine Ferraro, she’s from New York, she’s a Catholic, she’s been an effective member of the House, and she’s very smart.”

Tip had been grooming the congresswoman from Queens for years, pushing her for top jobs in the House leadership. When other members complained about her ambition, O’Neill had his quick answer.
“Sure she’s pushy. That’s what it takes in this business.” When reporters called, I figured he wanted me to trumpet his endorsement of the Queens congresswoman.

“She has a lot of political moxie,” I told the Associated Press. “The Speaker feels she would add to the ticket dramatically.” With the
Times
, I went further, saying Ferraro would be the perfect foil in debate with Reagan’s vice president and running mate, George Herbert Walker Bush. “She looks very classy, very familiar, whereas he’s a red-and-green belt type guy who’s a bit aloof.” I pitched her as representing the populist, ethnic, big-city values of the crucial blue-collar voters who, four years earlier, had turned away from the party. Just possibly, Geraldine Ferraro could bring back the Reagan Democrats—the Notre Dame subway alumni—to the party of their roots.

After acquiescing to O’Neill’s call for him to select Ferraro, Mondale turned and asked the Speaker for a favor. He wanted him to agree to stand down as the Democrats’ leading spokesman. Otherwise, every day that Tip was featured on the evening news attacking Reagan,
he
, Fritz Mondale—the actual candidate—wouldn’t be. That’s what he told him. The former vice president very clearly felt himself in the position of attempting to command the spotlight from underneath Tip’s extralarge shadow. Unfortunately, any spotlight can be dangerous if and when you happen to make a mistake.

Conventions are always chaotic and exhausting, yet also exhilarating, and this one was no different. Also, I sometimes think that political parties are the most energized, the most galvanized, and have the best times when the going is roughest. However, in the end, the sole unforgettable moment came when Mondale called for a tax increase.
“I was sitting in a broadcast booth with Dan Rather,” the Speaker would recall, “and I couldn’t believe my ears. It was a terrible mistake, which played right into the hands of the Republicans. It gave Reagan the opening he was looking for, and allowed him to use his favorite line on the Democrats: ‘There they go again, tax and spend, tax and spend.’ ”

After Labor Day, after the campaign began in earnest, Tip started to show publicly his concern at the Democratic nominee’s passivity. He called on Mondale to stop letting himself “be punched around” by the president, to “stop acting like a gentleman and come out fighting, to come out slugging.” And Mondale did seem to start showing his teeth. In the first debate that fall, in Louisville, Kentucky, he in fact scored a clear victory over Reagan—and the public couldn’t fail to miss what had happened.