Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (38 page)

“People in the White House tend to get old mighty quickly,” O’Neill rubbed it in a few days later.
Worse was the
Wall Street Journal
headline: I
S
O
LDEST
U.S. P
RESIDENT
N
OW
S
HOWING
H
IS
A
GE
? R
EAGAN
D
EBATE
P
ERFORMANCE
I
NVITES
O
PEN
S
PECULATION ON
H
IS
A
BILITY TO
S
ERVE
. Jim Baker, obviously shaken, felt worried enough to release copies of his boss’s most recent medical report. If tests were any measure, the man sitting in the Oval Office remained “mentally alert.”

Far more telling was this on-the-record observation by Howard Baker, the Senate Republican leader.
“If the point of this is to get an inside view, you got more of that tonight than I’ve ever seen in public with Ronald Reagan.”

Having watched Mondale attack his administration’s record with such relish, Reagan, now the incumbent, was forced to take stock.
“I never realized how easy it is to be on the other side,” he’d later admit.
“Well, the debate took place & I have to say I lost. I guess I’d crammed so hard on facts & figures,” he confessed in his diary. “I guess I flattened out—anyway I didn’t feel good about myself.”

But the lurking age issue was the serious question, and it wasn’t going to go away.
“Another disastrous performance,” Reagan later wrote to himself, “could send Nancy and me packing, headed back to the ranch for good.” He’d even heard one television correspondent refer to the matter of the seventeen years he had on his Democratic rival as the “senility factor.”

But, from the start of the next debate, held in Kansas City, Reagan came prepared with one of those easy utterances he seemed to have been born to let fly. He’d used it before, had been counseled by debate advisor Roger Ailes to ready it now, and so had only to await his cue. When the chance to say it arrived, it came as a question directed to him about his ability to deal with suddenly escalating situations, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. After assuring the reporter who’d asked—and, of course, the tens of millions watching—that he felt up to the job, Reagan offered his beaut of a reply.
“I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Even Mondale chuckled. I have to think he knew his campaign’s one brief, shining moment—that first debate, when he’d been able to overpower his opponent—would be forgotten in the cascades of laughter at what Ronald Reagan had just said.

Soon after, the course of the election stopped being in real doubt. The GOP ticket was going to walk away with the big chunk of the Democratic vote Tip O’Neill knew it needed to prevail. Out
on the campaign trail, where the president was in his element—he’d perfected the whistle stop during those years of crisscrossing the country for GE—Reagan was thrilled to have the loyalty of blue-collar workers, “voters traditionally allied with my former associates in the Democratic party.”

The Speaker, too, was leaving Washington regularly, to do his part supporting both Mondale-Ferraro, along with other embattled Democratic candidates. But
when away from the Capitol, he’d encounter, though far less happily, the same voters the president had. One day, while in New Jersey campaigning for Mondale, he met a woman employee at a sausage factory. “I love Mr. Reagan,” she informed the Speaker. And then, with some indignation, asked, “Why don’t you leave him alone?”

Closer to home, but unknown to Tip—as well as to those of us looking out for him—trouble now was brewing. A group of those Watergate babies elected to Congress a decade earlier had started to get restless, and, foreseeing the Democratic losses facing them—including a large number of seats in the House—they were meeting secretly. They’d begun discussing what had previously been unthinkable—a change at the top. The talk tended toward a coup d’état, one that would challenge the leadership if November went as disastrously as feared. Whether that would include the Speaker himself was never spelled out.

My first inkling of what was up came by way of a hometown guy, Philadelphia congressman William Gray. I was at my desk in the Speaker’s rooms when he found me and laid it on the line. There were members plotting against the leadership, and Bill, concerned, named several names. I refused to believe it. It came out of nowhere, as far as I was concerned, and seemed unthinkable. It marked the one, rare time when we, the people around him, whom the Speaker relied upon for intelligence, let him down. All those days of asking,
“Anything I ought to know?”—and we’d failed to catch any telltale signs of a rebellion in the ranks.

It was the voters themselves who wound up saving the day. While the president won forty-nine states—carrying a quarter of the Democrats who voted—his party gained just fourteen seats in the House, losing two in the Senate. The American public had re-embraced Ronald Reagan but held back when it came to his policies.
“Well 49 states, 59% of the vote & 525 electoral votes,” a defiant Reagan noted. “The press is now trying to prove it wasn’t a landslide or should I say a mandate?”

But while the mixed message delivered by the electoral results dampened the confidence of the congressional plotters, it didn’t stop them. The Speaker had put his weight behind Walter Mondale—an old-fashioned liberal of his own stripe—for the party nomination, and now he had to pay a price. Who’s to say that a younger, lesser-known westerner like Gary Hart might not have given the aging Californian in the White House a real fight? Mondale had failed to, and that was what mattered. The defeat meant that Tip would now have to fight and win the battle his candidate had lost.

It turned out that two camps were arraying themselves against the Speaker that November. First, there were the conservative Democrats. Led by Texas congressman Charlie Stenholm, the guys on “Redneck Row” had been joined by moderates in the party from other regions of the country.
The usual crew of twenty-nine had grown to seventy-five.

The second camp was this crowd elected in 1974 and 1976, drawn into politics by the drama of the Watergate era and the promise of a different Washington. From either the suburbs or urban middle-class areas, these members weren’t part of the old Democratic machines. They were more likely to flaunt their independence. While the old breed, like Tip, Rosty, and New York’s Charlie Rangel, was bonded to the folks back home by tribe and tradition, this crowd
was more into change and reform. What they loved most was hanging out to discuss
policy
, especially “new ideas.”

However, the characteristic they shared dearly with the old breed was a desire for more influence. They knew they’d have to wait decades to get the prized chairmanships. But that was the old way, and it wasn’t good enough. What they wanted was to be
heard—
and heard
now
.

For Tip, this meant waging a war on two fronts. The first call I got from him was an instruction to keep him out of the newspapers. There’d been a moment, when he’d been out there fighting Reagan—after we’d talked him into accepting the spotlight—that he’d decided he might have been occupying too much of it. “I don’t have to be on the front page every day,” he’d kidded me back then.

This time around, he was deadly serious. If the hopes of those taking aim at him were so focused on his “image,” Tip O’Neill was determined that it be a nonissue as he now went about the business of destroying those hopes.

The assault he planned on the first faction, the party conservatives, accomplished in true backroom style, was artful and old-school perfect. Its initial stage involved skillfully taking on those previously nonaligned individuals who’d joined up with the conservatives; he intended to peel them away, one at a time. He went to a member from Alabama who immediately swore his allegiance, and then, from that guy, heard of a Georgian who didn’t feel he was getting enough attention. Next, he learned that a congresswoman from Maryland hadn’t been allotted even a single slot to appoint a youth from her district to the minor but desirable patronage position of House page. Having won reelection several times, she wondered why her rising seniority hadn’t been recognized. Tip saw to it she was immediately satisfied on this score. And so forth.

Tip and Leo Diehl went about the task at hand systematically, discovering each member’s beef, and then figuring out the best
method to resolve it. Charlie Stenholm saw what was happening and backpedaled, abandoning the rebellion he’d begun. “I found out that even some of my friends would not support it.”

That left the other malcontents to deal with. But their yearning for regime change all of a sudden seemed to have lost steam. One day, Dick Gephardt of Missouri, its recognized leader, requested a sit-down with the Speaker. When Tip asked him just what it was he and his crowd wanted, his visitor explained that it was a matter of
process
. They didn’t want Tip’s head; they just wanted his attention. That’s all.

So much for the revolution. The demands of the new-breed cabal now came down to all the various factions of the House joining together in a “Speaker’s Cabinet,” which would meet with the leadership and top committee chairmen on a regular basis to share in the big decisions of the day. Fine, O’Neill agreed. However, he set a giant condition. He, the Speaker, would get to select the members who’d be representing the various factions—the Young Turk crowd, the more conservatively inclined southerners, African-Americans, etc.

Each and every one he picked was, naturally, a trusted Tip ally.

Thus, the Speaker’s Cabinet started its weekly sessions. For the spot, Tip chose his Capitol hideaway down the hall from his working office. It was a room without windows, encased in the thick marble of the Capitol’s East Front. We met there on Wednesdays for breakfast, sitting around a square made up of several tables. The fare was heavy: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried potatoes, hot biscuits. What I recall about those mornings, more than anything else, was the mass fatigue of that bunch of well-fed politicians, up early and now wondering what, exactly, they were doing there. Dan Rostenkowski and Energy and Commerce chairman John Dingell were the outliers when it came to that very question:
why do I have to sit through this?

They didn’t have to wait for long. I think it was the third week
of this peculiar exercise that the electricity went off in the Capitol, right in the middle of the eggs and bacon. Sitting together, there in the total darkness, surrounded by all that marble, the full absurdity of the occasion sunk in. While someone went for candles, the Speaker, Rosty, Dingell, and the other old-line chairmen just sat there. They might have muttered under their breath a bit, but they didn’t have to. Their refusal to stand up and leave was their response. This wasn’t
our
idea, they were signaling, but we’re being good soldiers. You wanted us; here we are. Now what?

Eventually, the lights came back on, but the Speaker’s Cabinet never met again.

• • •

When Inauguration Day arrived, on Monday, January 21, 1985, it was far too wintry, with the temperature hovering near to zero, to hold the oath-taking outside. The decision was made to move the swearing-in to the Rotunda of the Capitol. It proved a cozy ceremony. Though I’m six foot three, I remember having to stretch to see over people’s shoulders as, once again, Ronald Reagan took the oath.

“In my fifty years in public life,” Tip O’Neill said in salute to the president at lunch afterward, “I’ve never seen a man more popular than you are with the American people.” O’Neill, himself, had won a measure of similarly genuine recognition from the other side. “For Republicans,” said Congressman Bob Walker, a Republican fire-breather, “he has become a polarizing figure, seen as an old-fashioned liberal wielding power dictatorially. But some Democrats see him as a kind of folksy figure who is making certain that the Democratic Party philosophy gets a fair hearing within government.”

Neither Ronald Reagan nor Tip O’Neill would ever again have their names on a ballot. At ages seventy-four and seventy-two, they knew, despite their victory and survival, this was right and fair. They had both been visited by their political mortality.

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the Children of God.”

—M
ATTHEW 5:9

Ronald Reagan had always fought a Cold War he believed in winning. Not for him the ambiguities of détente! In the classic Hollywood ending he envisioned a day when the Soviet Union fell and the West stood alone in triumph. Where others were resigned to what Jack Kennedy had called in his inaugural address the
“long twilight struggle,” Reagan looked to the morning.