Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (41 page)

A date for a second Reagan-Gorbachev meeting was eventually set for the fall of the following year in Iceland. In the run-up, Tip O’Neill found himself playing a quiet but consequential role. The nuclear “freeze” faction of the Democrat membership had by then revved itself up and, no longer willing to wait, was demanding action. Indeed, the time had come for an up-or-down call on the whole panoply of nuclear arms issues. Congressmen Ron Dellums and Edward Markey believed they stood at a great moment in history, one in which they could frame clearly the grand goal of global nuclear disarmament.

The Speaker summoned a meeting in his office. Bluntly, he warned what would happen if Reagan failed at Reykjavik. They and the other Democratic doves would bring the weight of the blame upon the entire party. Tip prevailed. It was better to wait, as both Dellums and Markey accepted, even though having to delay their crusade against nuclear arms proliferation was
“heartbreaking,” as Dellums put it. Yet not even the freeze leaders themselves could have predicted that Reagan and Gorbachev would themselves talk of eliminating all nuclear weapons.

For those of us who’d spent our early youth hiding beneath our fragile wooden school desks imagining a nuclear air raid, a seismic change was occurring. Despite the roadblock at
Reykjavik—Reagan’s insistence on strategic defense—the scene of two superpowers headed toward Armageddon had evanesced. Suddenly, the world might no longer be the one we’d known since the early 1950s. Mikhail Gorbachev understood what was happening.
“This,” he told Steingrímur Hermannsson, the Icelandic prime minister, as they stood together on the tarmac in the sleeting rain, “is the beginning of the end of the Cold War.”

“What matters most about political ideas is the underlying emotions, the music to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality.”

—S
IR
L
EWIS
N
AMIER

Both Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were American Irish, but different kinds. One was the corner buddy, staying close to home, holding fast to his tribal identity. The other was the rambling boy, making his name and fame elsewhere. It explains why they shared their Irish stories differently. Reagan offered his, theatrically, with a brogue, just as he’d done for that Vegas revue he’d once briefly emceed. Tip’s anecdotes came with his DNA, I’d say. But he’d also accumulated a useful collection over the
years, heard at weddings and christenings and a thousand political dinners.

Reagan,
raised Protestant by his Scots-English mother, over the years was in danger of forgetting the other half of his bloodline. His heavy-drinking Catholic father was a beloved, if embarrassing, connection to the religion Reagan would refer to, without animus, as “Bells and smells.” Pat O’Brien was another reminder of the old sod when he welcomed the young man starting to make his way in Hollywood into the clan at the Warner Bros. commissary.

“I knew I was Irish even before I knew I was American,” wrote Tip when he sat down to look back on his life. At the age of seven, he’d been enrolled in a Gaelic language school. Around him was a world of families that closely resembled his, yet as he grew up, signs in shopwindows still warned:
NINA
.
NO IRISH NEED APPLY
. For the likes of Tip and his peers, they mirrored the anti-Catholic bigotry across the Atlantic that kept Northern Ireland a battle zone. Tip also remembered other signs from those days—
I GAVE TO THE ARMY
being one. It meant a contribution had been made to the Irish Republican Army.

Like so many in his community,
O’Neill had loyally supported the IRA up through the late 1950s. However, as the situation changed, so did his thinking. With the eruption of the bloody violence—“the Troubles”—in the era that followed, he began to question the conventional Irish-American habits of mind he’d previously taken for granted. What now became apparent to him was that the struggle between nationalist and loyalist in Northern Ireland would not, in the end, be decided by gun and bomb.

Influenced by John Hume, a Northern Ireland nationalist leader pressing for a nonviolent approach to the rights of the Catholic minority, Tip and three other well-respected Irish-American politicians—Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and New York governor Hugh Carey—had joined forces in 1977. All four men recognized the truth of what Hume urged, that the continuous flow of Irish-American dollars funding the IRA arms stockpile had to stop. They also understood that the Protestant majority was never going to give up its loyalty to Britain, while, at the same time, the minority Catholics should never have to accept second-class status. Any agreement arrived at, they knew, would need to be based upon democratic principles, and if Northern Ireland were ever to join the Republic of Ireland, it would have to be by majority vote.

Dubbed the “Four Horsemen” in honor of the famed Notre Dame backfield of 1924, Tip and his cohort made themselves first heard on St. Patrick’s Day of 1977 in a statement that called for an end to the sectarian killing and encouraged the possibility of dialogue. While the new approach stirred anger by the hard-liners, it began to show results. Tip, speaking for the other “Horsemen,” found a key ally in Jimmy Carter. Always an advocate for human rights, President Carter now tried pushing the British government for a settlement in Northern Ireland, and promised U.S. aid as a way of sweetening the initiative.

As I’ve shown, from the moment they met, Tip O’Neill accepted Ronald Reagan as a fellow Irish-American, sharing jokes and stories. He made an annual ritual of hosting a St. Patrick’s Day lunch in the Speaker’s dining room, with the president always the guest of honor. When Tip visited Ireland in April
1984, just prior to a Reagan arrival there that June, he set about smoothing the way for the president, wanting to be sure he was treated properly. (The Speaker, I should add, loved noting that the name of the president’s ancestral village, Ballyporeen—to which Reagan intended paying the expected pilgrimage—was Gaelic for “valley of the small potatoes.”)

Upon arrival, Reagan was delighted with his reception and repaid Tip’s courtesy by calling his Democratic rival “a great son of Ireland and America.” Their shared heritage was, he joked,
“part of our blood. . . . That’s what I keep telling myself every time I try to iron out my differences with the speaker of our House of Representatives, a lad by the name of Tip O’Neill.”

In Dublin, Reagan addressed the lower house of the Irish national parliament on June 4, and opened by describing how, when he’d landed at Shannon a few days earlier, “something deep inside began to stir.” He then reminded his listeners that the first Washington embassy he’d officially visited, upon becoming president, had been Ireland’s.
“I’m proud that our administration is blessed by so many cabinet members of Irish extraction.” Pause. “Indeed, I had to fight them off Air Force One or there wouldn’t be anyone tending the store while we’re gone.” Then, quickly, he got serious.

Although the bulk of his speech looked beyond Irish borders to larger East-West issues—the spread of “democratic development,” and U.S. efforts at ensuring global security—Reagan first spoke forcefully of the need for peace in Ireland, north and south.
“All sides should have one goal before them,” he said, “and let us state it simply and directly: to end the violence, to end it completely, and to end it now.” Yet he made clear the United States’ position was only one of solidarity. “We must not and
will not interfere in Irish matters nor prescribe to you solutions or formulas. But I want you to know that we pledge to you our goodwill and support, and we’re with you as you work toward peace.”

Three months earlier, in March, back in Washington, Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald—his own family home was, as it turns out, less than seven miles from Ballyporeen—had traveled to America and lunched at the White House. Naturally, also on hand for the event was Tip O’Neill—giving Reagan the chance to quip during his welcoming toast, “In fact, the secret wish disclosed the other day by my friend, Tip O’Neill, is an indication of the hold that Ireland has on all of us here in the States. This is a nation where the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives aspires someday to be Ambassador to Ireland. ‘Tip, what about day after tomorrow?’ ”

Now, in Ireland and standing before its parliament, President Reagan referred back to that earlier event.
“When he was in America in March,” he said, “your Prime Minister courageously denounced the support that a tiny number of misguided Americans give to these terrorist groups. I joined him in that denunciation, as did the vast majority of Irish-Americans.”

Tip and others committed to changing the situation in Northern Ireland recognized the necessity of shifting the American approach to Great Britain. They saw that the elusive key to peace in Northern Ireland was to be found only in London. However, in October 1984, that vital piece of the puzzle became more elusive still, as Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, only narrowly escaped harm when the IRA bombed a Conservative Party conference. Even before, her Tory loyalties had allied her to Protestant Unionists. In the aftermath she was even more hardened, opposing
the very notion of a Catholic and Protestant power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

In November 1984, of course, President Reagan was reelected.
The following month, just before Christmas, Prime Minister Thatcher crossed the Atlantic to attend a roughly three-hour meeting at Camp David with the president and his senior advisors. The primary reason for the trip was to discuss with Reagan her own recent session with Mikhail Gorbachev. But other subjects were covered, including the current situation in Ireland.

Anticipating American interest, Mrs. Thatcher herself raised the matter. She emphasized that, with regard to Ireland, despite reports to the contrary, she and Garret FitzGerald were on good terms and . . . making progress on the difficult question. In reply, President Reagan told her that in Washington there was great congressional interest in the issue, adding that he’d had a
personal letter from Tip O’Neill asking him to appeal to Mrs. Thatcher to be reasonable and forthcoming.
The president followed through, writing Tip later to assure him that he’d done as he asked.

On November 15, 1985, Thatcher and FitzGerald signed the historic Anglo-Irish Agreement, which established two critical principles for future talks. The first was that their two countries now agreed on their equal interest in Northern Ireland. Second, both London and Dublin also accepted the fact that any change in Northern Ireland’s status would have to be made by the popular vote of its citizens, Protestant and Catholic alike. The agreement ushered in an era of genuine negotiation between Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland, but even beyond that, it made it possible for John Hume, the visionary nationalist from Derry, to help bring the IRA openly to the bargaining
table. It was the beginning of the end to the Troubles. Both Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan had played roles they could take pride in.

The episode warmed the Speaker’s heart toward Reagan as never before.
“His feelings changed to one of appreciation and respect for Reagan when he let the Four Horsemen and him personally change the public posture of the United States from viewing Northern Ireland through the prism of Great Britain,” his son Tom would say with his own warm recollection. “He knew it put the president and Thatcher in an awkward position. They were close, the two of them. But Reagan never resented it and she did.”

• • •

President Reagan’s State of the Union address for 1986 was scheduled for January 28. However, at 11:39 that morning, the
Challenger
exploded less than two minutes after takeoff. Six astronauts were killed, along with thirty-seven-year-old Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher chosen from more than eleven thousand applicants for the coveted primary slot in NASA’s Teacher in Space Project.

The State of the Union address was postponed, the first and only time to date that that has happened. Instead, at five o’clock, sitting in the Oval Office, the president went on television—with far different matters on his mind and in his heart. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I’d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the State of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering.”

He was plainspoken, and all the more eloquent for it.
“We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been
doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the
Challenger
crew, were pioneers.”

Millions of young schoolchildren, he told his country, had been watching with special interest, excited that a teacher, just like the ones they saw every day, would be riding into space with astronauts.
“I know it is hard to understand,” he said, addressing them specifically, “but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The
Challenger
crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”