Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (43 page)

To me, their personal agreeability was as natural as their political antagonism. Had Tip and the Gipper been on the same side, meeting at fund-raisers and after-hours dinners, they would have gotten along swimmingly. Where they did meet was on the fighting line between liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, and that made all the difference.

What makes my case is how proud Tip was to work with Ronald Reagan when the two could find common ground—like on Social Security and bringing peace to Northern Ireland and on this historic 1986 tax reform bill.

Yes, it was a victory he could proudly share.
“After the vote, I was struck by how much could be accomplished when the president and the Speaker, coming from opposing parties but working together, could agree on specific legislation,” Tip explained. “Only a few months earlier, none of the lobbyists had given tax reform a chance. . . . This was one case where leadership made all the difference.”

“There are two kinds of success: initial and ultimate.”

—W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL

Back in the 1980s, when you entered the members’ dining room of the Capitol on Tuesday through Thursday mornings, you were invariably greeted by a familiar quartet of faces. First, at the table nearest the door you’d see Bob Griffin, Tip O’Neill’s Boston College buddy, employed by the Chrysler Corporation as a lobbyist. His breakfast companion, as predictable as the dawn, was Leo Diehl, indispensable to the Speaker as an ally since their early days together in the Massachusetts legislature.

At a table closer to the swinging kitchen doors would be the second predictable morning duo I remember so well. One of them was Eddie Boland, who for twenty-four years had roomed with Tip before he stopped his weekly commutes back and forth from Cambridge
and brought Millie to Washington to live. Boland’s tablemate was fellow Bay State congressman Joe Early, of Worcester. Years later I would be reminded of these two Black Irishmen mumbling grimly to each other when I overheard two Old Gaelic speakers in the rural Cork bar where Michael Collins had his last meal.

Tip’s ex-roommate was more substantial than he seemed. The
son of Irish immigrants who’d settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, Edward Patrick Boland never in his political life had lost an election and would eventually represent his district for thirty-six years before retiring. A World War II vet, he’d marched in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King. A bachelor until the age of sixty-one, he then married Mary Egan, the president of the Springfield City Council, with whom he had four children. He and Tip had entered Congress the same year, 1953, and Boland’s long friendship with the now Speaker—as the
New York Times
put it in his obituary when he died in 2001—was
“a touchstone of his career.”

Tip knew Boland as well as he knew any man and trusted him enough to make him chairman of the new Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The main mission of this committee was to keep a congressional eye and ear on what the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the intelligence community were up to, at which point it would then decide, discreetly, what to do with that information. When forming the committee, the Speaker had explained that he, himself, hated those occasions when he’d needed to be briefed by the Agency. It placed him, he said, in the position of being either accomplice or whistle-blower, and the truth was, he wished to be neither. Instead, with this new committee up and running, his good friend Eddie could take on the responsibility he preferred to abdicate—and thus Boland found himself joined in the last great partisan debate of the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan had, as I explained earlier, revealed an early interest in Central America. Seeking an edge as he sought the Republican presidential nomination back in 1976, he’d decided to make a battle cry of his opposition to ceding U.S. ownership of the Panama Canal.
“We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it.” It was the simple truth, at least as he saw it, and he repeated it again and again to wild cheers while on the stump across the country. Beginning with his upset victory in that year’s North Carolina primary, his Canal
cri de guerre
was nearly enough to steal the GOP nomination that year from incumbent President Gerald Ford.

When he took office in January 1981, Reagan looked to what he saw as U.S. vulnerabilities in Central America and quickly moved to put his muscle where his rhetoric had been. The newly elected President Ronald Reagan’s first target for action was Nicaragua, where the leftist Sandinista regime had grabbed power in 1979. President Carter had given the new government financial aid to discourage it from forging ties with Moscow. The aid continued even when the Sandinistas began supporting left-wing rebels in neighboring El Salvador. Upon taking office, Reagan signaled an abrupt change in this existing U.S. policy, cutting off every dollar going from Washington to Managua.

By year’s end and still not satisfied with the punishment he was meting out, the president ordered arms, equipment, and money sent to the Contra forces opposing the Sandinistas. However, it was only a matter of time before the presidential action provoked a response from the Democratic-controlled Congress. The result was that in December 1982 the Congress passed the first Boland Amendment, which prohibited the use of U.S. funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.”

In October 1983, the United States invaded Grenada. At the
same time, the White House, despite the Boland Amendment, continued, covertly, to provide support for the Contras fighting in Nicaragua. Reagan’s lieutenants managed to justify it with a pair of loopholes they’d spotted in the bill’s language. For one, there was nothing in it specifically preventing wealthy U.S. allies—ones especially reliant on our goodwill and security support—from demonstrating their gratitude. Once hints had been dropped revealing how important the Contras were to the Reagan administration’s worldview, Saudi Arabia, for example, could be especially generous.

The second loophole spotted by the Reagan people dealt with the phrasing of the Boland Amendment. It proscribed using funds for the purpose of “overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” They simply denied this was their purpose even if it was the purpose of the Contras themselves. While it could be seen as hairsplitting of the worst kind, it was justification enough in the anticommunist cause.

In January and February 1984, shockingly, the Nicaraguan harbors were mined, damaging local fishing boats, a Dutch dredger, and a Soviet tanker, among other vessels. Initially the Contras took credit.
Two months later, David Rogers of the
Wall Street Journal
broke the story that it was the Central Intelligence Agency that had masterminded it. More stunning was the fact that the operation had been run out of Reagan’s National Security Council. A young marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver North, had encouraged the use of the mines. Later, one of the planners would be quoted as saying, “The whole thing was a fiasco.”

The exposure of the CIA’s embarrassing role in the incident was no deterrent for the president, whose commitment to getting rid of the Ortega government was unswerving.
“There is a totalitarian
government now in Nicaragua. And the Nicaraguan government is supporting and providing ammunition and weapons to the guerrillas in El Salvador, who are trying to overthrow a government that was duly elected by the people,” he said at a luncheon of prominent Republican women. “Well, we’re supporting people who are fighting for democracy and freedom and those people who shut off that aid are supporting a totalitarian dictatorship in Nicaragua.” It was now the company line. “Man, if you weren’t hard enough in your support for the Contras,” a senior aide said, “you were a commie.”

Equally strong in his feelings on the subject, Tip O’Neill labeled the president’s phrasemaking on the subject of Nicaragua “demagoguery.” Here was Tip, without irony, sizzling Reagan with the same branding iron his rival had used at the outbreak of their ideological range war.

Jim Baker was starting to worry.
“If Congress says you can’t give aid to the contras,” he pointed out at a national security briefing that summer, “you’d better be careful about going out and getting it from third countries.” But while he and Mike Deaver were nervous about the administration’s Central American excursions, the instigators remained gung ho.

In October 1984, a second Boland Amendment became law. It was designed to plug the loophole, banning the U.S. intelligence agencies from funding the Contras for whatever purpose. It stated that “during fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense or any other agency or entity involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose of which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual.”

Then, a week later, the story broke that the CIA had passed
on to the Contras a handbook on assassinations.
“It is possible,” it instructed, “to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges . . . police and State Security officials.” The CIA-authored manual also advocated the triggering of Sandinista violence against antigovernment critics. In this way, “martyrs” useful for purposes of Contra propaganda would be created.

According to a White House aide, Reagan knew nothing of the manual. O’Neill, however, went right for the source.
“It is nothing short of outrageous that the C.I.A. should do this,” the Speaker declared at his press conference the next day. He called for Reagan’s CIA director, William J. Casey—the man who’d chaired his presidential campaign—to quit. “I say it’s time Mr. Casey should leave his job. I want him out of there.” He pointed out that if the CIA chief remained agency head, “then it shows the president condones his actions.”

After November, Ronald Reagan was flush with the forty-nine-state victory that had affirmed his personal popularity. And so, buoyed with new confidence, he began early in 1985 to push for $14 million in “humanitarian” aid to the Contras in the form of food, medicine, and clothing. Framed as part of what was called a “Central American Peace Proposal,” this initiative pitted him against the Speaker once again. “Have learned Tip is asking Demos to vote against aid to the Contras,” he had jotted in his diary, “as a farewell gift to him since he’s retiring in 86.”

On the day of the speech, Reagan recorded that O’Neill was “bad mouthing” the proposal. “Indeed Tip sounds irrational.”
Passionate
is the word I’d have used for Tip’s efforts at this time to thwart Reagan.
“The president of the United States, and I hate to say this,” the Speaker charged, “but I don’t think he’s going to be happy until he has troops, our boys, in Central America.” Tip tried hard to change Reagan’s thinking, going so far as to suggest he look
at a gruesome recent
Newsweek
photo of a man, his throat slit, lying in an open grave, ostensibly the victim of a Contra death squad. The president would not be swayed.
“I saw that picture and I’m told that after it was taken, the so-called victim got up and walked away.”

But this round went to the Democratic opposition. Despite determined White House lobbying, Reagan’s idea for aid to the Contras met with enough resistance that it was beaten—narrowly—in the House. The failure drove Reagan to new heights of indignation.
“Tip has engineered a partisan campaign to hand me a defeat,” he committed to his diary, “never mind if it helps make another Cuba on the American mainland.”

President Daniel Ortega now made a startling gesture that upped the stakes. After watching Reagan fail in his dramatic effort to support the antigovernment rebels violently attempting to depose him, the Nicaraguan set off on a pilgrimage to Moscow. There he hoped to secure a promise of significant economic aid. It was a way of thumbing his nose at Reagan—and the United States, generally. And by acting the supplicant in this way, he handed the White House ample reinforcement for its vision of his country’s status as an all-out Soviet client. When Ortega got to the Soviet Union, however, Gorbachev greeted him warmly, but didn’t agree to a specific amount of aid. Moreover, he appeared to deride his guest for continuing to believe in an imminent U.S. invasion of his country, which he saw as crying wolf.

Thanks in large part to Ortega’s poorly timed mission, the House reversed itself on Contra aid that June. Where it had voted to give
no
aid in the spring—not even the requested “humanitarian” kind—it now followed the Republican-led Senate in approving $27 million for food, medicine, and clothing to the Contras. It was roughly double what it had rejected just two months earlier.