Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (6 page)

Like the man he served, Baker subscribed to the same goals, but it was his responsibility to do the careful planning. He knew what invitations to the White House were worth, whether the event was a breakfast for the GOP leadership or invitations extended to lucky members of Congress—Democrats included—to watch the Super Bowl with the president on the big screen in the White House family theater.

Baker, acting on Reagan’s behalf, was right to fix Tip O’Neill squarely in his sights when it came to bestowing careful treatment. For one thing, you couldn’t be trying to play the game of politics and fail to acknowledge the Speaker’s essential Boston-Irish toughness, a part of Washington lore.
“I’ve known every speaker since World
War II, including Sam Rayburn, one of the great ones,” Nixon had recalled. “I would say that Tip O’Neill is certainly one of the ablest, but without question, he is the most ruthless and the most partisan speaker we have had in my lifetime. The only time he’s bipartisan is when it will serve his partisan interest. He plays hardball. He doesn’t know what softball is. So, under the circumstances, when I heard that he was taking over shaping the Democrats, I knew that we were in trouble.” The veteran Bay State representative had, in fact, been the Democrat backrooming Nixon’s impeachment.

Baker also knew about “Hannibal Jerkin.” But it’s likely he respected Tip for never criticizing Jimmy Carter himself personally, even as he wisecracked about Jordan.
“We were particularly aware,” he remembers, “of the imperative as a Republican administration dealing with a Democratic House, of finding a way to establish a relationship so we could deal. When we came in we had a 100-day plan. And that plan was to reduce the tax rates—the marginal tax rates—and get some spending cuts. We were going to focus with laser-like efficiency and intensity on getting that done. We knew from the time we first got there that none of this could happen if the Democratic House could not somehow be co-opted, be persuaded to vote for it.”

For his part, Reagan, too, was well briefed on how shortsightedly Carter’s aides had dealt with O’Neill and the Speaker’s office.
“He’d been aware of all that,” Max Friedersdorf, Reagan’s chief of congressional relations, told me, shaking his head. “They’d offended the Speaker from day one.”

Exactly two weeks after Election Day, Ronald Reagan made a trip to the Hill, where he visited the Speaker in his office. According to Tip—in his memoir,
Man of the House
—they bonded in ways both expected and unexpected.
“When President-elect Reagan came to my office in November of 1980, we two Irish-American pols got right down to business by swapping stories about the Notre
Dame football team. I told Reagan how much I had enjoyed his Knute Rockne movie, and he graciously pointed out that his friend Pat O’Brien was the real star of that film.”

In response, Reagan was able to share with his host their common New Deal roots.
“He told me how, back in 1948, he and O’Brien had been part of Harry Truman’s campaign train. O’Brien used to warm up the audiences, and Reagan would introduce the president. He took great delight in that story. . . . Before [he] left my office that day, I let him know that although we came from different parties, I looked forward to working with him. I reminded him that I had always been on good terms with the Republican leadership, and that despite our various disagreements in the House, we were always friends after six o’clock and on weekends.

“The president-elect seemed to like that formulation, and over the next six years he would often begin our telephone discussions by saying, ‘Hello, Tip, is it after six o’clock?’

“ 
‘Absolutely, Mr. President,’ I would respond. Our watches must have been in sync, because even with our many intense political battles, we managed to maintain a pretty good friendship.”

That first Reagan-O’Neill meeting contained only one discordant note. It came when Reagan reported to Tip how well he’d gotten along with the legislature as California governor. As O’Neill recalled it years later: “
Reagan was proud that he, a Republican, had worked harmoniously with the Democratic state assembly. ‘That was the minor leagues,’ I said. ‘You’re in the big leagues now.’

“He seemed genuinely surprised to hear that. Maybe he thought that Washington was just an extension of Sacramento.” When the two walked out of the room together to confront the press, Tip promised not to turn up the heat for six months, adding that “we will work to turn America around and make the economy work.”

“I echo what he said,” Reagan was quick to agree. “We know,
of course, that we’re not going to accomplish anything without the cooperation of the House and the Senate. In other words, we’re not going to just throw
surprises
up here at the Hill.”

Obviously, the absence of actual issues—they talked neither policy nor politics—played a big part in the warmth of this first encounter. Push had not yet come to shove. It was simply about two pols of a shared generation finding themselves well able to like each other as people. This is despite the grand canyon of difference in their life experiences.
“My father didn’t get the world of Hollywood,” Tom O’Neill told me decades later. “It was far different from the streets of North Cambridge.”

Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan had yet to draw their weapons. Both were still looking for a way, if such a way still survived in the brutal arena of national politics, to fight without becoming enemies.

• • •

The day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, January 20, 1981, was the
warmest oath-taking day on record. Tip O’Neill, along with Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, was invited to join the president-elect and the outgoing Jimmy Carter on the ride up to Capitol Hill. Affable as always, Reagan attempted to break the ice with anecdotes from his Hollywood past. Carter, who had been up all night hoping for the hostages’ return, smiled tightly but couldn’t really follow the point of the stories.
Later he’d ask his longtime media advisor Gerald Rafshoon, a man well acquainted with the movie biz, “Who’s Jack Warner?”

Reagan’s inauguration was the first set on the Capitol’s West Front, overlooking the Mall, and the moment of his swearing-in was the signal, in Tehran, for the release of the hostages after 444 days. Timing is, indeed, everything. Another “long national nightmare” was over.

At a congressional lunch following the ceremony, in his toast President Reagan spoke of
“the adversary relationships” that often
are part of the constitutional territory that assures “checks and balances.” But, he said, he hoped there’d be more cooperation than conflict.
“I look forward to working with you on behalf of the people and that this partnership will continue.” He and O’Neill both understood the delicate balance of power between them, one that would grow even more uncertain in the months to come. Though the Democrats controlled the House, dozens of their members were southern conservatives open to Reagan’s embrace. Would their loyalties swing left or right?

But the headline-grabbing drama that had determined the election—the fate of the hostages in Tehran—was still playing out, right up until this very moment. After hearing for certain that the plane carrying the Americans was finally winging its way home, President Reagan announced to his congressional hosts:
“With thanks to Almighty God, I have been given a tag line, the get-off line, that everyone wants for the end of a toast or a speech, or anything else. Some thirty minutes ago, the planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian airspace, and are now free of Iran. So we can all drink to this one: to all of us, together, doing what we all know we can do to make this country what it should be, what it can be, what it always has been.”

Before leaving the Capitol, Reagan graciously obliged the Speaker’s request that he put his now-presidential signature on a stack of commemorative stamped envelopes. As he did so, Reagan joked that he was counting a Democratic vote for each sheet he signed—which could have been a way of reminding the Speaker that his very ambitious plans for changing Washington and the country would mean poaching directly on Tip’s terrain. The declaration he’d just made on the West Front—
“Government is not the solution to our problem; government
is
the problem”—could not have been a starker rebuke. In hearing Reagan’s words, how could O’Neill not have heard a denunciation of himself?

“Civility is not a sign of weakness.”

—J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY
I
NAUGURAL
A
DDRESS

It was clear that Ronald Reagan respected Tip O’Neill both for his long career and for the high position he’d reached. O’Neill’s failure to respond with equal regard—that crack about Sacramento being in the “minor leagues”—showed a genuine lapse of awareness. It’s the wise gladiator, after all, who arrives at the arena prepared to face his rival’s strengths. Ronald Reagan possessed numerous gifts, but one of the very greatest was the way, by simply being “Ronald Reagan,” he continually induced foes to underestimate him. He would later tell biographer Lou Cannon how glad he’d been to see O’Neill fall into the old, familiar trap. But arriving back at the White House after his first trip to the Hill, Reagan couldn’t help feeling galled. Even after he’d decisively trounced an incumbent American president,
he had to hear his eight-year success in California being dismissed as Triple-A ball.

While Tip’s quip welcoming him to the “big leagues” would continue to irritate the White House, it didn’t bother the Speaker a bit. Meeting with journalists right after Reagan’s visit to the Capitol, he made sure his sly put-down got into public circulation. After saying his guest had been taken aback by what he’d said, he added for good measure,
“It won’t be the last time he’s surprised.”

At the White House, Tip’s chest-thumping didn’t go down well. Even though the Speaker was the acknowledged Washington veteran of the two, he’d overstepped, the Reagan people felt, by rushing to emphasize his senior status in the pecking order.

Yet the Democrat’s needling didn’t mean the end to Reagan’s campaign to win him over. Reagan was shrewder and more cunning than that. Soon after the inauguration, the O’Neills received an invitation to have dinner at the White House with the Reagans two weeks later. “Boy, am I in trouble,” Tip laughed. “How am I going to fight with this guy?”

By January’s end, the Reagan team was presented with a fifty-five-page plan of action. Prepared by pollster Richard Wirthlin and David Gergen, it came to be known simply as “The Black Book.” It was intended as the administration’s road map for the first hundred days, addressing the national mood as well as outlining action:
“The first fundamental economic objective of the Reagan presidency must be to restore a sense of stability and confidence, to demonstrate that there is a steady hand at the helm.” With this mission statement in hand, the president’s staff understood exactly where they needed to position their man—not just as the anti-Carter but also as a serious leader fully ready to guide the ship of state.
“The second fundamental economic objective of the Reagan presidency must be to convey a sense of hope, that there is a light
at the end of the tunnel.” As Jim Baker had already decided, the number-one priority was to be the economy: cutting taxes, cutting social programs. The implications for such proposals were serious and far-reaching.

It would fall to Tip O’Neill to play Horatius at the bridge.

For his part, Tip refused to believe in the reality of what others accepted as a populist-driven Reagan mandate; to him, the Democratic wipeout in November had been a repudiation of Carter pure and simple. In his opinion the GOP campaign promises were
“so clearly preposterous” that any thinking person must reject them. Their inadequacy boiled down to a simple equation:
“Surely everybody could see that you couldn’t balance the budget, cut taxes, and increase defense spending all at the same time.” But whether Tip’s idea of the math’s logic worked or not, Reagan was indeed planning a radical assault on the old liberal order.

In early February, the new president went on TV. No longer the candidate packed with promises, he was now the tough steward, explaining to the country the price of achieving the goals he had set. Like every president before him he was making the inevitable pivot from critic to manager.

I’m speaking to you tonight to give you a report on the state of the nation’s economy. I regret to say that we’re in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.

Now, we’ve just had two years of back-to-back double-digit inflation—13.3 percent in 1979, 12.4 percent in 1980. The last time this happened was in World War I.

In 1960 mortgage interest rates averaged around six percent. They’re two-and-a-half times as high now, 15.4 percent.

Let me try to put this in personal terms. Here is a dollar such as you earned, spent or saved in 1960. And here is a quarter,
a dime and a penny—thirty-six cents. That’s what this 1960 dollar is worth today.