Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (24 page)

Such was the look of the battlefield as the opposing forces examined and solidified their positions in 1982’s early months. Ronald Reagan needed to ensure the country remained patient, thus allowing his program its chance to stimulate economic recovery. Tip O’Neill had the task of roundly bringing home the other side of the argument, which equally meant the argument over
him
. Lampooned in 1980, derided in 1981, he could now be seen as rightfully openhanded when it came to those in need. Here was no lobbyists’ fat cat but rather an experienced paternal figure long committed to a regular flow of monthly Social Security checks into America’s mailboxes, and also to keeping them hefty enough to pay for inflation. Listening to the advice of veteran pollsters like Pat Caddell and Peter Hart, O’Neill learned to adjust his political grip. The sharpest shot he now took at Reagan had no trouble hitting the bull’s-eye: not that Reagan was tough on the poor, but that his real constituents were the rich.

• • •

It was the night of Ronald Reagan’s first State of the Union address and he’d come to the Capitol early. For reasons of security he needed to be in place even before the Secret Service walked their bomb-sniffing dogs through the House chamber, and so while he
waited, he needed to be held in a suitable room in the building. The one selected was the Speaker’s ceremonial office, right next to mine. It was where the Speaker’s daily press conferences took place, the ones currently showcasing his regular criticisms of the president and his policies. After a bit of hesitation, I walked through the door and introduced myself. He was standing in the middle of the room surrounded by a few staffers I didn’t recognize.
“Welcome, Mr. President, to the room where we plot against you.” Technically, we hatched our plans in the Speaker’s back office, but it was as good an icebreaker as I could manage.

In any case, Reagan was having none of it.

“But it’s after six! The Speaker says in Washington that’s when we put politics aside.” It was the first I’d heard of it, but, of course, I didn’t argue. He then promptly disarmed me by speaking as confidentially as if he’d always known me. “Like opening night,” he said, admitting his jitters. On a nearby table I noticed a cup of tea with a slice of lemon that he’d undoubtedly requested. Later that evening, when he got back to the White House, he wrote in his diary:
“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to addressing the joint sessions of Cong.?” The boy from Illinois had been a bona fide movie star and then governor of our nation’s most populous state, and still he felt the weight of history.
“I’ve made a mil. speeches in every kind of place to every kind of audience. Somehow there’s a thing about entering that chamber—goose bumps & a quiver.”

The speech he delivered swerved away from his ongoing war with Congress over spending and taxes. It was no time to hold up a scorecard on his economic program, which would end up doubling the national debt in his presidency. Instead, he offered an off-the-topic case for returning more than forty federal programs to the control of the country’s state and local governments. The “new federalism,” he called it. The Democrats, however, weren’t buying either
the topic or its fancy moniker. Here’s how the Speaker responded at his daily press conference.

Question:
There has been some talk that the “new federalism” proposal is simply a diversionary tactic, to avoid discussing the economy. Do you think it is?

Speaker:
Did I think it was? Yes. He avoided the No. 1 issue at the present time, which is unemployment.

It was Reagan’s proposed deficit, as evidenced in the budget he presented to the House in February for the upcoming year, that started the new round of fighting.
“Met with bi-partisan leadership on budget then with Repubs. alone,” he recorded. “Then signed the bud. & sent it to the hill. Tip O’Neill still thinks I’m depriving the needy. Told the press I associate with the country club crowd. He plays more golf & I don’t.”

The president, as Tip already knew, loved having a repertoire of horror stories of Democratic regulations and spending habits that he could pull out for every occasion. The trouble was his habit of casually blurring the edges between useful anecdote and established fact, a habit popular on the partisan luncheon circuit. These Reagan assertions—always vaguely plausible and always at the expense of liberal programs—drove Tip crazy: What about the Medicaid rule that hospitalized a young girl for a decade—at huge cost to the government—when her treatment could have been administered just as well at home? What about the rich kids in upscale suburbs receiving free school lunches? What about the well-off college students getting food stamps? There was simply no stopping him; the president was incorrigible when it came to his relish of such tales. For him they vividly, and believably, portrayed a world where Big Government and Bleeding Heart types were allowed to hold sway.

Irritated anew by Reagan’s hard-line conservatism, Tip decided
he’d had enough and felt justified in letting loose publicly. Accusing Reagan of turning his back on his origins, he claimed the president had “forgotten his roots.” Though he cultivated an average-guy image whenever he could, the Democrat argued, he spent too much time “associated with that country-club style of people.” The gloves were off at this—and Reagan took the opportunity for a hard jab in reply. “I’ve only played golf once since I’ve been president, and he’s an inveterate golfer, and I’m sure he
must
have to go to a country club to play golf.”

The Speaker got off a well-placed punch of his own, accusing the White House of trying to sell the country a “Beverly Hills Budget.” It stuck. The phrase nailed Reagan squarely as a Southern California
swell
who preferred spending his evenings and weekends with multimillionaires. It was meant to sting and did. Meanwhile, the Reagan budget, with its proposed $90 billion–plus deficit, hit Reagan’s Republican allies with what amounted to sticker shock.
“There is unrest among the troops over the budget problem,” he noted unhappily in his journal.

Early in 1982, I started to keep my own record of my experiences in the trenches of Washington warfare.
“Tomorrow we begin the long-run fight for the year.” I realized how decisive the year would be, with so much riding on it in the years to come. If Tip lost this election, there’d be no coming back.

Then, two days later I noted:
“President hit hard at press conference. Press treatment is cold; the President’s attempt to charm his way through rough moments ran very thin today. The best he could say about economic outlook was that there would be a return to normalcy sometime this year. We need to build argument that Reagan program is responsible for economic problems facing the country. I notice a growing consensus that the Democrats should pick up seats in the House this Fall.”

What I’d seen was that the polls were starting to show a hard swing away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats as the “party of prosperity.”

• • •

Not long after, on a snowy afternoon in March, I got a personal sense of why Tip O’Neill enjoyed such genuine loyalty in the House. We were sitting, the Speaker and I, in one of those Learjets used by corporate executives. As we took off, I couldn’t stop thinking that just weeks before, an Air Florida jetliner, departing this same airport and with too much ice on its wings, had plunged into the Potomac River.

With this recent tragedy on my mind, thinking of my wife, pregnant with our first child, and watching the wintry sky outside the window, I caught the eye of the giant man sitting in the plane’s backmost seat. I wondered what perversity of chance-taking led him to take the seat farthest to the rear, making it all the harder for that little aircraft to strain through the snow that had surrounded its wheels and still kept coming down hard. “What are you worrying about?” asked the face beneath the Irish tweed hat. Well, for one thing, I thought, the prospect of slipping through the ice of Lake Erie, never to be seen again. I mumbled something about “the weather” and began shunning eye contact in order to better attend full-time to the white-knuckled hell of that frost-covered porthole.

Why, you must ask, as I certainly did that March afternoon, was he taking this trip on such a day? The answer is that he’d made a promise and was keeping it. Dennis Hertel, a young congressman from the Detroit suburbs, wanted the Speaker of the House on hand to bolster his credibility at a couple of fund-raisers. In the coming months I would often remember the trip on that Learjet in such terrible weather and see it as a metaphor for Tip’s fateful decision to face off with Reagan. It was as if up there in the media skies he’d been doing battle with the gale-force reality of early 1980s
Reaganism. I’m not saying Tip O’Neill didn’t worry. I’m saying he didn’t let people
see
him worry even when everything he stood for was being jostled and thrown into the wind, even when his long, hard-fought-for career was at stake.

“I was the lone voice out there crying—you might say whimpering—last year,” Tip admitted as the winds began to shift in his direction and he watched congressional allies who’d virtually abandoned him now come drifting back. “But I won’t be alone this year.” The reversal of fortune he was experiencing wasn’t a matter of poll numbers alone. It was also evidenced by the fact that, over in the White House, President Reagan was showing signs of badly needing his support.

Only with the Speaker’s backing could the president secure the votes in the House he needed, the ones required for the difficult steps to cut the massive government deficit. Yet even as he was aware of his importance to the man in the White House, Tip wasn’t hopeful about a deal. Reagan, he said, had seen too many John Wayne movies and equated compromise with retreat. Tip’s own hard-line position was simple: there would be no reductions whatsoever in Social Security, and unless Ronald Reagan himself proposed it, no discussion, either. This dynamic laid the groundwork for one of the biggest battles between Tip and the Gipper.

As stubborn as he was, Reagan was also in a corner. Not even the Great Communicator would find it easy to sell the public a budget with so large a deficit. He and his fellow Republicans had campaigned successfully on the argument that high deficits cause inflation and high interest rates. To stanch the red ink, he needed a deal. The problem was that the conservative Democrats who’d helped form the previous year’s coalition in the House and handed him his historic budget victories needed to rethink their defection.
How could they stick with all this White House–endorsed red ink now that they were facing reelection?

This was where the situation stood late in March just as cherry blossom season began. If Ronald Reagan were to get out of the crisis with some measure of his presidential dignity intact, the Democrats would have to come on board and help rescue him from the mast he was clinging to. That went double for any messing with Social Security.

Despite Tip’s over-my-dead-body stance, the White House ambition was to draw the Speaker into a deal that would make him a partner in any slashes, including the egregious ones. When it fell to Chief of Staff Jim Baker to make the initial approach, he set off for what he intended as a highly discreet meeting with Tip at the Speaker’s suburban Maryland residence. That it happened on Tip’s actual home turf, with the proud Baker traveling out to the Speaker’s modest condo, was a sign of the administration’s rising panic.

Tip, who had no reason to keep the rendezvous secret, afterward let reporters in on just what had happened. Baker had come to him, he said, asking permission to meet with two key Democratic committee chairmen: Oklahoma’s Jim Jones of Budget and Illinois’s Dan Rostenkowski of Ways and Means. But he wasn’t telling the press everything; he knew what was actually afoot beyond the good manners. Baker’s appearance in his living room, and the elaborate courtesy that it spoke, was a message in itself. By carefully seeking Tip’s approval to schedule those meetings with his congressional colleagues, the White House was implying the Speaker’s imprimatur could be attached to the results.

With such a scenario now being plotted around him, Tip was faced with a dilemma that lacked a simple solution. He knew if he refused such an extremely correct offer to allow those Democratic members even to discuss the red-ink problem, he would undoubtedly
be made the villain of the piece. Therefore, he’d have to agree. At the same time, there was a giant hazard ahead that he couldn’t ignore.

O’Neill saw the cunning that caught him in the Hobson’s choice.
“He thought that Baker was the toughest political opponent he ever came across,” his daughter Rosemary recalled. The political reality guiding the Reagan forces was their need to rope in the Democrats. As Tip understood, the only safe route for the Republicans at this point, burdened as they were by the looming specter of monster fiscal humiliation, was to win political cover from his side. This meant securing his out-in-the-open partnership. Participating, however, would mean he’d have to personally agree to painful economies, most likely ones including cuts to Social Security.

The White House request to meet with Jones and Rostenkowski, two Democratic colleagues more accommodating than he, demanded an equally shrewd response. O’Neill decided to agree to the proposed meetings with one caveat. The White House could have all the get-togethers they wanted with the moderate Jones and the deal-loving Rosty. However, as far as the Speaker was concerned, just one person would be representing him in budget talks. That was his ever-loyal chairman of the Rules Committee, Missouri’s Richard Bolling. And the White House had to accept it. Tip wanted a stand-in he trusted in any such dealings.

Throughout these curtain-raising preliminaries to what, a few days later, would wind up as a ballyhooed face-to-face between Tip and Reagan, I never knew how far he was willing to go. Would he actually have agreed to cut Social Security benefits if the offer had struck him as fair? In Tip’s vocabulary, that would have been a bargain that, at minimum, raised taxes on the wealthy to match any cut in the social safety net. In the meantime, Bolling’s task, as Tip’s surrogate in the meetings Baker wanted, was to listen, discuss, probe for a deal, and, above all, protect the Speaker.