The Speaker Speaks
Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill.
by Thomas P. O’Neill, With William Novak.
Random House. 387 pp. $19.95
The early 1980’s were a dismal time for Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. In the most memorable televised campaign spot of the 1980 elections, an O’Neill look-alike was cast as the ultimate Washington pol, driving an immense, sputtering gas-guzzler, wanting to spend, spend, spend, but short of the cash to refuel. The cigar-chomping, white-haired, 250-pound Democratic Speaker of the House became a favorite subject of cartoons, a caricature of everything anachronistic in American life.
O’Neill’s image worked wonders for the GOP. After the Republicans swept the White House and the Senate in November, O’Neill’s own party turned on him. “Repeal O’Neill” buttons proliferated. Representative Les Aspin wrote his colleagues that the aging New Dealer should be retired: “Tip is reeling on the ropes. . . . He’s in a fog.”
But the Republicans, eager to run against him, and the Democrats, eager to dump him, seemingly misjudged O’Neill. For while he had made his reputation as a savvy backroom operator who kept a keen eye on the next patronage contract and a low public profile, he emerged in his twilight to transform the insular speakership into a bully pulpit. In an age when most members of the House take marching orders not from the leadership but from interest groups outside the chamber, O’Neill became a public personality who solidified his ranks behind “bread-and-butter liberalism” in order to stave off the Reagan agenda. In this he proved a formidable foe; his public-approval rating jumped from 11 percent in 1980 to more than 50 percent by the time he left office last January. And so it is fitting that in retirement the rejuvenated O’Neill should have received an honorary degree from Harvard University, become a pin-up boy for American Express and Hush Puppies, and delivered, after a million-dollar advance, a memoir that has quickly climbed the best-seller lists.
The book is certainly an agreeable read, for O’Neill is a legendary storyteller. He captures well the flavor of machine politics in the days when he first entered politics fifty-one years ago, vividly recounts how legislative battles were won and lost, and has any number of tart observations to make about fellow politicians. A few examples: about the young John F. Kennedy, O’Neill writes, “Let’s just say that in his early years in the House, he showed considerably more interest in his social life than in legislation.” Harry Truman disliked Dwight D. Eisenhower because of his affair with Kay Summersby. Richard Nixon would complain bitterly after losing a few dollars in a poker game. “‘People love to see you carrying your own bags,’” O’Neill quotes Jimmy Carter telling him, revealing cynicism behind the former President’s piety. Ronald Reagan, informed that a reconditioned oak desk in O’Neill’s office had once belonged to Grover Cleveland, said “I once played Grover Cleveland in the movies”; Reagan was thinking of his role as Grover Cleveland Alexander, the baseball player in The Winning Team.
While the stories here are O’Neill’s, it is noteworthy that this book was composed in the as-told-to form of the modern mass-marketed memoir, which enables the subject to recount his tale with a minimum of fuss to a writer—in this case, William Novak—who shapes it and fills in details. This approach works better, however, for Sydney Biddle Barrows, the “Mayflower Madam” who was Novak’s last subject (Lee Iacocca was the one before that), than it does for Tip O’Neill, from whom one might reasonably have expected a somewhat more thoughtful book. The reader instead is inundated with a mix of schmaltz and blarney, too many statements like “government should do the right thing by the people” and “when the good Lord made James Michael Curley, He broke the mold.”
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The lack of substance in this book may have to do with more than the fact that it was dictated, frequently on the run and in an obviously offhand manner. O’Neill draws no connection between his salty anecdotes and his political philosophy, and he may not know which one to draw. Perhaps what is most troubling about this memoir is its striking exposure of the failings of Tip O’Neill the political leader. The Speaker, unable to comprehend the vast political and social changes that have swirled around him for five decades, indeed may have lapsed into a fog from which he has yet to emerge.
O’Neill says, for instance, that the supporters of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential candidacy in 1968 were “way-out flaky liberals,” and confides that in 1972, when George McGovern defeated Edmund Muskie for the Democratic party nomination, “We got beat by the cast of Hair.” He fails either to see or to acknowledge, however, what the rise of the McGovern forces, culturally and politically so alien to himself and his constituents, meant for the party. Over 25 percent of the House seats changed hands in the elections of 1974 and 1976, and the House itself became a very different place as many big-city ethnic pols like O’Neill were replaced by issue-oriented liberals and radicals. The epicenter of the party lurched leftward, with the result that O’Neill’s “little fella” voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and again in 1984.
For his part, O’Neill, following Sam Rayburn’s motto—“to get along, go along”—endorsed reforms sponsored by the Democratic Left that sapped the power of committee chairmen in the House and paved the way for the present chaos, when on any given day even the lowliest freshman may arrogate to himself powers heretofore reserved for the President. Other consequences of the so-called reforms have included a rapid escalation in the number of congressional committees and especially subcommittees, a farcical budget process, the mishandling of sensitive information, and the emergence, in a micromanaging congressional staff, of a fourth estate. Congressmen have had less reason to maintain allegiance to the party and its mainstream constituencies, more to their special-interest backers. Thus the Democrats have been left standing at once for everything and for nothing. In a fulfillment of his lifelong ambition, O’Neill was elected Speaker of the House in 1977; he found himself holding the reins of a horseless carriage.
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“Despite what many people believe, and what the Republicans want us to think,” O’Neill writes,
Reagan’s victory in 1980 did not represent a revolution in American values. And despite what the media claimed, Reagan was not elected because people were fed up with the huge federal deficit and were clamoring for budget cuts. . . . I didn’t buy the idea of a Reagan mandate then, and I certainly don’t buy it now.
It would be a matter of some interest, then, to find out just how this long-time Democratic leader would explain the changed fortunes of his party, from indisputable dominance in the debate over the proper functions of government to a position at the margins. O’Neill celebrates his role in building Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and his later efforts to fend off Reagan’s budget axe. Why were his last years in public life spent in such a defensive posture? O’Neill seems to be unaware that his idea of job-creation—a billion-dollar leaf-raking bill—is no longer tenable. He points out that the poverty rate fell from 50 percent in the 1930’s to about 13 percent by 1980, but offers not so much as a hint that this in itself may require a reassessment of public policies. In the Reagan years, from his firm Democratic base in the House (thanks to gerrymandered congressional districts), the Speaker dug in his heels, adopted a demagogic style, and succeeded in frustrating the White House; hardly the stuff of leadership.
Curiously, there is little discussion of foreign policy in this book. O’Neill approvingly describes the secrecy surrounding appropriations for the Manhattan Project, of which only one committee chairman in the House was apprised, and also says he “agreed with Sam Rayburn’s saying that politics stops at the water’s edge—that when it comes to foreign policy, you support your President.”
It must, then, have been a fascinating intellectual odyssey—though readers will not find its explication here—that brought O’Neill during the Reagan years to abandon any pretense of bipartisanship or even comity on matters of foreign relations. He led the charge of those congressional Democrats who have politicized (and even sought to criminalize) foreign-policy disagreements with the Reagan administration. In their zeal, this group has propounded the grossest distortions of the historical record, a prime example of which is O’Neill’s own allegation that “no Americans were in danger” in Grenada. (O’Neill must know this assertion contradicts the report of a fact-finding mission to Grenada that the Speaker himself appointed.)
O’Neill brings about the same level of sophistication to bear on the civil war in Nicaragua; one does not have to be a supporter of the contras to expect better than his sole reference to them as “a small ragtag army of racketeers, murderers, and bandits.” Without exception, on every disputed issue between the Congress and the Reagan White House in foreign policy, O’Neill came down on the side of American disengagement.
A civil tongue is not one of O’Neill’s better qualities, but in his discussion of Ronald Reagan, whom he judges “the worst” President he has known, he displays both a flailing contemptuousness and genuine bewilderment. “We’re roughly the same age, we’re both of Irish ancestry. We’re both sports buffs. We’re both sociable and outgoing. We both come from modest backgrounds and had FDR as our hero as we came of age in the 1930’s,” O’Neill observes, baffled as to why the two ended up on opposing sides of almost every issue in the 1980’s. O’Neill clearly has no grasp of the Reagan phenomenon, and this confusion fuels his stubborn anger. “It was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President,” he concludes. Sin is for others to judge; but it is surely a shame that the Democratic party, adrift since Vietnam, had Tip O’Neill at the helm all those years.
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