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March 11, 2001
The Last Liberal
Tip O'Neill never wavered in his belief that government could cure social ills.


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  • Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., a Democratic Power in the House for Decades, Dies at 81 (Jan. 7, 1994)
  • First Chapter: 'Tip O'Neill'
    By MARIO M. CUOMO

    TIP O'NEILL
    And the Democratic Century.
    By John Aloysius Farrell.
    Illustrated. 776 pp. Boston:
    Little, Brown & Company. $29.95.

    John Aloysius Farrell's long, detailed and fascinating book, ''Tip O'Neill: And the Democratic Century,'' is more than the definitive biography of a flawed but startlingly successful old-fashioned political leader. It's also a guided tour through American governmental history from the beginning of the New Deal through the Reagan years, featuring the struggle between two larger-than-life political champions and their ideologies -- Ronald Reagan and the Old Conservatism against Tip O'Neill and the New Deal liberalism. It was a battle over the nation's political soul.

    For America's first 150 years, severe recessions occurred every 20 years or so, leaving many people unemployed, incapacitated and uncared for. Then the Great Depression devastated the American economy. One of every five American workers became jobless, millions were homeless or about to be, and many feared our grand experiment in democracy was teetering. President Herbert Hoover and other conservatives felt that the Depression was an inevitable part of the business cycle that would '' 'purge the rottenness' out of the economy.'' They believed ''the sole function of government is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to . . . private enterprise.'' President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected in 1932, disagreed. He argued that the federal government had an additional duty to take aggressive steps ''to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot.'' Roosevelt's New Deal grafted that simple but defining principle onto the political structure of the nation. He brought millions of Americans back to work and security with his alphabet agencies and his political pièce de résistance, the Social Security Act, providing old age benefits, unemployment insurance and welfare.

    The rock-hard conceptual foundation provided by the New Deal principle, and the major programs that embodied it, were never attacked by a president until 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected the charismatic pitchman-president, vowing to restore pre-New-Deal conservatism as the nation's governing political philosophy. That set up the struggle between Reagan and O'Neill. Farrell relishes the drama of it:


    The Associated Press
    Tip O'Neill with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office of the White House in November 1985.
    FROM THE ARCHIVES
    "The Speaker also found Mr. Reagan to be appallingly ignorant of the intricacies of government; indeed, he called him the most ignorant man who had ever occupied the White House. Publicly, Mr. O'Neill called Mr. Reagan 'Herbert Hoover with a smile' and 'a cheerleader for selfishness.'"
    -- from the obituary of Tip O'Neill, Jan. 7, 1994.

    ''Tip O'Neill versus Ronald Reagan. Theirs was no sophistic debate: these were world views clashing, hot lava meeting thundering surf. And good it was, for the country, to have the debate -- to state the claim of a 'more perfect union' against the demand for 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' once again. History was happening. The heritage of the New Deal, a philosophy of governing that had lasted for half a century, was at stake.''

    O'Neill's strongest weapons in the battle were his political skills and the depth of his personal commitment to the rationale for government assistance to the needy. Thomas Philip O'Neill Jr. was born in a rented third-floor apartment in a three-family house in North Cambridge, Mass., on Dec. 9, 1912, and grew up surrounded by immigrants and the children of immigrants, most of them Irish Catholics, many of them politicians and all of them struggling. To O'Neill, ''all politics is local'' was more than a motto, it was a political creed. He spent his entire life never far removed from his birthplace, and he understood that its people were the first, permanent and indispensable support for his half-century political career: it was their votes that made him first a state legislator and then ''a man of the House,'' a member of Congress and then speaker. What his neighbors and friends felt and believed was always a powerful, and often a determining, influence on his judgment. That was manifest first in his early support of the Vietnam War and eventually his disapproval of it when the local voices of opposition became louder. It was also evident in the lifetime advocacy of his church's political positions on birth control and, with some ambivalence, abortion.

    The teachings of his religion and the example of the local politicians also fused in him an unshakable belief that Roosevelt's New Deal was no more than a reflection of what God wanted from and for his people. Farrell tells us, ''He kept the Commandments just as best he could but never failed to heed the Sermon on the Mount.'' Tip never lost his fixed belief in government as a curer of social ills: he was ''an absolute, unrepentant, unreconstructed New Deal Democrat.''

    That powerful conviction was augmented by an impressive collection of personal characteristics uniquely suited to his role as a politician. He was 6 feet 3 inches tall, weighed well over 200 pounds, developed a great shock of white hair and was big, bluff and charmingly ingratiating, with the Irish gift of words and tales. For all his blarney and indirection, some of the most hardened political writers conceded his extraordinary popularity with constituents and colleagues alike. Jimmy Breslin, who attached himself to O'Neill throughout the Watergate hearings after O'Neill had become known as ''the architect of impeachment,'' wrote poetically in his well-received book, ''How the Good Guys Finally Won,'' ''For if you see Tom O'Neill as he is, not as conformity forces us to see, then there is coming into the room a lovely spring rain of a man.''

    O'Neill was more than likable. Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith, who befriended him, believed he had a ''a first-rate intelligence'' that gave him ''a margin of mental advantage over the run-of-the-mill members'' of Congress. He was also blessed with an acute political instinct that limited the amount of day-to-day political calculation he would have to make. The combination of intellect and instinct served him well in the endless clash of views that crowded his life for 50 years, contending with the five presidents who followed John F. Kennedy, scores of Congressional counterparts and even several world leaders.

    On the other hand, although O'Neill often prayed to the saints, he was much too realistic a man to think he would ever be listed next to Thomas More in his church's canon of miraculously moral politicians. Tip elevated the practice of quid pro quo to a political art form, interceding on behalf of lobbyists, performing favors for constituents and receiving from them gifts and contributions. He was subjected to various investigations and on occasion clearly withheld or distorted the truth, thereby at the very least suggesting a high degree of self-consciousness. In a separate chapter Farrell lays out many of these transactions in extensive and gritty enough detail to be excruciating for any O'Neill fan. But he ends the chapter by pointing out that O'Neill's colleagues and inquisitors all concluded he was an honest man. In any event, his ethical high-wire act appears not to have impeded his political progress.

    After 16 years as a legislator in Massachusetts and 25 years in the House of Representatives, O'Neill's experience, personal gifts, unfaltering partisanship and a series of fortunate circumstances carried him to the top of the Congressional hill as speaker of the House in 1977, just as Jimmy Carter began his ill-fated term as president. Carter had been swept into office principally as a reaction to Nixon's cynical, bizarre and disastrous high crimes and misdemeanors and the urgent public desire for a cleansing of government.

    But those impulses weren't enough to offset the gradual shifting of the political tectonic plates that was destabilizing the Democrats. Farrell explains: ''There were no longer enough militant union bosses, poor folk and minorities, urban ethnic and 'yellow dog' Southern democrats . . . to negate the growing influence of suburbanites, independents, white-collar workers or middle-class Catholics who were now prosperous and secure enough to vent their disaffection with the party's leftish stands on abortion, civil rights, crime and taxes.''

    Carter rejected the old liberalism with a call for fiscal austerity, tax cuts, smaller government, deregulation and welfare reform, an agenda that foreshadowed the New Democrat approach successfully employed by Bill Clinton 15 years later. O'Neill did what he could to help Carter without betraying his own fundamental beliefs, but the relatively modest accomplishments of the Carter administration were not enough to offset a calamitous combination of political disasters, including double-digit inflation and interest rates, increased unemployment and the inability to orchestrate a return of the hostages from Iran. When Reagan won a landslide victory in 1980, Tip was the only Democratic leader left standing. The Republicans were delighted by the prospect of their handsome movie actor president going toe-to-toe with Tip as the Democrats' champion, ''a shambling, old, cigar-smoking Congressman coming off a bad season.''

    Farrell's description of the struggle that ensued is the fastest moving, most engaging and most memorable part of this book. As one of his first acts, President Reagan demanded huge tax cuts that would benefit mostly the rich, accompanied by billions of additional dollars for defense, even though the federal budget was already substantially in deficit. He had been convinced that the tax cuts' stimulative effect on the economy would magically produce a quick tide of new revenues large enough to balance the budget in three years, even at the lower tax rates and despite the huge new expenditures.

    O'Neill responded to Reagan's proposal by making the first in a series of successful tactical moves. Sure that his weakened Democratic majority could not prevent Reagan's significant reductions in programs or impede the giant tax cuts Reagan wanted, and believing Reagan's supply-side magic theory would produce huge new deficits instead of a balanced budget, O'Neill acquiesced. He tried to convince his members that if they gave Reagan enough rope, he would get tangled in it. In the end it worked out exactly as Tip had anticipated, but first he had to endure harsh attacks from the press and some of his colleagues. When Reagan's program passed Congress easily, the press declared it a triumph for Reagan and a disastrous defeat for O'Neill and his party, disheartening many of Tip's liberal colleagues. Some believed Tip was simply overmatched by the Great Communicator and they called for him to step down, but in the months that followed it became clear that Reagan had indeed become ensnared in the rope O'Neill had given him. The magic of supply-side was not working, the deficits grew worse, the economy sagged, and a serious recession developed in 1982.

    O'Neill had been right, and as Reagan's end of the popularity seesaw descended, Tip's end rose. From that point until 1986, when he retired, Tip became increasingly stronger. Aided by an energetic and talented staff led by Kirk O'Donnell, and with the clever work of a bright and resourceful young spinmeister, Chris Matthews, O'Neill became an effective media presence, regularly making the case against the president directly to the public. Reagan began to respond with mistakes, and one of them was a particularly serious blunder. David Stockman, the White House budget director, persuaded Reagan he should seek to offset the mounting deficits by reducing Social Security benefits for people who left the work force voluntarily. Reagan did, and having touched the third rail of politics, he was badly burned: Matthews directed O'Neill in a stinging media barrage, excoriating Reagan and the Republicans, which roused public opinion against the move. ''Reagan finally has made a wretched mistake,'' Jim Wright, then House majority leader, wrote in his diary; ''the administration is badly stung by the wrath of millions of aging Americans.'' Reagan was forced to capitulate on the issue.

    More mano a mano skirmishing between Tip and the president was to follow, and, in the end, the Republicans who had been delighted at the prospect of having O'Neill as an opponent were greatly relieved to see him finally step out of the ring.

    In his two terms Reagan managed to reduce dramatically the taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans, encouraged freer trade and entrepreneurship and, for a while, discouraged big government. But Reagan's effort to undo the basic New Deal commitment of government to help struggling people who were not able to help themselves had failed. None of the major programs, like Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income for low-income people with disabilities and public education were dropped or seriously limited. Indeed, since Reagan, both political parties have cooperated to increase those programs and add others, and even our newest president felt obliged to soften the harsh edge of his label as a ''conservative'' by laying over it a veil of ''compassion.''

    Intended or not, that's a bit of a tip o' the hat to the likes of the late, great speaker. There have been many like it. When he finally left Washington, he was viewed favorably by 63 percent in a Harris poll, and the Almanac of American Politics for 1986 said O'Neill was ''the most effective and accomplished Speaker the nation has had for 40 years.'' Not many have quarreled with that assessment: certainly Farrell doesn't.

    This is Farrell's first book in a distinguished career at The Boston Globe. His skills as a reporter are apparent: his work is meticulously documented; his writing lucid, cogent and frequently eloquent; and Farrell, now the Washington editor of The Globe, has gone to considerable lengths to assure completeness of the historical record in a warts-and-all presentation. There may be more material in this bulky volume than some readers will want; occasionally the chronological sequence lurches in ways that can be distracting, and some will quibble with other editing decisions, but Farrell has given us an entertaining book and a valuable history of the 50 years that have changed America, probably forever. Together with Jimmy Breslin's ''How the Good Guys Finally Won,'' it is surely one of the two best books written on Tip O'Neill.


    Mario M. Cuomo's most recent books are ''The Blue Spruce'' and ''Reason to Believe.'' He served three terms as the governor of New York.

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