Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O`Neill
By Tip O`Neill with William Novak
Random House, 416 pages, $19.95
If the jolt of revelation and the kick-and-tell inside story are what some people look for in political memoirs these days-and they are-the estimable Tip O`Neill may disappoint some customers with this chronicle of his 50 years in public life.
There are herein some deft and perhaps slightly surprising digs at assorted members of the Kennedy clan, of which O`Neill was an always faithful political ally, and some sharply dismissive judgments on President Reagan, of whom the retired speaker of the House was always a favorite target.
These surely will be what earns the book whatever attention it draws in the news columns.
But blowing the whistle on the other guy has never been Thomas P. O`Neill`s line of work and that sort of thing is not really what this book is about.
O`Neill is Irish, Catholic, a Democrat, an FDR-New Deal kind of liberal, an unabashed and unapologetic partisan and the kind of old-time politician who never forgot where he came from.
He is also a grand storyteller, an O`Neill talent even Reagan admired and appreciated. He has here the help of William Novak, coauthor of the best-seller biographies ”Iacocca” and ”The Mayflower Madame,” and he has turned out an entertaining and instructive recollection of his long political career. Reading the book is like sitting with Tip in his office or a saloon and listening to him talk, at which he has never been a slouch, about the good old days and the great characters and the big events and the crazy things he has known and seen and been part of from the days back on ”Barry`s Corner” with Wee Wee Burns, Toddy Megan and other boyhood pals through his 10 years as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
O`Neill is an old-fashioned politician, too old-fashioned for some of his ambitious younger colleagues who complained during the early Reagan years that the speaker was over the hill.
But there is an enduring wisdom in O`Neill`s brand of politics and there is a kind of blunt charm, too, that is sorely missing in a lot of our new plague of robotic young political hotshots.
The first lesson he learned, in the only election he ever lost (for the Cambridge city council), O`Neill writes, was that ”all politics is local.”
And he swears by that yet today. ”You can be the most important congressman in the country, but you had better not forget the people back home,” he writes.
He is also strong on loyalty and sticking by old friends. But mostly what O`Neill believes in politically is that everyone ought to have a crack at getting a job. The ”idea has fallen out of favor” in recent years, O`Neill concedes, but he is ”still a bread-and-butter liberal who believes that every family deserves the opportunity to earn an income, own a home, educate their children and afford medical care.”
Further and even more heretical currently, O`Neill believes ”the federal government has an obligation to help you along the line until you achieve that dream. And when you do, you have an obligation to help out the next group that comes along.”
It is easy to see from his book where and how O`Neill came by his political creed.
He was born and reared in North Cambridge, Mass., where his immigrant grandfather and his father both worked in the brickyards until the Irish moved up and those tough jobs in the clay pits were passed on first to French-Canadians and then to Italians.
O`Neill came along at a time when the Yankee Protestant Brahmins of Boston were still advertising jobs with ”NINA” (no Irish need apply)
strictures and, as he observes, ”I knew I was Irish even before I knew I was American.” He has never forgotten it either.
North Cambridge was a mostly Irish working class neighborhood, only a couple of miles but actually ”on the other side of the moon” from Harvard. But it was Harvard that decided O`Neill on a career in politics. At age 14 he got a summer job mowing lawns at Harvard for 17 cents an hour and happened to observe the commencement exercises at which he ”could see hundreds of young men standing around in their white linen suits, laughing and talking” and
”drinking champagne which was illegal in 1927 because of Prohibition.”
”Who the hell do these people think they are,” O`Neill said to himself, ”that the law means nothing to them.”
It was on that day at Harvard, O`Neill writes, ”as I watched those privileged, confident Ivy League Yankees who had everything handed to them”
that he vowed he would ”work to make sure my own people could go to places like Harvard . . . .”
That, of course, has come to pass through the years, to the point where some of O`Neill`s ”my people” have now even turned Republican. He didn`t do it all, of course. But his approach was pure O`Neill.
As late as 1950, when he was speaker of the Massachusetts legislature, he recounts, he met a young fellow coming out of the North Avenue Savings Bank in North Cambridge with tears in his eyes. The man had left another job on the promise of a vice presidency at North Avenue but the bank reneged when it learned he was Catholic.
O`Neill stormed into the bank, told the man running the place who he was, how he and his siblings had put a dime in the bank every Tuesday when they were kids and that his parish had $33,000 on deposit there.
”If my friend doesn`t get the job,” O`Neill said, ”I`m going to walk the streets from here to Fresh Pond Parkway and I`m going to tell every person I meet along the way that you`re a bigoted son of a bitch who won`t hire Catholics. And I can guarantee you`ll have the biggest run on your bank that you`ve ever seen in your life.”
A few days later O`Neill`s friend had his vice presidency, and two other Catholics also had new jobs at the bank. That is O`Neill. He is big hearted and jovial and sentimental. He can also be tough. He is basically as partisan as they come. The best he can bring himself to say about President Eisenhower, a Republican, for instance, is that he was a better soldier than politician but that ”he served his purpose.”
And that is kid-glove stuff compared to what he says about Ronald Reagan, whose election as President he calls ”sinful” and whom he dismisses as ”an actor reading his own lines.” But ”let me give him his due,” O`Neill writes. ”He would have made a hell of a king.”
Partisan as he is, O`Neill is also no patsy, as he demonstrated when he became, as Lyndon Johnson put it, ”the first member of the Democratic establishment” to break with LBJ on the Vietnam War.
And he can be at least slightly clear visioned in his judgments on friends and allies, as he demonstrates in his observations on the Kennedys.
While crediting John F. Kennedy, ”a great friend of mine,” with leaving a ”shining legacy” as president, for instance, O`Neill also notes accurately that ”he never had much success in getting his programs through Congress.”
He skips the details on President Kennedy`s fondness for the ladies but he notes that as a young congressman Kennedy was a lot more interested in his social life than in his job.
Of Robert Kennedy, O`Neill writes, ”. . . to be blunt about it, I never really liked him . . . . To me he was a self-important upstart and a know-it- all.” O`Neill also records that old Joe Kennedy complained once to him that ”Jack was too soft” and that ”Bobby`s my boy. When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”
Tip doesn`t seem to hate anyone, which is one of his-and the book`s-charms.
