Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (9 page)

Ari Weiss, Tip’s legislative whiz kid, came from a different generation and had a different set of skills. He somehow had the knack of knowing what was happening in the House each morning within minutes of arriving at his desk. It was uncanny. Because of this, the Speaker relied on him completely, always wanting Ari in the room and at his side whenever legislation was being discussed. Yet there was another, important fact to know about Ari, over and beyond his legislative radar, which was that he and Tip were rooted in a mutual past, despite the four-decade difference in their ages. “I knew his father and his mother,” the Speaker liked to say, and this shared history was, for Tip, the coin of the realm.

The moment had now arrived for my first meeting with the man himself. It took place in his office on the East Front of the Capitol, secreted far away from visiting tourists. He was behind his desk and leaning toward me, his short-sleeved shirt showing off his huge forearms as I took my chair. He seemed to me at home in this world,
organic
to the place.

He was curious about me, and the feeling was obviously mutual. It’s possible my notions before meeting him owed a lot to those caricatures I’d been recruited to help combat. With so many years intervening since then, it’s hard to remember now at what moment my
imagined
Tip O’Neill suddenly merged with the real one. The
one thing I will never forget is the “animal” aspect to him, something that dominated the space around him. If power is measured in physical presence, he projected it in strength. What sat before me was a bear of a man.

One thing that was clear from the start was that this national figure whose reputation I’d long known about regarded me as a professional. I’d arrived on his doorstep with advance billing that told him I could help fix his problem. If I’d been a golf pro—or a plumber, for that matter—he’d have treated me the same. Beyond that, what linked us right off the bat was the way his need matched up with my readiness to get to work. There were also the stakes that brought me there in the first place. What he and I both knew—and neither of us wanted to say, certainly not at this meeting, at least—was that if he didn’t win this fight there wouldn’t be another.

Given all this, I was relieved he felt no need for coyness. Looking me straight in the eye, he said, “Tell me what I’m doing wrong and what I’m doing right. Let’s have a little conversation.” After listening to what I had to say, he made an unforgettable declaration. “You know an old dog can learn new tricks,” he pronounced. And, when I heard him say that, my sense of anticipation about what lay ahead, and what we might do together, kicked in. And guess what else? I saw how it would be a way to tap again into the fighting energy I’d felt back on Air Force One, writing speeches for President Carter.

It wasn’t long before I was reporting for work. The pattern of my days now weirdly echoed that of a decade earlier when I’d split my time between Senator Moss’s office by day and guarding the Capitol, armed and ready, by night. In the current era I would spend my mornings checking the national news and looking for ammo that Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., the battling national Democrat, could
fire at Ronald Reagan. I knew that O’Neill needed to get
larger,
to grab some top billing by injecting himself into the fast-moving news cycle.

Each day, too, I’d drop into Kirk O’Donnell’s office to discuss with him the current agenda, specifically the topics to be covered at that morning’s session in front of reporters. I soon began to produce short statements for Tip to use. They were designed to be what beat journalists call “news helper,” colorful copy to liven up what they’d go back to their desks and file. My hope was that those covering Tip would be more likely to quote him if he delivered such lively zingers. That was the idea. But for a good many weeks, I’m sorry to admit, the Speaker decided to ignore any of the offerings I’d knocked out with such excitement.

After catching the Speaker’s press conference each Tuesday through Thursday, which was usually over by noon, I’d walk over to the headquarters of the DCCC on nearby North Capitol Street to tackle whatever was waiting for me there. If on the Speaker’s team I was playing defense, here I was on offense.

At the DCCC one of the ideas I came up with was the creation of the Congressional News Service, a made-for-the-occasion periodical whose only purpose was to stir up trouble for incumbent GOP House members. The contents of any “edition” consisted solely of customized news items featuring Republican members of Congress that would then be mailed to their local newspapers and TV and radio stations. It was modeled after Nader’s Capitol Hill News Service, where I’d once worked, but the content we now assembled was specifically focused on Republicans. It consisted of embarrassing items that normally went unmentioned in official constituent newsletters, for example, how much this member or that had enthusiastically enjoyed that year’s Paris Air Show. To keep it legit, each edition, with its official-looking banner, included a credit line at
the bottom of the page clearly reading “Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.” That said, I’ll be the first to admit the size of the typeface required not just excellent eyesight but a weary editor’s alertness.

I remember one punchy Congressional News Service headline I particularly enjoyed. It read,
COYNE CAN’T COUNT
! The member in this case was James K. Coyne III—a freshman Republican from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who may not even have remembered the legislation involved until the Congressional News Service reminded him. The best I can recall, it derided the Republican doctrine that cutting taxes and raising defense spending would somehow avoid higher deficits. But any sins the opposition committed, however obscure, were rightly fair game, as far as I was concerned, and so I’d write up the stories I liked and send them out. Later, after a newspaper in Congressman Coyne’s district had used our item, I received a clipping of it attached to an appreciative note from the Democrat whom Coyne had beaten the year before.
Keep up the good work
was the message.

What I was doing was partisan politics at its most basic, nothing on a very high level but definitely a lot of fun. The goal was to hit back effectively at the same dozens of House Republicans, for the purposes of 1982, who’d managed to KO House Democrats in 1980. We were targeting not only the usual swing districts but also some historically Democratic ones that had been carried by Reagan.

Yet our fear remained that Ronald Reagan would do such a bang-up job as president that he’d sweep those same Republicans right back in a second time. Not only would he protect them, he’d
entrench
them.

In early March, Tip O’Neill made a fateful decision. Believing as he did that the American people make only one national decision politically, whom to elect president of the United States, it was an
inevitable one. He decided, in his words, to “give Reagan his schedule.” He was going to allow the White House’s fiscal agenda—all the spending and tax cuts—to be debated and voted upon in the House by August 1. There would be no procedural games, no foot-dragging. The voters wanted Ronald Reagan, so now they would get him, and in sufficient time to judge the results by the 1982 congressional elections.

This decision, which won for Tip a personal thank-you call from the president, was actually a strategic withdrawal.
“I was convinced that if the Democrats were perceived as stalling in the midst of a national economic crisis, there would be hell to pay in the midterm elections,” he said. If Reagan got his program and it failed to produce positive results, the Democrats would be rewarded at the polls.

Tip knew that he had little leeway. The situation facing him in the House was far worse even than it appeared on paper. Over the past decades, with only the brief exceptions of the early New Deal and the Great Society, the Congress had been ruled by a conservative alliance of Republicans and southern Democrats, two factions sharing common ground when it came to increased national defense spending or opposition to social legislation. Meeting with the Democratic Conservative Forum, a group composed of southern Democrats, Reagan now found himself surprised but delighted to hear that their own list of proposed spending cuts topped his by $10 billion.
“You’ve made my day,” he told them, thrilled.

As they were assembling their forces and their ammunition, it was critical that Reagan and his shotgun guard, Jim Baker, avoid any missteps. When Senate Republicans surprised the White House with their plan to “freeze” Social Security benefits, denying retirees their expected cost-of-living adjustments, the Reagan team quickly stomped it to death. They knew better than to touch what Kirk O’Donnell had christened the “third rail” of American politics.

The Reagan team, in fact, was smart enough to steer clear of
anything
at all that might stall its momentum. It knew that the spring and summer of its inaugural year was the once-in-a-presidency moment to launch the administration’s program on its way. The Senate Budget Committee, where I’d worked under Edmund Muskie, was now in Republican control and moving fast, to the chagrin of liberal Democrats, on Reagan’s cuts. As the last days of March drew on, the committee was swinging into action on the White House plan.
“We have undone thirty years of social legislation in three days,” New York’s senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked blackly.

The Democrats, looking around, believed that the country’s affections for Ronald Reagan could not possibly grow deeper. The sole consolation they could offer themselves was that all honeymoons, especially the political sort, come to an end.

“I do not know that in our time we have seen such a display. It makes us proud of our president.”

—S
ENATOR
D
ANIEL
P
ATRICK
M
OYNIHAN

As a White House speechwriter, I’d known Jerry Parr up close: he’d been the head Secret Service agent responsible for protecting the president. Parr had come to the White House during Carter’s presidency, having earlier served both at home and abroad. On that sad November morning when Carter had flown south to cast his vote in Plains, Jerry was there with us on
Marine One.
On the inaugural platform he’d been the fellow positioned, first, in back of Carter, and, once the torch was passed, behind Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, sworn in as the fortieth president of the United States.

The young Jerry Parr had set his heart on becoming a Secret
Service agent from an early age.
When he was nine he’d talked his dad into taking him to the movie
Code of the Secret Service,
whose hero, Lieutenant Brass Bancroft, a dashing agent and ace pilot, was played by a busy young actor, Ronald Reagan. This was Reagan’s fourteenth movie after only two years in Hollywood, and he would appear as Brass Bancroft four times altogether. According to the buildup, Brass and his fellow agents were required to be “dauntless in the face of danger” and “fearless in the face of death.” Hoping to keep audiences hooked on the series, publicists at Warner Bros. came up with the idea of starting a Brass Bancroft fan club, which they called the “Junior Secret Service Club.” Anyone joining it would receive a membership card signed by Ronald Reagan.
The nine-year-old Jerry Parr had been so enthusiastic about
Code of the Secret Service
he went back to see it again and again.

In 1962, at the age of thirty-two, after stints with the air force and a public utility company in Florida and then earning a previously deferred college degree, Parr fulfilled his boyhood dream of becoming a Secret Service agent. After being accepted into the program, he found himself to be the oldest trainee in his class.
Over the following years, Parr served diligently, rose through the ranks, and finally was put in charge of presidential protection—as head of the Secret Service White House detail—in 1979.

Inspired so many years before by Ronald Reagan, in ways that wound up giving shape to his life, Jerry Parr, a little over four decades later, now was about to return the favor.

History often produces strange parallels.
In March 1981, another moviegoer, twenty-five-year-old John Hinckley, would also reveal himself to have been greatly influenced by a film, and to be equally motivated to act out what he’d seen on the big screen. A depressed college dropout, whose wealthy family was in the oil business, Hinckley seemed to fail at everything he tried. Repeatedly
viewing Martin Scorsese’s grimly violent
Taxi Driver
—released originally in 1976—he became obsessed with one of its stars, Jodie Foster. She’d memorably played a preteen prostitute in the movie, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s election she’d entered college and was a freshman at Yale.
Determined to make Foster notice him, Hinckley first moved to New Haven, writing and phoning her repeatedly. But when his attentions proved entirely unwanted, he began to envision impressing her by the magnitude of an extreme act he would plan and commit.