Reagan, O’Neill, and Someone Named Chris By Craig Shirley
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/30/reagan_oneill_and_someone_named_chris__120502.html
An actual history should be written someday about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. But not by Chris Matthews.
Matthews’s new book, “Tip and the Gipper,” is not the history of Ronald Reagan and neither is it the history of Thomas P. O’Neill III. It is the history of Chris Matthews before he became the Chris Matthews we see on cable television today. It falls into the category of micro personal history, but is so elfin as to be inconsequential.
There are several reasons for this. Matthews has assured Washington for years that he was a close aide and confidant to the former speaker of the House. Presumably in support of this narrative, Matthews invites readers of “Tip and the Gipper” to also look at O’Neill’s autobiography, “Man of the House.” That book provided some important source material for his own, says Matthews.
So this historian closely examined O’Neill’s book — and found no mention of Chris Matthews in the index. The photo section was also inspected. No pictures of Matthews. Was Matthews the “ghost” on O’Neill’s book? No — William Novak aided in this task. So is Matthews in the dedication, then? No again. Only in the acknowledgements section does his name appear, but only alongside the names of dozens of other staffers and individuals.
Other than that, there is no mention — zip, nada — of Matthews in the body of Tip O’Neill’s tome, though plenty of other aides and individuals are mentioned throughout and often warmly. “Man of the House,” by the way, is a treasure-trove of Reagan bashing, despite the hollow plea of Matthews that the two men were really the best of friends.
Tip O’Neill said it was “sinful” that Reagan had been elected president. He said Reagan didn’t care about the poor, and that Reagan would have made a better “king” than a president — and that, in any event, Reagan was the “worst” president of his lifetime; a period that encompassed Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. There are dozens of other examples of Reagan-bashing, not excluding O’Neill’s ungentlemanly claim that Nancy Reagan was “the queen of Beverly Hills.”
He attacked Reagan for calling the Soviet Union “evil” and “godless” after it had murdered millions of people and outlawed religion. Indeed, one entire chapter of “Man of the House” is devoted mostly to harsh criticism of Reagan. In 1984, O’Neill advised Democratic nominee Walter Mondale that he had to “remove the evil that’s in the White House at the present time.” What was that about close friends?
But back to Chris Matthews.
It is possible to be overlooked by your own mentor, and it’s happened to better men than Chris Matthews, but it’s still telling to contrast how Matthews views his own role in history with how O’Neill and other contemporaries viewed it. (Matthews is not mentioned Reagan’s diaries or autobiography and appears in no other important books about the events of the 1980s, either.)
To read “Tip and the Gipper,” then, is to understand how much Matthews wishes the reader to believe he was a crucial part of those events, which is what really gets to the nub of what is wrong with his new work.
History comes in many packages. There is the broad expanse of Winston Churchill’s seven volumes on his life and times, or Dumas Malone’s sweep of Jefferson in six volumes. There is the micro history, focusing on the events of one day, such as Gordon Prange’s “At Dawn We Slept,” the single best book ever written about Dec. 7, 1941.
Matthews’s book does not concern a single day, but it’s a kind of micro personal history with a narrow focus: the relationship between two men. The trick to writing personal micro history, however, is make the story compelling to readers by putting them in the room where action is taking place. Most authors do this with detail. Matthews does not.
His book reads like an unimaginative teenager’s dry diary crammed full of first person pronouns. (I asked the publisher for an unedited copy of Matthews’s diary, by the way, on which his new book is partly based. That never materialized.) Strangely, Matthews does not even tell the reader much that is interesting about himself, save the advice he was giving O’Neill or the people who were championing his career. He writes about direct-mail fundraising, but omits the nasty hit piece signed by O’Neill that made Reagan so furious he wrote about it in his own diary.
On one point Matthews does relate something interesting about himself. It seems Chris habitually got into trouble with O’Neill over — you guessed it — his penchant for egregious self-promotion. He also apparently worked hard to plant embarrassing stories about Reagan, according to “Tip and the Gipper.”
Another major failing of the book: The attempt to convince readers that O’Neill and Reagan were close chums and that Reagan loved making compromises. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Tip and the Gipper” is essentially a theory in search of facts. Matthews tries hard to make the case that Reagan and O’Neill were fraternity brothers of a sort, but never really presents the evidence except that they got together on St. Patrick’s Day. To the extent that they were polite (though not always) with each other is more a reflection of their upbringing than any sort of close relationship. To wit, O’Neill died in January 1994. Attending the funeral in Boston were both Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Reagan did not attend, although later that year he attended the funeral of Richard Nixon.
Reagan’s close aide Mike Deaver once told me that the Gipper was “the most competitive son of a bitch who ever lived.” Truth be told, Ronald Reagan loved conflict, loved competition and hated losing. He was no “Great Compromiser,” as Matthews alleges. That was Henry Clay. Reagan was the Great Communicator, but he was also the Great Combatant. Just ask anyone who went up against him over the years. Stu Spencer, who knew Reagan beginning in 1965, told me often he thought Reagan was the toughest and most resilient man he ever knew. Another longtime Reagan confidant, Martin Anderson, called him “warmly ruthless.”
From the time he took on the administration at Eureka College, to his fights with studio moguls in Hollywood, to his fiery speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964, to challenging — and conquering — the GOP establishment in 1966, 1976 and 1980, to taking on the establishment over the Panama Canal treaties, to his own government shutdowns, to firing the nation’s air traffic controllers to staring down Gorbachev at Reykjavik (whew) — this was not a man who was conflict-averse.
Matthews relishes telling how Reagan and O’Neill worked together in 1982 to pass TEFRA, a massive tax increase. What Matthews does not adequately address is the widespread resistance within the GOP led by Jack Kemp (with help from Newt Gingrich), or that Reagan’s nationally televised address urging support was one of the most poorly received speeches of his presidency. O’Neill often dismissed Gingrich and Kemp as “Reagan’s robots,” something given short shrift in Matthews’s book.
Matthews also fails to explain how O’Neill hoodwinked Reagan on TEFRA. The deal they struck was supposed to be $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. The tax increase came, while the spending cuts did not. Reagan never made another deal of this kind with O’Neill and asserted in his autobiography that he’d been sold a bill of goods. The story of TEFRA became a cautionary tale for Reagan: He never fully trusted O’Neill again.
Other convenient omissions and mistakes abound. Matthews’s outlandish claim that O’Neill was the first “approved” person to see Reagan after the assassination attempt on the president’s life in 1981 is patently false. O’Neill only saw Reagan a week after the shooting (and many “approved” people had already been in to see Reagan, including Jim Baker, Ed Meese, Paul Laxalt, Bill Clark and others). Early on, Matthews says Reagan should be seen as more than just an actor, and yet his book is studded with snarky asides about Reagan’s movie career.
Matthews asserts that Reagan’s opposition to high taxes came from his days in Hollywood, and while it’s true that Reagan’s opposition to high taxes gelled when he was put into a 90 percent top marginal rate the first time he made any real money, Reagan’s philosophical underpinnings simply elude Matthews. Reagan told conservatives in 1981 that he championed lower taxes as a way to “reorder man’s relation to the state.” Reagan wanted to move power from centralized authority back to the individual, where the Founders intended it to be.
Matthews also claims that under Reagan and O’Neill government shutdowns “were averted.” This is meant as a rebuke, the reader supposes, to John Boehner and Barack Obama, but there were actually goodly number of shutdowns in the 1980s. (There was also a new weapon — the debt ceiling — used by members of the Senate to wring concessions from Reagan on other issues. Perhaps Matthews doesn’t mention that because it was Democrats who were refusing to vote for an increase in the debt limit then.)
Although he likes to sometimes play one on TV, Chris Matthews is not an historian. His 1996 work about Nixon and John Kennedy was marred by minor factual errors and a major overreach — a tendency familiar to his MSNBC viewers.
“Interesting as these Kennedy-Nixon conflicts are,” New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani noted, “Mr. Matthews displays an annoying tendency in these pages to overstate his argument, going so far as to suggest that his book explains ‘the tragedy of Watergate.’”
For research on “Tip and the Gipper,” Matthews seems to have interviewed only four or five people, including James A. Baker III, who was Reagan’s superb first chief of staff. Matthews never talked to Ed Meese, Dick Allen, Peter Hannaford, Paul Laxalt or anyone, for that matter, on Reagan’s speechwriting team or in his political office or on White House advance staff. These were the people who spent the most time with Ronald Reagan. He also interviewed Ron Reagan (the liberal son) but not Mike Reagan (the conservative son).
Matthews cites as an authoritative source Edmund Morris’s ridiculous and widely panned “Dutch,” as well as the Reagan books by liberal writer Richard Reeves, whose work is marred by an obvious animus against the 40th president.
Matthews’s central conceit is his belief that politics was somehow more cordial and productive in the 1980s. But even as Matthews laments a false past, he undermines his own vision by gratuitously insulting the Tea Party, Dick Cheney, Mark Levin, and any other conservatives with the temerity to question Obama-era collectivism. It bears reminding that his show is called “Hardball.”
The fights of the 1980s were long and bloody and they took place over important issues: the size of government spending, the level of taxation required to sustain government, America’s place in the world, anti-communism (O’Neill really worked overtime to stop Reagan from arming Nicaraguan contra rebels fighting the communist regime in Managua).
Don’t let anyone kid you: The ’80s were halcyon days for conservatives because of what Reagan stood for — and his success in advancing his agenda — and not because he was eating birthday cake with Tip O’Neill.
This brings us to the crux of this flawed and biased book. Matthews ostensibly has written a plea for good-government in which men of goodwill — even men with very different worldviews — can iron out their differences in a way that protects the common good.
That not only misreads the history of the era, it ignores the most salient fact about the Gipper, Tip, and Chris: Namely, that as O’Neill’s press secretary (and later) Matthews has been a harshly cruel polemicist for the Democrats. His own rhetorical record is replete with false accusations against Reagan, the most vicious being that Reagan was a racist.
For example, Matthews has asserted many times that Reagan invented Chicago’s notorious “welfare queen” on the 1976 campaign trail. In fact, her existence is well-documented. Her name was Linda Taylor and she was prosecuted for fraud by authorities who considered her one of the greatest welfare cheats in history. Her feats were recounted by the Washington Post and the New York Times, and included in Lou Cannon’s Reagan biographies. When Taylor was sentenced to prison in 1977, the Associated Press story stated that “her schemes, aliases, and disguises were so numerous there is no telling how much she bilked out of welfare agencies, but from early 1973 to mid-1974 she used 14 aliases to obtain $150,000.”
Last year, as a way of attacking welfare reforms suggested by Mitt Romney, Matthews predictably insisted on his television show that Reagan’s welfare queen story was “malarkey.” Even after Matt Lewis set the record straight in The Daily Caller, Matthews continued the false attacks on Reagan. He’s also said on a number of occasions that Reagan made slurs against young African-American males. This book would have been better had it been a mea culpa. But because he smears anyone he disagrees with, it should be seen for what it is: a political polemic meant to address a current political problem. Perhaps that’s a worthy goal, but it isn’t history.
All of this is to say that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were both good men who disagreed on almost everything relating to American public policy — and they fought things out accordingly.
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Craig Shirley, president of the public affairs consultancy Shirley & Banister, is the author of two bestselling books on Ronald Reagan’s campaigns. He is currently writing “Last Act,” an examination of Reagan’s post-presidency.
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