May 8, 2015

Finest Hour 108, Autumn 2000

Page 16

By CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS

The first time I met Ronald Reagan was in Tip O’Neill’s office. “Mr. President, this is the room where we plot against you,” I offered, perhaps too gamely. “Not after six,” retorted this debonair fellow about to give a State of the Union address to the United States Congress, plus a hundred million or so Americans. “The Speaker says that here in Washington, we’re all friends after six o’clock.”

What a country. Here I was, aide to the liberal Democrat O’Neill, towel-snapping with the conservative Republican president who’d spent his inaugural year pounding the Democrats into submission.

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Or so it seemed that January in 1982. By November, the nation’s political pendulum would swing the other way. The economy bottomed during the worst recession in a half century. Reagan would pay the price of trying to reform Social Security. Tip O’Neill’s Democrats would gather back twenty-six seats, and the power to co-govern for the next six years.

During all those years, I learned something about leadership from both these men. Unlike so many of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan did not want to be president. He wanted to do things: defeat the Soviets by outrunning them in strategic weapons; stimulate the economy and shrink the federal bureaucracy by cutting taxes. The key fact of this “great communicator” was that every cab driver knew what he knew: why he, Ronald Reagan, was there.

His rival, Tip O’Neill, had the same sense of purpose. He had entered politics in the 1930s as a meat-and-potatoes Democrat. In those years of the Great Depression, when “Irish Need Not Apply” was still an underlying attitude in some circles, his greatest joy was knocking down a door for a guy who needed a job, a sick person who needed a hospital bed.

He never changed. Once I drafted an attack on the spiking federal deficit, blaming Reagan for the red ink. O’Neill refused to use it. “That’s not me,” he said. He cared about the poor kid who wanted to go to college, the woman facing breast cancer. Fiscal responsibility! Balanced budgets! That was the other side’s cause.

What the Irish fight card of Reagan vs. O’Neill shared was that rare, elusive brand of politics. Each man was, in his own way, a leader. One spent years in the political wilderness derided as a “failed B-movie actor,” a Gold-waterite without a chance of national election; the other was derided as an anachronism: a big-government liberal in a time of rising conservatism. It was my break of a lifetime to catch this fight from ringside.

Each morning the great Tip O’Neill would arrive in his Capitol hideaway, his Churchill cigar lit, ready for the day’s work, eager for scuttlebutt. “What do you hear?” he would ask. “Anything I ought to know? Anything special out there?” He wanted to know everything: what the President was up to, what the reporters were writing and saying, what Republicans had up their sleeves, what was the buzz in the Democrat cloakroom.

Like Reagan, the beauty of O’Neill was that none of this information, and certainly not the poll information he gobbled up like his beloved corned beef hash, budged him from his principles. Like Reagan, Tip loved to bask in popular approval—what politician doesn’t?—but was ready instantly to sacrifice that popularity for the cause that brought him into politics.

Both men had a way of being heard. When Reagan fired the wildcatting air traffic controllers in 1981, he sent a message that Moscow could read: Don’t mess with this guy. When he insisted on visiting those Nazi graves at Bitburg, he showed he could stick to a deal, back up an ally—even when it cost him. When he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” it meant something.

O’Neill’s leadership was up close and personal. He loved holding court behind his desk (once used by President Grover Cleveland), his cigar burning, the doors closed, and he, Tip O’Neill, making the decisions—including when to open the doors and let his captives out to breathe. His other trick, besides controlling the oxygen supply, was ripping into one side, which gave satisfaction to the other, even as he ruled in the former’s favor. “This is the last time I’m going to let this happen, do you hear!”

A Canadian pollster once listed for me the three ingredients common to all great political leaders: . motive, passion and spontaneity. You know what they want, what they feel and when you knock on the door, you know someone is home.

We have been fortunate to share this century with some grand exhibitors of such traits. Columnist Joseph Alsop wrote of being in Hong Kong the day after Pearl Harbor. With Japanese bombs falling just blocks away, he listened on the radio to the intermittent sound of Franklin Roosevelt’s words. “In these…gloomy and frustrating circumstances,” Alsop wrote, “it never for one moment occurred to me that there might be the smallest doubt about the outcome of the vast war the President was asking Congress to declare. Nor did I find any other American throughout the entire world who ever doubted the eventual outcome.” The aristocrat who had come to the presidency to save the “forgotten American” had become “Dr. Win the War.”

Winston Churchill was another man of motive, passion and spontaneity. In the 1930s, when not even his own Tories would listen, he warned the world of the Nazi menace. After Hitler was defeated, Churchill announced in a speech in Fulton, Missouri that an “Iron Curtain” was descending over Europe. A cigar in one hand, a “V” formed by the other, he had warned of the century’s two greatest menaces and had recruited against them.

The years since have served up reminders of such greatness. John F. Kennedy came to the presidency hoping to win the Cold War by dazzling diplomacy (the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress) and a willingness to “bear any burden” militarily. Whatever his faults, his grand mission to defeat the communists without a third world war was always at the forefront.

Margaret Thatcher was another leader who left no doubt of why she’d come to office. A maverick among the Tories, this shopkeeper’s daughter wanted to replace the old “establishment” with a vibrant, venturesome British middle class. Through a decade of leadership, she never budged from her path.

An American senator, Edmund Muskie, once offered the best definition of all of this, one that may be as useful in the coming century as it was in this one. “The only reason to be in politics,” he said at the celebration of his final electoral victory, “is to be out there all alone and then be proven right.”

That’s the nub of it. Just as King Solomon knew that the true mother was a woman so intent on her child’s welfare that she was ready to give her life, true leaders are people so intent on their country’s welfare that they are willing to risk rejection. The way to find such leaders is to look for them, and to listen—not for the voice that resonates with the popular view of things, but the one, such as Churchill’s during the years of complacent appeasement, that challenges it.

By this definition, many great nations today are leaderless. In America, the White House takes its direction around the clock from nightly polling and daily “focus” grouping. Politicians take not just their signals from the data but also their lingo. A healthy stock market and high employment cannot be applauded for fear of offending someone. A just and surprisingly successful war to stop genocide becomes a remote exercise in high-technocracy. Absent a moral compass, a true and confident captain at the helm, we do not feel good even when we do good. We end the century not in triumph, but with our ship of state bobbing in the water.

Mr. Matthews is the host of CNBC’s “Hardball,” Washington bureau chief of the San Francisco Examiner, and the author of two bestsellers, Hardball and Kennedy and Nixon. This article is reprinted by kind permission of the author and Cigar Aficionado, the cigar connoisseur’s magazine. To subscribe telephone (800) 992-2442.

“English-Speaking Peoples” is a periodic opinion series on matters of moment among the English-speaking democracies Churchill loved. Comment and counter-opinion are always welcome.