Tip O'Neill

American representative (1953-1987) and House speaker (1976-1986)

• Born: December 9, 1912
• Birthplace: Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Died: January 5, 1994
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

O’Neill was a lifelong defender of social legislation and an energetic leader of the House of Representatives whose ten years as Speaker saw a resurgence of congressional authority.

Early Life

Tip O’Neill was the son of Thomas Philip O’Neill and Rose Ann (née Tolan) O’Neill. O’Neill was nicknamed Tip for baseball player James Edward O’Neill of the St. Louis Browns, who was famous for hitting foul tip after foul tip until he was finally walked to first base. His father, Thomas, Sr., was the son of an immigrant bricklayer from County Cork, Ireland, and a dedicated member of the Democratic Party. Beginning in 1900, Thomas, Sr., served six years as an elected member of the Cambridge City Council. As a result of his upbringing, Thomas, Jr., remained close to his Irish-immigrant, working-class, and Democratic roots throughout his public career.

Educated exclusively in Roman Catholic schools, O’Neill began his education at St. John’s Grammar School and continued at St. John’s Parochial School, where he was considered an average student at best. Equally unimpressive in athletics, he nevertheless was elected captain of both the football and basketball teams. At the age of fifteen, O’Neill experienced his first taste of politics when he campaigned for the Catholic Democratic candidate Al Smith in his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1928.

After his graduation from secondary school in 1931, O’Neill enrolled at Boston College. During his senior year, he ran for city council and lost; this would prove to be the only electoral defeat of his entire career. He lost by only 160 votes, largely because he had taken his own neighborhood for granted and had failed to solicit votes there. This loss, accompanied by his father’s advice that “all politics is local,” formed a lesson O’Neill would never forget.

After graduating from Boston College in 1936, O’Neill was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature. While serving there, he married his sweetheart of many years, Mildred Miller, in June, 1941. As a legislator during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, O’Neill formed his liberal democratic principles. By such acts as arranging jobs for out-of-work constituents and advocating quality education for the working class, O’Neill earned a reputation as a friend of the people. As a result, in 1948 he was made the youngest majority leader in Massachusetts history. As leader, he pushed through a broad program of social legislation popularly known as the “Little New Deal.”

When then Congressman John F. Kennedy launched his senatorial campaign in 1952, O’Neill decided to run for the vacant position. Enjoying strong support from the heavily Democratic Irish and Italian working-class wards of the Eleventh Congressional District, O’Neill was easily elected to the U.S. Congress.

Life’s Work

O’Neill’s ascension to the U.S. House of Representatives marked the start of over three decades of service in Washington. As the protégé of House Democratic Whip John W. McCormick, a fellow Bostonian, O’Neill was quickly introduced to the House power structure. Soon, O’Neill was invited to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn’s informal “board of education” meetings, held after-hours for congressional leaders and friends. At these meetings, congressional business was discussed in casual detail, allowing O’Neill an inside track in the rough-and-tumble world of Washington politics.

These contacts would gain him a coveted position on the House Rules Committee in only his second term, a rare appointment for a freshman congressman. The committee regulated the flow of legislation to the House floor, exposing O’Neill to all facets of the legislative process and helping to make him a more well-rounded, less parochial congressman. Following Sam Rayburn’s advice “If you want to get along, go along” O’Neill proved himself an adept compromiser, able to steer his bills around the deadlocks resulting from the 1950’s split between liberals and conservatives.

In keeping with his roots, Congressman O’Neill routinely voted along liberal Democratic lines, casting votes in favor of housing redevelopment, expansion and improvement of mass-transit facilities, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1956, 1957, and 1964. His advocacy of adequate health care, education, and increased worker opportunities all reflected his New Deal roots. Later, O’Neill supported strict gun-control laws, busing to achieve racial equality in schools, and strong environmental legislation.

By the mid-1960’s, the Vietnam War had come to dominate the national consciousness. Initially, O’Neill backed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Southeast Asia policies, as did most of O’Neill’s blue-collar constituents. Eventually, however, O’Neill reconsidered his position at the urging of both his own children (Thomas III, Christopher, Michael, Susan, and Rosemary) and the intellectual communities of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which were in his district. After much soul-searching, O’Neill concluded that Vietnam was a civil conflict from which the United States needed to withdraw. He made his opinion known to President Johnson in 1967, long before “dovish” (antiwar) positions were popular, and he backed the Democratic peace candidate Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential primaries.

Thereafter, O’Neill worked to withdraw American troops from Southeast Asia. In March, 1971, he cosponsored a bill setting a date for U.S. withdrawal contingent on the release of American prisoners of war. He also supported legislation in August, 1973, that would have cut off funds for the continuation of air raids against North Vietnam. In November, O’Neill voted to override President Richard Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Bill, which effectively limited the executive’s war-making powers.

O’Neill’s opposition to the Vietnam War eventually gained him the respect and support of many younger members of Congress, who would be largely responsible for his rise to the speakership. O’Neill’s rise began in 1971, when he was appointed majority whip. When majority leader Hale Boggs died in a plane crash the following year, O’Neill assumed his position.

O’Neill was pivotal in leading the charge for House reform. He lessened the autocratic power of committee chairpersons, pushed for the publication of committee votes, and advocated limiting the number of chairs a representative could hold. O’Neill also urged Congress to embrace its responsibility to oversee the actions of the other branches of the federal government, a desire reflected in his calls for the investigation and impeachment of President Nixon when the Watergate scandal broke in 1973.

O’Neill’s ability to compromise, along with his affability and overwhelming popularity, led in December, 1976, to his election by acclamation as Speaker of the House. In 1977, in the shadow of Watergate, O’Neill helped to pass a far-reaching government ethics bill as his first official act as Speaker.

Jimmy Carter entered the White House at about the same time that O’Neill became Speaker. During Carter’s four years as president, it seemed that the two men shared only their party affiliation. As politicians, they were direct opposites: Carter a Washington outsider elected to office on his antipolitician credentials, O’Neill a politician who had raised himself through the party ranks. Yet despite their differing views, O’Neill as a loyal Democrat felt bound to support Carter. This he did by backing the president’s foreign-policy initiatives (such as the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt) and by pushing for passage of Carter’s energy legislation.

Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election brought to Washington the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. On the surface, O’Neill and Reagan had many similarities. Both were from blue-collar, Irish backgrounds and had outgoing personalities; they also shared an interest in sports and were the same age. The similarities ended there, however; according to O’Neill, Reagan had forgotten his roots. From 1981 to 1987, O’Neill led congressional opposition to the Republican president.

The remainder of O’Neill’s career as Speaker was largely spent performing damage control, as the Reagan administration worked to slash spending on government social programs including Social Security, Medicare, employment-training programs, and college-aid programs and increase defense spending. O’Neill constantly reminded members of Congress and the public that it was these programs that had enabled many people to rise to their current status, and he implored them not to deny these same benefits to others. By stressing the theme of fairness, he resisted Reagan’s efforts to slash social programs and helped to preserve New Deal legislation, much of which O’Neill himself had originally helped to implement.

On October 18, 1986, O’Neill retired from the House of Representatives, bringing his fifty-year career in politics to a close. Thirty-four of those years were served as a member of Congress, and ten as Speaker of the House of Representatives the longest continuous term of any Speaker in history. Throughout, O’Neill made certain he never lost touch with his roots. On January 5, 1994, he died in his hometown of Boston at the age of eighty-one.

Significance

A liberal New Deal reformer in the Roosevelt mold, O’Neill never forgot his origins. Having grown up in a working-class community, he worked tirelessly to raise men and women out of poverty by way of social legislation. Believing the federal government to be the only body capable of creating a solid middle class, O’Neill stuck by these principles even when they were unpopular. Above all, O’Neill stressed fairness. His generation had been saved from the depths of the Depression by government intervention, and a solid middle class had been created. To O’Neill, it was unfair for these very people to kick out from behind them the ladder that had allowed their ascent, denying others the same opportunity for upward mobility. As Speaker, he headed a resurgent Congress no longer willing to concede all initiative and authority to the president. Tip O’Neill fought his entire life to assure people their government’s help in achieving the American Dream.

Bibliography

Clancy, Paul R., and Shirley Elder. Tip: A Biography of Thomas P. O’Neill, Speaker of the House. New York: Macmillan, 1980. A comprehensive and readable biography that follows O’Neill’s development as a politician from childhood to the Speakership. Provides a solid bibliography to aid further research on O’Neill’s life, career, and influence on American politics.

Farrell, John Aloysius. Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. Farrell, a reporter for the Boston Globe, traces O’Neill’s political career from the 1930’s in local Boston politics through his years as Speaker of the House, placing it within the context of the Democratic Party’s traditional belief in an activist government.

Kennon, Donald R., ed. The Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives: A Bibliography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Provides a brief synopsis of O’Neill’s career up until 1984, followed by a comprehensive bibliography. Organized by topic; easy to follow.

O’Neill, Tip, with Gary Hymel. All Politics Is Local: And Other Rules of the Game. New York: Random House, 1994. A guide to politics as envisioned by O’Neill. Provides insight into his life, political tactics, and relationships; also useful as a guide to modern U.S. politics.

O’Neill, Tip, with William Novak. Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker O’Neill. New York: Random House, 1987. A valuable primary source that provides a careful and detailed personal recollection of O’Neill’s life from his boyhood to his retirement.

Peters, Ronald M., ed. The Speaker: Leadership in the United States House of Representatives. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1994. Describes and reviews the Speaker’s role in the House. Specific contributions are also made by former Speakers such as O’Neill, his predecessor Carl Albert, and his successor Jim Wright. Delineates these men’s various views on politics and on how power should be used in the House.

Vogler, David J. The Politics of Congress. 5th ed. Newton, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1988. Provides a good overview of the workings of Congress. More specifically, however, it shows the tremendous influence O’Neill had on Congress, especially during his years as Speaker.