journal of the churchill center and societies - Winston Churchill

English-Speaking Peoples
THE LEADERSHIP GAP :
WHERE ARE TODAY'S
WINSTON CHURCHILLS
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.
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.
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.
His
rival, Tip
O'Neill,
had the
s a m e
sense of
purpose. He had entered politics in the 1930s as a meat-andpotatoes
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 Goldwaterite
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
FINEST HOUR 108/16