Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

John A. Farrell: Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century

John A. Farrell’s new biography of Tip O’Neill shares more than a passing similarity with another Farrell’s work, James T. Farrell’s multivolumenovel ,StudsLonigan,whichdetailedingritty,street-wiseprose, thewastedlifeanddissipatedtimesofWilliam(Studs)Lonigan,alowermiddle -class Irish-Catholic Chicagoan, from 1910 to the early 1930s. Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century presents us with the life andtimesofThomasP.(Tip)O’Neill,Jr.,amiddle-classIrish-Catholic from Boston. Its author is the White House correspondent for the Boston Globe, and his penetrating and entertaining biography shows us the rest of the century through the rise and accomplishments of the consummate political man, Tip O’Neill. It is not often that the publication of a biography of a deceased politician is a timely event, but this one is. Indeed, this illuminating work couldn’t come at a more propitious moment, just as the Democratic Party enters a new century having lost the presidency and both houses of Congress narrowly to the Republicans. Whether or not the twenty-first century becomes the Republican century may depend on whether the lessons found within Mr. Farrell’s book are taken to heart by the Democratic Party.  John A. Farrell: Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century 202 203 This is not the typical biography, but a more panoramic production , a newsreel of nearly three-quarters of the last century. We see Tip O’Neill compete with the startling events of his time, events he influenced or observed from the inside. Over and over, this volume serves as an antidote to the America malady of forgetfulness: here is our political past, presented clearly, and with style. Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell, said, “The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.” Well, Farrell possesses some of that quality, but in the main, he can find good things to say about the anti-Vietnam War movement and Ronald Reagan’s mad but successful plan to outspend the Soviet Union into financial (and governmental) bankruptcy. Tip O’Neill is often described (by Farrell and others) as a “man’s man,”whichappearstomeanaguywholikestospendmostofhistime with other men, but doesn’t want to have sex with them. O’Neill was blessed (there’s hardly any other word) to have had a devoted wife, Millie, who took care of him and their five children, and let the young (and then old) politician do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. It was a good thing O’Neill rewarded her devotion with a life of productive public service during interesting times. Farrell’s book is popular history, but of a superior sort: though the person of Tip O’Neill, he makes the nuts and bolts of governing, at the state and national level, fascinating and understandable. Hindsight is not always 20/20, but Farrell is even-handed surveying the controversies of the last half century–The Great Society, civil rights, Vietnam, Middle Eastern, Irish and Central American policies, The Greed Decade , Iran-Contra, etc. Unlike the insider see-it-now books of Bob Woodward, Farrell’s is a more straightforward narrative, with a wider range, free of Woodward ’s fly-on-the-wall, made-up dialogue. 204 O’Neill’s early career in the Massachusetts legislature was marked byacertainprovincialism,andclosetiestothehierarchyoftheCatholic Church. Farrell writes: “Massachusetts politics was, at the time, quite susceptibletotheocraticintervention,especiallywhenitcametolifting restraints on women.” A proposed birth control bill was the center of controversy, in the spring of 1948, and “O’Neill fought the bill in committee , blasted Planned Parenthood and led the Democrats in voting against the legislation.” O’Neill and other Catholic legislators “labeled the proposal a ploy to free women to pursue such idle goals as ‘careers, cocktailpartiesandbridgegames.’”Ayearlater,O’Neillbecamethefirst Democratic Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. But, when O’Neill was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives , in 1952, he began a slow evolution that paralleled the rest of the country’s twentieth century march toward liberalism in matters of religion, race and social mores. O’Neill’s district, North Cambridge, was the fiery furnace that shaped and reshaped him, since it was divided between ethnic blue-collar folk; immigrant-based Irish, Italian, and African stock; and America’s premier intellectual center, the site of Harvard University, among others. On one hand, there was O’Neill’s steadfast loyalties and on the other, a never-extinguished intellectual openness to new ideas and change. The divisions in his district were a...