Things are quiet in DC, 50 years ago today as the new year arrives. In a week or so, the new congress will be sworn in and seated. A few weeks after that, Judge Sirica will be holding guilty pleas for the five Watergate burglars, as well as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Things will really heat up then.
But for now, for the last day of the year, let’s turn attention elsewhere.
Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man
If you were to go to central casting and ask them to send someone over who could play an irascible but lovable old Boston Irish politician – especially one who looked like he’d seen some thing and survived some political knife fights – and they sent over Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, you’d laugh and send him back. Too obvious a typecast.
O’Neill won his House seat in 1952, after another Boston Irishman, John F. Kennedy, had vacated if for the Senate. And Tip – who was actually only “Tip O’Neill” to the DC press corps (hilariously, he was “Tom” to friends and colleagues) – knew he was no Jack Kennedy. He wasn’t super charismatic. He’d be the first to tell you he wasn’t the smartest guy in the House. Even in a clean, freshly-dry cleaned and pressed suit, he looked rumpled.
But Tip O’Neill had a superpower. He had an innate, unerring ability to sense what voters, in general, wanted. He could sense even the mildest changes in political winds long before anyone else could. His political instincts and something akin to political clairvoyance made him a valuable asset to the House Democrats, and so when a leadership position opened to be the Majority Whip (the number three man in the House party leadership, behind the Majority Leader and the number one man: Speaker of the House), O’Neill was put forward.
Just above O’Neill in the House leadership was wily Louisiana Democrat Hale Boggs. Boggs was a pretty fascinating guy. He was on the right side of history in Brown v. Board of Education, and drafted a huge memo for the Democratic party in the South in the late 1950s denouncing segregation. He’d served as the Majority Whip for 10 years before stepping up to House Majority Leader in 1971, opening the Whip position for O’Neill. It was Boggs who’d whipped the votes to pass LBJ’s Great Society legislation – Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, etc. etc. (Boggs’ daughter, Cokie Roberts, would be a longtime fixture at ABC News from the 1980s through the 2000s.)
O’Neill figured that maybe House Majority Whip would be as high as he’d go – he was 60 when he assumed that role. But maybe…maybe he’d climb a little higher before he retired. He hoped to learn from the two congressmen above him, Boggs and House Speaker Carl Albert, about the intricacies of leadership positions within the party caucus. And then, maybe after a decade of apprenticeship on of those two would either retire or move up and he’d try leadership for a term or two.
But that sounds like a plan, and the political gods scorn such things. At a meeting in the summer of 1972, O’Neill let Albert and Boggs know that the Democrats could expect to lose between 10 and 20 seats in their House majority in the coming election. Not too much of an issue given the size of the Democratic majority, but both men were eager to try to prevent as many losses as possible.
One Democratic incumbent facing a close race was Alaska freshman congressman Nick Begich. Boggs decided to help Begich out with a fundraiser up in Alaska, a state Boggs was keen to see. On October 16th, Boggs and Begich took off in a small, twin-engine Cessna from Anchorage, bound for a fundraiser in Juneau. Their plane never landed. A 40-day search provided no clues whatsoever. (Ironically, a new federal aviation law had passed two weeks before the disappearance of this flight, one requiring all planes to carry an emergency locator beacon. Sadly, the deadline to install those beacons was December 31st. No wreckage of the plane – which likely crashed into the ocean off the coast in freezing rain that day – has ever been found.)
The two congressmen were legally declared dead at the end of December, 1972. Tip O’Neill suddenly found himself the House Majority Leader for the coming year. That might be an important thing.
And one thing that was definitely important was that Tip O’Neill’s finely tuned political antennae were perking away like crazy. Something about the 1972 election seemed…off. Not the result, really; he and most other Democrats expected a Nixon landslide win. But there were other things that felt very wrong.
For one thing, O’Neill knew the names and the amounts expected from the Democratic Party’s high profile, big-ticket donors. And he noticed early on that an expected donation from George Steinbrenner had never shown up. Steinbrenner had been a reliable contributor for over a decade. When Tip got him on the phone, Steinbrenner admitted that he’d been all but forced to kick in $100k to those anonymous Republican PACs mentioned in the link above. Tip gave the future Yankee owner some sage advice that he’d better watch his own ass, and hung up.
And as the summer of 1972 turned into Fall, O’Neill couldn’t help but notice a number of his party’s biggest donors – especially the ones he knew were vulnerable on various regulatory issues, or who needed some government help with a contract – had flipped to become “Democrats for Nixon.” Tom O’Neill was a veteran of Boston political ward fights; he knew strong-arm tactics when he saw them.
And so on January 3rd, 1973 just an hour after the 93rd Congress had been sworn in, O’Neill went to pay a visit to the office of House Speaker Carl Albert. He told Albert about his suspicions and about the way he sensed that something very bad had happened in 1972, and how it might involve all sorts of wrongdoing, somewhere. In fact, he told Albert, it wouldn’t surprise O’Neill at all if that Watergate thing was a piece of the puzzle.
In any event, he told Albert that it was possible, maybe even likely, that the unthinkable – impeachment – would be something the 93rd would at least be asked to fleetingly consider. Or maybe more than “fleetingly.” And Albert, even more of an institutionalist than the rookie, unlikely House Majority Leader told his colleague that if that indeed did come to happen, Tip O’Neill was going to be the one to take point on it, not him.
That was something that ran contrary to O’Neill’s own institutionalist mindset, but he also felt like he couldn’t ignore the warning sirens going off in his head, either. His political instincts hadn’t failed him yet, and this case they were telling him that the 93rd Congress was going be asked to consider some monumental choices regarding the White House. And O’Neill knew that if things really were to play out that way, he’d need to be ready.
