A Sea Change

Remember that marvelously effective little television commercial from the campaign wars of 1980---the one in which burly, white-thatched actor hired by those devilishly clever Republicans so unmistakably the most powerful and prominent Democrat in Congress, the similarly burly and white-thatched Speaker of the House of Representatives, as arrogant glutton who neither knew nor cared that his big, black, gas-guzzling automobile was rapidly running out of fuel until it did?

I asked him---the Speaker, not the actor-about it at the Democratic Convention that year, suggesting cautiously that perhaps the Republicans had made a metaphor out of him.

"A what?" he muttered, clearly irritated by the inference.

"A metaphor, sir," I reiterated. "A metaphor. Doesn't that bother you a bit---being a metaphor, I mean?"

Somehow, challenging and then defying all natural law, his impressive hulk of a body enlarged itself to even more formidable dimensions---a great white whale filling its massive lungs.

"The Speaker of the House is not a goddamned metaphor," he growled malevolently, glaring down at me as though I had launched Ahab's harpoon. "I never have been a metaphor and, God willing, I never shall be."

Then he stalked away, mad as hell, and from the fire in his baleful eye and the edge in his gravelly voice, you'd have thought I'd asked him about the dreaded Tongsun Park.

Thomas P. O'Neill is now into his 70th year (he would, no doubt, deny with equal vehemence being a septuagenarian), having spent nearly 50 as a pisser of a politician---scratching and scrambling his way up from the back streets of Boston into the very mainstreams of the American political process, to national prominence and prestige as well. Yet now, almost half a century after he began his remarkably upward career standing on tiptoe to ring doorbells around the old neighborhood in behalf of Al Smith's Presidential candidacy, he faces the distinctly unpleasant but very real possibility that he could be remembered in the years to come not as the politician he has been but as the metaphor he may have become: the personification of the fading Democrats, a vibrant political force surviving past its prime, sputtering along on its last few ounces of relevance, coasting finally to a stop beside the highway, dead in its tracks, safely out of the flow.

No wonder he was so testy.

Even before the 1980 election, they were beginning to say that about him---him, of all people---and 1981 served only to increase the volume of such libel to such a strident level that, by the end of the year, he could, perhaps, already envision the words chiseled so cleanly into the final granite of his repute:

Thomas Phillip O'neill, Jr. A Goddamned Metaphor

And the Speaker's soul was sorely vexed, and there was no joy in him whatsoever, neither was there pleasure to be found.

Yea, and only travail.

The blues.

Here is what he wailed to friends one evening last spring:

"My problem, by God, isn't Republicans. My problem, by God, is Democrats!"

Bite thy tongue, Mr. Speaker.

It's as though he had confessed to them, with no apparent remorse, that he had voted for Richard Nixon. Twice. It was utter blasphemy---and yet it was quite understandable.

Consider the context.

O'Neill grew up with the Democratic Party, hardly realizing or recognizing the existence of any other throughout much of his youth and even into his early manhood. Like the Church and his name, the party came with the territory, the thickly Irish neighborhoods of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, just beyond the elegantly erudite fringes of Harvard. In such precincts, the consistent ratio of Democrats to Republicans was, roughly, one to zero, a balance that had held steady since the waves of Irish immigrants had begun flowing ashore at Boston Harbor in the latter part of the 19th Century. The local Democrats, outnumbered but fiercely ambitious, courted the arrivals with an ardor genetically repugnant to the Cabots and the Lodges and the rest of the Republican establishment of the day. Consequently, it was the Democrats, seeing in the Irish a potential constituency of vast promise and power, who found places for them to live and jobs at which to work and help when they needed it most desperately. It was richly fertile soil. The Irish became Democrats, and as their own power increased with the proliferation of their numbers, it was principally they who perpetuated the very concepts of the party that had attracted them to it in the first place---all the doing and helping and giving and lifting and underwriting and subsidizing that had drawn them unto its bosom in the beginning. The Irish did not regard themselves as liberals or conservatives. There were, for them, no separate wings of the party, no ideological shadings within its embrace. There was simply the party and they were simply Democrats.

The Speaker's father was just such an Irishman and just such a Democrat---and an important pillar of the local party, at that. He had held a seat on the Cambridge City Council for several years before becoming the sewer commissioner, a post with such sweeping powers of patronage that he soon came to be known as Governor---and on Sunday afternoons, after Mass, his house in North Cambridge would be jammed with all manner of politicians, saturated with their talk of politics, all Democratic, of course, and the governor's son and namesake was absorbing it all, an eager sponge of a boy crowded into the corner of the parlor, listening to the stories flow, loving the legends and the lore, becoming a Democrat in the same way he had become a Roman Catholic. He was a bright, receptive youngster, eager to please, and he happily embraced the Democratic Party and its principal concepts precisely as they were offered to him, as they were postulated in his father's parlor on Sunday afternoons, as they were practiced week after week in the neighborhoods of North Cambridge. He endorsed the party's candidates without question long before he could vote for them and he worked for them twice as hard because he could not; and when he himself came of age, fresh out of Boston College, he joined their lists and ran beneath their banners for a seat on the city council. He lost by a whisker, but he was bitten beyond recovery.

As politics had been his father's passionate vocation, so it would become his own. Flashing the lopsided grin that would become the everlasting mark of his presence, he ran again and this time he won a seat in the Massachusetts General Assembly, dominated for a century by the good, gray Republicans---and before he left for Washington 15 years later to take John F. Kennedy's seat in the House of Representatives, the young O'Neill had engineered a Democratic take-over of the state legislature and, naturally, he had become its speaker.

Those who worked with him and against him in Boston during those formative years of his political career quickly learned what made him tick. It was, of course, the party. As he had risen, he had taught himself and had been taught by others along the way the essential catechism of his life's work: the rudiments of power (if one is thought to possess it, one does) and the basics of legislative leadership (there is none without party loyalty and there is no party loyalty without party discipline), and he learned his lessons so well and practiced his craft with such patient and longsuffering diligence both in Boston and in Washington that eventually he began to stir some public notice, here and there: and finally he came to a certain popular pre-eminence. "Mr. Democrat," they called him, the "Politician's politician." He was one of the good guys, it was similarly written, who helped carry those dire days over the nefarious black hats of the Watergate conspiracies.

In Washington, now, they like to call him "the Tipper." It is the city's way of screwing up anything good you might have gone there with. His nickname, as most everyone still recognizes, is Tip. It came from a gentleman named Edward O'Neill, a member of the St. Louis Browns, who amassed one of the highest batting averages ever simply because, (continued on page 177) A Sea Change (continued from page 116) in those days, walks were computed as base hits. Ed O'Neill was the Heifetz of foul tips---get it?---quite capable of fouling off every good pitch that came his way until the pitcher was exasperated or tired or angry or all three and lost his cool and his control and threw him the fourth ball.

Tip, he was called by his teammates and by the sportswriters. And far away in Boston, the kid who seemed to have the most patience with life and with all things picked up the name.

In Gaelic, which our Tip O'Neill studied as a boy (didn't every kid in North Cambridge?), O'Neill means champion; but in Washington, O'Neill means a story. Never has a single name, with the exception, perhaps, of Paula Parkinson, stirred so many tales in that town. They flow like the Shannon, like the whiskey at an Irish wake---and the one I like most about him is the following one, made even better because it's true.

Now, O'Neill's a good poker player, see, and when he comes to Washington in the early Fifties, he gets into a regular Wednesday-night game with a couple of other Congressmen and Senator Karl Mundt, the Republican from South Dakota, who happens one night to bring along his good friend, the Vice-President of the United States---and they deal Richard Nixon in.

What do you know? He's not much at the table.

O'Neill says to him. "With all due respect, Mr. Vice-President, you are definitely going to lose your ass at this table every Wednesday night, because you can't play poker worth a shit."

So Nixon, who apparently enjoys being pummeled, asks O'Neill about Republican politicians in Massachusetts who might help him in his 1960 Presidential campaign, and O'Neill says he should forget it, because Jack Kennedy's getting in and Massachusetts will be Kennedy's.

"Fuck Kennedy," says Nixon. "We're running against Johnson." And so O'Neill says fine, and he gives him some of the best Republicans in the state, because he feels that is the only right thing to do, having taken so much money off the V.P. up to that point. And then Nixon says, Is there anybody else? And the Speaker says, Yes, there is this one guy who's really a whiz, according to everybody, and the Vice-President says, Yeah, yeah, who is it? And O'Neill says his name is Charles Colson---and Nixon says, Yeah, I'll get him.

Now, that story shows what sort of politician Tip O'Neill really is. He wants everybody to have the best, which makes the game as even as it can be. It's like choosing up sides, you know. You can just send every skinny-assed kid out to right field and hope nobody hits out there, because you know goddamned well everybody's going to hit out there, and then the game's over even before the final put-out---and the kids all pick up their gloves and go home before their mothers come to pick them up.

But O'Neill didn't have a mother to come for him. Rose Tolan died before his first birthday, and so the bond between him and his father was made even stronger than it might have been. In fact, it was his father who encouraged him to run for office the first time and encouraged him to try it again after he had lost---and who taught him over and over, again and again, about power: getting it, using it, keeping it, avoiding its abuse.

O'Neill has been, over the past quarter of a century, a fairly bright and stable beacon for American liberalism---of which there are damned few examples---and he has done so while maintaining a strikingly high political profile. While it is true that for much of his career such an identification was painless for him (given that overwhelmingly Democratic ratio in his district), he was always a man who could get it up morally.

For instance, when he began listening to his five children at home (he went home every weekend until he became the Speaker, back to the same house in which the governor had held his political salons every Sunday afternoon), he reasoned that their logic on the Vietnam war was at least as meritorious as those positions taken by his colleagues on the floor of the House, and he moved against the war---knowing all the while that his constituency was persuaded that he'd gone out of his mind.

O'Neill's position, the product of his children's debates at the weekend dinner tables, was simple: Why were all these kids getting their asses shot off, these kids from his district, from the little towns outside Boston, from the neighborhoods where not many young men matriculated to Harvard and where those who did didn't have to go to Vietnam to get their asses shot off? Why, he wondered---and he heard his children ask, with painful incessancy, why?---and he finally decided that something was wrong, that the basis of the Administration's pursuit of the war, national security, was quintessential bullshit, and so he broke with the President and with the mainstream of the party, and it was as though he had suffered a hernia.

He could not understand how a party in power with the weighty tradition and muscle of the Democrats could wrap itself so tightly in such a strategy---and, what is even more significant, he could not understand how Lyndon Johnson could so passionately embrace a war that was robbing the party of its constituency: the young, the black, the disadvantaged, the impoverished. "You're sending only Democrats to Vietnam," he told the President---ever the politician's politician---and Johnson had simply shook his head and said sadly that he understood that not all his old friends could always be his friends.

O'Neill had been where he had intended to be on all the issues that mattered most to him---with the people, he thought, in the midst of those who kept electing him to Congress year after year, no matter what his views on this or that might be, even on Vietnam. They gave him some static on that, of course, but he effectively countered with his intransigent defense of their inherent right to a piece of the pie. They believed it when he said that "the Government must be responsive and if it is not, it is not a government. It is then an imposition. A government ought to do what is necessary for the people it governs---all the people it governs---and if it doesn't, it's no longer fit to govern."

He was a son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as much as of his father, and from 1953 until 1977---the span of his service in the House before he was elected its Speaker---he had remained true to that legacy. He was firmly persuaded that the energizing factor in a democracy is the least of the brethren---what they need, what they require, like the Irish immigrants to Boston: education, food, money, guidance, jobs, health care---an elevating hand reaching down. It cost only a bit more out of the grand Federal bank roll and, besides, if it didn't go to them, you could be goddamned sure it would go to those who didn't need it---and they would be Republicans, by God.

Anyway, that's how Tip O'Neill saw it. And in 1977, his position was reinforced, even vindicated. For in January 1977, after 24 years in the Congress, without a single vote cast against him, Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., became the 47th Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America---second in the sequence of succession to the Presidency itself (no matter what Alexander Haig might read into the Constitution), one of the most significant personages in the great Federal population and the direct heir to the rich tradition of such giants of the American kingdom as Speaker Clay and Speaker Reed and Speaker Cannon and, right up there on everybody's all-time all-star team, of course, Speaker Rayburn.

Speaker O'Neill.

For years, though not always, he had wanted nothing more---and nothing less---and when he finally held it in his big hands, it was beyond him even then to escape those Sunday afternoons in his father's parlor. He was, he said quite simply, his father's son, politically as well as biologically---a pure product of the party who would not have risen to such heights without the party and could not be expected to further achieve without the party. It was, he said, as simple as that.

And so he began.

Mistuh Speakuh!

The House will be in order.

Mistuh Speakuh!

The clerk will call the roll.

Mistuh Speakuh!

The gentleman is recognized for three minutes.

Mistuh Speakuh!

For what purpose does the gentleman rise?

Mistuh Speakuh!

Will the gentleman yield?

Mistuh Speakuh!

The gentleman does not yield.

Mistuh Speakuh!

The gentleman is not in order.

Mistuh Speakuh! Mistuh Speakuh!

Mistuh Speakuh!

God, how he loved it---how he came so quickly to love it all: the polished gavel and the big chair at the center of the action, the grand suite of offices and the corps of aides and underlings, the limousine and the chauffeur, the deference and the respect, the attention and the acclaim---but what it all amounted to for him and what he cherished above all else was the power, the sheer, unadulterated muscle that was his and his alone, vested in him as Speaker by his fellow Democrats, the majority in the House.

He had often said that without power, all politics is bullshit and, as in all things in O'Neill's life, the power he so deeply treasured became in his hands a tool of the party he equally loved---a means of translating into law and legislation those principles and concepts he had learned so long ago in his father's house in North Cambridge, the legacy of the Democrats: Roosevelt's New Deal. Harry Truman's Fair Deal, Jack Kennedy's New Frontier and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson.

That's what power was for, the Speaker thought---to facilitate the American dream, to help it along, to reach down and lift up, to feed and clothe and house and hire. No one in Washington was more elated by the power that had passed into his hands than Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., unless, of course, it was James Earl Carter, Jr., who spoke well of those same legacies and traditions but who seemed to the Speaker to have come from a different land than his own. O'Neill was respectful of the new President, in public, but he sensed, nevertheless, that there was a distance between them, a gap in their common experience. "The thing I don't like about Carter," the Speaker once told a pal, "is that he doesn't like me. I don't mind that he doesn't like me but that he doesn't like me because I'm a politician. He doesn't like politicians. That's why I don't like him. Hell, I like politicians, don't you?"

In the evenings, he would recall a story for those gathered around his big old desk that once belonged to Grover Cleveland, a story about James Michael Curley---the Boston mayor and Congressman who had gone to jail for his shortcomings---who had come to O'Neill a long time ago to ask for a pension from the state of Massachusetts, not for himself, he said, but for his wife, the woman who, he strongly suggested, was soon to be his widow. There was no better approach to O'Neill than that. He knew it was poison all along. He knew he could get murdered if the slightest hint of his fingerprints were found on the bill---but he did it anyway, and he did it because he thought it was a party matter.

The party was like the Church and marriage. It was forever. So what if the Pope smokes Cuban cigars? What does it matter if your wife watches Death Valley Days? The important thing is that here was a party man in trouble, so where was the party? What could you count on if not the party? Where was the strength of your life, if not in the sinews of the party? Loyalty was his strong suit---and, just as he'd anticipated, the Curley pension bill caused problems for O'Neill. That they were not major problems he attributed to the strength of the party.

And what he knew as well was that Jimmy Carter did not have any idea---no earthly idea at all---as to why the Speaker would have thrust his old wazoo right out there on the old chopping block for such a grizzled old turkey as James Michael Curley, and there was finally no longer anything between them, the Speaker and the President.

Except that the Speaker was mightily grieved when the most inept Democratic Presidential candidate in years, with the exception of George McGovern, whom the Speaker declined even to discuss, lost the White House to this---this movie star who seemed to take such pleasure from saying that he was not a politician.

He would have him for breakfast, the Speaker thought.

It was no wonder, then, that as 1981 began, O'Neill could turn to Ronald Reagan and with much innocence and little guile welcome him to Washington as the "big leagues" of politics. "It's fun," he said. "You're going to love it."

And why not?

After all, no matter what manner of catastrophe may have befallen his fellow Democrats in the Senate, his Democrats in the House were still in a comfortable majority as the year began and he was, after all, still very much their leader. If this new boy in town thought he could translate his campaign rhetoric into laws and legislation that would shape a government outside the Democratic matrix, he had quite a lot of learning to do.

He didn't tell Reagan that, of course. In fact, in the early days of 1981, the Speaker was all lopsided grins and bear hugs and hearty handshakes at the White House, offering broad assurances of cooperation between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. O'Neill didn't threaten Reagan. He didn't have to. He had the votes and the votes gave him the muscle.

But something happened---to the Speaker and to the party traditions he cherished so deeply. By the latter stages of spring, with damnable regularity, week after week, in the papers and on the evening news, in vote after vote on the floor of his House, the new boy in town---and a fellow Hibernian, at that---was handing the Speaker his Irish ass, and he was doing it with Democrats.

And that is the context of his wailing:

My problem, by God, isn't Republicans.

My problem, by God, is Democrats.

He called them Schmemocrats, but he seemed confused by what was happening. Reagan was winning all the big ones---on the budget, on taxes, on everything---and, try as he might, the Speaker's reading of the votes could not persuade him that it would soon change. Whatever had overtaken his colleagues, it would not soon pass, he reasoned, nor was there much he could do to cure it---and so in the spring, he simply shrugged and went off to New Zealand to play golf, which further eroded his hold on his Democrats.

Even some of the loyalists were brittle by then, and a few were whispering snide asides about him---all off the record, of course---while others were planting little rumors around town about his waning effectiveness and competency and legitimacy as the Democratic leader in Congress, hinting around those grand marble halls that, what the hell, he would soon be retiring, anyway. And when he came back from down under, he seemed more addled than ever.

Something had happened, and he could not quite, by God, get a hold on it.

This former thespian who, for Christ's sake, claims he isn't even a politician and promises never to allow politics to influence his White House decisions or behavior---this guy who, for Christ's sake, is from California and likes to ride horses and likes to wear, get this, likes to wear jodhpurs and likes to eat, get this, likes to eat avocados, for Christ's sake, and doesn't even know what the hell parity is---this guy is consistently doing it to him. This guy wants the guts cut out of the New Deal and the Fair Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society and, by God, that's what he gets---in the Speaker's House, by God, with the Speaker's Democrats. This new guy is scrambling and scratching and wheeling and dealing and sweetening every pot within reach like he came right out of Boston politics, for Christ's sake, and everybody is on the Speaker's sweet Irish ass, clamoring at him to do something, and the Speaker, perhaps for the very first time in nearly half a century of politics, doesn't know what the hell to do.

There's this Congressman from Alabama, for instance. Flippo, Ronnie Flippo, that's his name---and he's a Democrat, see, one of the Speaker's guys, right? So there's this pretty big vote coming up and, naturally, with the way things have been going for him, the Speaker calls up this guy Flippo to see where he is and the guy says, sure, sure, he's with the Speaker, and then Reagan calls him up and all of a sudden, Flippo is not such a Democrat anymore, and he votes with the President.

"I've never seen anything like it in my life," the Speaker moans. On this particular evening, he is wearing a tie emblazoned with large American eagles. He is, perhaps, inspired by them. " 'These are the times that try men's souls,' " he says, looking as deeply sad as anyone can ever remember seeing him. "Truly, these are trying times."

And the Republicans, for Christ's sake, are laughing at him, and a few of his Democrats are snickering up their sleeves.

Something had happened and he just couldn't get a handle on it.

He no longer had the votes; ergo, he no longer had the power that had been his grail---the muscle to make the law that shapes the Government in the image of Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy and Johnson---and, what the hell, even Carter. He had become the politician's politician, and now they were laughing at him. For nearly 50 years, he had been at the table, winning some, losing some, playing the cards he'd been dealt, always according to Hoyle---and suddenly, Hoyle had dropped dead and the rules had changed. Aces didn't beat jacks and two pairs would take a full house and everything seemed to be wild and the game had gone straight to hell.

For years and years, when he had been asked about an upcoming vote in the House in which he had a particular interest, the Speaker had always patted his coat pocket, as if to say it was right there.

But it wasn't there anymore.

Try the Gipper's coat.

O'Neill's friends came, singly and in small groups, trooping into his gymnasium of offices, bringing, like the ancient Magi, gifts of golden optimism, sweet-smelling hope and pungently promising assurances that the cards would sooner or later turn for him, that the innings left were more important than the innings played. The Speaker had gladly received them all, like the widow at an Irish wake, and he had listened sympathetically to their well-meaning poker and baseball analogies, always making certain the bar was open for them, grunting occasionally from his big, high-backed leather chair, wanting rather desperately to believe they were right.

But, somehow, he sensed that they were wrong. This guy, this Reagan, had struck a chord across the country and it would be reverberating for years, he believed. Over the Fourth of July holiday, he had gone home to Massachusetts---to his summer cottage on Cape Cod, not far from the Kennedy's at Hyannis---and one morning he had opened The Boston Globe and found a cartoon that seemed to have been published especially for him. In the first panel, a pollster asks an average citizen what he thinks of the President's policies---cutbacks in funding for programs that affect the poor combined with generous tax breaks for the upper classes---and the guy lets loose with a stream of obscenities, indicating his pronounced displeasure. In the next panel, the pollster asks what the fellow thinks about Reagan personally, and he says, "Well, actually, he seems like a helluva nice guy."

There it was Everybody liked Reagan. For Christ's sake, even he liked Reagan. The President is a politician, after all, and the Speaker loves all politicians. There he was, drilled in the lung by some miserable, frazzle-minded kid in love with a teenage actress, and he was making jokes on the way to surgery. Not bad jokes, either. "Honey, I forgot to duck," he said. And to the doctors leaning over his wounded body, "Geez, I hope all you guys are Republicans."

And after that, it was simple. Reagan had put together the old Roosevelt coalition, substituting the new wave of young, middle-class, conservative-leaning whites in the South and the Southwest for the blacks of the old South and the urban North, and he had translated that electoral chemistry of 1980 into the Congressional muscle he required to screw the Speaker in 1981, putting the hammer on the Democrats from those same Southern districts, making a few deals---but not many---here and there (sugar imports, for example, and windfall tax exclusions for the oil folks), and they all came arunning. They were afraid not to be there, with the Gipper, the new messiah of supply-side economics, afraid he'd come down South in 1982 and campaign against them, beat the dog out of them in their own districts. He had them by the cajones---though it should be pointed out that very few of them felt the same way about the old New Deal that the Speaker did.

"It's the people who matter, not the parties," Reagan told them, passing out pounds of jelly beans at the White House (a mess of modern pottage), "and the people want me to do these things. I know that. This is what the people want and you've got to help me."

He did not say, or else!

The President didn't have to threaten. He had the muscle by then---or so it was perceived to be, and, as the Speaker had learned, if they think you've got it, you've got it.

My problem is Democrats, O'Neill moaned, but there was nothing he could do. After Watergate, the Congress had run amuck with reform. Seniority had become a curse. The power was passed around like unemployment checks, and with the passing of experience as a means to power, so also went the basis of discipline, and as the Speaker had learned, without discipline, there was no real leadership.

God, how he yearned for the old days when Speaker Rayburn would have cut their balls off if they went against him; but now, if he tries to strip them---these Schmemocrats---they'll probably just become Republicans, and if enough of them become Republicans, what the hell has he accomplished? The end of his power, by God, that's what. You make Republicans out of the Schmemocrats---the boll-weevil Democrats going down with the Gipper every time---and, presto, you give away the Democratic majority and there goes the Speakership.

The talk in Washington now is that the Speaker is finished---and there are moments when by the emptiness in his Irish eyes and the flat tone in his voice, that talk seems right on the money. It is possible, of course, that Reagan's overreaching in terms of even deeper budget cuts and the awkwardness of his positions on the AWACS deal with Saudi Arabia may have heartened O'Neill.

What is probably closer to the truth is that he will make one more race this coming fall and hope that he doesn't spend his last term in the House as the minority leader. It is a race he deems personally precious, since it will allow him to participate politically in the same campaign with his son. Tommy, now the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and a certain gubernatorial candidate this year. With the clout that the elder O'Neill has accumulated over the years, his muscle will be a significant factor in the governor's race, and seeing Tommy as governor would be a culmination of an aging dream for the Speaker.

During his tenure in Massachusetts politics, both as a member of the Democratic minority and later as its leader in the legislature, everyone talked about how really perfect he would be as governor---and there was always in the back of his mind, even after he went to Washington, the possibility that he would come back and make that race. He never did. Millie, his wife of 40 years, was always thankful that O'Neill never decided to try for the governorship. He is the sort of man, she has told friends, who would have tried to help everybody and, in the process, would have helped no one, least of all himself. He, on the other hand, always regretted that he did not run. Now, vicariously, he has a shot at it through his son---and he has more or less decided that he will be the most assistance to the younger O'Neill by seeking another term in the House.

But whatever may happen in Massachusetts in the autumn, in one O'Neill race or another, the really significant truth about the Speaker is that, God willing or not, he may have become that metaphor he dreads.

O'Neill's power has always resided in the reality of the party---its existence as an entity of ideas and ideals, concepts and policies, dreams and goals. He is the Democratic Party inculcate---a congregation of sons who must pay for the sins of their fathers, the spitting image of all those liberals who do not yet understand that the world around them is changing so fast as to defy their powers of comprehension, not to mention their political instincts. He is the embodiment of a Democratic Party that has somehow lost its constituency. Even the Speaker understands a part of that truth.

"You look back," he said after the first six months of 1981, "and you say to yourself, Who gives a damn what happened to the budget, and who really cares what happens to the tax structure in this country? And you say to yourself, The unions do, don't they?---and the blacks do, don't they?---and all the basically liberal groups in the country do, don't they? But what you quickly discover is that they don't, and that is the legacy of the party. We've done too good a job for all of them."

That is most simplistic, yet it is closer to the truth than any pile of empirical evidence or mathematical probabilities anyone might bring before him. The fact of the matter is that there is no longer any party. Ronald Reagan and the right-wingers might believe otherwise, given the sweet smell of their success in the polls and in the legislature---but the Speaker is right. The Democratic Party has done much too good a job. Its constituency has begun to drift away---the lower class becoming the lower-middle class, the lower-middle class rising upward into the middle class, and so on, ad infinitum. Only the great array of black Americans at the very bottom of the pile, because of racism so deeply etched into the soul of the country, are still instinctively Democrats---they and the upper-class liberals whose primary concern is foreign policy dictated and determined as they see it.

What the Speaker has not yet grasped, despite his impeccable instincts, is that so very few people in the country agree with him that the Government should be a vehicle of progress for its least brethren. That is no longer a question of any significance. The Reaganites have gone on to such explorations as how to open up the Republican Party to poor and disadvantaged black people who have been screwed by the Democrats, who promised more than they could deliver. The liberals have begun to focus simply on human rights, an essentially bipartisan issue, the guts of which can be argued pro and con no matter who is in the White House. Big Labor is looking only for an extension of inflation, realizing that within the rank and file there is not yet one single card-carrying union man or woman who would dare to speak up and out against the deadly spiral of wages and prices. Not a single one that anyone has yet been able to discover. There is no more party---not for the Speaker and not for the President---there is only a broad array of narrow, economic interests, spiced with such pseudomoral splinters as abortion, pro and con, tits and ass on television, pro and con, Federal money for parochial schools pro and con, the inherent virtue of the Panama Canal as an American enterprise and the inherent evil of anyone whose first name is Ayatollah. The issues are simple: the price of gasoline at the pump, the price of hamburger over the counter and the price of government, wherever it's paid---which, of course, is everywhere.

The Speaker's party is dead, and so is the President's. Neither will be glad to hear that, and both will vehemently deny it. Both will, in fact, over the months to come, insist that the traditions on which they have built their careers---one over the long term, one as a Johnny-come-lately---will resurrect themselves, will pull themselves back to a level of acceptance and respectability that will assure the continuum of the republic as they have come to know it and love it.

I think they're wrong---but what is even more grievous is that the Speaker probably understands and cannot adjust, will not adjust, because there is no room in his concept of the party to make that adjustment. You can damn well count on the hot numbers of 1982 and 1984 to adjust---even the old dragons of the party in the House who will go home to face a constituency beggared in by that grand master of persuasion, the host of Death Valley Days, and who already will have begun to trim their sails before their plane lands on the district terra firma; and the guys who see the White House in their future will begin talking about a new Democratic Party, more responsive to the needs of all those old Democrats who voted for Nixon and Ford and, in spades, for the Gipper, the old Democrats who can't seem to understand that much of what has made the country good is a product of the Speaker's party, because what they see are gas pumps that are not even capable of registering the true price of their purchase and must deal in half-truths, like much of everything else these days. But the Speaker? The Tipper? He's going to galumph along as always---the old party man, his father's son, James Michael Curley's posthumous hurrah, and the boll weevils will continue to cut his balls off---the supreme reversal of roles, Nixon's ultimate revenge for the Charles Colson reference.

It was the close of a rather spectacular day in late September, and as the bells of the Washington Cathedral pealed a crystal vespers from high atop Mount Saint Alban, the capital of the United States of America settled itself in for the evening---taking a load off its Federal feet, pouring itself a generous drink, setting its tables for dinner and quietly basking in the burnished glow of an amazing sunset that was working its magic democratically all across the city, from the cluttered enclaves of Georgetown to the stately rise of Capitol Hill to the grit and the grime of the ghettos, painting its steeples and statues, its ruins and relics, its monuments and memorials a soft and subtle pink.

The moment had finally arrived---that marvelous and unmistakable moment when the changing of the seasons becomes nearly palpable, that annual but unofficial and unrecorded solstice when summer and autumn merge at some pleasantly indefinable cusp, mutually accommodating the best the other has to offer, blending endings and beginnings into a smooth, rich mix of both: the last batch of gin and tonic, for instance, with the first faint whiffs of wood smoke.

On Connecticut Avenue---just a block away from the sidewalk where the crazy kid shot the Gipper---the limousines were waiting sleekly at the curb, their drivers passing the time of day, polishing, rubbing, standing, reading. Inside an old apartment building, much of the city's liberal bloc had gathered in the 18-room sprawl of a salon owned by Jane Dawson, said to be in hot pursuit of the Perle Mesta label, to pay homage to Senator Paul Tsongas, the other Senator from Massachusetts, on the occasion of the publication of his new book on the future of liberalism in America. Kennedy was there, and so was Frank Church and almost everybody who's anybody in that easily identifiable crowd---and so was the Speaker: looking incongruously gaunt for his strapping frame, a little tired from the wearisome task of guiding a party without party discipline.

Besides Kennedy, it was O'Neill who got the most attention. Smoothly, almost languidly, he turned compliments back on themselves, remembered the names of people he hadn't seen in months and put a fatherly arm around Tsongas, the son of a Greek immigrant, when the pictures were taken.

And when he was leaving, and stepping into the glow of the early evening, he was asked whether or not he might himself write a book.

"About what?" he muttered.

"Well, what about Tsongas' subject?" the interviewer said. "The future of liberalism?"

"Science-fiction, huh?" the Speaker said. No smile.

And in that magnificent light of the merging of the seasons, Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., himself turned pink. One more Washington monument painted by time.

"In Gaelic ... O'Neill means champion; but in Washington, O'Neill means a story."