Book Review A man for all houses

By Ray O’Hanlon

TIP O’NEILL AND THE DEMOCRATIC CENTURY, by John A. Farrell. Little, Brown. 776 pp. $29.95.

When you set out to write the first full-scale biography of one of the giants of 20th Century American politics, it helps to be from Boston, a town where American politics, both its style and substance, was arguably invented.

But John Aloysius Farrell, "Jack" to the broader world, is not a Boston native. He hails from Long Island and he cut his academic teeth far from the Charles River, at the University of Virginia.

But Farrell’s qualifications for the task of nailing down the life and times of Thomas "Tip" O’Neill did improve after that. He is the Washington news editor for the Boston Globe and thus covers two bases in one: He works for a paper published in America’s most political town, and he is based in America’s political capital.

But even that wasn’t quite enough. The late Tip O’Neill was a big man in every sense and a man who would have to be writ big. Farrell, whose newspaper job can be time consuming, to say the last, needed time, lots of it.

It has taken Farrell more than six years to research and write "Tip O’Neill and The Democratic Century."

But that’s all water under the bridge now. The book is being published today and Tip O’Neill’s continued selling power will bear much of the daily burden from here on in. The "Man of the House," as O’Neill called himself in his autobiography, is still on the job.

This is Farrell’s first book, but it is not one that he dreamed up all on his own.

"It was December 1994 and Tip had died the previous January. I was lining up to go into a White House reception. Susan O’Neill, Tip’s daughter, was behind me. She asked me how come nobody was interested in her father’s papers at Boston College," Farrell said.

Farrell made phone calls to throw around the idea of a biography of the man who had filled the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives through some of the Democratic Party’s toughest years in Congress.

"The reaction was that it was a great idea, but that was only the start. I spent the best part of the next year putting together a proposal and sample chapters."

Farrell was, however, hooked on O’Neill and there was never a chance that the mountain of work ahead — he would eventually conduct more than 300 interviews — was going to put him off.

"The nice thing about writing a biography for a first book is that the plot is already there for you. But it was still a lot harder than I thought it would be. Tip was a big guy and the first final draft of the book reflected that. It was 900 pages long," Farrell said.

Farrell, with encouragement from his editors at the Globe, began touring various archives and presidential libraries. But he found himself spending the bulk of his research time at Boston College and in the library of a president who was in many respects O’Neill’s Republican Party mirror image, Ronald Reagan.

O’Neill and Reagan were men of the same generation, Reagan the elder by a couple of years. Much of the politics of this country during the 1980s, the years of the "Reagan Revolution," were in fact the result of the political collisions and compromises of these two political giants, Irish Americans both.

Both men could be sentimental and equally as tough as nails. As O’Neill would put it, politicians were enemies up until six o’clock in the evening and friends afterward.

Sometimes, however, even that rule was there to be broken, if only for a while.

At one point in the book, there is a story of O’Neill and Reagan upstairs in the White House on Reagan’s 70th birthday. The two men are outdoing each other with Irish jokes, so much so that Reagan, who rarely drank, ordered up a bottle of champagne. It was lunchtime.

With the champagne flowing, Reagan proposed a sentimental Irish toast. As recounted to Farrell by Reagan staffer Mike Deaver, this is what happened next: "It was an old Irish toast he had heard somewhere. Well, Tip’s eyes were all filled up, you know, it was just incredible. And they left the dining room with their arms around each other’s waist and Reagan took him down to the elevator and Tip went out on the South Lawn and beat the shit out of Reagan with the press."

At times, though, the approach was more subtle.

"One of the more interesting things I discovered during my research was how O’Neill worked on Reagan in a way that had Reagan ultimately playing a central supporting role in the emergence of the Anglo Irish Agreement," Farrell said.

Farrell’s book reveals how O’Neill prodded Reagan into persuading Margaret Thatcher that her inflexible "Out, Out, Out" approach to Northern Ireland was a dead end, and that flexibility was vital if any political progress was to be made.

It also throws light on an other GOP politician who rarely has been afforded public accolades. William Clark, at one point Reagan’s national security adviser, is described in the book as a "key figure" in helping to move the political situation in Ireland away from the paralysis and confrontation that followed the 1981 hunger strikes.

"Clark was a big, big promoter of U.S. involvement in Ireland," Farrell said.

With his book finally on the shelves, Farrell is now gearing himself up for an extensive signing and speaking your. The reviews are beginning to come in and they are mostly very positive.

"Readable is the word I’m proudest of in the reviews so far," Farrell said.