Tip O’Neill

Thomas Tip O'Neill lost his mother when he was nine months old and was raised largely by a French-Canadian housekeeper in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his father, a bricklayer turned city councilman, remarried when Tip was eight. He grew up in a neighborhood called Old Dublin, captained the basketball team at St. John High School, and worked his way through Boston College, graduating in 1936. His only election defeat came that same year, running for Cambridge City Council as a college senior; he assumed his neighbors would vote for their own and lost anyway, a loss he later credited with teaching him the rule he built a career on, all politics is local. He won a seat in the Massachusetts House months later, at twenty-four.

O'Neill spent fifty-one years in elected office and never lost another race. He rose through the Massachusetts legislature to become its first Democratic speaker, then in 1952 won the Cambridge congressional seat John F. Kennedy had just vacated and held it through sixteen reelections. In the House he backed the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s, broke with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam in 1967, and called for Richard Nixon's resignation during Watergate. Elected speaker in January 1977, he served ten years, the longest unbroken tenure in the office's history, and spent most of them as Ronald Reagan's chief domestic antagonist in Washington, a rumpled, heavyset liberal squared off against an actor who had spent decades disliking the New Deal O'Neill never stopped defending.

The public war with Reagan had a private truce nobody advertised at the time. O'Neill said the two of them were friends after six o'clock, swapped Irish stories, and negotiated the 1983 rescue of Social Security together even while he was calling Reagan's tax program one big Christmas party for the rich and, less carefully, the most ignorant man ever to hold the office. That capacity for holding both things at once cut in more than one direction. O'Neill also gave his tacit blessing to Charlie Wilson's covert funding of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets, a Reagan Doctrine operation his own party generally associated with the president he spent his career opposing, money that outlived the Cold War it was fought in, in ways nobody in the room at the time could have priced.

He retired in 1987, wrote the bestseller Man of the House, and spent his last years turning up in Miller Lite ads and a Cheers cameo, trading on a public persona, jowly, Boston-accented, unmistakably large, that had outgrown the office itself. He died of cardiac arrest in Boston on January 5, 1994, and President Clinton called him the era's most prominent champion of working people. Boston named a Big Dig tunnel and a federal building after him, and Boston College named its library for him. The comity he and Reagan modeled, real dealmaking across a real ideological gap, has become the thing his successors in both parties are most often measured against and found not to have.

Tip O’Neill's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Man of the House book
  Bestselling autobiography written after retirement 1987
• Social Security Amendments of 1983 law
  Bipartisan rescue of Social Security negotiated as speaker with Reagan 1983
• Voting Rights Act of 1965 law
  Supported as a Massachusetts congressman 1965
• Friends of Ireland company
  Congressional group he co-founded to back Northern Ireland peace efforts 1981

• December 9, 1912 aged 0 Born in North Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 1936 aged ~24 Loses his only election, a Cambridge City Council race, then wins a Massachusetts House seat the same year
• 1949 aged ~37 Becomes the Massachusetts House's first Democratic speaker
• 1952 aged ~40 Elected to Congress, succeeding John F. Kennedy's old seat
• 1967 aged ~55 Breaks with President Johnson over the Vietnam War
• January 4, 1977 aged 64 Elected Speaker of the House
• 1983 aged ~71 Negotiates the bipartisan Social Security rescue with Reagan
• January 3, 1987 aged 74 Retires as Speaker after ten years
• January 5, 1994 aged 81 Dies of cardiac arrest in Boston

• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. opposed
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. succeeded the seat of
• Ted Kennedy 1932–2009
  Massachusetts senator who shaped decades of health care and civil rights legislation. co-founded Friends of Ireland with