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##### January 7, 1994 OBITUARY ## Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., a Democratic Power in the House for Decades, Dies at 81 ##### By MARTIN TOLCHIN, Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 Democrats and Republicans today bade a warm farewell to Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr., the gregarious and irrepressibly liberal Bostonian who symbolized the Democratic Party through much of the 1980's as Speaker of the House. Mr. O'Neill, 81, died Wednesday night of cardiac arrest at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Since his retirement from the House in 1987, he had lived in Washington and Harwich Port, Mass., on Cape Cod. President Clinton issued a statement today paying tribute to "a beautiful life well lived," and ordered Government flags lowered to half-staff until Mr. O'Neill's burial on Monday. "Tip O'Neill was the nation's most prominent, powerful and loyal champion of working people," the President's statement said. "He loved politics and government because he saw politics and government could make a difference in people's lives. And he loved people most of all." The current Speaker of the House, Thomas S. Foley of Washington, called Mr. O'Neill "the model of what a representative and a leader of the American people should be." Today, the capital's Republicans largely agreed. "Partisanship was put aside, and we could be the best of friends," the House minority leader, Robert H. Michel of Illinois, said of Mr. O'Neill today on the ABC-TV News program "Good Morning America." The Senate Republican leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, was one of Mr. O'Neill's most biting political critics in the 1980's. But today, on the CBS News program "This Morning," Mr. Dole called his old rival "the Congressman's Congressman." Mr. O'Neill, he said, "certainly will go down in history as one of the great political leaders of our time." He was also one of the last and least reconstructed liberals from the cadre of Roosevelt-era New Dealers who led Congress and the nation through most the 1960's and 1970's. A Proud Liberal, Fashionable or Not Mr. O'Neill was an old-style politician and proud of it, a House Speaker comfortable with power, who clung to his brand of liberalism long after it ceased to be fashionable, even among his fellow Democrats. An early opponent of the Vietnam War, Mr. O'Neill took strong positions on many controversial issues. He was the Congressional leader who pushed hardest for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon and later, as Speaker, put his prestige on the line for Congressional reform. Mr. O'Neill was the Speaker from 1977 to 1987, during the Presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both of whom ran against entrenched Washington officials and considered Mr. O'Neill the ultimate insider. But although he reached the heights of political power and mingled easily with national and world leaders, Mr. O'Neill was perhaps best known for his advice to colleagues to attend carefully to their constituents, because, as he put it, "All politics is local." He was a large, joyous, generous-spirited man with a bulbous nose, yellowed white hair that flopped over his forehead and an ever-present cigar. He was a rabid sports fan, frequently attending baseball games and boxing matches, a skilled poker player and a devoted but struggling golfer. To Mr. O'Neill, who spoke of the Democratic Party with near-religious fervor, the party was the one of the cities, the working people, the poor, the needy, the unemployed, the sick and the disinherited. "And no way are we ever going to let them down," he would insist. He opposed a balanced budget because, he said, it would "dismantle the programs that I've been working for as an old liberal." When President Reagan persuaded Congress to curtail many of Mr. O'Neill's favorite social programs, the Speaker lamented that the Democrats had been too successful at their work. He said the Democratic programs had created a broad middle class whose members had forgotten the many benefits they had received from government -- in education and housing, for example -- and wanted to pull up the ladder behind them. Republicans made Mr. O'Neill a target of their 1980 and 1982 campaigns, portraying him as a bloated old pol with outdated liberal ideas. They produced a television commercial that featured an actor who resembled the Speaker laughing off warnings that his car was low on fuel, until the vehicle finally ground to a halt. The announcer then proclaimed, "The Democrats have run out of gas." Mr. O'Neill remained steadfast. "I haven't changed my philosophy," he frequently told reporters, with whom he met daily. He made no apologies for the kind of politics he had mastered in Boston. As Speaker, he rewarded friends and punished enemies with the help of a long memory but few grudges. O'Neill and Carter: Different Democrats Mr. O'Neill's became Speaker the year Mr. Carter took office as President. About all they had in common was their political party. Mr. Carter, an emotionally taut Georgian with a scant power base among Democrats, had reached the White House as an anti-politician, an outsider who publicly disdained Washington insiders personified by the gregarious Speaker, who had worked his way up from ward politics. "Our first conversation," the Speaker recalled, "he told me how he had handled the Georgia Legislature, by going over their heads directly to the people." Mr. O'Neill said he responded by referring to the 289 House Democrats in the majority. "I said: 'Hey, wait a minute. You have 289 guys up there who know their districts pretty well. They ran against the Administration, and they wouldn't hesitate to run against you.' "He said, 'Oh, really?' " The two men did not speak the same language. Mr. O'Neill said he had once told the President, "Keep your left hand high." But the Speaker found that Mr. Carter was no boxing fan and was unfamiliar with the boxer's classic defensive posture. "He didn't know what I was talking about," Mr. O'Neill said. But as a loyal Democrat Mr. O'Neill felt morally bound to help Mr. Carter whenever possible. An autographed photograph from the President was inscribed, "To my friend Tip O'Neill, thanks for another lesson in good politics, Jimmy Carter, June 1977." But in 1980, when the Republicans won the White House and the Senate, and cut deeply into the House Democratic majority, the Speaker privately blamed the President, believing him inept. Today, Mr. Carter said in a statement that Mr. O'Neill "personified the finest of American politics." "Of all the people I have known, Tip O'Neill knew best how to enjoy politics," he said. O'Neill and Reagan: Different Irishmen Mr. O'Neill never shied from wielding power, although he frequently lamented that the power of the Speaker had declined since the days of Sam Rayburn, the Texas Democrat whose word became law during his 17 years in the post, ending in 1961. That was when a Speaker could get binding commitments from committee chairmen; it was before the diffusion of power that Mr. O'Neill himself worked to bring about. From 1981 to 1987, Mr. O'Neill led the loyal opposition to President Reagan, a man with whom he shared an Irish heritage, an interest in sports and an outgoing personality. But the two men had a profound philosophical disagreement about government: the Speaker regarded government as the solution to many social problems, as an agent of social change; Mr. Reagan regarded it as a problem in itself, interfering in the lives of Americans and impeding economic and social progress. The Speaker also found Mr. Reagan to be appallingly ignorant of the intricacies of government; indeed, he called him the most ignorant man who had ever occupied the White House. Publicly, Mr. O'Neill called Mr. Reagan "Herbert Hoover with a smile" and "a cheerleader for selfishness." Early in his time as Speaker, when his bill for a new House code of ethics was in trouble, he lumbered to the well of the House and cut through the debate on the crucial provision, a limitation on outside income. The speech was vintage O'Neill. Sure, he said, he knew what it was to be strapped. Wasn't he the one who had fought for a raise of $12,900 a year in Congressional pay? But in exchange he had promised the American people "the strongest code of ethics that this country has ever seen." The issue, after Watergate, he thundered, was "restoring public confidence in this Congress as an institution, restoring confidence in its membership." He looked out at an audience that included the 80 Democrats for whom he had campaigned the previous fall, the scores of members he had appointed to the nine select and special committees over which he had jurisdiction, and the more than 200 beneficiaries of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Fund, for which he had been the chairman. His listeners knew that the Speaker had a great voice in their committee assignments, the scheduling of floor action on bills, the disbursing of campaign money and the small favors that can make or break a Congressional career. Mr. O'Neill called in his chits. The result was a foregone conclusion. The vote was 344 to 79. Four years later, when 44 Democrats joined in voting to overturn a ruling of the chair, the kind of parliamentary decision that is the lifeblood of the House, Mr. O'Neill wrote them that he was "extremely disappointed" and obliquely warned that "disciplinary measures" were under consideration. Such measures could affect a member's committee assignments. He added that he felt that such measures were unnecessary. No future Democratic votes against the judgment of the chair were noted. Tip (as in Foul Tip) Tastes Politics at 15 Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. was born on Dec. 9, 1912, in a working-class area of Cambridge, Mass., which later became part of his Congressional district. His father was a member of the Cambridge City Council. His mother died when he was a child, and his father remarried. He picked up the nickname Tip from a baseball player, James Edward O'Neill of the old St. Louis Browns, who had the knack of hitting foul tips until the pitcher walked him. So Mr. O'Neill's boyhood friends gave him the name. The Speaker was an inveterate fan of the Boston Red Sox. Educated in Roman Catholic schools, he broke into politics at 15, campaigning for Al Smith in his 1928 Presidential campaign against Herbert C. Hoover. "All I knew was that Al Smith was an Irish Catholic and we had been suppressed all our lives," he said. Four years later, he helped get out the vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt. "You'd have Mrs. Murphy ready to get into an automobile to take her to the polls," he recalled. "And then you'd go to the next house, Mrs. Sweeney, and you'd have the car come for Mrs. Sweeney. We walked the streets to get the votes out." As a senior at Boston College, Mr. O'Neill lost his first campaign, for the Cambridge City Council, by 150 votes. But he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1936, where he rose to Speaker, and where he remained until 1952, when he was elected to the United States House. He won the seat vacated by John F. Kennedy on Kennedy's election to the Senate. It was also the seat once held by James M. Curley, the Boston politician whose career was the basis of the Edwin O'Connor novel "The Last Hurrah." A Protege Of a Future Speaker Mr. O'Neill and his wife, Mildred, decided not to move their family to Washington when Mr. O'Neill was first elected, and they did not go back on this agreement until Mr. O'Neill became Speaker, a quarter century later. Until then, Mr. O'Neill roomed with Representative Edward P. Boland, Democrat of Massachusetts, his closest friend. Their refrigerator was said to be stocked almost exclusively with beer. In Washington, Mr. O'Neill became a protege of Representative John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip who went on to become House Speaker in 1962. Mr. McCormack introduced him to the House power structure as part of the informal "board of education" meetings that Speaker Rayburn held after hours for Congressional leaders and friends. By his second term in the House, Mr. O'Neill had won a coveted seat on the Rules Committee. Mr. O'Neill's opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967, when he was a leader of the Rules Committee, was a decision affected by the anti-war feelings of his own children (three boys and two girls) as well as among the intellectual communities at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his own district. His blue-collar constituents, who made up the bulk of his support, were overwhelmingly in favor of the American role in the war. But Mr. O'Neill wrote in his autobiography, "Man of the House" (Random House, 1987), that he had come to the conclusion that the conflict was a civil war and that American involvement in it was morally wrong. When President Lyndon B. Johnson called him to the White House to explain his change of position, Mr. O'Neill recalled, he told the President, "In my heart and in my conscience I believe your policy is wrong." Johnson accepted his position, Mr. O'Neill said, when he found out that the Congressman had not changed it for political reasons. But his opposition to the war did eventually reap some political dividends: he won the trust and support of younger House members who shared his position on Vietnam, and they became important allies as Mr. O'Neill rose in power. In 1971, having supported Hale Boggs of Louisiana as majority leader, Mr. O'Neill was selected by Mr. Boggs to be majority whip, an appointive post. After Mr. Boggs died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1972, Mr. O'Neill was elected majority leader. Mr. O'Neill, as the whip under Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma, was the Democrats' strong man; he did the difficult things. He was instrumental in bringing changes that stripped the committee chairmen of their autocratic power, and he was the Democratic leader who pushed hardest for the investigation and impeachment of President Nixon, who resigned before a vote on impeachment was held. Mr. O'Neill was elected Speaker by acclamation in December 1976, when he was 64, and took office the next month. "The wonder of it is that such a decent, compassionate man could rise to the top of a place like this," said Representative Benjamin S. Rosenthal, Democrat of Queens. But Mr. O'Neill was not without lapses of judgment. He was among many House members who accepted favors from Tongsun Park, the South Korean lobbyist and intelligence agent. In 1973 and '74, Mr. O'Neill permitted Mr. Park to sponsor two lavish birthday parties in his honor, thereby bolstering Mr. Park's prestige. Similarly, some questioned Mr. O'Neill's judgment when he intervened in an application for Federal money made by James P. Wilmot, who had been chairman of the Democratic Party's Finance Committee. The Speaker telephoned the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Carla A. Hills, in July 1975, asking when there would be a decision on Mr. Wilmot's request for $2.2 million in annual rent subsidies for a housing project. Such inquiries tend to be viewed as requests for special consideration. In any event, Mr. Wilmot got his subsidies. Although he had close ties to the Kennedy family, Mr. O'Neill remained neutral in the party's Presidential nomination fight between Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and President Carter in 1980. He played a role behind the scenes at the Democratic National Convention, however, negotiating an agreement that led to Mr. Kennedy's reluctant endorsement of the President. Financial Security From a Book Until his retirement, the O'Neills maintained their home in Cambridge, enabling the Speaker to keep in touch with the city's intellectual community as well as its neighborhoods. A Saturday morning ritual when Mr. O'Neill was in Cambridge consisted of stops at the Chinese laundry, the Italian food store and the Star Market in Porter Square. In retirement, Mr. O'Neill divided his time between a house in Harwich Port on Cape Cod and an apartment in Washington and spent some holidays at a condominium in Florida. The Speaker's oldest son and namesake, Thomas P. O'Neill 3d, a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, is in public relations in Boston. Another son, Christopher, is a Washington lawyer, and a third, Michael, is in business in Cambridge. One daughter, Susan, has her own business in Washington, and another, Rosemary, is a political officer for the State Department. Mr. O'Neill is also survived by his wife and eight grandchildren. A family spokeswoman said the funeral would be held next Monday at St. John's Church in Cambridge, Reuters reported. On Saturday and Sunday, his body will lie in state in Boston's State House. After suffering colon cancer, which led to a colostomy, Mr. O'Neill made public service advertisements in which he joined athletes and movie stars in talking candidly about having cancer. Unlike some politicians who amassed a fortune, Mr. O'Neill retired from the Speakership in relatively modest circumstances. His book, "Man of the House," however, written with William Novak, became a best seller that made him financially secure. Mr. O'Neill also made commercials for a credit card company and a motel chain. Mr. O'Neill's book was a treasure trove of stories, including some about his political campaign for the Cambridge City Council while he was a senior at Boston College. He finished ninth in a field of 60 candidates, of whom the top eight were elected. The race taught him a lifelong lesson. He had not campaigned in his own neighborhood, which he had taken for granted and where he made a poor showing. In a post-mortem on the campaign, Mr. O'Neill's father told him what he had learned in a lifetime of politics: "All politics is local."
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