Man of the House, by Tip O'Neill with William Novak
Russell, Francis
BOOK REVIEWS T hey gush from the presses, these 1 autobiographies of the noted and the notorious, details gabbled into a tape-recorder, then written up by an able hack. Formerly such books were...
...He liked people, he liked doing favors, he liked get-togethers and cardgames and beer and baseball and football...
...In the thirties mail was not delivered on Christmas Day nor did firemen work 104 hours a week and policemen eighty-four, though this may have been true before 1914...
...Tip tipped in a generation later...
...Unlike the Honey Fitzes and the Jim Curleys, he did not have to elbow his way out of the gutter...
...But when Jack Kennedy, after several lackadaisical terms in the national House, made his long-planned bid for the United States Senate, Tip took aim instead at the vacant congressional seat, a safe seat in a district so Democratic that it might be considered a rotten borough...
...There were plenty before his day even if most of them didn't get elected to the final clubs...
...The new Grub Street, become Madison Avenue, is decidedly profitable...
...He was a backslapper...
...But Tip's recollections and Novak's researches at times go blatantly astray...
...Lee Iacocca's autobiography "with William Novak" has sold into millions...
...Here's a telegram, Sir...
...When he went to vote in the primaries, the officials could not at first find a Republican ballot...
...In the end even his primary powers of observation seem to have crossed him up...
...There is no hint of any such activities in his dictated recollections...
...I think he'd make a great president...
...Please send me a copy of your latest catalogue...
...At the highest level even the "with" is omitted...
...In Washington he made a point of knowing everyone on Capitol Hill...
...Formerly such books were subtitled "as told to," but now the form is "with...
...Tip himself is an epigone, the last of the line of Boston Irish-American politicians dating back to the gaslight era: Honey Fitz, Knocko McCormack, Smiling Jim Donovan, Pea Jacket Maguire, Up-Up Kelley, Diamond Jim Timulty, others no longer recalled...
...But for Tip the Kennedys were not real Democrats...
...He gives no sign of it...
...Curley liked to stun the gaping ward-heelers by quoting Shakespeare...
...Long before Tip was born, Boston had had its first two Irish-born mayors, Hugh O'Brien and Patrick Collins, men of competence and integrity...
...607 pages Liberty Fund edition, 1986 NEW Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality Acton focuses on moral and political issues as they relate to religion and to liberal Catholicism...
...In Man of the House men are always "guys...
...He tells a wistful story of taking a summer job in 1927 as a groundskeeper at Harvard and from this lowly position watching the class-day festivities as the "privileged confident Ivy League Yankees" in their smart summer clothes drank (then illegal) champagne...
...Rather they were their own party...
...Whether such jobs performed a useful function or not, they were a political constant...
...Edward Norman, Cambridge University Essays in the History of Liberty The unifying theme of Volume I is Lord Acton's famous work on the history of freedom...
...T ip's mind never stretched beyond 1 its early political horizon...
...Geraldine Ferraro is "the bright, attractive woman who believes in the same principles as I do...
...7440 N. Shadeland Avenue...
...The Massachusetts State House is a postgraduate school of practical political science...
...The old chestnut of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown being burned down by an anti-Catholic mob bobs up...
...I once knew an elderly Irish-American of that district who had met and liked Coolidge and had perversely turned Republican...
...There, in channels often subterranean, Tip grew knowledgeable in the techniques of political manipulation, the tricks of the trade-off...
...When he became of age, he declaims, there was no middle class, "only a handful of rich people at the top, and millions of poor people at the bottom...
...All orders must be prepaid in U.S...
...Novak has Tip say that "jobs for me would always be the main issue...
...Confident, knowledgeable, and persuasive, he became Democratic whip, then Speaker of the House, a presence, a familiar of Presidents, third in the line of presidential succession, a good pal too, a more than deft parliamentarian...
...And with that, the story of Tip O'Neill, like Jack-a-Nory's, is done...
...At 18 he campaigned for Al Smith...
...Yes, it happened, in 1843...
...Curley gives his own version...
...But Tip and Novak are innocently unaware that all the convent school pupils were from upper-class Protestant Yankee families, sent there to learn manners and French and to avoid the vulgarities of the public schools...
...Around the corner a Novak...
...His introduction to literature seems to have come from James Michael Curley, a man to whom Tip devotes an admiring chapter...
...Joe Barnes wrote Crusade in Europe, while sticking in a few of his red hen-tracks...
...If champagne was being drunk in the Yard that day it was probably bootlegged by Joe Kennedy for the fifteenth anniversary of his 1912 class...
...776 pages Liberty Fund edition, 1988 Individual Volumes: Hardcover $15.00 Paperback $ 7.50 Three Volume Set: Hardcover $45.00 Paperback $22.50 We pay book postage rate...
...And he grew to be an expert in the mechanics and machinations of government...
...Tip's life—as retailed by Novak—is, frankly, ennuyeuse...
...Once nominated in that district, Tip was assured of his election and future elections...
...Curley's mansion on Jamaicaway never had purple shamrocks painted on the blinds...
...Has he ever read a book in adult life...
...No insider revelations, no new and revealing aspects of the old scene, just incidentals...
...Because Tip is a political presence the book has been played up, become a best-seller...
...Not since Hoover have we had a President who wrote his own speeches except perhaps and occasionally Truman...
...Did he ever cross the threshold of the Museum of Fine Arts...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...Enclosed is my check or money order made payable to Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Every Massachusetts politician will buy a copy, and many a pol outside Massachusetts as well...
...He played golf...
...dollars...
...Gregarious, sharp-witted, single-minded, oversized, and affable, he rode the Democratic escalator with few stops along the way...
...And that's what we get and deserve in the end...
...The Acton Legacy" is composed of excerpts from his remarkable letters and unpublished notes...
...I really love that guy," Novak quotes Tip...
...One of the more expansive "with-its," Novak has also written Mayflower Madam, the dial-a-date call-girl syndrome, and now another best-seller with Tip O'Neill's Man of the House...
...One asks in return: "Prithee, why not...
...The world of Tip O'Neill...
...A major resource for academic readers — a collection like this has been needed for very many years — but also a work that will be useful for general readers concerned with some of the seminal ideals of modern western culture...
...Some day," Tip remarked to Novak, "I vowed, I would make sure that my own people could go to places like that...
...From those little streets he absorbed politics by osmosis...
...And that's what we get and deserve in the end Around the corner, a vanished friend...
...588 pages Liberty Fund edition, 1985 Essays in the Study and Writing of History Volume II covers Acton's distinguished study of history and his belief that it had to be impartial and based on moral judgment...
...A few years later he got himself elected to the state legislature...
...Yet such nonsense as Harvard's exclusiveness keeps cropping up in Man of the House...
...Nor did Curley interrupt a recitation of the Lord's Prayer to say what Tip has him say...
...It so happens that this was said much better by Harding in his forgotten inaugural address (which he wrote himself): "Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time to do for it too little...
...MAN OF THE HOUSE: THE LIFE AND POLITICAL MEMOIRS OF SPEAKER TIP O'NEILL Tip O'Neill with William Novak/Random House/$19.95 Francis Russell 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 Novak's "with" books have an interchangeable style, modeled—so it seems —from old Boston & Maine timetables...
...He talks, a grub-Streeter records and then fills in the gaps and interstices with scraps from other books...
...Purple Shamrock was the title Joe Dinneen gave to his Curley biography...
...So Tip O'Neill is "with" the political tradition...
...It even carried Calvin Coolidge to the White House...
...Tomorrow," I say, "I will call on Jim, Just to show that I've been thinking of him...
...Did he ever attend a lecture at the Ford Hall Forum on Beacon Hill...
...Nothing in between...
...The celebrated reverse phrase of the Kennedy inaugural is Sorensen's awkward crib from the Authorized Version: "Ask not what your country can do for you...
...After ten years as speaker he retired...
...The actual house had wooden shutters with a shamrock design incised, as anybody can see who drives by today...
...But with the onset of the Depression the escalator clanked to a grinding halt and the Democratic escalator took over...
...From him Tip learned the elemental lesson of the wards, beginning his career with the slogan "Work and Wages...
...Tip was born in 1912...
...The phrase "You've got to be kidding" recurs like a hiccup...
...Growing up among the massed three-deckers of North Cambridge's Celtic matrix, Tip claims he knew he was Irish before he knew he was American...
...Around the corner!—yet miles away...
...The world according to Tip...
...Ah, well...
...Indeed he may even have read some of the plays...
...Dept W-101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 Please send me: Selected W things of Lord Acton Quantity Ordered Title Price Per Edition Copy The Complete Set Hardcover $45.00 Total Price Essays in the History of Liberty Paperback 22.50 Hardcover $15.00 Paperback 7.50 Essays in the Study and Writing of History Hardcover $15.00 Paperback 7.50 Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality Hardcover $15.00 Paperback 7.50 Subtotal Indiana residents add 5% sales tax Total THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 37...
...Ikeep wondering just what it was Tip subsequently did to make life possible for Irish-descended students at Harvard...
...Profiles in Courage, as we know, was written by Ted Sorensen, though even then Joe Kennedy managed to wangle the Pulitzer Prize for the book his son never wrote...
...There would have been no NINA signs while those men governed Boston nor would they have existed under Boston's rogue-mayor, Honey Fitz, elected in 1905...
...He writes "with a punch," that is he sprinkles his pages with shopworn colloquialisms, solecisms, and mildly titillating scatologies...
...He was personable...
...Once there had been a Republican escalator in Massachusetts that carried the elect from the house to the senate, to speaker, to governor, and then to a State Street counting-house...
...Jim died today...
...Tip admits he did not like Bobby Kennedy and seems almost neutral about Jack, but Ted is something else...
...The O'Neills lived comfortably in blue-collar North Cambridge, remote from Harvard, where his father as a city councilor and Francis Russell is author, most recently, of The Knave of Boston and Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters (Quinlan Press...
...Marx couldn't have said it better...
...All three volumes NOW available Libert"ss/Lthertyassics SELECTED WRITINGS OF LORD ACTON in Three Volumes By John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton Edited by J. Rufus Fears, Boston University Iodrd Acton was among the most significant figures and illustrious historians in the intellectual life of nineteenth century England...
...From Presidents down, most of our political figures are pen-struck...
...As a Boston College undergraduate he was voted "class politician...
...If he did see them it must have been in some historical society's collection, for those signs faded away in the 1870s...
...Another Irishman, Stephen O'Meara, Boston's police commissioner from 1906 until his death a dozen years later, made a national reputation for himself and indeed became a lecturer in municipal government at Harvard...
...This, more than religion, may have incited the lower-class mob...
...Tip recalls seeing NINA signs in his boyhood: No Irish Need Apply...
...Tip kept his place on the treads, riding the escalator to speaker of the Massachusetts house and even considered bypassing the senate level to reach for the governorship...
...superintendent of sewers dispensed jobs to the faithful...
...He introduced Tip to Kipling's "If' and to "Abou Ben Adhem...
...One of the local complaints about the Kennedys has been that they did not take their place on the escalator, they commandeered it...
...Possibly Tip confuses fact with what he heard from his father...
...Name Address City/State/Zip Mail to: Liberty Fund, Inc...
...Tip's prime favorite, one he later recited at annual get-togethers with his old Cambridge cronies, was Charles Hanson Towne's "Around the Corner": Around the corner I have a friend In this great city that has no end...
...Did he ever as a student queue up on the steps of Boston Symphony Hall for the Friday afternoon concert's rush seats...
...But tomorrow comes—and tomorrow goes And the distance between us grows and grows...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
