The Politics of Loyalty

...They can run around the party structure like a young O. J. Simpson turning the corner on an end sweep...

...Until 1960 you couldn't get to work for the Post Office unless you get the OK of the congressional office," he noted, "and we'd put literally hundreds of women to work during the Christmas rush...

...I wasn't informed...

...With the use of direct mail, mass media and corps of volunteers, they can appeal directly to the electorate and eliminate the middleman...

...Soon O'Neill was running for office and winning a seat in the State Legislature...

...A lot of people did consider it cronyism, of course, and without a doubt loyalty has protected a lot of political hacks and hookers in Washington...

...They're Boston College people for the most part...

...he hung around with the boys, just as he always had...

...O'Neill does not forget such friends...

...One died recently, I think he was a commander in the Navy...

...The problem, he said, was all these "bedwetters," the new congressmen who have been elected in the last few years with no sense of party discipline...

...Griffin was embarrassed when TV cameras showed up in his office and besides, he had only 18 months to qualify for a pension...

...In Tip's world, however, one thing you do not compromise is friendship...

...Only three Democrats stayed with him...

...Their pay might average out to $87, but it made the difference between a good Christmas and a poor Christmas...

...But the kind of loyalty that moves a Tip O'Neill is rooted in a certain time and place, and as those places die, something important dies with them...

...Today, the Federal government has affected so many lives that many problems involve Washington...

...They can't depend on anyone else...

...Years passed and things changed...

...I know the whole Griffin family, it's a big family, well-regarded," he told me...

...You know their families and their parents, and they know yours...

...Then Watergate came around to make loyalty just about as popular as a three-count indictment...

...He told Frank Moore, the chief White House lobbyist, to "get the hell out" of his office, and that's like telling a priest to stay out of church...

...It was there that Tip first met Bob Griffin, and like Wee Wee Burns and the variously-shaped McDonalds, Bobby was not just another guy, he was part of a community, a parish, a family...

...you were sending them a gift...

...No question I was mad at the way it was done...

...Tip would sit in the kitchen and write down the names as the men trooped through the door...

...I loved politics," he recently told the magazine Yankee, "the local loyalty, the comradeship...

...When O'Neill came to Washington he recreated Barry's Corner in the Capital...

...Politics meant a lot to my race," he told me, "it was the first entry they had to any type of power...

...O'Neill went on to Boston College, an institution that commanded practically as much reverence from Boston Irish as the Red Sox or the Church...

...Instead of coming up through the system, instead of toadying to leaders and waiting their turn, the newer members have substituted their own personal organizations for the party...

...In some respects, Tip likes the new trend...

...The younger members are always going back home, holding town meetings, listening to their constituents...

...Subdivisions and shopping centers are rooting out the old neighborhoods...

...In the days of Barry's Corner, the Irish immigrants had problems that could be solved by the local machine-a snow button here, a food basket there...

...They won't compromise," grumbled one of the Speaker's aides, "but that's all we do around here-compromise...

...Never, never," grumbled the chairman...

...each button meant another link in the chain of loyalty...

...Tip was never the best player but he was usually the captain...

...The axe job was done crudely, though...

...At night they would have steaks at Paul Young's or play cards or take in a ballgame, particularly if the Red Sox were in town, playing the old Senators out al Griffith Stadium...

...But the beers and the ballgames didn't fill all the holes in a lonely life...

...Political loyalties to the process are changing...

...About this point in the conversation, in walked Jim Delaney, chairman of the Rules Committee, a red-faced Irishman from Queens who comes out of the same kind of local political machine as the Speaker himself...

...Ever since I was old enough to stay out after supper," says O'Neill, "the Barry's crowd was my life...

...Tip said later...

...A politician who can put people at ease has a special talent, like a baseball player who can hit a curve ball, low and away...

...They were all Irish, all congressmen from Massachusetts, and women did not play a big role in their lives...

...Steven V. Roberts is a Washington reporter for the New York Times...

...Now they see them all the time...

...When he was 15, young Tip and his pal, Red Fitzgerald, organized the campaign in Precinct Two for Al Smith and ran up the best turnout in the city...

...Griffin, by now number two at GSA, was not getting along with the director, and the White House decided he had to go...

...Even then, people turned to him for leadership and advice...

...I wasn't given any personal consideration...

...He paused and added, a bit ambiguously: "They're great salesman, no doubt about that...

...I've often said," the Speaker told me, "that being down here meant a tremendous loss of family life...

...The ties that bind are wound tighter than a nun's wimple...

...There's nothing like going home to a family...

...Do they tip their hats in Woodcrest Knolls or Cedar Glen Village...

...O'Neill patted Delaney on the back as he ushered him out and the talk turned to the new members, the bedwetters...

...No matter that this may mean a shouting match with the President of the United States...

...You went in the dark of night," Tip recalled, "and left them at the person's home because of the pride of the person...

...They didn't want to accept welfare...

...I advise younger members to get their families down here as soon as possible...

...One of the Barry boys, Jack, was a sportswriter for the Boston Globe, and the gang would sit the informer...

...Many of the new congressmen have set up, in effect, mini-machines, handling these problems pretty much as Tip used to handle t he jobs at t he Post Office...

...A high percentage of those who were recently elected came right to Congress, they never came up through the system, the City Council or the State Legislature...

...I asked Delaney if he ever thought, back in the old days, that when he became a committee chairman he would command only three Democratic votes on an important issue...

...Obviously he was, for Hymel called right back and said to come in the next day...

...The Speaker himself looks so much like an Old Pol that he could never play himself in the movies...

...And James F. Neal, the attorney who prosecuted John Mitchell, said recently: "Without excusing a clear violation of the law by John Mitehell, I was convinced during the course of the trial that his offenses emanated not from an evil soul but from a misguided and foolish loyalty to the President of the United States...

...We got to talking, and gradually the story unrolled from the drum of his memory...

...Agnes...

...After all, Nixon kept insisting that loyalty to his aides was [he main reason he covered up so much...

...Sometimes they were joined by Mike Kirwin of Ohio or Gene Keough of Brooklyn, and sometimes by Bob Griffin, a friend of Tip's from Boston College days who worked at the General Services Administration (GSA...

...The center of this hard-scrabble world was Barry's Corner, a political clubhouse and a street gang and an athletic team all rolled into one...

...Like his father before him, O'Neill cornered the market on buttons, and once the snow started to fall, men would start lining up outside his house at 5 a.m., begging for a chance to shovel snow at $3 a day, $4 if it was a city button...

...Then there was the O'Neill Club, a little private charity that handed out food baskets at holiday time...

...Even when they moved to this country, woe be to couple of them were doctors, very successful people...

...You do not forget Wee Wee Burns or Red Fitzgerald or Bobby Griffin, even if his nickname was Pinhead...

...Tip's wife, Millie, was back in Cambridge, taking care of the kids, and the boys in Washington would breakfast together in the House dining room at the table of John McCormack, the powerful speaker from their home state...

...The old gang was breaking up, but not the ties of loyalty and friendship that bound it together for so long...

...If you hand out enough buttons and baskets, if you remember enough names and go to enough BC games, you get elected to Congress...

...Sam Ray-burn ran the House with the glare in his eye, with the tone of his voice, with the way he pounded a gavel...

...At a recent reunion of the Barry's Corner crowd O'Neill got up to speak, and he praised the old neighborhood as a place where men still tipped their hats to the clergy...

...Audiences would say it was too much of a caricature...

...In the old system," he went on, "you followed the leadership, the chairmen of the committees...

...The big change is that the younger members don't owe anything to anybody and are therefore much harder to control...

...Worst of all, someone forgo...

...When 1 arrived, 1 was ushered into an office just off the House floor that is big enough to fit most of Cambridge's North Ward...

...Thomas P. O'Neill Sr...

...They are too busy applying to the country club and trying to forget that their fathers once lined up outside Tip O'Neill's door at five in the morning, begging for a chance to shovel snow for $3 a day...

...During the Depression, it seems, various agencies-the Boston Elevated, the Transit Authority, the city of Cambridge-would issue "snow buttons" that entitled the holder to a few days work shoveling snow...

...it is almost axiomatic that you can't have a strong party organization where people go to shopping centers...

...1 only did that by nature," Tip said, "1 didn't consider it cronyism...

...Tip's father followed the same trade-hard, dirty work, digging clay out of the pits and hauling it to the surface by horsecart...

...It stemmed from the persecution of the Irish in the old country...

...There were five boys, I think, a in the back room and help him figure out the batting averages for all the players...

...On Saturday nights, the boys would drop by with their dates before going out, and on Sundays, the Barry's Corner teams would carry the neighborhood banner into battle...

...O'Neill can get awfully sentimental about the old days, about the heavenly virtues of Barry's Corner and Sam Ray-burn and the good nuns at St...

...1 called Gary Hymel, the Speaker's chief assistant, and asked him if O' Neill was interested in discussing the Griffin case and the whole issue of political loyalty...

...That reflection brought up the snow-button story...

...The old ethnic neighborhoods that spawned the party machines are virtually gone...

...I've had loyalty ingrained in me all my life in politics...

...The Speaker was warmed up now and enjoying the memories...

...His son learned early that the Irish had to kick and scratch for their rights, and public office was the best place to kick from...

...Tip's grandfather was brought over from Ireland around 1845 to work for the New England Brick Company...

...They come down here and they don't care about the chain of command...

...There was real comradeship in the Barry's Corner crowd," he told Yankee...

...it was a sign of the times that one of the first things he bought was a cemetery plot...

...But to a man suckled on the milk of loyalty and party organization, the new style also has its drawbacks...

...He can still remember every person in every house of that precinct, fingering the names as if they were rosary beads: Eddie Jones and Wee Wee Burns, The Moose and Big Red, and the two McDonalds, Skinny and Fat...

...They never had a local leader, or were part of the local party...

...Sam Rayburn couldn't name 25 members of the whole House, but I have to know everyone in the party...

...Jim wanted to report that he had won a key vote in the Rules Committee, a vote that would block a liberal tax proposal from reaching the floor, but he had to do it mainly with Republican votes...

...So when a friend gets in trouble, you help him out...

...to tell Tip that his pal was getting canned, and the Speaker blew his top...

...Some of these districts never saw a Congressman until a few years ago," O'Neill said...

...A fellow misses that over the years...

...New-style candidates use the mass media and build their own organizations on the basis of key issues or personal attractiveness...

...With that lick of gray-white hair drifting over his face and a nose like a New England apple, with that shambling walk and an arm like an oak branch that claps you on the shoulder, O'Neill has the gift of making everyone around him feel comfortable...

...It seemed that O'Neill was displaying the sort of loyalty you just don't find in politics very much anymore...

...But in another sense this "new politics" is just as old as Moses hustling votes with the Israelites in the desert...

...Loyalty??that was inherent...

...went into politics on the side, got himself elected to the City Council from North Cambridge and became superintendent of sewers...

...The White House quickly found a cushy job at $50,000 a year for Bob Griffin and tempers cooled down, but I was intrigued by the incident...

...a Social Security check, say, or a workman's compensation claim...

...Barry's Corner is gone, and the sons and daughters of the old crowd don't know each other and don't help each other...

...I can remember in those days," he said, "patronage was the biggest thing in my life, getting people a job...

...I wasn't given a chance to sit down and talk with him...

...Donohue died and Philbin was defeated, Boland and Griffin got married and started having children, Burke got sick and lost a leg, McCormack retired and after a few years Tip became speaker and moved Millie down to Washington...

...Independence today is a tremendous factor," said O'Neill...

...It was the sort of com-raderie," he said, "that doesn't exist anymore...