Requiem for a Bygone Era
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Requiem for a Bygone Era Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O'Neill With William Novak Random House. 387pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman British Labor...
...During his 34 years in Washington as a Congressman from Massachusetts, including his decade as Speaker, Tip was faithful to the New Deal and to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society extension of its social benefits...
...he was indeed the first of his family to attend a university...
...Although many if not most of the new jobs pay poorly, they nevertheless define themselves as middle class...
...Across the Atlantic where it is morning in America, according to our re-elected all-American cheerleader, a Democrat has occupied the Oval Office a mere four of the last 20 years...
...Although earlier this year Kinnock enhanced his own standing by running an eloquent campaign and appearing in a celebrated television commercial—one of whose side-effects was Senator Joseph Biden's withdrawal from the Democratic Presidential race—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher won her third successive victory and promised or threatened to go on and on...
...For Democratic Presidential aspirants, the challenge is definition of a formula that unites the interests of the remnants of the industrial working class and the middle class aspirations of white-, pink- and gold-collared newcomers...
...As every reviewer from John Kenneth Galbraith to William Safire has happily proclaimed, the volume is full of wonderful stories and candid judgments of Presidents and lesser politicians, alive and dead...
...Fortunately, our peculiar constitutional arrangements have allowed Democratic Congresses at least occasionally to check the uninhibited exercise of Executive authority inherent in parliamentary systems...
...Unions have had little success organizing office workers in banks, insurance firms, brokerage houses, and other growth centers...
...At age 14, Tip was mowing the lawn in Harvard Yard, never expecting to attend any college, let alone Harvard...
...Unfortunately, though, it is a requiem for old-fashioned liberal politics in an era which appears to demand that compassion come accompanied by an accountant's certificate of cost effectiveness...
...Unemployment is low in the south and high in the areas where the Labor Party retained its grip...
...For any political junkie, Man of the House is purejoy...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock and former Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill don't look or talk alike, but they share a similar political preoccupation: how to win an election...
...As in Britain, our own blue-collar industries have shrunk and new jobs have opened in data processing, the health sector and financial services...
...O'Neill's book—writer William Novak's triumphant successor to his bestselling celebrations of the Mayflower Madam and Lee Iacocca—contains no advice to the six or seven would-be Presidents...
...The Democrat who turns the trick, and in so doing clearly separates himself from the Republican competition, will probably be our next president...
...Kinnock's forebears labored in Welsh coal mines...
...Bynowthebest of them—recipes for stealing elections in Mayor James M. Curley's Boston, tales of Kennedy family ruthlessness in the deployment of money and power, devastating verdicts on Jimmy Carter's White House staff and Ronald Reagan's qualifications for the Oval Office— have become too familiar to require repetition...
...Kinnock and O'Neill share workingclass origins...
...The trouble in England and the United States, however, is this: The welfare state has elevated a substantial fraction of the working class into the middle class and separated winners from losers...
...Both appealed to his progressive impulses in creating jobs, worker protections and shelter from the misfortunes of unemployment, disabling accident and illness, and indigence in old age...
...This phenomenon is especially stark in England, where substantial numbers of former Labor voters opted for Thatcher in the south while she fared badly in Scotland and the north...
...As one unkind critic whose name I can't remember has noted, though, a thousand generations stretches back to the Cro-Magnon era, a time when complete educational equality existed: No one went to school...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 18
