Tip O'Neill

1 Pages 263 Words

Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century
By: John A. Farrell

“Tip O’Neill: And the Democratic Century,” is more then the definitive biography of a flawed but startlingly successful old-fashioned political leader. It’s also a guided tour through American governmental history from the beginning of the New Deal through the Reagan years, featuring the struggle between two larger-than-life political champions and their ideologies—Ronald Reagan and the Old Conservatism against Tip O’Neill and the New Deal liberalism. It was a battle over the nation’s political soul.
Tip O’Neill came from a neighborhood of Irish immigrants in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a leader in the local Democratic Party machine and instructed his son in the ways of precinct captains, organization politics, and patronage jobs. In 1948 Tip became the first Irish American, the first Roman Catholic, and the first Democratic Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He served in Congress from 1953 through 1989 and saw some of the greatest moments of post-World War II American politics and the ride and decline of Democratic politics.
By 1952 he had arrived in Washington, in the beginning of his civil rights struggles. O’Neill has a complex relationship with the Kennedy’s and split with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. It was Tip who bridged the Gulf between the old and the new wings of the Democratic Party during the Vietnam era, Watergate, and the post-Watergate reforms. He was elected Speaker of the House in 1977 but watched his party crumble during the Jimmy Carter years and Reagan Revolution....