Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (33 page)

“Why are we there?” the young O’Neill had asked Eddie Kelly, a marine who returned from Nicaragua in a wheelchair. “We’re taking care of the property and rights of United Fruit,” he recalled the young man’s answer. “Gunboat diplomacy,” to Tip O’Neill, was only another variant on the rich calling the shots and he wanted no part of it. “A few people made a great amount of money,” he said of the early-century troubles in Central America, “and we are responsible for it.”

In the first third of the twentieth century the United States had intervened in Nicaragua militarily. An occupation by American marines that began in 1912 didn’t end until twenty-one years later. It was then that a guerrilla group led by Augusto César Sandino
successfully confronted both the local regime and the U.S. troops. But only three years later, Sandino himself was killed, and for the next four decades Nicaragua was ruled by the corrupt, authoritarian Somoza family. In 1979, a rebel group calling itself the Sandinistas forced out the Somozas.

Upon taking office in January 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to make his anticommunist stand in Nicaragua. Accusing the Sandinistas of collaborating with the Soviets and Cuba in efforts to overthrow the right-wing government in El Salvador—a nearby country separated from Nicaragua by a chunk of Honduras—the White House terminated U.S. financial aid to the country’s government. By year’s end, the president had escalated the battle, signing an order that gave arms, equipment, and money to an anti-Sandinista rebel group, known as the Contras because they were waging a
contrarrevolución.
Made up of several anti-Sandinista factions, the Contras had unified with the approval of the United States and had suddenly emerged to launch military attacks against the Nicaraguan government.

Angry Democratic reaction to the Reagan administration’s backing of the Contras led to the passage of the first Boland Amendment in December 1982. This was a measure sponsored by Congressman Edward Boland, O’Neill’s former roommate whom he had named chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It banned military support “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.” The Speaker said the White House’s backing of the Nicaraguan rebels would eventually lead to American troops going into that country.

• • •

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Its goals were to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organization’s base of operations in southern Lebanon, eliminate Syrian influence there, and establish an alliance with a Christian-led government. The task at hand, forcing
the PLO to leave the country, was accomplished quickly. President Reagan now agreed to send in U.S. troops as part of a multinational force, its purpose being to safeguard the Palestinians’ evacuation. Once this mission had been achieved, the American troops were sent back to their ships.

Then came a pair of horrors.

First, on September 14, Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese president-elect, was assassinated in his party’s East Beirut office.
Two days later, approximately seven hundred Muslim civilians—many women, children, and elderly men—were massacred between September 16 and 18 in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. The attacks were linked to the Phalangist party of Bashir Gemayel; and revenge for his death was the obvious motivation. In the aftermath of these acts of violence, President Reagan made the decision to summon the marines back into the country to help maintain order with their presence.

The dangers inherent in this second deployment should have been obvious. These members of the American military were dispatched originally as a symbol to a region where symbols were synonymous with targets. They went in as peacekeepers where there was no existing peace to keep. Summoned to serve as the “linchpin” of a diplomatic effort to rebuild the Lebanese government, the marines’ presence quickly became a pretext for further violence.

Tip O’Neill gave President Reagan his backing on Lebanon policy from the outset. When talk first arose of sending the marines—for their initial appearance on the scene, to help oversee the evacuation of the PLO—he was openly positive.
“If he asks my views,” he said, responding to a reporter’s question just before a White House briefing he was attending, “I will be happy to tell him through the years that I’ve always felt that if we had a bipartisan foreign policy the nation would be better off. I wait to see what the president has in mind.” He had the same reaction on hearing that Reagan intended the second
deployment of the marines. “I would hope that the leadership on both sides could be unanimous,” he told the press.

As might have been anticipated, the return of the U.S. marines to Lebanon triggered a violent reaction. On April 18, 1983, the United States Embassy in Beirut was car-bombed. Sixty-three people were killed, including seventeen Americans. Afterward, the attackers were defiantly open about their motivation:
Americans, get out!
had been the message.

On August 29, the Lebanese civil war reignited. U.S. marines were drawn into firefights, with two killed and fourteen wounded. Democrats began demanding that the 1973 War Powers Act—which gave Congress the right to set constraints on a president’s ability to make war, a law that remains subject to dispute to this day—be invoked.

By September, it was obvious that the American military role in Lebanon had grown beyond its stated mission as a peacekeeping force. Increasingly, our marines there were seen as belligerents on the side of Israel and the Lebanese Christians, and thus as enemies of the Muslim communities. By October, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was warning Reagan that the Syrians and other enemies of the Christian-led government regarded the Americans in their midst as combatants. From offshore, American ships were pounding Muslim positions in the mountains, with U.S. marines in forward positions acting as spotters. Worse yet, they had been assigned to what essentially was guard duty at Beirut International Airport. This placed them in close proximity to a radical Muslim neighborhood, which the marines had nicknamed “Khomeiniville.”

The clock was ticking until the next wave of retaliation.

What was now clear was that the deployment to Lebanon fell under the provision in the War Powers Act’s category of troops placed in a situation “where imminent involvement in hostilities
is clearly indicated.” That provision requires that the Congress approve any continued U.S. military involvement where U.S. forces face active hostilities. It is quite specific. Troops must be withdrawn within sixty days—ninety, if the president asserts he needs more time—unless Congress specifically authorizes them to remain in the war zone. The marines’ circumstances in Beirut clearly met the act’s standards of “imminent involvement in hostilities.”
As Tip O’Neill put it, “The marines are being shot at and are firing back.”

However, despite the ongoing September fighting, the Democrats in Congress, led by O’Neill, refused to use the War Powers Act as a way to order the marines to leave. “We discussed showing a united front,” he reported after a phone conversation with Jim Baker. “We are in there with three other nations. . . . we want to work together for the betterment of world relations and peace. And if Syria, for any reason, thinks the parties of America are divided and they can just hang around till we pull out, I would say they are wrong.”

The Speaker was taking his cues from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Key members of that panel, unfortunately, lacked his wariness of foreign entanglements, his “no more Vietnams” mind-set. One member of the Democratic leadership who called it as he saw it was Tom Foley.
“That country is coming apart,” he said at one backroom meeting I attended over the Lebanon resolution. “The only difference in whether we put those troops in is how many casualties we’re going to take.”

At this point, the Speaker pushed for a resolution that gave the president what amounted to a grace period of a year and a half before he’d have to go back again for further congressional approval to keep Americans on the ground in Lebanon. He was putting his leadership behind a committee-made policy, including the trade-offs and compromises that involved. Here was Tip’s defense of the time limit, just as I recall hearing it at the time:
“If it were for six months,
the Syrians would sit it out. If it were a year, it would be in the political sphere and at the height of the presidential campaign. So, eighteen months was the most favorable time.”

But O’Neill was clearly counting upon Reagan, not the eighteen-month time frame, to ensure “a Vietnam-type escalation is avoided.”
“I believe the president when he says he has no plans to change the peacekeeping role of our Marines. I believe he is expending every possible effort to see that differences in Lebanon are settled through negotiations, not through force of arms.”

It was Democratic congressman Sam Gibbons of Florida who made a speech that offered the compelling case
against
accepting the troop deployment. “If we are there to fight, we are far too few. If we are there to die, we are far too many.” It’s difficult for me to explain what was going through Tip’s mind on Lebanon, how it ran so differently from his general fear of “another Vietnam,” but in the end it was he and he alone who managed to sway enough Democrats to win. Even so, it was a close vote. The resolution to allow the U.S. marines to remain in Lebanon for another eighteen months passed the House 270 to 161, with 130 of Tip’s Democrats voting “Yea” and 134 voting “Nay.”

Right after the vote, President Reagan phoned the Speaker to thank him for his critical support.
“He was grateful,” O’Neill said, describing the call. “He thinks it was in the best interests of the nation. My response was that I hoped we could get the marines out as quickly as we possibly can and get the whole thing completed.”

In truth, the Speaker was uncomfortable in the role he’d just stepped into.
“I was doing my duty as a leader of the party and as an American. There will be plenty of things along the line that the president will not be happy with me,” he told reporters. He hated being separated from his party’s liberal, antiwar base, and that is precisely where he now was.

Reagan also thanked Tip publicly. “I want to thank the House of Representatives for its strong, bipartisan vote today supporting our policies in Lebanon and the continued presence of the U.S. peacekeeping force,” said a Reagan statement. “This vote would not have been possible without the strong leadership of Speaker O’Neill.”

One last detail remained. In order to solicit and win the bipartisan support Tip had supplied, Ronald Reagan had agreed to sign the resolution, thereby meeting the terms of the War Powers Act. He was, in O’Neill’s view, doing no more than accepting the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government, which required that he do so.
“The important thing is not what the president said today but what he did,” I told the
New York Times
 . . . after the ink had dried.

• • •

In the early morning of October 22, 1983, Ronald Reagan was given the news that six island nations—Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Antigua, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent—in the eastern Caribbean were asking the United States to intervene in neighboring Grenada. A British colony until 1974, Grenada lay about a hundred miles off the coast of Venezuela. With a population at the time of around ninety thousand, and a tropical climate, it was home to an offshore American medical school that would soon take on historic importance.

Two weeks earlier, the country’s socialist leader, Maurice Bishop, had been placed under house arrest in a Cuban-supported Marxist coup d’état. Demonstrations and counterdemonstrations occurred. Bishop, briefly, was freed. Escalating violence brought civilian deaths. General confusion, not surprisingly, reigned. The unfortunate Bishop, along with members of his cabinet, quickly found himself put to death before a firing squad. At this, the island descended into chaos, without any formal government to speak of.

What’s interesting is the way this small, little-known Caribbean
island—its area roughly 133 square miles—became, along with Nicaragua, “an obsession,” as one White House official put it at the time, for President Reagan. In a speech to the Organization of American States in February 1982, he’d noted specifically “the tightening grip of the totalitarian left in Grenada and Nicaragua.” He’d viewed both places in the reflected light of Cuba, as Soviet beachheads in the hemisphere. Those same half dozen neighbors of Grenada now calling for U.S. intervention had shared their concerns with Reagan the year before. This had occurred during a visit he and Nancy had paid to old Hollywood chum Claudette Colbert, who kept a second home on Barbados. The president had done a round of meetings with officials there that weekend.

At the time the Reagans had traveled to the Caribbean, Cuban workers on Grenada were building a ten-thousand-foot airstrip. Hearing of this project, Reagan worried it would be able to serve Soviet long-range bombers, as well as large Russian transport planes landing with arms for Central American insurgents. The one bit of news offsetting these disturbing revelations was that Bishop, the Grenadian prime minister, was not at all gung ho in turning his country socialist. He’d been encouraging private investment in hopes of making Grenada a popular tourist destination, and had made a ten-day visit to the United States to try to allay fears about his political intentions. Unfortunately, after Bishop’s death at the hands of his rivals for power, that moderating factor was gone.

Adding to the impetus for action was the presence of a thousand Americans on the island, six hundred of whom were students at the St. George’s University School of Medicine, established seven years earlier. It was not unreasonable to think Americans studying there might be taken hostage or harmed in what looked to be such an unstable situation. “The cost of not doing Grenada,” Reagan’s defense chief, Cap Weinberger, said later, “was obviously greater than
the cost of doing it. We didn’t want students held 440 days as hostages.” The memory of what had happened in Tehran, the incident that made Reagan’s 1980 victory possible, was never far from the administration’s mind.