An Apple That Fell Near the Tree

Politics positively saturates the life of Tip O'Neill's family. His five children --ranging in age from 22 to 30--can remember running for the swimming pool as youngsters and shouting: "Last one in is a Republican!"

Growing up in a solidly Irish-American district of North Cambridge, O'Neill developed a fiercely partisan love for Democratic politics. His stern, teetotaling father, the son of a bricklayer who came over from County Cork, was a local political power. For 35 years he was head of the city's water system, with 1,700 men on his payroll and access to hundreds of other jobs. When O'Neill was a boy, torchlight parades still surged through the narrow streets of Cambridge, and candidates shouted their speeches on street corners. In 1928, already a veteran campaign worker at the age of 15, O'Neill hustled out trustworthy Democratic voters in a losing effort to elect Al Smith President.

O'Neill attended Roman Catholic schools. He was a casual student and, though he kept getting elected captain of his teams, an awkward athlete. Even so, local lore has it that he got his nickname as a young boy from one James Edward O'Neill, who batted an eye-popping .492 for the old St. Louis Browns in 1887. Those were the days when bases on balls were counted as hits in players' averages, and O'Neill was renowned for "tipping." off so many pitches that hurlers eventually walked him.

O'Neill tried Boston College for a year, dropped out to drive a truck, finally returned, and was a 22-year-old senior when he ran for the Cambridge city council. Before doing so, he announced his intention to his father, who had once served on the council. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," replied the elder O'Neill, not at all displeased.

Tip lost by 150 votes, but learned an invaluable lesson. On election day, Mrs. Elizabeth O'Brien, an elocution teacher who lived across the street, told him, "Tom, I'm going to vote for you even though you didn't ask me." Surprised, O'Neill replied: "Mrs. O'Brien, I've lived across the street from you for 18 years. I shovel your snow. I didn't think I had to ask you."

"Tom," said Mrs. O'Brien, "I want you to know something--people like to be asked."

Since then, O'Neill has been carefully asking people for their votes, and he has yet to lose another race. He was 23 when he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature and 36 when he became speaker of the house, the youngest at that time in the state's history.

O'Neill used the full power of his office between 1949 and 1952 to ram through the state's "Little New Deal" of social legislation. During key votes, he was known to lock the doors, as he puts it, "to keep a fella from taking a walk."

In 1952, O'Neill was elected to Congress as Representative from the polyglot district that now embraces Boston's fashionable Beacon Hill, 36 colleges and universities, as well as the working-class neighborhoods of Cambridge, where his real power lies. His predecessor in the seat was John F. Kennedy, who moved to the Senate that year. When O'Neill went down to Washington, he made sure that his roots remained firmly planted in Cambridge. His wife Millie and their five children stayed at home in their modest house on Russell Street, just four doors away from the two-family house where he was raised.

O'Neill used to commute weekly to Cambridge from Washington, going up on Thursday night and returning on the Monday night sleeper. The family loved to linger over dinner, arguing politics for hours. Listening to his children, O'Neill began to have doubts about his hawkish party-line stand on Viet Nam.

He did some quiet checking in Washington, found some top officials who had private doubts, and became a dove in 1967--one of the first top Democrats of his stature in the House to break with Lyndon Johnson on the war. "Tip," said Johnson, "I never thought you'd do this to me." Fearful that his district would turn on him, O'Neill sold his position so effectively that the G.O.P. did not even bother to run a candidate against him in 1968, or since.

His eldest son, Thomas P. O'Neill III, 29, is finding things a bit more difficult. Running for his father's old seat in the state legislature in 1972, he quickly encountered the sly machinations of the Boston political jungle. His opponents found two other Thomas O'Neills to run against him, leaving it up to the voters to figure out which of the three was Tip's boy. They figured it out and sent Tip's son to the statehouse.

As a Washington "bachelor," the el der O'Neill has roomed for 21 years in Northwest Washington with Congress man Edward Boland from Springfield, Mass. They make an odd couple: Boland is the neat one, patiently tidying up their three-room apartment after O'Neill has rumpled it.

Usually there is nothing but a few or anges and some cans of Fresca in the refrigerator. O'Neill is constantly struggling with his weight, which has soared to 296 lbs., then dropped to 208, climbed to 286, then fallen to 215 before rising again. "I've lost a thousand pounds in my life," he estimates. In 1968 O'Neill joined a Weight Watchers group, the only man among some 50 women who had no idea who he was but applauded him warmly when the director an nounced: "Tom lost 16 lbs. last week."

A church-going Catholic, O'Neill is a moderate social drinker who plays golf for recreation, contentedly shooting in the upper 90s. Instead of joining a fashionable suburban country club, O'Neill slips away to a public course, pays his $ 1.60 and waits for a threesome to come along that needs a fourth.

With impeachment on his calendar, O'Neill wonders how long it will be before he gets to spend time with his family at their vacation house on Cape Cod. But he usually makes it back to Cambridge on weekends, and the voters come past to ask for favors as they always have. As always, Tip tries to comply. As a state legislator during the Depression, he often got as many as 250 men snow-shoveling jobs at $3 or $4 a day; as a Congressman, he was able to find 3,000 youngsters Christmas jobs at the Boston post office--before the non-political Postal Service was created. "I run a public-service agency," he says.

And very effectively, at that. The voters wait patiently for him for three or four hours, and when their turns come, they usually start out by saying "I'm so-and-so's brother-in-law." Or "I'm this fellow's grandson." Or "I'm somebody's nephew." Listening and remembering, Tip O'Neill can usually tie them into the intricate web of friendships and contacts he has built up over the years. This solid political base is the source he will need for the paramount event of his political life: the drive to push the impeachment proceedings through to resolution, one way or the other.

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