You liked Tip O’Neill or you didn’t.
By all accounts, it would be difficult to find anyone-including Ronald Reagan-who actually knew the former speaker of the House and didn’t like him.
But the legendary Boston Irish pol who died last Wednesday night was an acquired taste in a nation where politics is held in minimum regard, where party loyalty is considered a social affliction, where members of Congress spend their time belittling their institution and their own worth.
O’Neill wasn’t the sort to second-guess his calling or agonize much over the staying power of his fundamental political beliefs.
He was an unreconstructed big-government Democrat. He believed, until the moment his heart gave out at 81, that it was the business of government to take on all manner of social ills.
And it was the business of the Democratic Party to protect and advance the interests of working people.
If the interests of folks in the 8th District of Massachusetts were a tad over-represented, well, that was why the sons of immigrant bricklayers went into politics.
For better or worse, O’Neill was perhaps the final embodiment of an era when Americans voted their social and economic interests. You were a Democrat or a Republican because your people were Democrats or Republicans, because the folks who went to Congress and the state legislature went there with your jobs and homes and families in mind.
O’Neill was a New Deal Democrat by birth, history and inclination. And for all his florid, golf-clubbing, cigar-chewing bonhomie, he was not averse to firing a shot across the bow in the class war.
His 1987 biography, “Man of the House,” begins and ends on the grounds of Harvard University, an institution that nettled O’Neill as a young man and as an octogenarian.
While he was good-humored about it, he possessed the inevitable resentments that came with growing up amid Boston’s three-decker Irish-Catholic tenements.
At the close of his biography, O’Neill recalled the days when he was paid 17 cents an hour to cut the grass and trim the hedges around Harvard Yard.
“I look back to that summer day in 1927,” he wrote, “when I stood outside the canvas tent at Harvard University. As I watched the privileged sons of America drink their champagne, I dreamed of bringing my own people-and all Americans who weren’t born to wealth or advantage-into the great American tent of opportunity.”
By O’Neill’s lights, Ronald Reagan “was for the rich.” It was the turf on which O’Neill chose to fight his mostly losing battles with Reagan as the highest-ranking elected Democratic official for much of the 1980s.
That attitude made O’Neill a target of mockery, and his rumpled, overstuffed figure made him a godsend for editorial cartoonists and GOP campaign commercials.
But the presence of a Democrat in the White House these days suggests that the political wheel turned back in O’Neill’s direction before he died.
He was comfortable in his district for more than 30 years because his constituents knew he was one of them, and because he never wondered for a moment what he was doing in Washington.
In all the years O’Neill served in the House, he never felt it necessary to ape the current electoral fashion, running home every weekend to organize a town meeting in the high school gymnasium for C-SPAN consumption.
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In a graceful obituary in the Boston Globe, Martin F. Nolan recalled O’Neill’s growing up in the Barry’s Corner neighborhood in Cambridge and the remembrances of his boyhood companions.
“As Tip grew up, he never cut the branches,” said one of them.
Loyalty was hard currency with O’Neill as well.
In 1946 he declined to support Boston’s returning war hero, John F. Kennedy, in his first race for Congress. O’Neill, then speaker of the Massachusetts House, had offered his support to a Democratic pal, Mike Neville, and successfully resisted the blandishments of JFK and his acolytes.
Democratic insiders knew a winner when they saw one and many hustled to bask in Kennedy’s reflected glory. O’Neill stayed with Neville, the guy from the neighborhood, through the inevitable defeat, then made his peace with Kennedy.
Six years later, he took Kennedy’s House seat when JFK moved to the Senate.
In the gush of eulogies that appeared in the hours after O’Neill’s death, it was left to William Bulger, president of the Masschusetts Senate, to offer a proper Irishman’s tribute: “He wore it well, you know.”