
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 6, 1994                   TAG: 9401060170
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON                                LENGTH: Short

TIP O'NEILL, FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER, DIES

Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr., the former House speaker whose public career brought him from an Irish immigrant neighborhood to the pinnacle of national power, died Wednesday night. He was 81.

O'Neill, who underwent cancer surgery in 1987 and again in 1990, died at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. The cause of death wasn't immediately known.

A consummate politician and proud of it, Tip O'Neill lived Democratic politics from the day he was elected to his ward committee in 1936, just before graduating from Boston College, until 1987, when he retired at the end of his 17th term in Congress and fifth as speaker.

O'Neill transformed the speakership from a political and parliamentary post to a bully pulpit that he used in his many battles against President Reagan.

Not suave or athletic like the Ivy League-educated Kennedys, O'Neill was a rumpled old-style politician who remembered birthdays, sent flowers when a constituent died and did countless small favors.

It was O'Neill who made famous the phrase, "All politics is local."

His credo, passed onto him by his bricklayer father, was simple: "Do the best you can for your neighbor. Never forget from where you come. And see if you can improve the lot of your fellow man."

O'Neill rose not only to the speakership, arguably the nation's second most powerful public office, but to the position of national symbol. Republicans cast him as the epitome of the big-spending, big-taxing liberal. Cartoonists had a field day with his white hair and 250-pound physique.

by CNB