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

DATE: FRIDAY, January 7, 1994                   TAG: 9402250017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TIP O'NEILL

IN THE LONG career of Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill can be seen many of the ironies and ambiguities of American politics.

O'Neill died Wednesday at age 81. Like many who came of age during the Great Depression, he held a faith in government's capacity to make life better for average people. Yet O'Neill's fame and reputation rested chiefly on the skills of legislative leadership he displayed as speaker of the U.S. House from 1977 through 1986, an era when faith in government was widely and intensely questioned.

In the vocabulary of contemporary American politics, O'Neill was a "liberal." Yet as House speaker, he allied with moderate Democrats from the South, and was a spokesman for skeptics of the big-debt economic radicalism of the Reagan administration. In O'Neill's concern for social order, observed the 1986 edition of The Almanac of American Politics, "you can almost see him as a Burkean conservative, unwilling to rip up part of the web of social relationshuips we have constructed over a great many years."

O'Neill's congressional district was filled with colleges and universities, including two of America's most eminent, Harvard and MIT. Yet O'Neill was a product of a blue-collar, ethnic (Irish- and Italian-American) part of the district, and there was no confusing him with an Ivy Leaguer.

A lifelong pol, O'Neill entered the Massachusetts House the year of his graduation from Boston College; after16 years in the state legislature, he was elected to Congress in 1952, where he served for 17 terms. Yet even as he neared retirement, no member of Congress stayed closer to his own constituents than the man who insisted that "all politics is local."

A big, ruddy, shambling figure, with his shock of white hair and rumpled suits, O'Neill looked like a cartoon caricature of an old-fashioned ward-heeler. Yet he possessed a keen intellect, did not engage in vacuous phrase-making, and made no efforts to use public office for private gain.

In the 1980 campaigns, Republicans used an O'Neill lookalike in TV ads to dramatize discontent with congressional Democrats in particular and professional politicians in general. Yet throughout the '80s, young men on the make proved every bit as susceptible to scandal as the old pros. And in the end, it was O'Neill - the most seasoned of them all - who emerged from a half-century of public service with his reputation for integrity intact.

by CNB