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

DATE: SATURDAY, January 15, 1994                   TAG: 9401220017
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: C6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL D. COLFORD NEWSDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                 LENGTH: Medium

BOOK GIVES `TIP'S' TIPS FOR POLITICIANS

Former House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., who died Jan. 5 at age 81, was a gregarious pol of the old school and a raconteur with a lifetime of tales. In a final splash of his Irish charm, he has left behind an amusing book that could serve as his coda, laying out the rules of the political game as he loved to play it.

``All Politics Is Local,'' published this month by Times Books, offers simple lessons such as these:

``Never Forget Whence You Came'': It seems that the young John F. Kennedy, told by one Patsy McDuff that a neighborhood leader was hospitalized for ``trouble with his phosphate,'' corrected Patsy by saying, ``That's prostate.'' To which Patsy remarked, ``There he goes with that Harvard accent again.'' O'Neill concludes: ``The lesson is: You grow but the folks back home may not grow along with you.''

``Never Get Introduced to the Crowd at Sports Events'': They booed O'Neill before a heavyweight bout in Worcester, Mass., as he feared they would. ``People go to sports events to enjoy the action. They feel intruded upon if some outsider imposes on what they paid good money for.''

``All Politics Is Local'': The name of O'Neill's book comes from the adage impressed on him by his father - namely, never take your own back yard for granted. Or as O'Neill put it, ``A politician learns that if a constituent calls about a problem, even if it's a streetlight out, you don't tell them to call City Hall. You call City Hall.''

With a moral and supporting tale tightly presented every two pages or so, ``All Politics Is Local'' is to politics what ``Harvey Penick's Little Red Book'' is to golf - a sage primer that goes down fast and smooth. Watch this $15 hardcover take off like Penick's best-selling gem. O'Neill's sentiments are peppered by personal asides (he was against term limitations, for example) and by recollections of colorful characters such as his old pal Jimmie Burke, who gave him this advice on how to deal with reporters who are out to get you: ``Don't write it if you can talk, don't talk if you can wink, and don't wink if you can nod.''

Times Books - whose sister company Random House sold 340,000 hardcover copies of O'Neill's autobiography, ``Man of the House'' (1987) - printed 80,000 of ``All Politics Is Local'' before he died from cardiac arrest. And O'Neill, though slowed by arthritis, had eagerly made the early rounds of book promotion.

by CNB