O'Neill, Thomas P., Jr. ("Tip") (1912-1994)

American politician

Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.) served as Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1977-86. Born in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was first elected to the Massachusetts legislature as a Democrat in 1936, became Speaker of the state House in 1947, and was elected to Congress in 1952. For him, as he declared, “All politics is local.”

He first participated in politics in 1928 when he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith. In 1936, the same year he graduated from Boston College, he won a seat in the Massachusetts state legislature. In 1941 he married Mildred Miller, with whom he had five children. In 1948 he became the first Democrat in 140 years to be named Speaker of the Massachusetts House. While in the Massachusetts House, he supported a series of social programs known as the “Little New Deal.” In 1952 he was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. In 1955 O’Neill was named to the House Rules Committee. O’Neill supported welfare, civil rights, housing, and education reform legislation proposals of President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1968 he broke with the Johnson administration when he came out against the war in Vietnam. In 1971 O’Neill was elevated to majority whip, followed by an appointment to majority leader in 1972, when Majority Leader Hale Boggs died in an airplane accident. While in this position, he voted to cut off funding of the air war in Vietnam. In 1976 he was elected as Speaker, the same year James Earl Carter, Jr., came into the White House. From the outset, O’Neill experienced strained relations with the Carter administration. O’Neill wanted to focus on the economic problems of stagflation, and he felt Carter was too easily distracted by other issues, such as government reorganization, energy, and health and welfare reform. As a liberal Democrat, he opposed Carter’s budget cuts.

When President Ronald W. Reagan entered the White House, O’Neill unsuccessfully tried to form an alliance with aging House committee chairs and impatient young liberals who wanted to resist Reagan’s conservative agenda. Although O’Neill opposed Reagan’s budget cuts, many liberals within the House claimed that O’Neill caved in too easily to Reagan’s other initiatives. O’Neill continued to serve as Speaker until he left office in 1986. After he retired, he cowrote Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill. O’Neill died in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 5, 1994.

Further reading: Paul Clancy and Shirley Elder, Tip: A Biography of Thomas P O’Neill, Speaker of the House (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Thomas P O’Neill, with William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987).

—Leah Blakey