Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked Read Online Free Page B

position. You learn the same is true at the numerous executive agencies. You grasp this fast or you don’t survive long.
    I know, too, from experience that once you’re inside Washington politics, in the thick of things, you have a far different sense of what goes on. You’ve discovered how the engine works because you’re one of its parts. For the decade after returning home in 1971 from the Peace Corps in Africa, I was deeply involved with the day-to-day reality of the actual enterprise of governance. I worked as a staffer for a president and, before that, for a pair of senators—and was proud of the fact. Call that period of my life my apprenticeship. Those jobs taught and broadened me. The pace of the work was unrelenting; it absorbed me entirely.
    My grandest political job—the inspiration for this book—was in every way a dream one. Even now I still have trouble believing how incredibly lucky I was. It was in 1981 that I was hired to be administrative assistant to the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr.—better known as Tip—and soon found myself seated behind an imposing desk, suddenly more an insider in those marble hallways than I ever had fantasized.
    Here’s the story of how I got there.
    In the late winter of 1971, I found myself returning to the United States after living and working for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kingdom of Swaziland. Turning down posts elsewhere, I’d been seized by the allure of Africa, jumping at the chance to engage actively there in economic development. It was the Vietnam era and I saw volunteering for the Peace Corps as a positive role I could take on for my country in the world. I’d majored in economics at Holy Cross, had gotten a full-ride scholarship to the University of North Carolina for graduate school, where I had spent the winterof 1967–68 as a devout supporter of antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.
    The notion of the Peace Corps appealed not only to my romantic idealism but my readiness to face a rite of passage. Who knows how these things are truly connected. My hunch is that the wild confidence I would now show—knocking on the doors of Capitol Hill offices where I knew no one—originated in that exhilarating period when I zipped around the back roads of southern Africa on a Suzuki 120, speaking my limited Zulu and trying to teach modern business methods to Swazi villagers at remote trading posts.
    During a break from my job in Swaziland, I made my way, often hitchhiking, up through East Africa, with assorted adventures along the way. It was during a trip on the overnight Rhodesian Railways train from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in old Mozambique to Bulawayo that I stayed up enthralled by Ted Sorensen’s memoir, Kennedy . I learned that he, at twenty-four, had been appointed, pretty much out of the blue in 1953, to be legislative assistant to the newly elected senator John F. Kennedy. Before this, the two hadn’t really known each other, but JFK’s hiring instincts proved impeccable. Sorensen, both as speechwriter and advisor, quickly revealed himself to be an indispensable player in his boss’s skyrocketing career.
    It was heady stuff, reading such a thrilling firsthand account of faraway Washington and a young man’s rise. On the other side of the world, I couldn’t help wondering how I could manage to follow in his footsteps.
    Along those lines I was greeted by a stroke of luck. A guy who had graduated before me from Holy Cross sent a letter describing his work for a United States senator in Washington. Hetold of being a “legislative assistant,” the same title Sorensen held with Jack Kennedy. He included a giant detail that would give me confidence—he lacked a law degree. Suddenly a bar had been removed.
    When I finished my Peace Corps tour and flew back to the United States there was snow on the ground. After a brief stop to see old friends down in Chapel Hill, I headed to Washington, D.C. There I began