Reagan ‘An Actor Reading His Own Lines’ : O’Neill Pens Some Stinging Reflections

Retired House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. offers stinging reflections on 34 years in Congress in memoirs that cast Sen. Robert F. Kennedy as a “self-important upstart and a know-it-all” and Ronald Reagan as a selfish figurehead who “read his lines.”

In “Man of the House,” to be published in September, O’Neill also reveals a failed FBI attempt to trap him with an Abscam bribe and questioning the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a single gunman killed President John F. Kennedy, the Boston Herald reported Sunday.

In the proofs of his memoirs, the newspaper said, the Massachusetts Democrat offers blunt assessments of his half-century in public office, including 34 in Congress.

He blames Reagan, for example, for agreeing to arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in a desperate effort to keep control of the Senate in the 1986 elections.

“It was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President,” O’Neill wrote. “Most of the time he was an actor reading his own lines, who didn’t understand his own programs.

“He wasn’t without leadership ability, but he lacked most of the management skills that a President needs. Let me give him his due: He would have made a hell of a king.”

O’Neill said he is convinced that Reagan’s White House staged the 1983 invasion of Grenada simply to offset public dismay over the terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in a Beirut barracks just days earlier.

In a blistering overall attack on Reagan’s politics, the ex-Speaker added, “I blame the President for allowing . . . selfishness to become respectable.”

O’Neill also is tough on John F. Kennedy, saying that for one who left “a shining legacy” as President, “I’ve never seen a congressman get so much press while doing so little work.”

Of Kennedy’s younger brother Robert, the author wrote: “I never really liked him. To me, he was a self-important upstart and a know-it-all. To him, I was simply a street-corner pol. We weren’t friendly.”

On other topics, O’Neill wrote:

--Lyndon Johnson was “a friend who made a tremendous difference for a lot of people in this country. . . . If it hadn’t been for Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson could have gone down in history as another Roosevelt.”

--Richard Nixon is a “brilliant guy” with a “quirk in his personality that made him suspicious of everybody” and helped destroy his presidency, “a leery and nervous President who ran a closed shop.”

--Jimmy Carter is a man of “intelligence (and) tremendous moral strength” whose ignorance of Washington ways wrecked his presidency. “I miss Jimmy Carter, but talent (alone) isn’t enough,” O’Neill wrote.