O’Neill’s Book Tells the Way It Was

Former House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr., who died on 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 a 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 lessons such as these:

* “Never Forget Whence You Came”: 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 street light out, you don’t tell them to call City Hall. You call City Hall.”

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.”

With a moral tale 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.

“Tip saw himself as a storyteller, and others saw him as a fountain of good political common sense,” said Times Books Publisher Peter Osnos. It fell to Osnos and editor Jonathan Karp to pinpoint the moral in each of the tales they planned to use (because O’Neill himself wasn’t one to moralize). Anecdotes that lacked a redeeming lesson were axed--”and sometimes this was like ripping Tip’s soul out,” said Gary Hymel, one of O’Neill’s former administrative assistants. “After all, some of these stories had served him well for years.”

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

As Osnos recalled, the editorial process also involved an enviable weekend last summer at O’Neill’s home on Cape Cod, where the expansive Tip schmoozed out a lot of his text during hearty meals of chowder and steak, followed by the cigars he savored on the veranda.

The dance of politics has changed so radically through the years, with the electronic media now calling most of the steps, that O’Neill’s book provides a useful reminder if not of the way things ought to be, at least of the way things used to be, cigars and all.

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On the Racks: Architectural Digest devotes its January issue to the domestic splendors of Italy, including a rare visit to Gore Vidal’s villa in Ravello, overlooking the Amalfi Coast. The photos make it easy to see why this has long been the writer’s permanent residence. “In the early days I’d be inspired to take on a movie to get the pool finished,” he confesses. “That’s a powerful inspiration. I always date things by which book, which money, built it.” His novel “Lincoln,” for example, helped pay for the pool house and sauna.

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B Matter: The death last week of Virginia Kelley, President Clinton’s mother, has accelerated Simon & Schuster’s plans to publish her autobiography. Originally scheduled for next fall, “Leading With My Heart” will now be released in May . . . .

Judith Adler Hennessee has signed with Random House to write a biography of Betty Friedan . . . .

Former President Richard M. Nixon has written the foreword to a compact compendium, “The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill” (HarperCollins), put together by Churchill authority James C. Humes. Nixon says: “Churchill is one of the few statesmen who occupied both the world of thought and the world of action. Most of Churchill’s observations carry with them both the dimensions of actual experience and the knowledge of history.”