Man of the House: The Life & Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O'Neill - Biography of Influential US Congressman - Perfect for Political History Enthusiasts & American Government Studies

An enjoyable and light read, Tip O’Neill’s Man of the House was like sitting down with him and hearing his stories from the old days. He shared anecdotes, lessons, and timeless political truths, the most famous being that “all politics is local.” However, the book contains many of these axioms.Inspired by his civil servant father and infuriated by the discrimination towards the Irish of Boston, O’Neill entered politics after graduating from college at the tail end of the Great Depression. O’Neill had a political career long enough to have known the machine politics of Boston in the early 20th Century and the Iran-Contra Affair at the end. And he worked with every president from Truman to Reagan. An acolyte of FDR, O’Neill embodied the epitome of the New Deal Democrat, and he stayed true to these beliefs until retiring in the late 1980s. However, this was a time when Democrats and Republicans would socialize at the card table and on the golf course, with O’Neill saying that those on opposite sides of the aisle were always friends after six o’clock and on weekends.I found the prose endearing, even if a little meandering. The chapters on Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan were the most interesting. He doesn’t pull any punches. While his hopes for the Carter administration were high, he blames its failure on the weakness of his staff and Carter’s disinterest in engaging in the rituals and politics of Washington, D.C. His surprisingly harsh critique of Reagan and, by extension, Reaganism seems to be a reaction to the repudiation of the New Deal philosophy that he held dear.Whether you share O’Neill’s political perspective or not this book is a fun read for students of politics of any era, but especially those of the last half of the 20th Century.