Soothing the Speaker

When Tip O'Neill gets mad, things start to happen

Frank Moore dreaded the encounter.

"You can't believe how this is going to upset the Speaker," said President Carter's congressional liaison man.

"Why don't you go see him?" replied the President. "Tell him I'm going to back Solomon."

"I'll do that," said Moore, "but he's going to blow up."

What Moore had to tell House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O'Neill two weeks ago was that Carter was going to back Jay Solomon, chief of the scandal-plagued General Services Administration, in the dismissal of the agency's No. 2 Executive, Robert Griffin. An old friend of O'Neill's, Griffin was in no way implicated in the charges of theft and kickbacks at GSA that are currently being investigated. He simply did not get along with Solomon.

The Administration's first mistake was to underestimate O'Neill's sense of propriety. By the time Moore got an appointment to see O'Neill, the decision to dismiss Griffin had already leaked out. When the Speaker asked Moore about the rumors, he replied: "There is going to be a showdown, and the President is going to back Solomon." O'Neill asked specifically whether it was true that Solomon was going to call in Griffin the next day and fire him. "I don't know what you're talking about," Moore said. "I don't see how it can be done. Solomon is in New York, and he's going to California."

O'Neill apparently misunderstood Moore's words as meaning that Griffin was not going to be fired. "He said it can't happen," O'Neill later told a friend. "He didn't tell me the truth." When Griffin was indeed fired the next day, O'Neill was deeply outraged. He declared publicly that both he and his friend had been "treated shabbily." As for Moore, O'Neill said, he would no longer be welcome in the Speaker's office--an extraordinary blow to the relations between two branches of Government.

Over breakfast the next day, Carter tried to mollify O'Neill. "It's just one of those things," said the President. "They [Solomon and Griffin] didn't get along." Exploded O'Neill: "It's the way you did it, in the middle of a scandal."

The President then launched a remarkable campaign to undo his own deed. Griffin was invited to the White House, where officials praised his talents as an administrator. Most important, Vice President Walter Mondale was assigned the task of finding him another job. At midweek, the White House announced that Griffin had accepted a newly created $50,000-a-year appointment as a "senior assistant" to Robert Strauss, the President's Special Trade Representative and Counselor on inflation.

Nobody seemed to know exactly what Griffin was supposed to do--"a little of everything," said Strauss--but it was obvious that, with his congressional connections, he could be useful in lobbying. Tip O'Neill seemed partially mollified. "The performance between the Administration and the Speaker's office is on the same course as it has always been," he said.

It was Jerry Rafshoon, newly hired to improve Carter's image, who had argued most forcefully, that Carter should press ahead with the dismissal of Griffin regardless of O'Neill's anger. Backing off, he said, would make the President look indecisive. In the end, the Administration's handling of the Griffin affair seemed not only indecisive but inept. -

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