05/10/2026
This is what our society needs to get back to - disagreement without being disagreeable.
"On the evening of February 6, 1983, when President Ronald Reagan turned seventy-two years old, the celebration at the White House included a moment that perfectly captured everything warm and improbable and genuinely moving about his friendship with House Speaker Tip O'Neill — because there was O'Neill, the barrel-chested Democrat from Boston who had spent the better part of two years fighting Reagan's economic policies on the House floor with passionate and relentless opposition, standing in the Oval Office grinning beside a birthday cake and trading Irish jokes with the president like two old neighborhood friends who had never spent a single day on opposite sides of anything, which was in many ways exactly what they were after six o'clock, two sons of Irish-American working families who had grown up steeped in the same rich oral tradition of storytelling and humor and warmhearted argument, who could spend an entire dinner party swapping tales passed down from their fathers and forget entirely that one of them was the most powerful Democrat in Washington and the other the most powerful Republican in the world, and at O'Neill's retirement party in 1986 Reagan stood before the crowd and said something that silenced the room with its simple and unguarded sincerity — telling the Speaker that he was grateful he had been permitted the singular honor of calling him his friend, not a colleague, not an opponent, not a rival across the aisle, but a friend, the most honest word either man ever used in public life, and the one that history has remembered longest."
