O’Neill, 84, treasury secretary Bush ousted
Paul O’Neill had just presided over a celebrated revival of the aluminum giant Alcoa and was about to begin his retirement in late 2000.
Then came calls from Vice President-elect Dick Cheney asking him to become treasury secretary. Despite having a list of reasons for not being right for the job, O’Neill agreed.
It turned out to be an agonizing tenure.
O’Neill lasted less than two years in the job; his outspoken independence was seen as political disloyalty, and President George W. Bush fired him in December 2002.
On Saturday, O’Neill died at his home in Pittsburgh at 84. His son Paul Jr. said the cause was lung cancer.
Having been handed his walking papers by the White House, O’Neill rejected the suggestion that he should say publicly that he wanted to return to private life.
“I’m too old to begin telling lies now,” he said with typical candor. “If I took that course, people who know me well would say that it wasn’t true. And people who don’t know me well would say, ‘O’Neill was a coward — things aren’t going so well, and he bailed out on the president.’”
He promptly became the subject and chief source for a rare book about the inner workings of an administration still in power, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill” by Ron Suskind, published in 2004. Its contents were considered so politically volatile at a time when Bush was seeking re-election that the title was withheld until just before publication.
Suskind called the book “an experiment in transparency,” relying on thousands of documents supplied by O’Neill, who fact-checked the manuscript. Michael Tomasky, writing in the
New York Times Book Review, said it showed how “deeply corrupted” traditions of public service had become. The book reached No. 1 on the Times’ bestseller list.
Among its allegations was not only that Bush was often unengaged in policy discussions, but also that many decisions, including the invasion of Iraq, had seemed to have been politically ordained.
As Bush’s first term proceeded early on, the impression grew among outsiders that O’Neill’s long corporate career had rendered him insensitive to Washington realities and undermined his influence.
In fact, O’Neill noted in an interview for this obituary in 2017, his Washington experience had been “more than that of anybody at the table.” That experience included intimate involvement in most of the major domestic controversies of the Nixon years as a high-ranking official at the Budget Bureau. (It was renamed the Office of Management and Budget during his tenure, which included his appointment as deputy director.)
Paul Henry O’Neill was born Dec. 4, 1935, in St. Louis into a military family and grew up on bases in the Midwest and West with his two brothers and a sister. His father, John Paul O’Neill, was a master sergeant in the Army Air Forces. His mother was Gaynold (Irving) O’Neill.
He attended Anchorage High School in Alaska, where he met Nancy Wolfe. They married in 1955. She survives him, as do his son; three daughters, Patricia Wilcox, Margaret Tatro and Julie Kloo; 12 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.