Godfrey rates O'Neill as his 'favorite' governor

By Scott Benjamin

DANBURY – State Rep. Bob Godfrey says of the six governors he’s served under during the last 31 years, his “favorite” was the college drop-out who got his initial political education by tending bar.

Godfrey (D-110) of Danbury, who was initially elected in 1988, said Bill O’Neill, the 84^th governor of Connecticut, was “almost Horatio Alger.”

The former governor was an Air Force combat pilot during the Korean War and eventually worked and then owned O’Neill’s Tap Room in East Hampton, his family’s business, where he tended bar during his younger years. He lost two bids for a state House seat before initially winning election in 1966.

O’Neill ascended to the governorship under difficult circumstances as former Gov. Ella Grasso (D-Windsor Locks) stepped down following a long bout with cancer in December 1980.

O’Neill served from December 31, 1980 until January 9, 1991 - the second longest tenure for a Connecticut governor. It has been 210 years since a governor served longer.

Godfrey said partly because O’Neill had been the House Majority Leader from 1975 through 1978, he was “brilliant” in his outreach with legislators as governor.

“He was in touch,” he said. “He knew how to move the levers of the General Assembly to get things accomplished.”

“He did more for education than any governor in my life,” Godfrey said on O’Neill’s development of the Education Cost Sharing formula and the Education Enhancement Act, which increased teacher salaries and raised education standards.

O’Neill also has been credited with the largest transportation infrastructure repair program in Connecticut history as he responded to the June 1983 collapse of the Mianus River Bridge - now known as the Michael Morano Bridge, named after the former Republican state senator - in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich.

“Unlike now, he didn’t push off maintenance because he knew it had to be done and would cost more at a later date,” said Godfrey.

“He was the one who stood before the Legislature and said that decent housing was a right,” he said.

CTNewsJunkie columnist Susan Bigelow reported in 2018 that during the mid-1980s Connecticut’s economy soared as the insurance industry expanded in Hartford and former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s defense build-up created additional work at Connecticut’s military contractors – Electric Boat in Groton, Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney in East Hartford and Igor Sikorsky in Stratford.

In 1984 The New York Times reported that Connecticut had one of the best economies in the country.

O’Neill also improved the state’s Economic Development Department as Commissioner John Carson of Bloomfield helped develop trade missions to China and Japan. Perhaps the only Connecticut governor to come close to O’Neill’s outreach to foreign markets was Dannel Malloy (D-Essex), who served from 2011 to 2019.

Malloy and O’Neill are the only Connecticut state chief executives to lead a delegation of economic representatives on a trip to China. O’Neill did it about 13 years before the United States established Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China.

O’Neill was uninspiring public speaker. He was referred to as Connecticut’s equivalent of former President Harry Truman, who was noted for mangling words.

Former Republican state Sen. Jamie McLaughlin, a former Woodbury and Brookfield resident who now lives in Darien, said during his early years in the General Assembly in the early 1980s he didn’t think that O’Neill was sophisticated enough to be governor.

However, he added in a 1999 interview that he came to learn that the former governor “was a man of wisdom” who usually made sound decisions.

William Cibes of New London, a former state representative and secretary of the state Office of Policy & Management said in a 1999 interview that sometimes elected officials underestimated O’Neill.

Ella Grasso had supported Peter Kelly for the state Democratic Party chairmanship in 1975, but O’Neill got elected. When Lt. Gov. Robert Killian (D-Hartford) ran against Grasso for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1978, O’Neill bested a talented field of candidates, including future U.S. Sen. and vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman, for the Democratic lieutenant governor’s nomination.

He was challenged twice for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination – by former state House Speaker Ernest Abate of Stamford in 1982 and former U.S. Rep. Toby Moffett in 1986 – and in both instances his opponent was unable to secure the 20 percent of the convention vote to force a primary.

O’Neill attended Central Connecticut State University and the University of Hartford, but didn’t earn a degree from either school.

However, a faculty position in his name has been established at Central and an oral history project was completed on his career. The athletic complex at Western Connecticut State University’s west side campus is named after the former governor.

McLaughlin has praised O’Neill for upgrading his staff in the mid-1980’s with the addition of co-chief of staff David McQuade, communications director Jon Sandberg and legal counsel Howard Rifkin.

The former governor also recruited liberal stalwarts Jonathan Pelto and Cibes as strategists on his 1986 re-election campaign.

Former Hartford Courant political columnist Michele Jacklin said in a 1999 interview that O’Neill deserved credit for some initiatives, such as the transportation improvements, but he probably would not be viewed as favorably over the years as his successor, Lowell Weicker, who had the fortitude to enact the state income tax over strong-willed opposition.

Connecticut’s economy declined following the October 1987 Black Monday stock market frenzy and the huge federal budget deficits that had accumulated following Reagan’s across-the-board federal tax cuts.

However, Godfrey remembers a governor who related to the common folks.

He said that O’Neill “was warm and sympathetic and avuncular. He was blue-collar, and he reflected that in his politics.”