Power Game (59 page)

“Who is it?” Clark asked.

“Jim Baker,” Reagan replied, “and Mike will be chief of staff.”

Clark was stunned. Later he told others that he thought the president was joking, but looking at his face, Clark could see the president was serious. The prospect horrified Clark.

“Have you talked to George Shultz or Cap Weinberger or Bill Casey about this?” he asked.

“No, and I’m not planning to,” Reagan said. “I already have an announcement prepared.”

They went into the meeting, Clark fearful that Reagan would announce his decision; but Reagan did nothing. Clark passed notes to Meese, Weinberger, and Casey about the president’s intentions. After the session, Clark persuaded Reagan to come down to Clark’s office in the White House basement. Weinberger, Casey, and Meese came along.

All four men strenuously argued against both Baker and Deaver. They contended that Deaver was not up to the job of chief of staff, not competent to handle the range of substantive issues. For Meese and Clark, for whom Deaver had served almost as a flunky in Reagan’s California days, such elevation of Deaver was unthinkable. Weinberger and Casey were particularly outspoken against Baker. They argued that his appointment as national security adviser would shake the confidence of the international security community and would be viewed as a sign of weakness toward the Soviets, since Baker was known as a moderate. All four worked on Reagan, arguing that Baker be sent anywhere but to the NSC job.

“He can have my job even though I know he’s the biggest leaker in town,” Casey told Reagan. “He can’t go to NSC!”

Clark had a different idea. With a chance to get Baker out of the White House, he was ready to reverse his own plans. He told the president: “Perhaps you should consider sending Jim to Interior, and I’ll remain where I am.”

The president replied quickly—to everyone’s surprise—that Baker could not become secretary of Interior because of his ownership interests
in oil and gas in Texas. He would be disqualified because of conflict of interest, unless he would be willing to dispossess himself.

For half an hour, the harangue went on. When Reagan did not make the press announcement or return to the Oval Office, Deaver called Clark’s secretary, Jackie Hill, demanding, “Where is the president? Where is the president?”

Reagan felt opposing pulls within his official family. “He was torn inside in a hundred directions,” said one Reagan intimate who was not directly involved. “He was being torn on both sides by old friends.”

Finally, Reagan agreed to back off the appointments. He returned to the Oval Office to inform first Deaver and then Baker.

“I’ve had a lot of opposition to this from some of the boys,” the president told them. “I want to think about it over the weekend.”

By more than one account, Deaver was so deeply hurt personally that he yelled at Reagan. “You don’t have enough confidence in me to make me chief of staff!” he shouted.

More calmly, Baker suggested dropping the whole scheme. “If it presents a problem for you, Mr. President, that’s not what I want,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is put you in a difficult position. Forget it.”

“No, Jim, I’m not going to forget it,” Reagan said. “I’m going to think about it over the weekend.”

But when he came back on Monday, Reagan told them he was shelving the plan. Another battle immediately ensued over whether he should pick Kirkpatrick for the NSC job, as the Clark-Weinberger faction wanted, or pick Clark’s more moderate deputy, Robert C. McFarlane, whom Baker, Deaver, and Shultz favored. Having disappointed Baker and Deaver on their own plans, the president took their advice on McFarlane.

But the tensions inside the White House remained for the rest of Reagan’s first term. Throughout 1984 the White House was full of talk of an imminent shake-up, but Reagan did nothing to resolve the power conflicts. The entire episode left deep scars and ultimately contributed to the departure of Clark and Deaver from the administration and to the decisions of Meese and Baker to leave the White House at the start of Reagan’s second term.

Back to the Republican Model

What is interesting about Reagan is that the competitive staff structure of his first term fits more with the pattern of Democratic presidents than the standard Republican model. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford
liked to operate with a single strong chief of staff and a clear White House hierarchy. Historically, Eisenhower’s Sherman Adams and Nixon’s John Haldeman stand out as two of the strongest staff chiefs in modern presidential history. By contrast, Democratic presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy preferred a more freewheeling inner circle. They operated without a chief of staff, using several high-powered White House aides as spokes of a wheel with themselves at the hub. Lyndon Johnson, too, liked to play off his top aides against each other. Jimmy Carter’s White House had a loose structure, leaving the lines of power unclear.

But as Reagan’s second term began, he reverted to the Republican model—by accident. For in all this White House maneuvering, the president was strangely passive for a man with a reputation as a strong leader. It is a mark of his difficulty in dealing with personal matters that he was not the one to put his house in order. Ultimately, the independent urges of Reagan’s subordinates solved the problem of staff rivalry: They left the White House. Jim Baker arranged a job swap with Don Regan (at Regan’s initiative), with Baker becoming Treasury secretary and Regan becoming chief of staff. Deaver sold the idea to Reagan. It was a strange decision for a president who had understood in 1980 that he needed a chief of staff, such as Baker, with good political instincts and political antenna. Don Regan had none of these vital staff attributes, and both he and the president paid a heavy price. Throughout Donald Regan’s two-year tenure, Reagan seemed constantly saddled with troubles, from the furor over his visit to the German cemetery in Bitburg in early 1985 to the crippling Iran-
contra
scandal in late 1986.

Inside the White House, Regan succeeded where Baker had not: in centralizing command and concentrating the troika’s dividend powers in his own hands. As a scrappy, self-made Irishman, a poor boy from Boston who won a scholarship to Harvard and made it to the top as a millionaire chairman of Merrill Lynch, Regan ran the White House with the bullish, take-charge style he learned on Wall Street. Regan operated more like a corporate CEO or a Marine officer (he had been both) than a politician accustomed to the ways of sharing power. He personally held all the key levers in the White House power structure. His hand-picked aides controlled the president’s paper flow and schedule but were so meek and dutiful that they were quickly nicknamed the “mice.”

Given a free rein in the president’s political household, Regan tolerated no competing power centers inside the White House. In 1985, Edward Rollins, the blunt-spoken political director who had managed Reagan’s reelection campaign, clashed with Regan a few times and
then resigned in frustration. Periodically, Pat Buchanan, the conservative columnist tapped as communications director, pushed for a confrontational strategy with Congress and the press. Under Buchanan, the strongly ideological speechwriting staff of Bentley Elliot, Peggy Noonan, and Tony Dolan produced sharper, more passionate Reaganite speeches than Regan wanted; Regan had his loyal lieutenants tone down the speeches. Eventually, Regan fired Ben Elliott, the chief speechwriter, and Buchanan went back to the freer life of the columnist. Gradually, the White House apparatus came to reflect more loyalty to Regan than to the president.

Robert McFarlane, the national security adviser, had the only internal channel direct to the president, and Regan moved to control it. Early on, the two men crossed swords when McFarlane awakened the president—
without first informing Regan
—on March 24, 1985 to advise him that an American major had been shot dead by a Soviet guard in East Germany. Regan, caught unawares during a morning staff session with the president, immediately called McFarlane on the carpet. People in nearby offices could hear Regan bellowing. He was in a shouting rage, and McFarlane, a fellow Marine, gradually responded in cold, rising anger.
⁵⁵

“I’m in charge and running this place, and I need to be kept informed,” Regan blustered.

“You’re right, you should have been informed,” McFarlane conceded. “But I’m not going to stand here and put up with abuse of this kind.”

“Well, I’ll run the place the way I want, and you’ll goddamn do it the way I say to do it,” Regan shouted.

“No, I won’t,” McFarlane shot back.

McFarlane headed for the door, telling Regan that he was packing up for good. Within minutes Regan telephoned to apologize for losing his temper and to say he hoped McFarlane was not serious about leaving. A walkout by McFarlane would look bad so early in Regan’s tenure. Their relations were strained, simmering until McFarlane resigned in December. Regan handpicked Rear Admiral John Poindexter as McFarlane’s successor, but Poindexter was more secretive than McFarlane. Moreover, Regan knew little about foreign policy and left the substance to Poindexter, and Regan lacked the political horse sense to give the president independent judgment on the political risks in his foreign ventures.

Nonetheless, in domestic policy, Donald Regan enjoyed “the most extreme delegation [of presidential] authority to one person” in the
White House staff, since Sherman Adams after President Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955, according to presidential scholar Richard Neustadt of Harvard University.
⁵⁶
It was an unfortunate, almost prophetic comparison, because Adams was forced from office by scandal, lacking defenders other than his president; Regan, too, was forced out in early 1987.

Actually, Regan’s power was not as a great as it appeared. He had supremacy inside the White House but not a monopoly. The cabinet had more powerful figures than in the first term, evidence that power is often more in the person than in the job. With their ties to Reagan, Baker at Treasury and Meese as Attorney General were more powerful than their predecessors. With foreign policy more important in the second term, Shultz, Weinberger, McFarlane, Poindexter, and Casey had significant influence. And the NSC staff ran the funding and gunrunning to the Nicaraguan
contras
and the arms deals with Iran. The lesson was that even with control of the White House apparatus, the chief of staff could handle only so much.

Donald Regan tried to run a tidy ship. But alas, tidiness has never been a ringing virtue of American politics. What got lost in the corporate command were the political networking, the accessibility to outsiders, and the canny calculation of political gains and costs that had made Jim Baker so valuable to Reagan. The best staff people in Congress or the White House must protect their leaders by anticipating problems and sensing pitfalls, but Regan was full of political blindspots. He did not properly forsee the blow-up over the Bitburg visit, sanctions against South Africa, or the Iranian operation. He angered congressional Republicans by zigzags on the budget. For all of his talk about a millionaire’s independence, he became known as a “yes man” to Reagan.

What is more, Regan ignored the staff man’s axiom to take a low profile and let the spotlight fall on your boss. His attempt to make himself Ronald Reagan’s strong man ultimately broke him, a lesson for future administrations, just as Sherman Adams’s icy eminence had been. Regan’s personal power lust marked him for a fall. Both Congress and the press react instinctively to power lust in politicians; ambition made Donald Regan a target and left him with few allies to protect him after the shattering news of the Iranian scandal broke. With his Marine stories, his Irish jokes, and his aura of corporate success, Regan appealed personally to the president. But he acted as if Reagan were his sole constituent, as if he did not need to cultivate networks in Congress
and the political community to be summoned when he and his president were in trouble.

The deliberately cultivated impression that Regan was monopolizing power was his Achilles’ heel as a top staff man. When the Iranian scandal broke, Regan put a sign on his desk,
THE BUCK DOESN’T EVEN PAUSE HERE
, but it was too late to duck responsibility, given how assiduously he had polished his power image. When the cry rose for scapegoats, staunch Republicans joined Nancy Reagan in calling for Donald Regan’s head. Unwilling to fall on his sword to save the president, Regan was finally dumped unceremoniously.

The lesson, as one magazine article suggested, was that “in government, consensus is more important than command.”
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Significantly, the president replaced Don Regan with Howard Baker, a leader with friends and credibility throughout the political community and a reputation for patient persuasion and for building consensus. It was a reminder that a successful staff person needs as broad a view, and as sure and deft a political touch, as the president himself.

PART III
The Big Games of Power

The Big Games of Power

The great confrontations, the big power games which the public watches, are the culmination of the background games described in Part Two. In the titanic struggles, the background games all play a part: the working of power networks in Congress, the hidden leverage of staff and iron-triangle alliances, the video-driven independence of new-breed politicians, the divisive pressures of PAC money.

It is on this terrain—altered by the power earthquake of the early 1970s—that political leadership is tested.

Of the big games, the first for any president is the agenda game. No president can lead effectively without being able to fix an agenda, move it swiftly, and deflect the inevitable diversions—not only the moves of rivals but his own contrary impulses and the scattershot urgings of his supporters. With the magnifying power of television, the president has the advantage of commanding center stage. He is able to captivate the public with action or with image making, with substance or storytelling.

But the heart of governing is the solid carpentry of coalition building, the daunting task of not only passing legislation but of winning steady support to sustain policies and programs—especially in domestic affairs—long enough for them to take root. And for the opposition, there is the choice of whether to challenge the president, to bargain with him, or to make a show of collaboration and then—having drawn the president into dependency—how to reshape the content of his proposals.

Finally, on foreign policy, the test for the president is how to deal with the inescapable divisions within his official family. The president can either drag himself from one internal stalemate to the next or—as Reagan also did—simply bypass the internal wars by having his staff generate policies in secret.