Reagan Feted by a Festive Capital : Californians Exit as Second Term Begins

President Reagan and most of the California aides who followed him to the White House four years ago are going their separate ways in his second term--a transition away from mutual dependency that they all agree is healthy.

The Californians who have served Reagan both in Sacramento and in Washington--and there are scores of them--all seem to have a different story to tell: of financial hardship, self-fulfillment, family strain, career-building, bitter feuding, new alliances, disappointment, forbearance and exhilaration. They all grouse about Washington’s weather.

But among the relatively few who have worked closely with the President at the White House, there is one dominant theme: They got burned out mentally and physically and, one by one, decided they should leave.

President Gained Experience

Meanwhile, they say, Reagan was evolving from a Washington novice into an experienced President who no longer needed to be surrounded by the “security blanket” (as one intimate described it) of a California cadre of longtime trusted aides.

“Look, I don’t need a handler,” the President recently admonished one of his California confidants who had been arguing that Reagan should keep around him somebody he especially trusted and who was well-schooled in his habits and ways.

Such a person still will be at the White House, of course: the President’s wife, Nancy, whose career-long influence on her husband only recently has begun to be understood by official Washington.

Like her husband, the First Lady was deeply offended last year by Democrat Walter F. Mondale’s campaign charges that the President was detached and had allowed his advisers to captain the ship of state.

Objecting to “the stories that keep saying, ‘What is poor Ronald Reagan going to do now that all these men are gone?’ ” Mrs. Reagan last week lectured United Press International reporter Helen Thomas:

“‘Poor Ronald Reagan’ is going to be doing exactly what ‘poor Ronald Reagan’ has been doing for the past four years, and that’s running the government. Nobody else was running the government. It was not all these other people. It was Ronald Reagan.”

‘Very Quick Baptism’ Although they acknowledge that Reagan is hardly a student of detail, the President’s advisers emphatically agree with his wife’s basic point. “He’s much more his own man than you guys think,” John V. Svahn, presidential assistant for policy development, said.

Svahn, 41, who was Reagan’s state welfare director in Sacramento and implemented his welfare reforms, stands to become the highest ranking Californian remaining on the White House staff. “People here are going to have a very quick baptism--probably under fire--coming up to speed on Ronald Reagan,” Svahn said, talking about the staff turnover.

For the first time since Reagan entered politics 19 years ago, he will not have at his side, advising him on a daily basis, any of the four California aides who have played invaluable roles in his public career:

--Lyn Nofziger, 60, Reagan’s first gubernatorial press secretary and first presidential assistant for political affairs who now is a private consultant in Washington.

--William P. Clark, 53, a former gubernatorial chief of staff who served for two years as the President’s national security adviser and is resigning as secretary of the Interior to return to his San Luis Obispo County ranch.

--Edwin Meese III, 53, who served the longest tenure as Reagan’s gubernatorial chief of staff, became a presidential counselor with Cabinet rank and will leave the White House to become attorney general, if confirmed by the Senate.

--Michael K. Deaver, 47, who worked for Clark and Meese in Sacramento and became Reagan’s closest aide at the White House, orchestrating his schedule and packaging his image for the media. Deaver plans to leave soon for a high-paying public relations job.

All four of these aides--who used to be extremely close but some of whom were barely speaking to each other at various points in the first term--went with Reagan to the California governor’s office in 1967. And, when Meese and Deaver leave the White House, no remnants of that original gubernatorial staff will be at the President’s side. The consensus of Reagan’s aides is that he no longer needs them to be.

“This is the end of the California transition,” observed Craig L. Fuller, 34, a Californian who was only old enough to run the intern program in Reagan’s Sacramento office but who now is the presidential assistant for Cabinet affairs. Fuller also intends to leave the White House sometime this year if he is offered a good job in the private sector.

“The President and Mrs. Reagan have learned to have trust and confidence in a lot of people who weren’t in California with them, which a lot of Californians don’t always appreciate,” Fuller said. He particularly cited White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan (Baker and Regan soon will trade jobs) and national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane.

“The Reagans want good people around them,” Fuller added. “If they’re not from California, so be it.”

Fuller, one of the few key presidential aides who managed to maintain good relations with all warring factions during first-term White House feuding, pointed out that Reagan made a “significant decision” after being elected in 1980 to integrate his California-oriented staff with several influential non-Californians.

Thus, Meese and Deaver shared a troika power arrangement with Baker, an old Washington hand, who brought in several other veterans of previous Republican administrations.

“This really served to strengthen the President’s hand and shorten the amount of time it took him to settle in,” Fuller said. “The integration of trusted Californians engaged in on-job learning with non-Californians who were learning about the President resulted in the sum total being much greater than the parts.”

Reagan has downplayed the importance of the departure of longtime California advisers from his staff. “I could not expect them to contract in for the run of the show,” he recently told the Dallas Morning News, harking back to terminology from his acting days.

As for the fears among conservatives that when Meese leaves his staff and Clark leaves Washington there no longer will be an ideological “true believer” at his right hand, the President answered emphatically: “The true believer in the White house is sitting here in the Oval Office.”

And to USA Today, he lamented: “This picture that is being created that I sit at the desk and want to see who’s going to grab this arm and pull me this way or grab this one and pull me that way . . . You know something? I’m too old and stubborn to put up with that. I make up my mind. . . . I haven’t changed my views since I’ve been here.”

Philosophical Soul Mates Aside from losing philosophical soul mates, Reagan also is about to lose the California staffer many think of as his handler: Deaver.

“Mike’s sense of Reagan’s moods is something nobody else will easily master,” observed Stuart K. Spencer, the veteran California-based political strategist who never has joined any of Reagan’s administrations but nevertheless has remained close to the President.

Deaver, who has become particularly adept at presenting the President’s best side to the nation’s television viewers, said: “A lot of people around here made me look good--and the real guy who made me look good was Ronald Reagan.”

Even more so than most of the Californians who came to Washington with Reagan, Deaver’s life here has been a mixed bag of extreme highs and lows: traveling the globe to meet with world leaders, dodging bullets in a presidential assassination attempt, becoming one of the most powerful men in the country, going into debt to live here, greatly enhancing his earnings potential in private enterprise and constantly being pressured by his family to get out of the White House.

“These are very, very tough jobs, and I was frankly just tired,” Deaver said, recalling how he finally decided on the morning of Jan. 3 to ask the Reagans for permission to leave.

Inspired by Article

They gave it, and Deaver announced his resignation immediately, fearful that he might change his mind. He had been inspired to act by a Wall Street Journal story that day implying that he had traded on his influence to land his wife a high-paying public relations job and lucrative accounts.

“My family life improved immeasurably and immediately” after announcing his resignation, Deaver said. “I came home and my 14-year-old daughter greeted me shouting: ‘We’ve won.’ My 9-year-old son, on the other hand, said: ‘I suppose we won’t be able to go to the White House for Christmas dinner again.’ ” The Deaver family has eaten Christmas dinner with the President’s family for the last three years.

“Your life is consumed at the White House, but it also is stimulating,” Deaver said. “There are so many people you get to meet and talk with, whether it’s a Prime Minister (Margaret) Thatcher or a Mother Teresa. Now, I’ll really get a chance to think about those things and smell the roses.”

Clark, Meese and Deaver all were good friends in Sacramento. In Washington, Deaver allied himself with Baker against Clark and Meese. Deaver’s supporters contend, among other things, that Clark and Meese never could handle the fact that Deaver became not only their co-equal but closer than they were to Reagan. Allies of Clark and Meese say Deaver forgot who his friends were and embarked on his own agenda.

Ironically, some said, recent investigations into Meese’s financial dealings resulting from the severe money problems he encountered after moving his family here--a dilemma Deaver could empathize with--has tended to draw the two former Sacramento colleagues back together.

Several Californians observed that it’s the incredibly high stakes involved--the power, the reputations, the potential earnings--that drive ordinarily congenial, intelligent people to begin thrashing at one another in Washington.

“It’s a tougher ballgame here,” noted James Lake, 47, a Washington lobbyist who was Reagan’s press secretary in three presidential campaigns and--like Nofziger and Deaver--was raised among the oil derricks and cotton fields of Bakersfield.

“This is a very sharp pinnacle, and there are a lot of people down at the bottom who want to play at the top and can’t make it,” Lake continued. “People try very hard at the expense of friendships, peers, compatriots to get to the top. The top is different for everybody. But ultimately it’s the presidency, to be around that.”

Cautioned Staff

Nofziger, who also served at the White House during the Richard M. Nixon Administration, said: “I’ve always told people who work for me here, ‘Look, don’t let this go to your head. The people who didn’t return your calls before you get here won’t after you leave.’ It’s so easy to get enamored by the perceived importance you think you’ve got.”

Beyond that, Nofziger said, “I’m always a little bit amused by the guy who makes $60,000--$70,000 (as senior officials do) and can’t hack it (financially). Yeah, money doesn’t go as far here as it does in California. But I don’t think it’s necessary that you have to keep up with the Joneses or go in debt. Some people come here and think they have to get a big house, send their kids to private school--and when they do that it eats up your income.”

Whatever the reasons, many of the Californians whose political youths were spent in the cozy, easy-living atmosphere of Sacramento and later loyally followed their former governor here--full of pride and in high spirits--gradually have been beaten down and now say they need a respite.

“Washington is not a big Sacramento,” observed A. Alan Hill, 46, another California transplant who is chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

“But I’ve found one good thing about living here,” he added, referring to the three-hour time difference. “You don’t have to get up early to watch the Rose Parade.”

More tangibly, there is one facet of Washington that even the most jaded of Californians continually find fascinating: the myriad displays of history--the Revolutionary War and Civil War battlefields, the old taverns and meeting halls, the mansions, museums, monuments and the White House itself.

“Out there,” Hill said, referring to his native California, “once you’ve seen the missions, what else is there to see?”