2nd Term May Be Reagan’s Most Difficult Challenge

“You know, so many people act as if this election means the end of something . . . “ President Reagan told the jubilant crowd celebrating his reelection last November. “To each one of you I say, tonight is the end of nothing; it is the beginning of everything.”

And, indeed, Reagan’s successes at the polls and in office have not only fulfilled the dreams of his supporters but earned acknowledgement from his critics that the battered prestige of the presidency has in some measure been restored.

Yet, for all the brightness generated by Reagan’s triumph, and by his inauguration Monday, a longer look at presidential history raises questions about his prospects for making good on that confident election-night forecast.

Maintaining Grip Maintaining his grip on the country through two full terms, history suggests, will present Ronald Reagan with the most formidable challenge of his political life.

Not since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 has any chief executive completed a second term in office as well liked as when he began it. Moreover, near the end of his second term, even the almost universally venerated “Ike” found himself struggling at home and abroad with forces he could not control.

And the ink is still fresh on the records of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson--both of whom were returned to office by landslides, only to have their tenures end in debacles.

Given Reagan’s ingrained affability, his tendency to separate himself from the infighting of government and the sunny fortune that has so far smiled on him, the inclination of political professionals is to assume that he will be less scarred by the burdens of office than most of his predecessors.

‘Publicly Disengaged’ “One benefit he gets out of being publicly disengaged is that people don’t blame him for bad things that happen,” says John P. Sears, Reagan’s former campaign manager and a White House aide under Nixon. “When he retires, he stands a reasonably good chance of being relatively popular, and relatively healthy.”

But the larger question of Reagan’s second term, both for his friends and his foes, is not how high he remains in the public’s esteem but how great will be his impact on the nation.

To some, the prospects before Reagan seem daunting, portending at best a four-year anticlimax.

The great foreign policy challenge of arms control remains, and Reagan has let no time escape him in pursuing renewed negotiations with the Soviet Union; but getting talks started may prove easier than reaching a significant, and mutually acceptable, conclusion.

And, on the domestic front, the tasks ahead seem even more trying. For one thing, in the view of Harry McPherson, a longtime aide to Johnson, Reagan accomplished so much in his first term.

“In fact, I didn’t think he was going to run again because he had already done everything that was any fun to do,” McPherson said. In his first four years, he pointed out, Reagan cut taxes, slowed the growth of government, substantially increased defense spending and avoided major crises overseas.

“And what’s left in the second term,” he says, “is endless fighting over the details of government--what’s in the budget and what’s in the tax bill and so forth.”

That sort of menu would have given most modern presidents a severe case of political indigestion. In particular, it is the sort of fare for which Reagan himself has previously shown little appetite.

In fact, his lack of appetite for the nitty-gritty of Washington infighting is one of the ways in which Reagan differs from most of his predecessors, who immersed themselves in such policy struggles, according to Princeton University presidential scholar Fred Greenstein.

“You talk to the people around Reagan and you find out that he is not an intrinsically curious man,” Greenstein said. “He is not concerned about the details of strategy.”

Yet, in the view of his loyal aides, this aversion to inside political maneuvering was a source of Reagan’s strength in his first term and will continue to be so in the next four years.

“Everyone in Washington thinks that it’s deals and meetings and phone calls that make things work,” says Anthony Dolan, Reagan’s chief speech writer. “But the way Reagan achieved what he did in his first term is that he went to the people and pleaded his case and he believed in the power of the ideas that he stood for.”

One anomaly of the American political system that Reagan will have to contend with is the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which strips a second-term President of much of his potential influence by barring him from running again for the White House.

“A setting sun giveth off little heat,” Victor Gold, a former aide to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, once observed shortly after Nixon had begun his second term.

Old Reagan hands say that he learned how to function as a lame duck during his second term as California governor after he pledged not to seek reelection. It was during those four years in Sacramento that Reagan pushed a controversial welfare reform proposal through the Legislature, Robert Carleson, who was then director of the state Welfare Department, points out.

“Most of the advice he got beforehand was, ‘Don’t take on welfare--it’s a no-win proposition,’ ” Carleson recalled. “But he was willing to bite the bullet, and he got into it very personally.”

Tax Reform and Deficit Carleson regards the enactment of welfare reform as comparable in political difficulty to dealing with such issues as the federal budget deficit and tax reform, both of which confront Reagan.

Still, it is problematical whether the President can have similar success in handling those thorny economic problems.

His campaign promises to resist a tax increase or any cut in Social Security benefits would help him muster public opposition to such proposals. But, because he carefully avoided advocating specific solutions to the deficit problem, he might have a difficult time getting the electorate behind his approach to this issue once he decides exactly what it will be.

In coping with Congress, Reagan in at least one respect seems to have an advantage over two Republican second-term predecessors, Eisenhower and Nixon. They were confronted by a Congress in which both chambers were controlled by Democrats; Reagan has the benefit of a GOP majority in the Senate.

But this advantage may be more apparent than real. Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose of the University of New Orleans believes the natural tendencies of many Senate Republicans make them uneasy about Reagan’s heavy dependence on economic growth to close the budget deficit. “I think (those tendencies) are beginning to emerge and will emerge even stronger as we get closer to the 1988 elections,” Ambrose said.

Ambrose and other observers believe that Reagan could face serious political trouble in the 1986 congressional elections. They point to what is sometimes called “the six-year itch”--the tendency of voters to turn against the party that has held the White House for six successive years.

In his first term, Reagan was credited by conservatives with--and condemned by liberals for--curbing the growth of the federal government and shifting the national political debate to starboard. But, so far as many conservatives are concerned, the jury is still out on Reagan’s accomplishments.

“The question is whether he turns out to have been someone who just moderates the growth of government,” David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said, “or whether he really changes the direction of the country.”

Perpetuating a Legacy The final answer will depend not just on what Reagan himself is able to accomplish during his second term but also on who succeeds him as leader of the Republican Party, and whether that person can succeed him in the White House. In recent years, perpetuating a presidential legacy has become a near-impossible task.

Johnson and Nixon never really had an opportunity to do so because they were themselves discredited in office--Johnson because of Vietnam, Nixon because of Watergate. Eisenhower, although his popularity remained high throughout his stewardship, also failed--both in his effort to broaden the base of the Republican Party and to help it retain control of the White House.

“Well, this is the biggest defeat of my life,” the hero of D-Day remarked on the morning after Nixon’s defeat by John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Some conservatives believe that Reagan has already forfeited his chances of picking a like-minded successor, without fully realizing it, by choosing the more moderate George Bush as his vice president.

Foreign Policy Issues Many believe that Reagan, confronted by problems at home, will turn his attention overseas, as Eisenhower did in his second term, in hopes of forging a significant agreement with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms.

“What strikes me is that they (Reagan and his aides) are making noises about some sort of accommodation with the Russians,” says Princeton’s Greenstein, author of “The Hidden Hand Presidency,” an analysis of Eisenhower’s White House service.

“He knew he had four more years and they were his last four years,” Greenstein says of Eisenhower’s efforts to reach agreement on a comprehensive nuclear test ban. “He was thinking about the history books.”

Eisenhower had a special advantage in trying to bargain with the Kremlin, similar to one Reagan also appears to have. As a military hero, Eisenhower was unlikely to be attacked as being too soft on the Soviets. Reagan also probably would be shielded from such criticism, except perhaps from hard-line conservatives, because of his longtime reputation for vigilance against the threat of communist aggression.

Still, Reagan, like Eisenhower, will have to contend with the Soviets’ perception of their own self-interest and their own internal power struggles--factors beyond his control.

Pressures of Presidency Moreover, Eisenhower’s experience serves as a reminder that, in trying to meet his second-term challenges, Reagan may find that his own intentions are hampered by the conflicting pressures of the modern presidency.

Ambrose points out how a long-sought summit conference between Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, was wrecked when the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

“Fittingly, the flight that Powers made was one Eisenhower instinctively wanted to call off, but one that his technologists insisted was necessary,” Ambrose writes in “Eisenhower: The President.”

” . . . That this could happen to Eisenhower illustrates vividly the tyranny of technology in the nuclear/missile age.”