Chief of Staff Says President ‘Seems Satisfied’ : Regan Tightens Grip on Job After a Year

Last New Year’s Eve, Donald T. Regan, confronting yet another suggestion that he was in danger of losing his job as White House chief of staff, snapped that only Ronald Reagan could fire him, and the President “seems satisfied with the job I’m doing.”

Today, despite a year of sometimes-stormy relations with Congress, bitter disputes with other Republicans who considered him politically inept and recurrent rumors that he was on the way out, the crusty former Treasury secretary and one-time Wall Street executive has emerged stronger and apparently more entrenched at the White House than ever.

And Regan’s power--widely regarded as unequaled since the days when Sherman Adams served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s alter ego in the 1950s--has grown in recent months as a result of a largely successful effort to smooth off some of the rough edges and respond to the complaints of critics--especially in the all-important area of relations with Congress.

“I thought the wheels were coming off the White House back in the summer, but Don’s doing a helluva lot better now,” a longtime Reagan adviser said. “He’s still short on political savvy, but he’s listening to more people now.”

Rep. Dick Cheney (R-Wyo.), former chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford and a critic of Regan in the past, said Regan “is doing a pretty good job now and has been working aggressively with several of us on everything from the budget to aid to the contras in Nicaragua, so I have no complaints.”

Nowhere has Regan gained more lost ground than in the GOP-controlled Senate, where Republicans--including Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.)--were infuriated by what they regarded as a White House double-cross last year on budget-reduction plans. “Don Regan’s very powerful and probably ought to be,” Dole now says, adding that “the one big advantage” of dealing with him as opposed to the troika that operated the White House in the first term is that “now you can get a much quicker response to your requests.”

Dole, citing the kind of attention to seemingly tangential detail that can sometimes make or break an Administration official’s relations with the Hill, recalled that Regan recently reacted immediately when Dole put in an urgent request for an Administration presence at a meeting on the farm crisis that the senator was having with a large group of Republicans.

Termed Self-Promoter

“He couldn’t come because the President was going out of town to make a speech and he was going with him,” Dole recalled, “but he sent (Budget Director) Jim Miller, (political aide) Mitch Daniels, the undersecretary of agriculture, plus M. B. Oglesby (assistant for congressional liaison). That’s the kind of response I get from him today.”

As recently as two months ago, some of the President’s own longtime advisers were still highly critical of Regan and suggested that his days at the White House might be numbered. They accused him of being a politically insensitive self-promoter whose authoritarian manner had alienated members of the President’s own party in Congress. They held him largely responsible for Reagan’s deteriorating relations with Congress and other political problems that caused his second term to get off to a rocky beginning after his highly successful first term.

Such critics pointed to what they portrayed as clumsy footwork by Regan, for example, when House Republicans rebelled against the House tax revision bill--a rebellion that was put down only after some heavy lobbying by the President himself.

While the criticism has not entirely faded, it has abated considerably--for several reasons.

Less Confrontational

For one thing, Regan has adopted a more cooperative and less confrontational style in dealing with Congress. Moreover, responding to complaints that he was isolated and surrounded by inexperienced aides at the White House, the chief of staff now periodically seeks the counsel of longtime Reagan advisers who are no longer in the Administration, including former political advisers Edward J. Rollins and Lyn Nofziger, former congressional relations adviser Kenneth M. Duberstein, and former deputy chief of staff Michael K. Deaver.

Regan himself acknowledges that those are reasons he is no longer under such heavy fire. But, in an interview, he added:

“I think a lot of people are getting used to me and my style and they recognize that I’m not nine feet tall and 600 pounds. They are beginning to see that what I’m trying to do is merely to carry out the President’s program. When I first came in, there were a lot of worries about what was my agenda . . . and they recognized finally I have no agenda of my own. I’m trying to push the President’s agenda as I see it.”

Defends His Style

Defending his management style, Regan, swinging his fist like a boxer, declared: “This abrupt, punch ‘em in the nose, damn the torpedoes, full-speed-ahead type of thing is not my 100% style. I use that on occasion and I veer on occasion and I think that, at times, I am compassionate and I am mellow and I’m not always this just plunge-ahead type.”

A Regan aide said the chief of staff at first tended to shrug off the criticism heaped on him last year. “He realized he was the one lightning tower and there were three towers” under the old troika system, the official said. “So the criticism didn’t bother him until he began to worry it was impairing his effectiveness.”

A senior aide said: “In every job he’s had, there were a lot of people who didn’t like him and he considers that almost a mark he is succeeding. He associates it with making tough calls and doing a good job.

“Things are different at the White House. When he was head of Merrill Lynch it didn’t matter when a third vice president got mad, but now it does matter when a freshman congressman gets mad because he might shoot off his mouth and it hurts your effectiveness. Some of us have told him that and he’s doing a lot better.”

Praise From First Lady

Also helping to quell criticism of the chief of staff was First Lady Nancy Reagan’s public praise of Regan last month, described by White House staffers as “a laying on of hands.” Mrs. Reagan, fiercely protective of the President and a powerful influence in White House personnel matters, had added to the criticism earlier in the year when she reportedly told some longtime Reagan advisers that she disapproved of the way Regan elbowed others aside and ostentatiously took charge in the aftermath of the President’s cancer operation.

But the New York Times last month quoted her as saying that Regan was often blamed for “things he hasn’t had anything to do with.” And she added: “He has a good sense of humor, he’s straightforward. I like both of those qualities. He’s candid. He’s honest. From what I can see, he’s done some great things.”

Finally, Regan is riding high today in no small part because the President--after widespread talk last year that his cancer operation and political setbacks were threatening to make him an early lame duck and render him irrelevant in the budget and tax fights--has rebounded to unprecedented heights in public opinion polls and re-established himself as a strong force to be reckoned with on Capitol Hill.

One thing is the same today as it was a year ago: Regan’s power and influence--only more so.

‘Regan’s Robots’

Served and protected by a cadre of aides so attuned to his wishes that they are jokingly referred to as “Regan’s robots,” the chief of staff from the beginning established strict control over the access of people and paper to a President well known for delegating authority. That has made Regan an indispensable executor of presidential power and perhaps the strongest unelected official of modern times.

“He controls the schedule and the people who see the President and he controls presidential decisions on domestic issues in that when the big decisions are finally made, it’s just the President and one other person in the room--Don Regan,” said a senior White House aide who asked not to be identified.

Patrick J. Buchanan, Reagan’s director of communications and a veteran of the Nixon White House, sees Regan as stronger than H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s hard-bitten chief of staff, and “maybe more powerful” than Sherman Adams.

On domestic matters, Regan thrashes out policy options with other aides, then closets himself with the President for the final decision. “You don’t see arguments on domestic matters in front of the President the way you did in the first term,” a senior aide said. “Only on foreign matters are there general discussions with the President.”

Foreign Policy Influence

Even on foreign policy matters, an area in which he has less experience, Regan has had extraordinary influence since leaving Treasury last February and swapping jobs with then-Chief of Staff James A. Baker III.

Advising the President on everything from the Geneva summit to the crises in Haiti and the Philippines, Regan has shared the foreign policy limelight when things have gone well but has felt the heat when things have gone wrong. He won plaudits for Reagan’s performance at the summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

But congressional and State Department critics blame him for the President’s controversial statements that fraud and violence occurred on both sides in the Philippines election--remarks that brought an outcry from Congress and an eventual backdown from the President, who issued another statement saying fraud and violence were “perpetrated largely by the ruling party” of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

“There’s always a learning process for anyone operating in the White House,” said Cheney, the one-time chief of staff in the Ford Administration. “And you’ll always hear some grousing about the chief of staff. Lord knows I was criticized when I was there and Baker and Al Haig were too. It’s a favorite pastime in Washington.”

Bitter Resentment

Although Regan is a member of the National Security Council, Robert C. McFarlane, who resigned as the President’s national security adviser Dec. 4, was known to have bitterly resented what he considered Regan’s undue influence and interference in foreign policy.

Regan’s authority in the White House has been helped by the extraordinary chemistry that appears to exist between the 75-year-old President and his 68-year old chief of staff, who is Reagan’s only contemporary among top White House officials. “I found someone your own age to play with,” Deaver, then deputy chief of staff, told Reagan when he informed him Regan and Baker wanted to swap jobs.

“The chemistry is great both personally and professionally,” a Regan aide said. “Both (Reagan and Regan) have a great Irish sense of humor and they joke a lot. They share a sense of optimism and enthusiasm and neither wants to hear why it’s impossible to do something.”

The President often jokes with Regan about the similarities in their names and sometimes turns to him during group discussions and says: “Now let’s hear from my cousin.”

Criticism of Staff

If Regan’s performance is drawing increasingly high marks in hypercritical Washington, criticism remains focused on one area: the chief of staff’s own staff.

Complaints continue that the President is ill-served by having only one powerful official with an inner circle of relatively inexperienced aides.

“Don has begun to understand the ebb and flow of the political tide on Capitol Hill and the importance of having good relations with the various power centers in Washington, but he can’t do it all,” said a former Reagan Administration official who still advises the President. “He continues to suffer from the lack of other power players. He’s obsessed with being the only game at the White House and is surrounded by people who clearly are not in his league or in the league of other heavy hitters in Washington.”

Regan brought with him to the White House from Treasury a small circle of self-effacing, anonymous aides who are criticized as being relatively inexperienced in White House operations, too subservient to their boss and too cautious in dealing with outsiders--especially when compared to the gregarious and outspoken aides who surrounded Baker.

The Regan inner circle includes M. Dennis Thomas, 41, deputy chief of staff; Alfred H. Kingon, 54, the Cabinet secretary; David L. Chew, 33, a deputy presidential assistant who supervises the “paper flow” to the President, and Thomas C. Dawson, 37, executive aide to Regan.

After an early newspaper profile of the Regan aides noted that they had “no known views of their own,” the group proudly turned the description into an inside joke. At a Christmas party given by Reagan fund-raiser Roy Pfautch, Dawson recited the line to howls of laughter during a skit that poked fun at himself and Chew.

Staff Called ‘Maligned’

Regan, chafing over criticism of his staff, said the people he brought to the White House from Treasury are a major reason the criticism has died down. “This staff has been maligned--my robots or my boys or what have you. . . . We have a hell of a staff in the West Wing. . . . We’ve got a pretty cohesive group now, meshing pretty well, accomplishing things.”

With the recent departure of Oglesby as head of congressional affairs, Regan now has a White House senior staff largely of his own choosing. There are only three holdovers from the first term: Larry Speakes, the White House chief spokesman; John A. Svahn, domestic policy adviser, and Fred F. Fielding, counsel--and Fielding has announced that he will leave at the end of March.

Opened Doors for Speakes

Under Regan, Speakes is the only holdover to have grown in stature and influence. Under the troika system of the first term, Speakes often was left out of major domestic and foreign policy discussions and at times had to plead ignorance when questioned by reporters about major issues.

“The main difference now,” Speakes says, “is that Don Regan insists I should be in on almost everything from the start. If a meeting starts and I’m not there, he looks around and says, ‘Where’s Larry?’ He’s opened doors for me; I have walk-in privileges on 90% of meetings. He trusts me and I trust him to keep me informed. And if I screw up he holds me accountable. I have a new confidence to call ‘em the way I see ‘em.”

Regan, while firmly controlling access to the Oval Office, is generally praised as an “honest broker” who fairly conveys other aides’ positions to the President. “And he doesn’t approach questions with a fixed point of view and is solicitous of other people’s viewpoints,” one aide said.

“He gives a fair reflection of my views to the President,” Buchanan said, adding that if he feels strongly about a subject, he doesn’t mind “typing out a memo and sending it through the system to the President just like I did in the Nixon Administration.”

Time Drastically Rationed

Regan’s time with other aides is drastically rationed, however, and he has a reputation--as one aide said--for not “suffering fools gladly” and for taking credit for others’ ideas.

Talk in the White House corridors sometimes gets around to the “Don Regan three-time rule,” said one aide. “You go in to discuss a tough one with him,” the aide said, “and the first time you get thrown out and come out head over heels. The second time he listens to you. You go in the third time and he says: ‘That’s a pretty good idea I’ve got.’ ”

For all of that, there is general agreement even among those who have differed sharply with Regan in the past that, after a year on the job, he is directing White House operations with a much steadier hand. And they attribute much of the improvement to a mid-course correction in Regan’s approach.

Said one White House official: Regan “got on a fast-moving track” when he was named chief of staff last February “and he couldn’t catch his breath until the August recess when he sat back and reassessed the situation. But he’s no fool. He started looking at the criticism and adjusted.”

Regan agrees with that assessment. “That’s absolutely true, but we finally caught up,” he said.