Reagan Aides Showed Almost Total Unanimity on Tough Line

President Reagan reached his decisions to press ahead with the bruising campaign for military aid for the Nicaraguan rebels and to confront Libyan forces in the Gulf of Sidra in a rare atmosphere of almost total unanimity within the White House and among his larger circle of foreign policy advisers.

In marked contrast to Reagan’s first term, when more moderate voices in the White House tended to have a tempering influence on presidential decisions, the circle of advisers closest to Reagan now tend to share a relatively hard-line view on such issues as Nicaragua and Libya.

After a series of White House staff changes last year, the President is supported by what longtime Reagan adviser Lyn Nofziger described in an interview as “a more assertive team in the second term, especially in foreign policy.”

Nofziger added: “Of course, in the second term, the President’s not going to stand for reelection, so there’s not as much to lose from a political standpoint. Nobody says that, but there’s that feeling.”

In the case of Libya, despite some earlier reservations at the Pentagon, officials at the White House and elsewhere in the Administration say that when the final recommendation was presented to Reagan, no one spoke out against accepting Moammar Kadafi’s dare and ordering U.S. forces to cross the “line of death” in the Gulf of Sidra--a course of action designed in part to draw the Libyans into armed conflict.

Similarly, no one dissented from the policy of playing political hardball with Democrats in Congress who oppose military aid to the Nicaragua rebels, known as contras.

“Everybody was on board,” said Patrick J. Buchanan, Reagan’s combative communications assistant. “And the guy making the toughest speeches on aid to the contras was not Buchanan but (Secretary of State) George Shultz.”

Conflict Was Expected

Even Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who has often differed sharply with Shultz over foreign policy issues and has been more cautious than Shultz in the debate over preemptive strikes against terrorists, finally agreed to the Gulf of Sidra maneuvers, which officials knew were likely to lead to armed conflict.

Shultz had been looking for several months for a way to retaliate against Kadafi for his terrorist activities, according to Administration officials who participated in the planning for the large-scale Gulf of Sidra exercises. And Shultz’s hand has been strengthened by his close friendship with Donald T. Regan, who became the President’s chief of staff last year at the beginning of his second term.

Defense Department officials were less than enthusiastic over Shultz’s demands for a tough approach, according to the officials, and at one point told him, “We’re not in the counterterrorism business.”

But Shultz and John M. Poindexter, the President’s national security adviser, “really pushed,” one official said, and the Pentagon finally agreed to the approach that led to the confrontation between the Libyans and U.S. forces.

Shake-Up Hardens Policy

Last year’s shake-up of the White House staff came about primarily because of personal decisions by individual aides to make career changes, but the result has been a potentially significant shift in the atmosphere in which final presidential decisions on foreign policy are weighed.

Some of the President’s outside advisers are worried about the possible political fallout from the hard-line approach, especially over the issue of aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. They point out that, despite Reagan’s pressure, he apparently changed few if any votes in the Senate, which voted to approve military aid by a six-vote margin, 53 to 47. And, they say, the President could wind up losing the issue again in forthcoming votes in the House, which turned down contra aid, 222-210, on March 20.

One key adviser, who asked not to be identified by name, said there is “some evidence we might have won the contra vote in the House if a less confrontive style had been used.”

“It’s become a trade-off between a willingness to confront versus a desire to win,” he added. “The first-term team operated on the assumption it was important for the President to win on these policy issues, to get his laws through Congress by using a variety of pressures and inducements. Now the White House seems to believe it’s not necessary to win but to make a statement, to draw a line in the dirt, to put an issue in its most bold and bright colors even if it means hardening the opposition.”

This style, he said, “may have suited the (Richard M.) Nixon White House in the early ‘70s when it was prone to retreat into the bunker, but it doesn’t fit the personality, needs or requirements of a Ronald Reagan.”

Adamancy Is Reagan’s Own

The key to the new approach is chief of staff Regan, an ex-Marine colonel and former Wall Street executive who has often emphasized that he has no agenda of his own and adheres strictly to the President’s. Under him, the White House staff tends to reinforce Reagan’s own hard-line instincts on combatting terrorism and communism.

Regan’s first-term predecessor as top White House adviser, James A. Baker III, now secretary of the Treasury, was much more likely to weigh the political consequences of any such decisions and to advise the President to follow a more moderate course.

“There’s no question Don is more aggressive than Jim Baker was, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense,” said Nofziger, who served under Baker as Reagan’s top political adviser in the first term. “But now, the President is getting the kind of advice that says to do something rather than let’s sit back and take a look.”

Along with Baker, Michael K. Deaver, who was deputy chief of staff, was frequently a restraining force in the first term when other Reagan advisers counseled the President to take a more confrontational approach in both foreign and domestic policy. And both probably would have argued for greater restraint in the cases of Libya and Nicaragua, according to several former Reagan Administration officials.

“Baker and Deaver were much more oriented to domestic policy and much more cautious on foreign policy,” said Richard V. Allen, a hard-liner, who served as Reagan’s first national security adviser. “The confluence of events in Libya and Nicaragua has tested the mettle of the Administration,” said Allen, now a Washington consultant, “and I’m pleased everybody is singing from the same sheet of music.”

Called More Hawkish

The present national security adviser, Poindexter, has also played a major role in the new confrontational attitude. An official who worked with both Poindexter and his predecessor, Robert C. McFarlane, said that the difference between the two men is “pronounced,” and that Poindexter “is more prone” to opt for a military response.

Unlike McFarlane, who was accessible to the news media and became known through television interviews, Poindexter stays out of the limelight. But in his quiet way, he has put a hard-line stamp on White House policy-making, officials said.

“He has a natural tendency to factor in the military component,” said one official. “He believes that we have to assert the careful and proper use of our military as part of our foreign policy.”

Poindexter has reorganized the National Security Council with a more structured set of deputies, “almost like what you would see in the military,” a colleague said. And he has strengthened his position as an influential voice in the inner councils despite his invisible public profile.

Poindexter did not blink when it came time to take on Libya. But then, neither did any of Reagan’s other top advisers. Nor did they opt for compromise on aid to the contras.

On the contras, “the team has jelled better than it has on any other issue,” Buchanan said. “There’s unanimity on what we need and what we want, and we’re 100% behind the President up and down the line.”

‘A Cancer,’ Buchanan Says

Buchanan, a one-time aide in the Nixon White House who has pushed for the new get-tough policy since joining the Reagan staff early last year, said the President “perceived it accurately--that there is indeed a cancer, not a benign tumor, in Nicaragua. . . . He believes deeply in the urgency and necessity of his request for military aid to the contras and has conveyed that to everybody on the staff.”

“We all agreed that it’s a now-or-never situation,” he said. “So everybody here’s doing his level best, and for the next three weeks we’ll go all out to get the House to approve the aid.”

The House is scheduled to vote on the issue again on April 15.

Kadafi’s identification with terrorism and Nicaragua’s attack against contras in Honduras while the aid package is being considered in Congress have made it easier for Reagan to implement his get-tough policy without running the risks of widespread criticism, a former senior official who still advises the President said.

“The President’s been helped by the outlandishly sick nature of a Kadafi and the stupidity of an Ortega (Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega), the master of bad timing,” he said. “He looks good going after two perfect villains. But I don’t believe the White House is following any grand strategy. It’s all ad hoc. “

Regardless of whether Reagan’s actions on Libya and Nicaragua have been part of a grand design or just responses to individual situations, his more conservative followers seem to believe that he will follow a harder line on foreign policy during the rest of his presidency. And they largely attribute the change from what they say was a timid first-term foreign policy to the emergence of Buchanan as a strong force in the White House.

“The liberals didn’t understand the significance of Pat going to the White House,” said Richard A. Viguerie, a leading right-wing activist and fund-raiser. “Of all the conservatives out there, Pat Buchanan is the brightest and toughest of them all.”

Times staff writer Eleanor Clift contributed to this story.