New Book Has Unkind Words for Nearly Everyone

In his new book, David A. Stockman has unkind words for practically everybody he dealt with during his five years as President Reagan’s budget director. Here, according to excerpts in the upcoming issue of Newsweek magazine, is a sample of the judgments that Stockman offers on leaders of the Administration and Congress:

Donald T. Regan, now White House chief of staff and formerly Treasury secretary: Was determined to do Reagan’s bidding “without regard to the price.” When Stockman and others proposed delaying the second and third installments of the 1981 tax cut, Stockman writes, Regan exploded: “ ‘You’re not going to make a fool out of me with this plot. I’ll fight every one of you on this to the last drop of blood. This is the last time anybody is going to make tax policy behind my back.’ ”

Caspar W. Weinberger, defense secretary: Sought to protect his defense buildup against all claims that the nation could not afford it. Of a 1981 meeting in which Weinberger told Reagan that he did not need to raise taxes, Stockman writes: “I had heard a lot in the Cabinet Room over two years including some outright lies. But when I heard that I actually slapped a hand over my mouth to prevent myself from committing an indiscretion. It wouldn’t have been right to shout (b.s.) in front of the President of the United States.”

Alexander M. Haig Jr., former secretary of state: “What he did best (was) being a bully.”

Michael K. Deaver, Edwin Meese III, Lyn Nofziger, former top White House aides: “They never read anything. They lived off the tube. . . . The California crowd . . . consisted of personal retainers and electioneering hands. They were competent enough at their trades. But they were illiterate when it came to the essential equation of policy.”

Deaver: “Had never even feigned an interest in policy. But then he was busy stage-managing the upcoming inaugural--hiring elephants and Frank Sinatra.”

Meese, now attorney general: “Meese had by now (late 1980) entombed himself beneath a pyramid of paper and disorganization. He never met a committee he didn’t like.”

James A. Baker III, former White House chief of staff, now Treasury secretary: “Jim Baker was clearly the most competent of the inner circle. . . . But Baker was, deep down, neither very versed on matters of policy nor intensely interested in them.”

Rep. Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.), House Speaker: “Tip O’Neill, with his massive corpulence and scarlet, varicose nose, was a Hogarthian embodiment of the superstate he had labored for so long to maintain.”

Rep. Jim Wright (D-Tex.), House majority leader: “A snake oil vendor par excellence, a demagogue of frightening rhetorical powers. . . . He practiced the politics of envy, pure and simple: the inciting of middle- and lower-class resentment against the rich.”