Stockman’s ‘Mea Culpa’ Plus a Naming of Blame

David A. Stockman is intent on igniting a political time bomb with his memoirs, “The Triumph of Politics,” due to appear this week.

Since Stockman resigned as the director of the Office of Management and Budget last August, he has been furiously scribbling what he told friends was “the real story that has been brewing in my blood.” And since August, the White House has been scared stiff about the outcome.

Just before leaving office, Stockman was advised by White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan that his value to his new employers--the New York investment firm, Salomon Brothers--was his link to the President and the chief of staff. “Don’t burn your bridges,” Regan warned.

Stockman did not heed this advice--in part because he considered the source. It was, after all, the same Regan, a former Wall Street chief executive, who earlier advised Stockman not to go with Salomon Brothers, because as a Protestant, he could never expect to get ahead “in a Jewish firm.”

More important, Stockman believed he had no bridges to burn. Unlike some former Administration colleagues, Stockman did not leave government service to seek his fortune by influence peddling. While he admits that the stature he gained as a result of his budget job was important in winning a million-dollar-a-year Wall Street partnership (and a $2.5-million Harper & Row book contract), he maintains that talent, not contacts, was the major ingredient in making him so marketable.

Stockman was a public figure in an often faceless Administration role. He was the youngest Cabinet member in 150 years, the first from the post-World War II generation. He was a campus organizer during the anti-war movement of 1960s before joining the Reagan revolution, giving him a perspective guaranteed to unnerve Cabinet elders. And Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet was far from easygoing.

After Stockman went to the “woodshed” for comments that appeared in the Atlantic in October, 1981, he developed some sympathy for Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr.’s problems with the White House staff. But in the beginning, he took an impish delight in needling the excitable Haig.

Haig’s successor, George P. Shultz, commanded more respect. But in September, 1983, when Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger sparred endlessly over minutia during the U.S. involvement in Lebanon, Stockman, the ex-radical, wryly observed, “Now I know why I opposed the war in Vietnam.”

Stockman’s greatest contempt, in fact, was reserved for the secretary of defense. Weinberger’s incessant demands for ever-burgeoning defense spending incensed the budget director. While Stockman was no closet dove, his main objective was budget equilibrium, a goal savaged by the simultaneous pursuit of defense increases and tax cuts. Stockman could at least understand the rationale of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “They are like squirrels gathering nuts for an anti-war winter,” he said. But he thought Weinberger had no discernible plan other than “more is better.” Stockman’s budget paring was not only undermined, his intellect was offended by what seemed to him a mindless, non-stop drumbeat from the defense secretary.

Stockman harbored few illusions about the commander in chief as well. Although repeatedly warned that he was tilting at windmills, he alone persisted in delivering bad news to Reagan. Stockman ultimately saw the President as an inept if amiable fellow, inadequate to the demands of his office. Whether it was raising taxes or lowering defense spending, Stockman was time and again rebuffed--or worse, ignored. He believed that Reagan was unable to grasp the implications of technical arguments that he, Stockman, considered the essence of governance.

Now, Stockman takes his case to the public against the most popular President in a generation--the subtitle of his book is “Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.” He knows he again runs the risk of a public dressing down or, worse, being ignored.

But he has taken precautions. Central to his research are many hours of taped interviews with the Atlantic; the same interviews that almost caused him to be fired now, ironically, become records for credibility. More protective cover comes from Stockman’s determination to avoid writing an apologia for his own behavior. If anything, Stockman’s mantra is mea culpa. A friend says, “As a failed revolutionary, Stockman is as unsparing on himself as on any of those bozos in the White House.”

Such candor is consistent with the self-deprecating style Stockman brought to the Cabinet. On policy matters, as the magazine article made clear, he was consumed with self-doubt. When friends congratulated him for the Administration’s historic 1981 tax cut, he responded with concerns about the largess dispensed to one and all. “The hogs were sure feeding,” he said.

Self-deprecating, yes; but also defensive. He felt besieged inside and outside government. In public he was particularly defensive about charges of callousness in what he viewed as a mission to undo the excesses of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. (Others called it a campaign to dismantle the welfare state.) In private, he suffered an army of supplicants camped outside his door, often including Cabinet secretaries. He saw these Cabinet members as adversaries, not potential allies. One thing he enjoyed was receiving supportive phone calls from other “misunderstood” men like baseball’s Reggie Jackson and from former critics such as Lee A. Iacocca, whose Chrysler loan bailout Stockman had opposed as a congressman. Iacocca, Stockman would say proudly, considered him the only sensible member of the Administration.

On a day-to-day basis, Stockman’s only allies were his staff and a few other “big picture” thinkers such as Richard G. Darmen, deputy to then-Chief of Staff James A. Baker III. Even Baker, who alone defended Stockman when all the others in the White House were demanding his firing after the Atlantic affair, was not a soul mate. He was too much a “man with a clipboard” and did not consider the long-range implications of the Reagan revolution.

Before he left office, Stockman did make a few important political alliances--but they were outside the Administration. On Capitol Hill, where Stockman had bruised many congressional egos during the heady first six months, he finally found succor. Senators such as Peter V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Bob Dole (R-Kan.) now fare best on the final Stockman score card.

But when the former budget director speaks highly of such men, it is not because they now agree with his latest economic theories. Stockman, the former theology student, has come to see them as the true embodiment of the popular will. They have come to power through a sacred electoral process, the modern equivalent of a laying on of hands.

And with them in mind, Stockman comes to press with his last crusade. He believes he must restate a basic law of finance: Deficits consume society’s savings. His timing may be unfortunate. In a period of rapidly falling interest rates, deficit fears tend to disappear. Stockman’s warning may sound like Chicken Little. But he will not be deflected from his Cassandra-like message: We can get away with massive borrowing from abroad for a while but, inevitably, we will have to pay the piper. Sooner or later, he predicts, the government will wind up “running the printing presses” to ignite an unprecedented runaway inflation.

Stockman is lifting the veil on official Washington in the most blunt manner since Richard M. Nixon unwittingly exposed himself on tape. Stockman justifies his actions by saying, “I am so disillusioned that I don’t want to come back to town.” If, as some of his former colleagues predict, this display of “profound disloyalty” makes him a political pariah, so be it.