Termed ‘Citizen’s Call to Arms’ : Reagans’ Anti-Drug Talk to Be a Major Production

It will be a White House first: a joint address by the President and First Lady at 5 p.m. PDT today on the Administration’s continuing crusade against drugs. And from its White House producers, it is getting all the attention of a Broadway opening.

“This is clearly a citizen’s call to arms,” said Kenneth Khachigian, a longtime friend of President and Nancy Reagan who was called in from San Clemente to write the script. “He challenges a lot of different segments of society to get involved.”

For Reagan, this is just another of a long series of speeches from his bully pulpit. But for Nancy Reagan, who has campaigned against drugs almost from the moment she became First Lady, it will mark something of a debut and she has been rehearsing almost non-stop.

“Let’s face it, it’s one of those career-ending events if it doesn’t come out right,” a nervous White House aide said.

The Reagans will attend a stage rehearsal this afternoon on location in the West Hall, the room on the third floor of the Reagans’ residence that White House producers selected as the homiest setting for the half-hour speech.

Under present plans, the President will open by observing that his wife’s presence makes the speech different from any other he has delivered during his presidency. He will then ask the American people to allow him and his wife to wear “a new hat . . . as parents, grandparents and neighbors.”

Nancy Reagan will use the middle 10 minutes of the speech to lament the human wreckage caused by drug abuse. The President will close out the joint appeal to the American public.

Not Too Much Icing

The Reagans will forgo the use of fancy graphics, which have punctuated some of the President’s recent televised speeches. “When you have a grand innovation, there’s no need to overly ice the cake,” White House Communications Director Patrick J. Buchanan said. He characterized the speech as a heartfelt message “from the First Family to the American family.”

Khachigian, a former White House speech writer who is now a practicing lawyer, was flown in because of his record as author of some of Reagan’s more memorable addresses. Among those is one last year at Bitburg, West Germany, that defused the controversy over Reagan’s appearance at a World War II cemetery where Nazi storm troopers are buried.

“He’s a designated hitter,” a White House official said. “We bring him in for the big stuff.”

Fierce Political Struggle

Although the speech is cast in nonpartisan tones, Reagan is locked in a fierce struggle with congressional Democrats over who is in the forefront in the war against drugs on the eve of November’s congressional elections. Most Democrats tend to view the First Family’s televised appearance as a gimmick to win political points rather than a serious effort to combat the nation’s drug problem.

“It’s the caboose on the train that they’re going to try to paint as the engine,” Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.) said.

The House last Thursday passed an omnibus anti-drug bill that carries a price tag of about $2 billion next year. By contrast, the Administration is talking about spending between $300 million and $500 million in new money over the next two years and shifting another $500 million from existing programs to the anti-drug effort.

Even that represents an increase from original projections of only $250 million for the anti-drug package.

‘Budget Busting’

“The House was coming in with this humongous, budget-busting program,” one White House official said. “If you meet it flat zero, you don’t have any cards. To deflect, you had to show a little enhancement.”

A White House strategist accused the House, which gave overwhelming support to a required death penalty for some drug-related crimes, of “piling on” in its zeal to get “a good-guy issue” for the election campaign. “Hanging, drawing and quartering would have passed by at least a simple majority,” he said.

The issue was at least as emotional and contentious within the Administration, whose top officials spent much of last week haggling over such issues as the dimensions of a presidential order mandating drug testing for some government employees.

The debate reached such a pitch that Education Secretary William J. Bennett spoke up at least twice in Cabinet meetings to remind his colleagues that the real problem was in the streets and the schools, not among middle-aged government bureaucrats.