Shadow of Earlier Self : Age, Scandal Take Toll on Reagan, Aides Say

President Reagan, battered by the Iran- contra scandal and finally showing his age, has become a shadow of the vibrant political powerhouse of the early 1980s who brought about some of the greatest social, economic and governmental changes since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, according to many of those who work closely with him.

Speaking publicly, Administration officials insist that Reagan is every bit the President he has always been.

“This man is not going to become a lame-duck President for a long, long time,” Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. insisted July 5 on ABC-TV. “And he is acting very presidential. He is acting on long-held beliefs.”

But privately, some of Reagan’s own advisers say he is preoccupied by the Iran-contra affair and frustrated by his loss of public trust. He shows little or no enthusiasm, they say, for any second-term goals except an arms reduction agreement with the Soviet Union and continued U.S. aid for Nicaragua’s contras.

“It’s just a maintenance operation from here on out, and you can forget the conservative agenda,” said one presidential adviser, who asked not to be identified. “He has no interest in it, and you can’t hold his attention if he’s not interested.”

Another adviser said Reagan can concentrate only on arms control, the contras and a tax increase, which he adamantly opposes.

“And his mind is made up on those issues,” the adviser said. “He’s not interested in any other subject. You can try to talk to him and he’ll look like he’s listening, but he’s not engaged in the discussion.”

Reagan, the survivor of an assassination attempt in his first term and of bouts with cancer in his second, has at times seemed larger than life, almost indestructible. He is trying to maintain that image.

“You may have heard some people talk about a certain lame duck and about the end of an era,” he declared in a speech in Connecticut last Wednesday. “Well, all that lame-duck talk is for the birds.”

But at 76, Reagan is by six years the oldest man ever to serve as President. The rigors of the office ground down many of his younger predecessors, and now Reagan himself is showing signs of slowing down.

“He just shouldn’t have run for a second term,” said a former aide who retains close ties to the White House. “He’s an old man, just too old to be President. He gets exhausted too easily, and you can’t hold his attention. His staff doesn’t tax him because they can’t.”

In his official discussions, even on the telephone, Reagan usually sticks strictly to comments on index cards prepared by his staff. “The cards tell him what he needs to say generally in the discussions,” said one aide, “but he sticks faithfully to the script and just reads from them. He needs a script and a lot of direction.”

Nor has Reagan proved exempt from the rule that even the most popular presidents stumble into political land mines in their second terms. In recent decades, Watergate drove Richard M. Nixon from office after his landslide reelection in 1972. And for Lyndon B. Johnson, who ran as an incumbent in 1964 and won a landslide of his own, the Vietnam War proved so unpopular that he dropped out of the 1968 presidential campaign.

Voices Frustration

At least to a degree, the Iran-contra affair is Reagan’s Watergate or Vietnam. In private, the President has frequently voiced frustration and seemed dispirited over polls showing that a majority of the American people do not believe he has told the truth about the scandal.

During a recent session at the White House, several aides tried to cheer him up by pointing out that the same polls also showed that he was still more popular than most presidents in the third year of their second term.

“Oh yes, they like me,” Reagan replied. “They just don’t believe me.”

A White House aide, relating that incident, said: “The President sort of laughs and acts like he’s talking in a light sort of fashion when he says things like that. But you can tell the loss of credibility with the American people has hurt him.”

Another adviser said: “The Iran-contra hearings have discouraged him, and so has the extent to which people say they don’t believe him. He just doesn’t enjoy the job like he once did.”

Pollster Disagrees

That view is not universally shared. Richard B. Wirthlin, who takes public opinion polls for the White House, has held three conversations with Reagan since his return June 12 from the economic summit in Venice and said he found the President “very much engaged.”

Moreover, Wirthlin said, Nancy Reagan told him that the President “is as active and in as good health as he ever was.” He called Mrs. Reagan “the best barometer” because she “keeps guard over his health with passion and jealousy above all else.”

Reagan can still regain credibility and end his presidency on a positive note, Wirthlin said, even though “there likely will be indictments (in the Iran-contra scandal) that could last into next year.”

“Short of a smoking gun or some other sensational disclosures concerning the President, I expect by fall that the nation’s attention will turn to other issues,” said Wirthlin, who along with other Reagan advisers says he expects the President to reach an arms reduction agreement with the Soviets.

On the other hand, a senior Administration official who sees the President regularly said: “There’s no question about his slowing down, and Nancy watches his scheduling much more closely now to try to protect him from too much activity and pressures.”

Tires More Quickly

Reagan has never been known to put in long hours. But compared with a year ago, say White House sources, the President tires much more quickly, is easily bored and has a much shorter attention span.

His schedule, according to daily White House releases, is more slowly paced than earlier in his presidency. It is not unusual for the schedule to show a 9 a.m. meeting with Baker and Vice President George Bush, a session 30 minutes later with National Security Adviser Frank C. Carlucci and no more than two or three other meetings during the rest of the day: perhaps to confer with a Cabinet member or to receive an award.

Last Monday, after spending the Fourth of July weekend at his retreat in Camp David, Reagan met with Baker, Bush and Carlucci, gave a speech to a Kiwanis convention and had lunch with staff members in a weekly session devoted to a discussion of current issues, the White House said. The rest of the day was reserved for meetings with staff members and unspecified paper work. “It’s actual work,” said Ben Jarratt, a White House spokesman.

Reagan’s schedule has been adjusted so that if he stays out late in the evening, the next morning’s appointments are postponed. After attending a party on the evening of June 30, the next day’s meeting with Bush and Baker was pushed back to 10:30.

The senior Administration official, who like most sources agreed to be interviewed on condition he not be identified, predicted “even fewer press conferences and fewer state dinners during the rest of his presidency.”

Press Conference Record

Reagan has held only two press conferences so far this year--one in Washington on March 19 and one in Venice on June 11 at the conclusion of the economic summit. In 6 1/2 years he has held 41 press conferences, compared with President Jimmy Carter’s 59 in four years.

Although aides drilled the President extensively for his March 19 press conference, he was not too keen on holding it or practicing for it, said an adviser who helped prepare him.

“In a way he was preoccupied by Iran-contra,” the adviser said, “but he just didn’t want to concentrate when we had a two-hour rehearsal the day before the press conference. You could tell something else was on his mind and he couldn’t wait for the session to end. When we finished our questioning he said: ‘Now I can tell you my joke.’ ”

The President proceeded to regale his eight staffers with a ribald joke involving a chimpanzee that used hand gestures to tell a state policeman about the crash of a passenger bus.

If Reagan’s age is slowing him down, there is ample precedent. Robert J. Donovan, a biographer of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman, said: “Second terms are brutal regardless, and there is a real problem with aging and the presidency.”

Eisenhower, who left office at 70 and had been the oldest President before Reagan, suffered a heart attack and a slight stroke and underwent an intestinal bypass while in office. “There’s one thing I know,” Eisenhower said toward the end of his second term. “No one should be in this office past the age of 70, and of that I am sure.”

Truman ‘Terribly Tired’

Truman was so exhausted after eight years that Roger W. Tubby, his press secretary, marveled that he “got through it all.” In Tubby’s diary, he wrote of Truman’s falling asleep in a chair and delaying the signing of a batch of documents until he was not so “shaky” and “terribly tired.”

Franklin Roosevelt, although paralyzed from the waist down by polio, managed to serve three terms and even win reelection to a fourth before dying in office of a cerebral hemorrhage. Woodrow Wilson, who completed two terms, suffered a stroke in his second and spent his last 18 months as President making decisions from a sick bed and depending heavily on his wife.

In the Reagan White House, said a former presidential aide, some staff members “talk about what Reagan wants or doesn’t want almost as if he’s no longer there, as if he’s a historic figure. He is kept under pretty tight control.”

White House aides, according to a Justice Department official, are so protective of the embattled President that they do not involve him personally in contacting prospective presidential appointees if there is any chance that they will reject their offers.

That, the official said, helps account for the long and still-unsuccessful search for an FBI director to replace William H. Webster, who resigned to become CIA director. Both U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen of San Francisco and former Gov. Dick Thornburgh of Pennsylvania declined the post after being contacted not by Reagan but by his aides.

“They won’t put him (Reagan) in the position of someone turning him down,” the official said. “My understanding is that they are not exposing him to possible negatives if they can avoid it.”

Baker Declines Offer

Before naming Webster to the CIA directorship, one White House source said, Reagan did personally call at least one other candidate for that job--Howard Baker, who was then a lawyer in private practice. But Baker said he wasn’t interested. The source, who is close to Baker, said that the former senator would have accepted if Reagan had urged him to take it but that the President failed to follow the script written on his index cards.

When Baker subsequently succeeded Donald T. Regan as White House chief of staff five months ago, many Reagan supporters thought things might be looking up for the embattled President. The presidentially appointed Tower Commission, which investigated the Iran-contra affair, had severely criticized Regan for mismanagement and said he bore primary responsibility “for the chaos that descended upon the White House” after the scandal erupted last November.

In contrast to Regan, Baker brought to the White House an excellent record of congressional relations and a knack for dealing with the press. Reagan supporters hoped those talents would help the President repair his deteriorating public image.

But there has been little, if any, improvement. In fact, Baker has run into serious problems of his own.

At the economic summit, both Carlucci and Secretary of State George P. Shultz felt compelled to contradict him after he misstated Administration policy by indicating the Soviets could play a positive role in the Persian Gulf.

Official Contradicts Baker

Later, after Carlucci and other Administration officials had charged that China had supplied Silkworm missiles to Iran, a White House spokesman contradicted Baker after the chief of staff said he would accept China’s word that it had not sent Iran any missiles.

More recently, both the White House and the State Department issued statements to dispel an impression left by Baker that U.S. warships might be withdrawn from the Persian Gulf in return for a Soviet withdrawal.

“There are serious differences between Baker and Shultz over Mideast policy,” said a Reagan adviser, “and part of the problem is that the State Department is annoyed that Baker is so involved in foreign policy.”

Another problem, said a Reagan adviser, is that Baker, like Reagan, is not interested in imposing order on the complex White House operation.

“There is no cohesive approach in the Administration because the Cabinet secretaries are running their departments as separate barons,” this adviser said. “And even if Baker was a disciplinarian, he would find it difficult taking on a multi-front war against the powerful Cabinet members.”

Just before Reagan’s trip to Canada last April, the adviser said, the President looked mystified as Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger engaged in a “nasty, personal argument in front of about 30 people over some arcane treaty that guaranteed Canada the right to passage between the mainland and an island.

“It went on for some time, and the President watched it like watching a tennis match. But he did nothing to stop it.”

Staff writers James Gerstenzang and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.