Slack . . . Entropic . . . Senescent . . . : Reagan Administration Decomposes, Drifting Toward Its End

There is a scene in “Zorba the Greek” in which Madame Hortense, the village harlot, is in her bed dying and the people of the town flock to her apartment. They come not to pay homage to the old woman but to steal her possessions. As she breathes her last, the villagers stream past her bearing bedsprings, bird cages, anything that can be carried. Her final moments are blighted by human avarice.

So it is with the advanced senescence of the Reagan Administration. Everyone in Washington has his eyes fixed on the monitor over the bed, and as the brain waves begin to flatten out, the hospital administrators gleefully anticipate getting the bed ready for the next occupant.

This Administration has always been a little unpredictable. The Reagan Administration made good on its promises to an extent that confounded both its friends and its enemies, yet it never went far enough to exalt the former or flatten the latter. Ronald Reagan turned out to be more flexible on East-West issues than liberals dared to hope, but was even more defiant on taxes than any of them had feared. Following that pattern, the Administration has now entered the stage of active decomposition sooner and more noisomely than anyone had anticipated.

The mid-term congressional election at Reagan’s sixth year in office was a kind of two-minute warning for the incumbent President. The first team left the field and the scrubs came on. Remarkably, a sizeable number of varsity players remained on the field despite the fact that only Sam Pierce of Housing and Urban Development is of the original Cabinet. Howard Baker, who did not join the Administration until after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, was not on the team in 1981 but is a first-team type. James Baker, while no longer at the White House, is still a very influential figure in his role as treasury secretary. Kenneth Duberstein, who had so admirably handled the Administration’s congressional liaison and left the White House, was recalled from his corporate lobbying firm to restore relations with Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair. George Shultz, while not a Cabinet original, has been on the job since the middle of July, 1982. Ed Meese is still at his post at the Justice Department, where he has been since the beginning of 1985. Meese has been with the President in a high-level capacity since Reagan’s days as governor of California. Meese is not just a Cabinet member: he is a senior Reagan adviser and personal confidante. What makes this political denouement so horrifying, then, is that it is the first team that has dropped the ball.

When presidential administrations come apart, the bills still get paid. The public services get performed. The Army stands guard and the Navy goes on patrol. A political crisis under our form of government does not see anxious crowds gathering outside the White House or soldiers posted in radio stations.

When a superpower democracy begins to drift, the effects are less obvious but no less dire: Allies become nervous or defiant; financial markets tremble; adversaries look for targets of opportunity, and the attention of citizens begins to wander. This last is perhaps the worst, because it means that it is harder to rally them to support the objectives that the President wants to accomplish in his waning days at the White House.

Why have things fallen apart so spectacularly and at such an accelerated pace? Part of the trouble can be traced to the President himself. He has become increasingly irascible but less lucid. His cantankerous mood has no obvious purpose. At a recent White House-Capitol Hill summit on the deficit, members of Congress expressed bafflement at the meaning and purpose of the President’s table-pounding petulance. Clearly, he has been under pressure ever since Mrs. Reagan’s surgery, but the bright prognosis for her has not brightened his mood or sharpened his attention. His last stab at delineating the theoretical basis for deficits during a news conference made you pray that they install a prompter’s pit before his next encounter with journalists.

While the President has never been a hands-on executive, his recent slackness has unleashed a form of intramural combat at the White House that has always been on the verge of erupting but had been contained until now: The struggle between the “prags” and the “wingers.” The former group, embodied by Chief of Staff Howard Baker, is locked in mortal and debilitating combat with Atty. Gen. Meese and his troops. Members of Congress, whose role in internal Executive Office affairs would be nominal in a smooth-running White House, have now become major players. Sen. Jesse Helms, once an irritating but distant influence, has become a formidable player and the chief lab technician in charge of administering ideological litmus tests to high-level political appointees.

For a presidency with less auspicious beginnings, this entropic end would have been less shattering. This, after all, is the man who gave us $40 billion in budget cuts in 1981 and gave statutory life to supply-side economics. He triumphed in Grenada, skillfully evaded blame for the Marine barracks calamity in Lebanon, persisted in his support of the Contras, and kept the protectionists at bay. Now he would be doing well if he got the vacancy on the Supreme Court filled on his third try, something he could have pulled off without a hitch in 1981.

Reflecting on that earlier time, the fear among liberals was that in its aggressive conservative activism, the Reagan Administration would trample the entire structure of the modern welfare state in the manner of a raging rogue elephant. Much of this apprehension turned out to be unfounded. Today it is instead an inert and confused Administration that, through its passivity, is creating a host of serious problems for its successor. Not a rogue elephant on the rampage in 1987; more like a rogue gerbil.