Deaver Book Attributes Purge of Hard-Liners to First Lady

First Lady Nancy Reagan was the force behind purging hard-line conservatives from the Administration, and she nudged President Reagan toward his first meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former White House aide Michael K. Deaver writes in a new book.

“It was Nancy who pushed everybody on the Geneva summit,” Deaver writes in the book, to be published in February. “She felt strongly that it was not only in the interest of world peace but the correct move politically.”

Paper Given Copy of Book

Deaver’s book, “Behind the Scenes,” is to be published by William Morrow & Co., which provided a copy of the manuscript to the Washington Times.

Deaver writes that he and Mrs. Reagan worked together to persuade the President to replace Richard V. Allen and William P. Clark as national security advisers, Donald T. Regan as White House chief of staff and James G. Watt as secretary of the Interior.

The President tends to defend subordinates if he believes people are ganging up on them, so Mrs. Reagan instead “will wage a quiet campaign, planting a thought, recruiting others of us to push it along, making a case: Foreign policy will be hurt, our allies will be let down,” Deaver writes.

“At times, Ronald Reagan has been very much a puzzle to me,” he writes. “I had never known anyone so unable to deal with close personal conflict. When problems arose related to the family or with the personnel in his office, Nancy had to carry the load.”

Deaver discloses also that Nancy Reagan and he shared a mutual fondness for certain celebrities and intellectuals who were far from Reagan backers, including the late Truman Capote, described as one of her closest friends.

Resented Social Contacts

“Others in and around the White House sometimes resented my bipartisan social contacts, but Nancy always wanted to know what the people were like and what was said,” Deaver writes. “She was the little girl with her nose pressed up against the candy store window.”

Deaver, an adviser and confidant to the Reagans for 20 years, is now on trial facing perjury charges. He is accused of lying to a House subcommittee and a federal grand jury about contacts he made on behalf of clients of a lobbying firm that he established after leaving government on May 10, 1985.