Deaver’s Downfall : From Bakersfield to the White House and Back Down--a Tale of Power, Greed, Loyalty

Michael K. Deaver will never forget seeing his face on the cover of Time magazine.

As a top aide to President Reagan, he had dined with royalty while struggling to pay his rent and the kids’ tuition. When he left the White House in May, 1985, he had taken a rocket ride to wealth by starting his own Washington-based consulting company. And at the height of his euphoria, he posed for Time in the back seat of a limousine with a car phone pressed to his ear, the Capitol dome visible out the window.

“I had been on a plane and flew into (New York’s) Kennedy Airport,” Deaver recalled, “and at the airport those magazine stands will take the news magazines and put 30 of them across the shelf behind a cashier. There were 30 pictures of me!

“That’s very heady stuff for a kid from Bakersfield.”

At the time, Deaver was too thrilled to be upset about the headline that also appeared on the cover: Influence Peddling in Washington.

‘It Caught Me’

“This town, unlike any other town, has a very strange effect on people and it caught me,” he said. “There’s no question I got caught up in and enjoyed the fact that people were interested in printing what I said, were interested in taking a picture of me . . . that people were willing to pay me $200,000 and $300,000 for my advice.”

Others saw it quite differently, pointing to the Time cover as a portrait of Washington greed and impropriety. Deaver, they said, was one more guy intent on cashing in big on government service, tossing ethics and ordinary good taste aside, a man who would do anything for money, a man who would sell his access to the President and wasn’t even smart enough to be quiet about it. It was, they felt, the beginning of the end of Deaver’s high-flying days.

Indeed, little more than 10 months later, Deaver was convicted of three counts of perjury stemming from a sweeping investigation of his business dealings. The lengthy probe uncovered no violations of law, but the intense public scrutiny and the charges of perjury permanently deflated his reputation and drove clients away by the score.

To some, it seemed the perfect comeuppance for a man who for five years wielded power at the highest levels of the White House and made plenty of enemies doing it--a man who had made no secret of his desire to make money after he left office. To others, it was a baffling paradox: How could the man renowned as Ronald Reagan’s savvy one-man P.R. machine, have so badly misjudged reaction to the flaunting of his own success?

Total Dedication

Today, friends say it was Deaver’s total dedication to the President and First Lady that caused his downfall, that he was so preoccupied with the Reagans that he ignored his own reputation, his own plans for the future until he had made too many political enemies and had led his family to make too many sacrifices.

Deaver himself believes his story is a tale of the dark side of Washington, of how the city seduces honorable people with its trappings of power and then punishes them when they succumb. He believes that the political enemies he made along the way conspired to make him a sacrificial lamb.

“I could have gone back to Los Angeles and done the same thing. In any other town, I would have been judged a great success,” he said in an interview in his Northwest Washington home, which still houses some of the prizes of good living, a Bosendorfer grand piano made in Vienna, a Charles Remington copy of a man on a horse, a Mercedes 190 in the drive way. Noticeably absent are any pictures of the Reagans.

“I’ve gotten amused about the fact that everybody is so aghast that somebody wants to make money,” he added. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody talk about Malcolm Forbes or Donald Trump as being greedy. But a guy who didn’t have it and made it in six months got greedy.”

The California Years

In his book “Behind the Scenes,” to be published Feb. 15, Deaver wrote about his roots in Bakersfield, where he grew up one of three children of a Shell Oil distributor. He recalls being conscious of not having money, of feeling on the fringes of various worlds that intrigued him.

His parents “saved to buy appliances on a monthly plan,” he wrote. “We Deavers had what we needed and not much else.

“I came to envy this about Ronald Reagan, not that he had money or was indifferent to it, but that he never seemed to give it much thought,” Deaver wrote.

On Wednesdays, the young Deaver would go to a neighbor’s to watch roller derby and wrestling matches because the Deaver house was the last on the block to get a television set.

“I can still remember my mother having one of those accordion folders in which you would put $10 for the laundry and $50 for food and $20 for the doctor.”

Diagnosed at age 8 with nephritis, a kidney disease, Deaver was never able to participate in sports and turned to the piano instead. “I was accepted by a fraternity in college because they needed a piano player,” he recalls in his book. “I was invited to join the Bohemian Club, an exclusive club in the redwoods above San Francisco, because they needed a piano player.”

After college, when he went to work for IBM in sales, according to his closest college friend, Deaver was fired when his boss caught him playing the piano for extra money in the evenings.

Hard-Working Youth

As a youth, he had a paper route, worked as a soda jerk and a fry cook, dug ditches, read meters and was an offset printer. And his college friend, Burger Benson, recalled that Deaver also was the house manager of Delta Sigma Phi fraternity at San Jose State, “hiring and firing the cook” and coaching the group to victory in the Spring Sing competition.

Benson said Deaver, a political science major, was a guy with “a great sense of humor, always fun to be with, a very up kind of person.” But he also remembered him as a “worrier, a thinker,” who nursed an early-life ulcer with large quantities of milk. Deaver also had sinus allergies and developed hypertension.

After college, the two set off to see the world, ran out of money in Australia and eventually returned separately to California. Although Deaver had briefly considered becoming an Episcopalian priest, after he returned to the United States he looked to his first love--politics--and went to work for the California Republican party, helping to organize state Assembly and Senate races.

Deaver learned early the power of images. Working on the 1964 California Senate race for George Murphy, Deaver followed Murphy’s opponent, Pierre Salinger, to several campaign stops, handing him a cigar each time. Salinger, who lost to Murphy, would stick the cigar in his mouth and then the photographs that were taken portrayed an unfavorable fat-cat impression. Deaver wrote in his book that he related the story proudly to Salinger 20 years later over lunch at Maxim’s in Paris.

After Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966, Deaver was brought to Sacramento to work for him by Reagan aide William Clark, who would become one of Deaver’s right-wing enemies in Washington. Clark was one of several conservative California Reaganites who would later feel that Deaver had turned his back on his old friends in steering Reagan on a more middle-of-the-road-course, away from the likes of California intimate Ed Meese and toward James Baker, the Texas-born Princeton pragmatist.

In Sacramento, Deaver met his wife, Carolyn, who also worked for Reagan at the time. She asked Deaver for a raise and got a marriage proposal a few months later instead.

‘The Mommy Watch’

One of Clark’s duties in Sacramento was to attend to Nancy Reagan’s needs, “The Mommy Watch,” they called it. Clark was “intimidated” by Mrs. Reagan and soon she became Deaver’s charge, Deaver said in his book. That led to the close personal relationship with Deaver that eventually made both Reagans feel he was indispensable. This they learned the hard way, losing him in a campaign aide power struggle in the 1980 campaign, then asking him to come back. From that point on, the Reagans never wanted to let him go.

“I think the biggest single influence on his life was Nancy Reagan,” Benson recalled. “She would call him at all hours of the day and night. It bothered Carolyn a lot, which of course had to have some effect on Mike. I know I couldn’t have done it. It just takes your life away.”

At that point Benson and others saw Deaver become a man immersed in a cause: Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

When the Reagans moved to Washington, Deaver uprooted Carolyn, himself and their two small children from their native state and took Nancy Reagan’s demanding phone calls at all hours, even during Thanksgiving dinner. Once, he literally ran through a glass door in a rush to retrieve her make-up kit from an airplane.

“I always imagined that when I died, there would be a phone in my coffin, and at the other end of it would be Nancy Reagan,” he wrote in his book.

So ‘Involved’

“He was so emotionally involved with the Reagans that it was hard to see his own role,” said Nancy Reynolds, who had been assistant press secretary to Gov. Reagan and is now a Washington consultant.

“If Deaver had a serious failure, it was his failure to understand that he ought to spend as much time worrying about the perception he’s creating for Mike Deaver as he is for Ronald Reagan,” said Washington lobbyist Jim Lake, a close friend who has worked with Deaver on Reagan’s presidential campaigns.

For Deaver, the California years became “years of putting things off, of never quite being able to afford the things we wanted.”

Why did Deaver put the Reagans first, ahead of himself and his family?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it was something instilled in me, a kind of duty. I also believed then and still believe that Ronald Reagan was a man who was fulfilling a destiny. I believe he was chosen to do something. If you believe in that sort of thing, then I had a role, I had a responsibility and it was higher than anything else, myself included.”

Was that view a mistake?

“Well,” Deaver said, pausing, “I don’t know. Because the final chapters haven’t been written and I don’t know what all of this means to me or to Carolyn and the kids. There’s no question we’ve all been strengthened by this, we’ve learned from it.

“My obit will probably say, ‘Close Reagan aide dies,’ ” he added. “That doesn’t bother me a bit. That’s my life. That’s probably my greatest achievement.”

The Washington Years

After Reagan’s two terms as governor expired in 1974, Deaver and Reagan speech writer Peter Hannaford formed a California public relations company, Deaver & Hannaford, whose principal client was Ronald Reagan.

They company was dissolved amid some rancor when Reagan was elected President and Deaver gave in to Reagan’s request to move to Washington, above the tearful objections of Carolyn Deaver.

In Washington, as deputy chief of staff, Deaver quickly compiled a group of enemies. He writes in his book that he helped prevent Edwin Meese from becoming chief of staff and took a key role in the firings or resignations of National Security Adviser Richard Allen, Interior Secretary James G. Watt, National Security Adviser William Clark, Budget Director David Stockman and Secretary of State Alexander Haig.

In addition, Jim Lake recalled Deaver as being “quiet, very terse,” and ignoring people’s phone calls. He became “a self-contained little shell,” said Lake. “The first problem I think Mike had is that he created more enemies than friends.” Among the press corps, on Capitol Hill, in the lobbying community, Lake said, the widespread feeling was that “Mike Deaver is an ass. He is arrogant. He doesn’t return phone calls.”

After four years of stepping on people’s toes, Deaver lost what Reynolds calls “a base of support,” something that can be viewed as critical in Washington when trouble arises.

While working for Reagan in Washington, Deaver did business with the Reagans’ wealthy friends--the Annenbergs, the Smiths, the Weinbergers--and he started socializing with other rich figures, such as Washington Post Co. Chairman Katharine Graham.

Being around so many wealthy people was “definitely a factor” in Deaver’s desire to make good money, “no question about it,” said Joe Canzeri, a former Reagan aide and good friend of Deaver’s who successfully started his own public relations business after leaving the White House.

“I think when you travel in these circles and you’re exposed to them, I think the desire (for money) is there,” Canzeri said. “There’s nothing really wrong with that. I know he liked to live well. So do I.”

Added Reynolds: “I certainly think he was human enough to want to enjoy all the places and things that he’d been exposed to. I think Mike felt he was trying to make up for lost time. He always wanted a nice home. They had rented their home here for a long time.”

A Personality Change

Lake had been trying to persuade Deaver to leave the White House for years but Deaver had told him he just couldn’t do it, that Reagan needed him too much. Around the time of the 1984 election, friends began to notice a drastic personality change in Deaver. He would disappear from dinner tables, not appear at meetings. He became, even with friends, “moody, abrupt, restless, forgetful,” said Reynolds.

Deaver would reveal later that he had started drinking heavily around this time, hiding bottles around his office. The son of recovering alcoholics, Deaver had been something of a wine connoisseur but never had been a problem drinker until his time to break with the Reagans began to approach. In his adult life, the only job he’d ever had was working for the Reagans.

“Maybe it was a lack of confidence,” said Reynolds. “We all have a lot of bravado, but maybe underneath it all Mike was very insecure about what he could do in the world.”

Benson was one of the close friends who urged Deaver to accept a $300,000 job offer from Burson-Marsteller, a large, reputable firm in Washington, after leaving the White House, rather than starting his own business.

“He felt that by starting his own company he could do better, make more money faster,” Benson explained. “He just tried to go too fast.”

In hindsight, Deaver now says that taking the Burson-Marsteller job would have been the wiser thing to do, that the organization would have provided him “protection” from those who were waiting to get him.

Canzeri thinks that Deaver still might have had problems, even at Burson-Marsteller.

“It’s the proximity to the President, as well as the enemies,” said Canzeri. “I don’t know of anybody that I can recall in my time, in 30 years in politics, who had that kind of family relationship, a personal relationship with a President, particularly a popular President.”

Deaver left the White House in May, 1985 and created Michael K. Deaver & Associates with a handful of employees.

“I remember,” Deaver said, “the day after I got out of the White House thinking, ‘Phew! I made it! Four and a half years and I didn’t get screwed, I didn’t get scandalized, I didn’t have to leave under fire. I made it!’ I thought when you got out, you were safe. You aren’t, I guess.”

On His Own

The early success of Deaver’s company surpassed his wildest dreams.

He had never, he says now, viewed his new business as peddling access to the President, but as selling his public relations and long-range planning skills, which he had read so much about. Projections by his company’s business expert, Fred Hale, were to take in $1 million gross in the first year, but the company flew by that goal in the early months as Canada, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, TWA, Philip Morris, Inc. and other big accounts flooded in.

In seven months, Deaver reportedly billed more than $3 million in fees. He was able to buy the house next door to the one he’d been renting, and add a roomy kitchen with a wall of windows. He bought a marine-green Jaguar and furnished his office with a 19th-Century English desk, a hand-painted Chinese pewter screen, Chippendale armchairs, original paintings and copper engravings. The private schooling of the Deaver children, Amanda and Blair, was no longer a problem.

Business Questions Arise

While the business flourished financially, all kinds of stories began to surface about it in the press. One of them, questioning how Deaver came to have Canada as a client on the acid rain issue, prompted Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich) to write a letter on Dec. 10, 1985, asking the comptroller general for a general accounting office investigation of Deaver.

A source close to Deaver said that Allen, one of the White House aides Deaver had alienated, had put Dingell up to asking for the investigation and had also been planting stories about Deaver with prominent journalists. Both Dingell and Allen deny the allegations that Allen had a part in bringing about the investigations that later took place, including one by Dingell’s Oversight and Investigations subcommittee.

Allen, traveling in Asia, declined to be interviewed but cabled a reply through a spokesperson, “The notion that I had anything to do with Mr. Deaver’s troubles is . . . preposterous . . . one of the more farfetched theories I have heard in this, the world’s greatest rumor mill.”

Stories about Deaver’s business continued to surface. They hit the zenith with his limousine appearance on the Time magazine cover of March 3, 1986.

“It was sort of the public rubbing of the nose of everybody in town who felt that this guy . . . is rubbing our face in it. Anything I can do to get him, I’m going to do,” Lake said.

How could Deaver, the public relations wizard, pose for such a picture?

“Why do the minister’s sons get in trouble? Why does a doctor get sick? You think about the patients and your clients and your flock. You don’t think about yourself,” Deaver said. “The biggest mistake I made was that I never really took the time or understood what my own public persona was.

“I would have said for a client, ‘You’re not going to pose in that car with a telephone.’ ”

But pose he did, and the furor that resulted was so high-pitched that one month later, Deaver requested an independent counsel to investigate his business activities.

‘That’s the Mistake’

“The Time cover is the tangible thing that people can look to and say, ‘That’s the mistake he made.’ And I would never for a minute not acknowledge that I made mistakes,” Deaver said in the interview at his home. “I do think that part of the problems I had were because of other things in this town, politics. I was the guy who was close to the President so I was the target.”

As the investigation continued and Deaver testified before Congress and a grand jury--at one point, he answered 1,050 questions over 10 hours--the clients began to drop away and Carolyn Deaver began suffering migraine headaches.

By that November, Deaver had hit rock-bottom and admitted himself to the Ashley Center for Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation, run by an alcoholic priest, Father Martin, in Havre de Grace, Md.

“Overconfidence did me in,” Deaver writes of his alcoholism. “I read about my slick and astute self in the national press, Macho Mike and Mike the Magician, and I began to believe I could handle anything. It was not an illness that crept up on me unawares. It just crept.”

In the early galleys of his book, Deaver wrote that he had been drinking up to a quart of Scotch a day. When the Washington Times reprinted that, Nancy Reagan told Deaver that she couldn’t believe he had been drinking that much, and Deaver said the figure was a mistake. He took that figure out of the book and now will not say how much he drank.

“I don’t think it’s really important to talk about how much I drank. The point is, I was addicted to alcohol. I drank too much,” Deaver said.

Deaver has embraced his recovery with the kind of single-mindedness he once applied to working for the Reagans. He has become active in helping other alcoholics and, because he is famous, receives calls from many asking for help.

Four months after his rehabilitation, in March, 1987, Deaver was indicted on five counts of perjury. He pleaded innocent to all five counts and still maintains his innocence today.

Recurrent Theme

The theme of Deaver being victimized by political enemies surfaced in the trial as Deaver’s attorneys sought to blame long-time Reagan friend Walter Annenberg, the wealthy publisher, for sabotaging a proposed sale of Deaver’s company to the London-based Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm for about $16 million. Asked about it at the time of the trial, Annenberg told a reporter that he had indeed tried to stop the transaction because he thought the specter of Deaver “stepping out of the White House and accepting an $18 million to $20 million position” was “very destructive” to Reagan.

: Supposedly the ax that Annenberg had to grind against Deaver was that he was offended by Reagan’s visit to Bitburg cemetery, which was planned by Deaver, and because Deaver had not included Annenberg on the original list of the advisory committee for the Reagan library. According to a source close to Deaver, Nancy Reagan called Deaver from Palm Springs and said, “Walter is on the ceiling because he’s not on the advisory committee.”

Canzeri, one of the administrators of Deaver’s defense fund, felt the political deck was stacked against Deaver, even at the trial. “I’d hate to go before a jury in this town,” Canzeri said. “If you work for Ronald Reagan and 92% of the blacks in this country vote for a Democrat and don’t like Ronald Reagan, that’s got to have some effect on the way people think.”

No Defense Witnesses

The jury at Deaver’s trial was all black, a mix of mostly middle-class government employees and retirees. Deaver’s lawyers had talked about his alcoholism being the reason that he could not correctly remember the things that were brought up in the perjury charges. But then, apparently confident that the prosecution had a weak case, Deaver’s lawyers presented no defense at all, called no witnesses, and were caught by surprise when, on Dec. 16, Deaver was found guilty of three of the five counts of perjury.

The next day, special prosecutor Whitney North Seymour Jr. made a rather unusual move by holding forth with the press, complaining that unethical practices have proliferated in Washington, where “vast sums of money” are spent by U. S. corporations and foreign governments “to buy influence and favors.” There is, Seymour told reporters, “too much loose money and too little concern in Washington about ethics in government.”

Deaver finds it hypocritical that people would expect him to leave the White House and not perform some service connected with his experience in government.

“What was I expected to do-- brain surgery?” Deaver asked. “Nor do I feel I committed any wrong by representing clients, whether companies or foreign governments, that needed a voice in Washington.”

Although Deaver is upset by what he perceives as the actions of this enemy coalition, he is not sorry he made the enemies.

“Yeah, I made a lot of enemies,” he said. “You can’t be in that position (and not make enemies). It’s not a regret. There’s no question that there are people who are very unhappy with me who support the axiom ‘Don’t get mad, get even.’ ”

No Contact With Reagans

Ironically, the Reagans have now stopped talking to Deaver, and for the first time in four years did not invite the Deaver family to the White House for Christmas dinner. The Reagans have said they have ceased their contact “on advice of counsel.”

Some observers see this as proof of one theory that the Reagans considered Deaver a “glorified servant,” words that Deaver used in his book.

“I never had the feeling I was a servant,” Deaver said. “I haven’t taken as much time as everyone else to psychoanalyze me. I don’t think I was motivated by that as much as by achieving and achievement itself.”

Although Reagan has not replied to some letters Deaver has written to him, Deaver said he has heard from a “couple of people” that Mrs. Reagan “is thinking about me.”

“I know how he feels about me and I know how she feels about me,” Deaver added. “I’m sure they love me as much as I love them. I’m certain of that.”

A few weeks ago most of Deaver’s office furnishings were auctioned off to help put a dent in his legal bills. And, although a continuing court battle on the constitutionality of Deaver’s special prosecutor may cause the case to be thrown out, he still faces an uncertain future.

Yet, sitting in his living room, he exudes the quiet peace and strength that one sees only in individuals who have made the voyage back from the edge. If Deaver has to go to jail, “I’ll be able to deal with that,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything I couldn’t deal with today.

“For the first time in my life, I understand me--my strengths and weaknesses,” he added. “I work every day on trying to deal with life. All of those wonderful cliches have begun to work for me: ‘One day at a time; don’t worry about the things you can’t change, worry about the thing you can change.’

“I don’t have any job offers. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I know I’m not going to worry about it. The only reputation I care about is right here, inside me. I’m terrific.”