Plugging Into D.C. Power Games

President Reagan is on the telephone, pleading with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to let him out of his commitment to visit Bitburg Cemetery.

American Jews are in an uproar over the proposed visit, which is supposed to signify unity between the United States and West Germany. Nancy Reagan is so upset about it that the President is not sure she will make the trip with him.

So Reagan is on the phone trying to get Kohl to switch their visit from Bitburg to a war memorial shrine he has just learned about at Festung Ehrenbreitstein, where there are no graves at all.

But Kohl is not budging.

Unusually Long Call

After 19 minutes, an unusually long call for world leaders, Reagan puts down the phone and tells others in the Oval Office, “We have to do this. Helmut says his government would fall” if they back out.

Later, the President asks Nancy, “Are you going with me?”

She replies, “I’ve been in this thing for 30 years. And I’m not backing out now.”

The Bitburg debacle, and the story behind it, compose one of hundreds of anecdotes that New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith attempts to tell in a new way in his book, “The Power Game,” published this week.

Operating on the assumption that Washington is at least as mysterious and interesting as Moscow, Smith--who has covered both cities--decided to write a book about the nation’s capital, using the same approach that won him worldwide acclaim 13 years ago for “The Russians.”

Smith’s Pulitzer Prize standing in the Washington community assures him that his voluminous effort will not be ignored by the city’s power elite, who will turn first to the index to see if they are mentioned.

Recently Smith called Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.) to compliment him on his new book, “Too Funny to Be President.”

“I couldn’t put your book down,” Smith told Udall.

Udall replied, “I couldn’t pick yours up.”

A Hefty Volume

The book’s length is a result of pages-long treatment given not only to events that newswatchers already are somewhat familiar with, but also to some they are not--like what happens when the Reagans decide to spend the night at Sen. Howard Baker’s Tennessee mountain hideaway. A peaceful little cabin turns into a command post. Its blinds are nailed shut, holes are drilled in the floors for telephone lines and troops cover the countryside, only to have Dinah Shore drop in for dinner in her helicopter, completely unannounced.

In the inside history of Star Wars, a picture is painted of Reagan getting carried away with a mostly wishful idea that a defense system could be built to deter the attack of all nuclear weapons. Reagan was determined to run with the idea and go public before it had been researched, and amid the verbal skirmishing, Secretary of State George Shultz bellows at the President’s science adviser, George Keyworth, “You’re a lunatic!”

“The Power Game” is the third book the 54-year-old Smith has written during the Reagan Administration, following “Reagan, the Man, the President” in 1981 and “Beyond Reagan: The Politics of Upheaval,” in 1986.

Spending about eight years covering Vietnam, Cairo, Paris and Moscow, Smith has been in and out of Washington for the last 25 years, observing the political scene for the New York Times. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his work on the Pentagon Papers and for his international reporting. He spent almost two years writing “Power Games,” but in his research, he said: “I can’t actually say there was one single, surprising, blinding thing.”

Of his findings, he added, “There aren’t blinding flashes of sensational disclosure. There is exclusive material in the Star Wars section, and the fact that they had found an alternative site to Bitburg, nobody’s had that before. But I didn’t write the book intending to make that kind of disclosures. I wrote to make insights build gradually.”

Of course the basic burning question is: Are Washington politicians the best and brightest dedicated to serving the public? Or are they power-hungry and endowed primarily with a a flair for self-glorification?

‘A Little of Both’

“Obviously they’re a little of both and somewhere in between,” Smith said. “My own feeling after 25 years in and out of the city is that politicians are a lot better than most people give them credit for. They come here with more serious ambitions. Clearly they’re interested in power. They want the limelight, they want to have an impact on things, they either want it for personal satisfaction or personal grandeur or they want to do it for some cause they believe in. But I think there’s more idealism in politicians when they come to this city than the public realizes.

“They get to the city and they get caught up in the game and they get mired down in the way the system operates, the access game, the turf game, the image game, the coalition game, the opposition game or the porcupine power game, which is where you keep anything from happening by being prickly and being difficult.”

One champion porcupine power player in the book is Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who filibusters and blusters his way into the hearts of Southern conservatives, often making progress on their issues by the only method possible.

Having covered both Moscow and Washington, Smith feels both governments work well and also work badly in different situations.

Capacity for Innovation

“For all the problems that we have in moving in one direction or another, we have in this society a capacity for innovation, for tackling old problems in some new way, throwing up new leadership, and so forth, that revitalizes this country in a much better way than the Soviets have had, until Gorbachev,” Smith said. “And we don’t know what the returns are on Gorbachev.

“Their system just became totally rigid. There was no sufficient avenue for people with different ideas, good ideas, and I’m not talking about anti-Communists, I mean within their own framework, making the economy work better, modernizing their technology, dealing with some of their nationality problems; they were congealed. For all the stalemates we have had and all the frustrations that divide our government, we simply don’t have problems on a comparable level.

“On the other hand, when the Soviets set their minds to something like a military buildup and they have decided on that in 1962 and gotten their leadership behind it, by God, they have pursued that with a continuity over 10 or 15 years that overcomes a lot of this business of being congealed. They can decide to build a railroad across Siberia if they think that’s what they need and build enormous dams and they don’t go through the repeated votes on appropriations that we go through ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Basically the real problem is, they don’t innovate.”

The American political system, on the other hand, is strangled by a fragmentation of power that too often has a President of one political party battling to a draw with a Congress of another party, Smith feels.

Two Productive Periods

“You’ve had two really productive periods of the presidency in the last 25 or 30 years,” Smith said, “Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 1965 with the war on poverty, and Ronald Reagan with the tax and budget cuts.”

Harvard American history teacher Alan Brinkley, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said, “ ‘Power Games’ may be the most sweeping and in many ways the most impressive portrait of the culture of the federal government to appear in many decades.”

Yet, in comparison to “The Russians,” in which the rich and colorful surprises of the unknown Soviet life style come alive, the inner workings of political Washington may be much more familiar and dull, leaving some critics unimpressed.

“He has written a book that is 700-plus pages long and a quarter-inch deep,” Newsweek Washington correspondent Timothy Noah said in a review for the Boston Globe.

Reviewing for the conservative Washington Times newspaper, Judge Robert H. Bork pronounced the book old news.

“People who take an interest in politics and government will learn again that Presidents have less actual power than they do pomp,” Bork wrote. “Large staffs are themselves powerful in both the legislative and executive branches, the cohesion and influence of political parties have declined; politicians who know how to use television can bypass the hierarchies of Congress and achieve power by popularity with voters; congressmen now raise money and campaign almost continually, which adversely affects their substantive performance; and much more--all true, all important, and all well known. The moderately well-informed have been reading all of this for years.”

Smith counters, “This book is not written for Washingtonians. The real kick to me with ‘The Russians’ was to have (the book read by) students, university students, particularly people who knew nothing about Russia except that it was foreign, strange, communist, something to be mistrusted but with no human element, no human quotient to it. That’s for whom ‘The Russians’ was written. And that’s the kind of person I’m trying to reach here.”