Volumes of Frustration From the White House

The chronicling of a presidential administration by key members has become an American institution, but the rush to judgment by Reagan Administration figures is, in celerity and volume, something new. Five White House insiders--David A. Stockman, Michael K. Deaver, Larry Speakes, Donald T. Regan and Martin Anderson--have written books of memoirs and impressions. So have former Cabinet members--Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and Secretary of Education Terrell H. Bell.

A close look at this growing library suggests something quite different from the “kiss and tell” label appended by the news media. The books reveal deep and sometimes angry needs for self-justification. They convey baffled expressions of frustration with the personality and style of a President who distanced himself from decision-making, who avoided serious one-on-one dialogue or discussion of problems, who expressed little appreciation for jobs well done but was loathe to accept responsibility when things went awry. The President’s hands-off style unleashed members of the Administration to conduct their responsibilities according to their own predilections and perceptions, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad--often at cross-purposes.

For the first time since the 1920s the presidency belonged to a man who not only recoiled from decision-making but divorced himself from the rough-and-tumble of the process.

To cater to the Reagan personality, Edwin Meese III long ago created a system of government by Cabinet when he was Reagan’s chief of staff in California. Reagan presided but, in Deaver’s terminology, he was an “endorser,” not an arbiter or leader. When disputes arose, Meese usually shortstopped them before they reached Reagan. In those rare instances when Reagan was called on to decide, the buck did not stop with him. Instead, he bounced it right back. The secret of the Teflon presidency was to prevent anything from touching the frying pan.

While Meese’s system was feasible for the governor of California, the infinitely more complex White House and federal Establishment required something more. So Meese elaborated the structure into one of “Cabinet councils” or sub-Cabinets, coordinated according to intersecting interests. Staffs multiplied until Reagan, who made a career of running against bureaucracy, was presiding over a White House bureaucracy rivaling the Kremlin, with built in “choke points” designed to reduce Reagan’s exposure to disputes.

The Oval Office, instead of being the nexus of the federal Establishment, became an insulated showcase to display the President. Members of the Administration were left to confront, individually, the reality that their President circumvented.

Consider the economy. Even the most dedicated supply-siders, like Anderson, did not believe that a tax cut could recoup more than 17% of the lost revenues through economic stimulus. But once Reagan was sold on the concept, it became a magic formula--Stockman would wave his computational wand and all would be right in the budgetary world.

“What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?” Stockman asked in his book, “The Triumph of Politics.” “Once the recovery started booming in the spring of 1983, there was not a thing you could tell him to shake his absolute faith that these massive deficits were simply going to vanish.” By 1984, the White House, Stockman said, “had become a dreamland.”

Stockman and Anderson were largely responsible for initiating these financial fantasies. Anderson, while drawing up the Administration’s fiscal blueprint in Chicago on Sept. 9, 1980, had factored in all the pluses and preferred to overlook the minuses, so a projected $50-billion deficit turned into an evanescent surplus. Stockman had magnified the prestidigitation by making a high school math error on his pocket calculator, thereby doubling the rate of Reagan’s defense buildup. By the time Stockman discovered his mistake, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger had gleefully built the excess tens of billions into the Pentagon budget and refused to relinquish any of them. Then when Reagan smiled and said, according to Stockman, “OK, you fellas work it out,” there was no one to adjudicate. Differences became irreconcilable; errors were left to compound.

In such an atmosphere, Stockman began to see himself as the architect of a potential disaster. So he initiated regular, confidential confessionals with William Greider, an editor at the Washington Post. Off the record he was going on the record so that he might eventually absolve himself.

Anderson, Deaver, Regan and Speakes criticized Stockman for telling tales out of the Administration. But that did not stop them from rushing their own versions into print. For Regan and Speakes, the antagonist was Nancy Reagan, whom the President cast as the most influential first lady in the history of the presidency.

Movie star Ronald Reagan had been trained in a system that presented him with a script, a supporting cast and crew, a director and a producer. He would be in the spotlight--but he was not involved in the details of production or personnel.

In middle age, Reagan changed jobs but not habits. Nancy was, in effect, his personal manager, both before and after.

Deaver, working hand-in-glove with Nancy for 20 years, was Reagan’s de facto private secretary, court jester and alter ego--”You know,” Deaver told Anderson during the 1980 campaign, “I am Ronald Reagan. Where do you think he got most of those ideas over the years? Every morning after I get up I make believe I am him and ask what should he do and where should he go.”

As deputy chief of staff in the White House, Deaver, together with then-Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and presidential counselor Meese, was one of the troika responsible for conducting the Oval Office during the first Reagan Administration. Working together, Deaver and Nancy orchestrated the schedule of the President so as not to overtax him. (Especially after he was wounded in the March 30, 1981, assassination attempt, Reagan’s stamina was limited.) Reagan’s office hours were 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; he could regularly be found in his pajamas after 6 p.m. Deaver and Mrs. Reagan also catered, discreetly, to the President’s superstitions, for which Nancy took the heat in Regan’s book, “For the Record.” Earlier, Deaver had written in “Behind the Scenes” that the President is “incurably superstitious. If he emptied his pants pocket you would always find about five good-luck charms that people had sent him. I am sure he reads his horoscope every day.”

Meanwhile, Deaver’s alcoholism became more pronounced--in January, 1985, he suffered acute kidney failure on the job--and Meese was notoriously disorganized. (Deaver mused that “roaches could be having orgies” in the clutter atop Meese’s desk.) Regan, as secretary of the Treasury, perceived the lack of efficiency; he and Baker (who resigned last week to run the Bush campaign) agreed that for the second term they would swap jobs.

“There was no design for leadership,” Regan wrote. “There was no inventory of national priorities. No philosophical consensus on which policy was based, no system for carrying a problem that subordinates could not solve to the President for final decision.”

What Regan had not realized was that this was by design, according to the President’s personality and predilections. Regan’s attempt to implement his own brand of efficiency and no-nonsense business style in the White House was like installing a new engine in an old jalopy.

Nancy protested that the President would not be able to stand the pace Regan proposed. Regan rebuffed Nancy’s practice of using the telephone as a stethoscope into the Oval Office. Deaver had once said to Speakes, “That’s seven calls so far today.” And it was only noon.

Regan’s attempt to rein individualism caused other friction. He noted that everyone had become used to a governing principle: If the President did not say no, the answer was yes. Since the President rarely interjected, the result was almost always implicit approval. “He listened, acquiesced, played his role and waited for the next act to be written,” wrote Regan.

In this context came Iran-Contra. “Only the President had the authority to tell (National Security Adviser Robert C.) McFarlane not to do what he was proposing to do, and the President--once again saying yes by not saying no--did not do that,” Regan wrote.

When the scandal broke, both Regan and press spokesman Speakes thought the President should make a clean breast of things and put the affair behind him. But the President equivocated--”he could not bring himself to say that he had made a mistake,” Speakes wrote in “Speaking Out”--and Nancy, having consulted her astrologer, procrastinated about press conferences. Regan claimed that Nancy maneuvered to shift the onus to him and manipulated the chief of staff’s ouster, while the President, as was his wont, refused to face up to the situation. “I just wish he’d had the manliness to tell me himself,” Regan said to George Bush.

Speakes had been dealing with the President’s rationalizations for almost six years--”I didn’t have cancer. I had something inside of me that had cancer in it and it was removed.” Then, caught between Nancy’s determination to manage information and the press demand to know every detail, he bailed out when he felt the Iran-Contra scandal would destroy the last vestiges of his credibility.

Hardly any Administration in American history has escaped scandal of one kind or another. But few have unraveled quite like Reagan’s, with members of the Administration arguing among themselves, then leaving. Of the four economic-policy experts at the beginning, two of them--Anderson and Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers--distanced themselves after little more than a year. Stockman and Regan departed disillusioned. There have been four different chiefs of staff. The positions occupied by Meese and Deaver in the first Administration were vacated but not refilled. Six men have held the title of national security adviser, a key White House office that became a revolving door.

For the American electorate, there is a lesson here: a pressing need to judge presidential candidates not only by their rhetorical ability and proposed policies, but by abilities to implement and execute. Americans should demand to know not only what a President would do and why, but, most important of all, how.