That was Sear's description, Zoltan. Perhaps you'd prefer Donald Regan's description.
From a review of FOR THE RECORD From Wall Street to Washington. By Donald T. Regan. Illustrated. 397 pp. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $21.95. NYT, 5/29/88
As Treasury Secretary, Mr. Regan says, he was appalled at the lack of specific policy direction provided to subordinates by the President and at the tendency of first-term White House aides to pursue their own agendas. So, when he took over as chief of staff, he decided to run things so as to ''let Reagan be Reagan'' - that is, make sure that the President's broad philosophical goals were faithfully carried out. In the process, however, he failed to appoint strong subordinates (his appointees were referred to by other White House aides as ''the mice'') and he rejected the notion of compromising (or even mixing socially) with opposition figures in Washington. As a result, when trouble arose, he had no friends to defend him. He still exhibits no awareness whatever of these faults.
In fact, they might not have led to disaster had it not been for the Iran-contra scandal. In other respects, Mr. Regan often reminds his readers, the two years during which he presided were marked by achievement - landmark tax reform, sustained economic recovery, the beginnings of deficit control, two summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the confirmation of two conservatives on the Supreme Court and - until November 1986 - record-high Presidential popularity.
Mr. Regan establishes almost beyond doubt that he was not guilty of the worst accusations made against him during the Iran affair - that he knew about the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan contras and that he tried to engineer a cover-up when the scandal began to unfold. But he reveals himself as having been nearly as passive as the President was when it came to overseeing the National Security Council. He assented as readily as did the President when the then-National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane proposed the first arms-for-hostages trade in November 1985. Even though Mr. Regan's predecessor (and successor at Treasury), James Baker 3d, had required Mr. McFarlane to clear meetings with the President in advance, Mr. Regan allowed Mr. McFarlane and his successor, Adm. John Poindexter, free access to the President. He also allowed them to get oral approval for their activities, without any records being kept. And, although many journalists knew Lieut. Col. Oliver North, and knew he was somehow aiding the Nicaraguan contras, Mr. Regan says he recalls having no more than one telephone conversation with Colonel North, and claims he knew nothing of his activities. ''In retrospect I wish that I had been less careful of [ N.S.C. aides' ] prerogatives and had exercised control over their activities,'' Mr. Regan writes, in his one confession of error. Mr. Regan shows no self-awareness, either, about how ill-equipped he was to deal with Mrs. Reagan. Psychohistorians may suspect that he harbors an aversion to strong-willed women. He describes his mother as having dominated his childhood home, and twice in public he disparaged the ability of women to cope with serious public issues. But he could have benefited (and perhaps survived) had he followed another of Mr. Baker's examples - that of relying on Michael Deaver, a close family friend of the Reagans, to ''handle'' the First Lady. Mr. Regan simply allowed Mr. Deaver to leave the White House staff and did not look for a similarly connected aide to replace him. Clearly, Mr. Regan could not himself soothe her anxieties about the President's well-being or parry her attempts (which he describes as unreasonable and incessant) to influence personnel, policy and (above all) scheduling decisions.
As practically everyone now knows, Mr. Regan reveals that Mrs. Reagan regularly consulted a San Francisco astrologer and, relying on her advice, imposed a veto on Presidential activities - which Mr. Regan claims prevented the President from publicly countering the effects of the Iran-contra scandal that broke in November 1986. He also asserts that Mrs. Reagan imperiously demanded that he get rid of various executive-branch officials, even including the Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, who lay dying of brain cancer at the time. He does not claim (as Michael Deaver did in his book, ''Behind the Scenes'') that Mrs. Reagan attempted to soften the country's policy toward the Soviet Union and cut the defense budget, but he considered her influence so pervasive that in a climactic exchange with the President, he quotes himself as saying, ''I thought I was Chief of Staff to the President, not to his wife.''
Mr. Regan is so bitter at Mrs. Reagan that he likens her (not quite explicitly) to Livia, the ''clever but ruthless woman who ruled the Roman Empire . . . through the manipulation of her much older husband, Augustus Caesar,'' and routinely poisoned rivals in doing so. ''Without stretching things too far,'' he writes, ''it can be suggested that the most popular poison in . . . Washington is bad publicity. In massive doses it can destroy a reputation outright. When leaked slowly into the veins of the victim it kills his public persona just as certainly, but the symptoms - anger, suspicion, frustration, the loss of friends and influence - are often mistaken for the malady. The victim may realize that he is being poisoned; he may even have a very good idea who the poisoners are. But he cannot talk about his suspicions without adding a persecution complex to the list of his faults that is daily being compiled in the newspapers.''
As a proud (perhaps prideful) human being, Mr. Regan clearly suffered from the death by news leak that was visited on him. He writes that his White House departure ''threw a shadow over all I had accomplished'' in life and says he is thankful that his parents and brother and sister were not alive to read the ''scurrilous lies'' written about him. Some lies were written - notably, the charge that he had ordered an Iran-contra cover-up - but most stories simply conveyed the truth that not only Mrs. Reagan's circle, but much of official Washington, thought the President needed a new chief of staff. Mr. Regan wanted to depart on his own terms. Others wanted him out sooner, and he lost the contest, quitting in a huff last February when a television network reported the name of his replacement, Howard Baker, before he was officially informed.
What about President Reagan? He stood by, as usual, while all of this was going on. Mr. Regan does not blame him for it. He treats the President as a kind of fact of nature - one that he describes in arresting detail, but ultimately cannot explain. How could the same man who won two landslide elections, changed (for better or worse) the nation's economic priorities and toughed it out with Mr. Gorbachev - how could this man also be so utterly careless about things going on around him? Mr. Regan cannot solve this paradox, and as long as it persists, whatever damage his book was meant to cause the waning Reagan Administration cannot be fatal. The President comes out looking foolish, but simply cannot be written off as a fool.
I wouldn't claim Reagan was a fool either, and I think he had an effective administration. But there's no evidence that he was ever really running things, just playing his role. Who the director was, who can say? Nancy and her astrologer? Al "I am in control" Haig? The alcoholic Michael Deaver? Ed "if you're a suspect, you're guilty" Meese? George "out of the loop" Bush? The smart money would be on James Baker, I guess. |
