by Bob Spitz
Reagan didn’t blink. “I must tell those who failed to report for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law,” he announced at a press conference in the Rose Garden, “and if they do not report for work within forty-eight hours they have forfeited their job and will be terminated.” There would be no amnesty. A federal judge in Brooklyn backed him up by ordering PATCO to pay fines of $100,000 for each hour the union struck.
The administration was prepared with contingency plans. “The weekend before the strike a few of us met in Drew Lewis’s kitchen to make arrangements,” says Ed Meese. They hastily assembled scratch crews—a hybrid assortment of nonunion supervisors, military controllers mustered by the Pentagon, and a few hundred non-strikers—to handle air traffic at the nation’s airports. The administration gambled that most of the controllers would come back to work. When it was apparent that that wouldn’t be the case, the president was forced into the nuclear option: replacing the entire force. “I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?” he asked Fred Fielding, his legal adviser, before delivering the verdict. “You are, Mr. President,” Fielding replied, “unless there’s a crash in the first forty-eight hours.” In that case, Ronald Reagan would be a one-term president. He fired the strikers, had the union decertified, and ordered training programs for up to six thousand new controllers.
It made a huge impression on the country at large. “He wanted people to see he couldn’t be pushed around,” Meese says. It sent a message to critics who called him soft or disengaged that his administration wasn’t to be trifled with. Those who didn’t meet their obligations would be dealt with accordingly. Reagan’s toughness paid immediate dividends. A Gallup poll showed an across-the-board approval of his handling of the strike, 57 percent to 30 percent. As David Broder intoned in a Washington Post column, “The message is getting around: You don’t mess with this guy.”
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Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, apparently didn’t get the message. On August 18, he sent two Soviet-made Su-22 fighter jets to shoot down American aircraft that were on maneuvers with the Sixth Fleet in the Gulf of Sidra, beyond his country’s twelve-mile territorial limit. Qaddafi had been threatening such an act for months, and Jimmy Carter had canceled similar exercises in 1979 to avoid potential skirmishes with the Libyans, but Reagan was not so deterred. He considered Qaddafi “a madman” and had already closed the Libyan embassy in Washington. At a National Security Council meeting in the Oval Office, the rear admiral who had responsibility for the Sixth Fleet in the maneuvers sought to clarify the rules of engagement. “What about hot pursuit?” he wanted to know. “If they fire on us and we chase them and they fly back over Libyan territory, can we pursue?”
“You can follow them into their own damn hangars if necessary,” the president responded.
It was almost a foregone conclusion that the Libyans would engage, and the Sixth Fleet had its orders. When Libyan aircraft made good on the threat, the American pilots didn’t hesitate. Two F-14s from the USS Nimitz shot down the aircraft on first pass.
Dick Allen got the news just after eleven p.m. on August 20, long after the Reagans had gone to bed. It was always a difficult decision whether to wake the president. Everyone knew how Nancy felt—that her husband’s rest took the highest priority—and understood they interfered with it at their own peril. In this case, it was up to Ed Meese, who treaded lightly where the First Lady was concerned. Meese knew the score: she had little love for him; she considered him too ideological, too disorganized, too indecisive. She continually raised concerns about his judgment. Her opinion had lost him the chief of staff job to Jim Baker. Were the Libyan jets worth incurring her wrath? “Let’s make sure we have all the details before we wake the president,” Meese told Allen. When it came to Nancy Reagan, Ed Meese couldn’t win. “He made a serious mistake,” she recalled in a memoir, “when American Navy jets shot down two Libyan fighter planes, and Ed waited five-and-a-half hours before calling Ronnie to wake him up and tell him about it.”
Had Meese called earlier, the outcome would have likely been the same, but he’d waited, and he took the heat for it. “Meese’s decision not to notify Reagan immediately raised once again a question that has popped to the surface from time to time in the Reagan administration,” the Washington Post reported. “Who is in command?”
Anyone working at the center of the administration knew the answer to that. The president had strongly exerted his authority any number of ways his first year in office. But there were cracks in the foundation. Several of his appointments in particular were coming under increasing fire.
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None more than David Stockman, the budget director who had miscalculated when it came to projecting the budget deficit for 1982, delivering a major embarrassment to the president. It now appeared as if the country’s budget would be below water to the tune of $100 billion or more. “The balanced budget is long gone,” Stockman fretted. From his perspective, the president’s Economic Recovery Program—indeed all of Reaganomics—teetered on the verge of collapse. The numbers on which Stockman had based his bullish forecasts no longer added up, if they ever did. The economy was weak; the financial markets were in a swoon, more than nine million Americans were out of work. According to the Washington Post, “Federal interest rates soared to nineteen percent, making it expensive to borrow money and tipping the country into recession.” “A slight one,” the president admitted.
The administration fought to downplay the bad economic news, when a bombshell hit: an article appeared in the December 1981 issue of The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Education of David Stockman.” Not just any article, it was a fifty-page indictment of Reaganomics written with the full cooperation of the budget director himself. In it, he admitted to making “snap judgments” about the likelihood of being able to “zero out,” or close down, federal programs, which was essential to the 1982 budget. He detailed how Cabinet officials “fought, argued [and] pounded the table” to restore their budgets, as did greedy legislators who flooded Congress with amendments to bills that reinstated generous subsidies for their local industries. He trashed Ed Meese and Jim Baker. It was an indiscreet takedown—but it got worse. Stockman “cheerfully conceded that the administration’s own budget numbers were constructed on shaky premises in a way that, fundamentally, did not add up.” Then he delivered the coup de grâce: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”
None of us really understands . . .
The White House nerve center was apoplectic. “My friend,” Jim Baker warned Stockman, “your ass is in a sling.” There was a clamor for Stockman’s immediate ouster. The Troika met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the matter. “I urged the president to ask for Stockman’s resignation,” says Ed Meese. “Jim voted to give him another chance. If at least one of us recommended another chance, it took the president, who couldn’t fire anybody, off the hook.”
For now, Stockman remained. For now. But his days as budget director were obviously numbered, as his adversaries lay in wait until he tripped up again.
There were other heads in line for the chopping block. Dick Allen was the first casualty. He’d had a rough time of it as national security adviser, with Al Haig riding roughshod over him in areas of foreign policy and relatively no direct access to the president. Allen was a brilliant but abrasive man, with a big personality that often rubbed colleagues the wrong way. He regularly undercut Haig and disparaged Jim Baker. Another aggrieved co-worker was Mike Deaver who, according to Ed Meese and others, “had a lot of hostility toward Dick.” Deaver set out to poison the well. He told Nancy Reagan that Allen was overloading the president with homework and keeping him from quality time with her. Once you had an adversary in the residence, the die was cast. “Because of Deaver’s animosity and the disharmony among the aides in general, the president felt it was necessary to make a ch
ange,” recalls Meese. But how? He couldn’t bring himself to fire him. That just wasn’t part of Ronald Reagan’s makeup, to part ways with someone he knew and liked.
Deaver had an idea. He recalled that the day after the inauguration Allen had arranged an interview with Shufu no Tomo, a Japanese women’s magazine, for Nancy Reagan. As it concluded, the reporter handed over a packet of press clippings she’d done with previous First Ladies, which Allen intercepted as a matter of protocol. “I went across to the West Executive Building,” he recalls, “and shuffled through the clippings, which is when I discovered an envelope mixed in with one thousand dollars in it.” Allen recognized the gesture right away: it was an honorarium, a sign of great gratitude by Japanese reporters in exchange for interviews—standard operating procedure. Still, to Americans it would seem like a bribe of some sort. Allen turned it over to his secretary, who locked the cash in a file cabinet and promptly forgot about it. Unfortunately, in the same cabinet were three Seiko watches that had been part of an exchange of gifts between Allen and a former Japanese colleague. Another traditional Asian gesture that could be misconstrued. An anonymous tip in September 1981 led to the discovery of these items, which triggered an FBI investigation. And although Allen was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the president now had the lever he needed to ask for his national security adviser’s resignation. In effect, Allen was railroaded out. “The money and watches were just an excuse,” says Ed Meese. “The president felt Allen needed to go.”
He felt the same about Al Haig, but it was much tougher to get rid of him. He needed his secretary of state’s expertise. Haig was the only member of the Cabinet with any kind of foreign policy experience. And he was astute. “Al hasn’t steered me wrong yet,” the president was heard to remark. He appreciated that Haig confirmed his belief that “we had the Soviets on their knees.” But it was so damn difficult to deal with Haig. The anger and tantrums! He fought constantly with Cap Weinberger, whom Haig despised as an “arch villain,” and he belittled the Troika—“the three beasts,” he called them—who he felt alienated him from the president. “There was hardly an issue that ever developed between myself and the president that was not victimized by an undercurrent of mischievous misinformation,” Haig later claimed. And when it came to his contempt for Reagan, Haig had no filter. “He isn’t a mean man,” Haig confided to Bill Clark, his deputy secretary. “He’s just stupid.” During a heated exchange with the president over Latin America policy in a National Security Planning Group meeting, Haig blurted out: “We’ll see who has the balls in this administration, Mr. President.”
It was hard for Reagan to resist accepting one of Haig’s routine letters of resignation. There had been half a dozen opportunities, as well as other provocations. The petty issues were almost too absurd—Haig’s hissy fit at being subordinated to the Reagans in a G7 motorcade, or the secretary’s complete meltdown when he was removed from a receiving line at the American embassy in Rome so that the president could have his wife standing next to him instead. “He festered on that,” says Bud McFarlane. “It was evidence to him of a White House conspiracy.” Other points of contention drew greater scrutiny. Haig continued to press his belief that there was an opportunity for the United States to stir up sufficient opposition in Cuba to unseat Castro—a scheme his own lieutenants disagreed with and was far from Reagan’s agenda. And he advocated for a more vigorous covert operation in Latin America, which Reagan initially shied away from.
What ultimately sank Haig, however, were events unfolding in the Middle East. In the summer of 1981, the Israelis had launched a surprise preemptive attack in Iraq, destroying a nuclear reactor. Reagan was angry that Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, whom he personally loathed, had left him in the dark. But Reagan was sympathetic to Israel’s efforts to protect itself, especially in regard to hostilities in southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut, alarmingly close to the Israeli border, where the Palestine Liberation Organization, armed with a cache of Soviet-built long-range missiles, had hidden twenty thousand fighters among the Lebanese population. It was a powder keg on the verge of explosion.
Six months later, in February 1982, Haig warned the president that a war in the Middle East was imminent and that if the United States did not take certain high-profile initiatives Israel would ultimately find a pretext to invade Lebanon. In fact, both Begin and Ariel Sharon, Israel’s minister of defense, had asked Haig’s permission to approve an invasion, which Haig firmly rejected. Reagan had already dispatched Philip Habib, his foremost Foreign Service envoy, to broker an agreement between the Israelis and the Lebanese in an attempt to head off an invasion. “There was a clash between Phil’s and Al’s recommendations on what we ought to do,” says Bud McFarlane. Habib felt that, barring a diplomatic solution, the United States should cut off all military supplies to Israel and support a UN resolution calling for Israel’s immediate withdrawal from Lebanon; Haig subscribed to stepped-up pressure on the PLO. “The president leaned toward Habib’s position, which Al took as a personal rebuke rather than just substantive policy judgment.”
Reagan did not subscribe to the concept of Eretz Yisrael—the Greater Israel—and Begin’s ambition to consolidate Israel to include all of the West Bank, part of Jordan, and parts of Lebanon and Syria. While Reagan felt Israel was not defensible with its current borders, the United States would not be a party to the country’s expansion.
On June 6, 1982, while Ronald Reagan was in Europe on a ten-day tour, Israel pulled the trigger, sending eighty thousand troops into Lebanon to establish a so-called buffer zone while wiping out the PLO. Afterward, Haig sent detailed negotiating instructions to Philip Habib, who was in Lebanon, without first running them past the president. Reagan was outraged and considered firing his secretary of state immediately, but balked and instead issued a stern warning. “This mustn’t happen again,” he told Haig. “We just can’t have a situation where you send messages on your own that are a matter for my decision.”
Haig understood this from a military perspective; chain of command must never be breached. What he couldn’t condone, however, was what he saw as “petty maneuvering” by the White House staff, what he’d later describe as “guerrilla warfare by a bunch of second-rate hambones”—the Troika—who interfered with his ability to conduct foreign policy. Their fingerprints, Haig felt, were on everything that crossed his desk. More often than not, they blocked his path to the president. “I simply can no longer operate in this atmosphere,” he insisted.
Haig had prepared a “bill of particulars”—really just a list of complaints—along with a letter of resignation, but in a last-minute decision he produced only the list, which he handed to Reagan before leaving the Oval Office. He also made it clear that he expected the president to reduce the authority of his new national security adviser, Bill Clark. That cinched it. The following morning, the president decided to give Haig’s job to George Shultz.
Shultz was a solid, unflappable choice. He had impeccable credentials: a former Marine with degrees from Princeton and MIT, dean of the University of Chicago, three high-level government posts—secretary of labor, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of treasury—and president of the Bechtel Corporation, an international engineering and construction firm that also spawned Cap Weinberger. But more important, Shultz was a pragmatist who’d survived the fierce turf battles of the Nixon administration. He placed responsibility above ideology. He knew how to effectively manage difficult personalities in highly charged situations. He could be courtly or combative, depending on the situation. He had a clear understanding of “the crucial give-and-take of politics” and swore by the Princeton motto, “In the Nation’s Service.” What a welcome change from the histrionics of Alexander Haig. When Shultz accepted the job, Ronald Reagan was gratified and relieved.
So were Mike Deaver and Jim Baker, both of whom recognized a fellow pragmatist when they saw one. Shultz’s nature would provide them with
an ally at State, and in return they gave the new secretary the kind of access to the president that Al Haig had only dreamed about. Baker scheduled weekly private lunches for Reagan and Shultz. And Deaver, as was his wont, squared things with the First Lady.
But not all was wine and roses in the White House. Cap Weinberger was no fan of George Shultz. There was bad blood stretching back from their days at Bechtel, where Shultz had treated Cap like the hired help. And they had drastically different views when it came to relations with the Soviets. In Weinberger’s eyes, a pragmatist like Shultz would revive détente and wreak havoc on the Defense Department’s military buildup. Weinberger also believed that Shultz was quick to put American troops on the ground as leverage in diplomatic efforts, whereas Cap wouldn’t commit troops to any situation unless it meant fighting was required. Nor would he condone negotiating with the Soviets, whereas Shultz maintained a core belief that “we should push very hard to engage” them.
Their difference in philosophies collided over the crisis in Lebanon. No sooner had Shultz been confirmed as secretary of state than on August 1, 1982, Israeli troops—the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces—laid siege to Beirut. The president had operated under the impression left by Menachem Begin that a diplomatic solution was being negotiated to broker a cease-fire. In the days and weeks that followed, numerous cease-fires were reached and breached while solutions were sought for the PLO’s safe evacuation from Lebanon. The remaining Palestinians—a civilian population—were relocated in refugee camps so that their safety could be assured. Meanwhile, the Arab world looked to the United States to get the IDF out of Beirut.
On September 14, 1982, Bashir Gemayel, the new president of Lebanon, was assassinated, complicating matters exponentially. The Israelis decided to enter Beirut on the premise of preventing a bloodbath. Three days later, on September 17, on Rosh Hashanah, the IDF stood by while Maronite Christian forces swept into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, massacring six hundred Palestinians—entire families, whose bodies were bulldozed over with rubble using Israeli equipment. It was a horrible atrocity that shocked the world. Phil Habib, the U.S. envoy, had been given assurances, and in turn had given his assurances, that people in the camps would be protected; the Israelis and the Phalangists had promised not to intervene. “The brutal fact is, we are partly responsible,” George Shultz admitted. “We took the Israelis and Lebanese at their word.”
