Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  “Reagan is detached from reality,” Mondale argued, soft on civil rights, arms control, women’s rights, and the environment. But the criticism fell on deaf ears. Nothing—not Reaganomics, not Star Wars, not the deficit, not policy gaffes, not napping in high-level meetings—stuck to the Teflon president. Several incidents should have tarnished his bulletproof image. In March, William Buckley, an American diplomat, was kidnapped in Lebanon and later exposed as the CIA station chief. On September 20, 1984, twenty-three people were killed when a suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives outside the new American embassy in Beirut, and ten days later four CIA operatives died in a plane crash in El Salvador. These were clear foreign policy embarrassments. But no matter how much hay the Democrats made of it, voters failed to hold Ronald Reagan accountable.

  Two debates were staged. The first one, held in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 7, a date chosen by astrologer Joan Quigley, was an unmitigated disaster for the president. He seemed indecisive, fuzzy-headed, often losing himself in the midst of an answer. After a particularly hard-hitting challenge from Walter Mondale, Reagan mumbled, “I’m all confused now. . . .” Afterward, he admitted, “I flattened out,” and he blamed it on “too many hours poring over briefing books, and in skull sessions and mock debates preparing for the encounter.” Stu Spencer, however, had joined the president at Camp David the weekend before the debate and observed that Reagan never opened the briefing books. “We spent eight hours watching old movies,” Spencer recalls, “most of them his movies. The next day, the books were still sitting here. He didn’t do his homework.” Spencer told Lou Cannon, “He was just plain lazy in preparing, and he knew it.”

  Spencer walked out of the debate with the president, who was reeling from the lopsided exchange. “God, I was awful,” he groaned. Mondale was coming down the ramp behind them, and from where they stood he appeared “twenty feet high.” “I killed him,” Mondale exulted. “I killed him.”

  Nancy Reagan was furious. In her estimation “that debate was a nightmare,” and she vented her spleen at Mike Deaver. “What have you done to my husband?” she cried. Deaver had always handled these situations with aplomb. He was the facilitator, he made sure the president was at ease and prepared. He had the magic touch. But in the days leading up to the debate—in the entire campaign, for that matter—Deaver was nowhere to be found. Later, he admitted to Stu Spencer, “I was sitting in my room drinking.” Deaver’s alcoholism had taken root. “He was trying to combat it in his own way,” says his wife, Carolyn, but it was undermining his effectiveness with the First Family. “His body was worn down, it was hard for him to find the energy to keep up.” The president depended on Deaver to orchestrate the daily grind, and the paces Nancy Reagan put him through were grueling. “I could always tell when he was on his way home,” Carolyn Deaver recalls. “The White House operator would call and say, ‘Mrs. Reagan would like to speak to Mike.’ But he was in transit. She would call again as soon as he got home, and again in the evening. And again, and again. She had to churn through her day with him every day.”

  Deaver pulled himself together enough to prepare for the second crucial debate, and he had plenty of help. This time, Stu Spencer and Paul Laxalt were recruited to restore the president’s confidence. They eliminated the briefing books in favor of one-page memos, deciding to “let Reagan be Reagan.” Richard Nixon gave him a pep talk. And the election team brought in a media coach, Roger Ailes, whose reputation as “Dr. Feelgood” was the perfect elixir for a candidate whose spirits had taken a hit. Ailes was primarily concerned with postdebate criticism that focused on Ronald Reagan’s intellectual acuity, the fact that he might be too old and disengaged. A headline in the Wall Street Journal put it bluntly: “New Questions in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age?” Ailes reviewed the age issue with Reagan, reminding him that “for the last ten days you’ve been pounded that you’re too old for the job.” He could count on it being a factor in the next debate. The president assured Ailes, “I can handle it.” In fact, he had a comeback he’d tried out on Mike Deaver a few days earlier. The opportunity to use it came midway through the next and final debate with Mondale, in Kansas City on October 21.

  For the first thirty minutes, Mondale relentlessly attacked Reagan’s handling of foreign policy in Central America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union, demanding to know, “Who’s in charge? Who’s handling these matters?” One of the moderators, Henry Trewhitt, the diplomacy correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, saw it as an opening to segue into the age issue, casting it in terms of national security. “I recall,” Trewhitt said, “that President Kennedy had to go on for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?”

  This was the question the president had been waiting for—and he pounced. “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” he said matter-of-factly, “and I want you to know that I will also not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

  It was vintage Ronald Reagan and the crowd loved it. No matter what the previous exchanges had revealed or the doubts they raised about the president’s ability to effectively govern, Reagan’s quip deftly swept them aside. The cleverness, the performance, was what the audience in Kansas City and those watching at home wanted from their popular president. Here, at last, was their Great Communicator, who warmed their hearts with his ability to deliver a great line. Mondale grinned at the witty rejoinder, but knew he’d been upstaged. More than that. He later admitted, “I knew he had gotten me there. That was really the end of my campaign that night.”

  Mondale read the tea leaves correctly. Three days following the debate, a New York Times–CBS poll indicated the margin had widened considerably. It revealed that “among probable voters fifty-three percent favored Reagan and thirty-five percent favored Mondale,” with 12 percent of registered voters still undecided. On November 6, 1984, Ronald Reagan swept to reelection in perhaps the greatest landslide in American political history, carrying forty-nine states to Mondale’s one, his home state of Minnesota, as well as the District of Columbia.

  To Reagan, the outcome had endowed him with a mandate to press his agenda for the next four years. Nancy Reagan agreed, telling Mike Deaver on election eve that they had “taken enough and swallowed enough.” Echoing her friend Frank Sinatra, she declared, “From now on we’re going to do it our way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “LET REAGAN BE REAGAN”

  “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them.”

  —HARRY S. TRUMAN

  On the same day Ronald Reagan was racking up his resounding election victory, a National Security Council deputy, Lt. Col. Oliver North, held a secret meeting on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building across the street from the White House, where he coordinated a full-service undercover operation known as Project Democracy. North’s guest was an unnamed Contra operative who requested help for a plan to “borrow” a jet from Honduras, paint it with Sandinista markings, and use it to attack Sandinista installations. Such covert operations had been under way since December 1981, when Reagan signed the presidential finding approving aid for the Nicaraguan rebel force. CIA chief Bill Casey, along with NSC staff, interpreted the directive to their own satisfaction in order to underwrite guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua, concealing it from Congress. In explaining such activities to the president, Casey remained purposely vague, often mumbling unintelligibly, as he was prone to do when he preferred to conceal the details of secret foreign-policy arrangements. And he knew that in Ronald Reagan, he had a listener who, consciously or not, would tune them out.

  The Contra situation began to unravel almost as soon as the election returns were in, and it would snowball across Reagan’s s
econd term, overshadowing domestic achievements, Soviet peace initiatives, and arms-control triumphs, while shredding his credibility. Part of the damage stemmed from the fact that he was ill-served by some of his most trusted advisers.

  * * *

  —

  The Troika in particular had functioned well beyond anyone’s expectations through the first four years. All in all, it had effectively run the nerve center of the U.S. government. Jim Baker, Mike Deaver, and Ed Meese managed to strike a balance of duties that, while competitive and frequently at cross-purposes, kept the Oval Office humming and the president on track. They’d observed Reagan’s dictum “There is plenty of work for everybody,” adhering to their own policy of mutually assured destruction—that is, recognizing that any attempt to sabotage one of them would doom them all. They protected the president from rapacious influence peddlers (and from himself). But the constant pressure had taken a toll. “These were tough jobs,” Mike Deaver recalled, “and we all had to get out of there.”

  Jim Baker got high marks as chief of staff, but he was burned out and felt underappreciated. Nancy Reagan viewed him warily. Fingering him early as “an ambitious man,” she said, “I always felt that his main interest was Jim Baker.” And his persistent press leaks drove her to distraction. It was obvious to White House staff that Baker wanted out—but not that far out. Though he’d flirted with becoming commissioner of baseball, another, less stressful job in the administration was more suited to his purposes. A Cabinet post was at the top of his list.

  Mike Deaver, the Reagans’ loyal retainer, set his sights elsewhere. Since moving to Washington, he’d caught a case of what Nancy Reagan called “Potomac fever,” whose symptoms were exacerbated by power and money. “The power intoxicated him,” Ed Meese says. Deaver was a working stiff in a league of men worth many millions of dollars, which frustrated him no end. For all his talent in handling the president of the United States and his wife, for all his control of the daily schedule, for all his skill and influence as the White House facilitator, Mike Deaver was barely eking out enough money to cover his living expenses. He’d shown considerable flair for public relations in his early efforts with Pete Hannaford and nimble interplay with the Washington press corps. If he parlayed that into a lobbying job, the payoff would be tremendous, but it would take some doing to extricate himself from the Reagans’ grip.

  Ed Meese was already in the wind. Eight months earlier, when William French Smith resigned from the Justice Department to return to private practice, Reagan nominated Meese to take over as attorney general, the job the faithful counselor had always coveted. The appointment, however, had been held up ever since, pinned down by embarrassing revelations about Meese’s personal finances. Reports surfaced that Meese had obtained a low-cost mortgage from a savings-and-loan bank whose officers he’d helped obtain government jobs, along with a long-term loan from his accountant. Adding insult to injury, someone in the General Services Administration accused him of accepting gold cuff links during a fact-finding trip to Korea. As a result, the Senate had held up his confirmation while an independent council debated whether there were grounds to indict him.

  In any case, it was clear that the palace guard was breaking up.

  Donald Regan was also on the fence. As secretary of the treasury, he’d launched the overhaul of the tax code while continuing to wrestle with the massive federal deficit. He’d kept his own counsel throughout the first term, managing the department with sovereign command, much as he did at Merrill Lynch, where he’d served from 1946 to 1980, lastly as its CEO. Regan was acknowledged to be a tough sonofabitch and ambitious. He was bored at Treasury; as he put it, “finding the same problems—third world debt, trips to the economic summit, the IMF. Who the hell needs this stuff.” He was looking for a more prestigious job with greater influence that brought him to the inner sanctum of the Oval Office.

  “You know what’s wrong with you, Baker?” he asked the beleaguered chief of staff during a meeting days after the election. “You’re tired. You’re fed up. You want to get out but you don’t know how. We ought to swap jobs.” They’d each get what they wanted—Baker his precious Cabinet post, Regan the ultimate White House appointment.

  Deaver helped sell the plan to Nancy Reagan, whose imprimatur was necessary on any high-level appointment affecting her husband. As much as she frowned on Jim Baker, she recognized his value as an effective administrator. He was politically astute, knew how to delegate, and was fundamentally loyal, leaks notwithstanding. And he coordinated with Deaver, who conveyed her wishes. But Deaver convinced her that Baker was definitely leaving and it was in her best interests to approve a replacement who would counsel the president in much the same way. He assured her that Don Regan was “a bright man and a strong manager,” someone they could all get along with. To Nancy Reagan a decisive man like Regan seemed like a logical alternative. On the surface, he had no personal agenda. He was mature, sophisticated, polished, fabulously rich, and successful in his own right—a man, in many respects, like her Beverly Hills friends.

  It was an ill-fated choice.

  Don Regan’s management style was legendary, if not notorious, on Wall Street, where he had often bragged, “I don’t get ulcers—I give them.” A former battalion commander in the U.S. Marine Corps, he was used to barking out orders and having them obeyed. It had been that way at Merrill Lynch, the international brokerage he was said to have presided over with despotic insensitivity, some said as “an absolute dictator.” With Regan as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and with the Troika dismantled, there would be no challenge to his authority. There was no need for consensus policy. He alone would determine what was best for the president. And he intended to seal off the Oval Office from quotidian traffic, running it as he saw fit. Everything—everything—would come through him.

  Even before the appointment was announced, Regan was signaling his independence. In a revealing bull session in the Oval Office, minutes before facing the press as the new chief of staff, he surveyed the room’s occupants with an appraising gaze. Baker, Meese, and Deaver had joined the president to salute Regan’s appointment with a show of unified support.

  “Mr. President,” Regan said, “you might as well realize it. I got something these other guys haven’t got. Jim Baker’s got some of it. Meese doesn’t have it, maybe never will. And Deaver will try to get it.”

  “What’s that?” the president asked, arching a curious eyebrow.

  “I’ve got ‘fuck you’ money,” Regan said. It was true; he had a $40 million blind trust he registered per the Office of Government Ethics. “Anytime I want, I’m gone.”

  But he’d never tangled with Nancy Reagan before.

  * * *

  —

  The First Lady was laying the groundwork to secure her husband’s legacy. She had her own ideas about the kinds of big, consequential accomplishments that would follow him into history. “More than anything,” Stu Spencer recalls, “she wanted him recognized as a man of peace.” The image that trailed Reagan as he’d entered the presidency—that he was dangerously confrontational, a warmonger, “a trigger-happy cowboy”—galled her. And during the first term, his hard-line stance with respect to the Soviets, the tough talk, the massive military buildup, hadn’t done much to alter the image. As she saw it, he had a great opportunity in the second term to change the course of history by improving relations with the Soviet Union. “Improving U.S.–Soviet relations became Nancy Reagan’s special cause,” according to Lou Cannon. “Although few thought of her as a peaceful force, she became a force for peace within the White House.”

  No less a strategist than Richard Nixon agreed. As he’d done prior to Reagan’s first inauguration, the former president produced a memo—this one a five-page effort entitled “A New Approach for the Second Term,” which laid out his vision for an effective agenda. “The President has already won his place in history as the leader . . . who restored the Am
erican people’s faith in themselves,” Nixon affirmed. “He can become the preeminent post–World War II foreign policy leader by establishing a new, less dangerous relationship with the Soviet Union.”

  But where to begin? Reagan had made no real headway with Brezhnev or Andropov. Their successor, Konstantin Chernenko, presented an opening by agreeing to resume nuclear-arms-control talks between the two countries. Soon after the election he sent a letter to the U.S. president: “We propose that the Soviet Union and the United States of America enter into new negotiations with the objective of reaching mutually acceptable agreements on the whole range of questions concerning nuclear and space weapons.” A follow-up letter a month later called for “the elimination of all nuclear weapons and of ‘strike weapons’ in space,” an indication that the Strategic Defense Initiative alarmed the Soviets. So be it. If all went according to schedule, George Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would meet in Geneva on January 7, 1985, the first step toward determining how to reach these objectives.

  It was a first step into the unknown. No one knew how serious the Soviets were or what the substance of their ideas were. Despite a storehouse of American intelligence, no one could decipher the Russian mind. And Chernenko was mysteriously indisposed. American officials understood that the Soviet premier was gravely ill with emphysema, signaling the possibility of another untimely transition of power. They were already combing pictures of Politburo meetings trying to determine a likely successor.

  The odds-on favorite was Heydar Aliyev, a longtime KGB hardliner and leader of Azerbaijan. But Shultz told the president that the Kremlin’s number-two man, Mikhail Gorbachev, a protégé of Andropov, was “the man to watch.” Unlike some Moscow hardliners who argued the Marxist-Leninist line, Gorbachev had risen through the Interior Ministry at the Republic level and took a less insular approach to Soviet doctrine. He was less reactionary. At fifty-four, he was younger by decades than his predecessors, and the first high Soviet party official to be college-educated. What’s more, he was well traveled. He’d engaged with Helmut Kohl in Germany and Canada’s Pierre Trudeau. During a visit to London in December 1984, Margaret Thatcher came away impressed with what she’d heard. “I like Mr. Gorbachev,” she said afterward. “We can do business together.”