Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  In the morning, he concluded that Don Regan was right and gave him the order to fire John Poindexter. The imperturbable national security adviser was calmly enjoying breakfast and unrepentant upon hearing the news, but he had already prepared a letter of resignation, which he handed to the president at the regular morning briefing. Reagan interpreted it as a gesture of honor—“In the old Navy tradition he accepted the responsibility as Captain of the ship,” he noted, perhaps not considering that it was he, the president, who captained the ship. He continued to trust that Poindexter was “a fine naval officer” who was innocent of wrongdoing, and he regretted losing such a trusted adviser. North, who was regarded as a “detailee” and not officially a member of the administration, would be sent back to the Marine Corps. But the president refused to badmouth the charismatic intelligence deputy, convinced he’d gotten a raw deal.

  “He thought North had done his best and had gotten mixed up in a thing that was beyond his skills,” according to Peter Wallison, who personally believed North was “a liar” and “a fantasist.” Not so, according to the president. “He is a national hero,” Reagan told Time’s White House correspondent in an interview later that day, a conclusion that confounded many of his staff.

  The day itself dredged up a cornucopia of alibis and apologies. At 10:00 a.m., the president met with the Cabinet to fill its members in on the latest developments. Afterward, the joint leadership of the Congress was summoned for a similar report. The grand finale, however, was scheduled for noon, when full disclosure would be dropped in the lap of the press. That was an event Reagan sorely dreaded. He was still blaming the press for the collapse of negotiations with Iran on recovering the American hostages. Their report of the scandal was “irresponsible,” he declared. “They were like a circle of sharks.”

  The circle closed in around the president as he recounted an abbreviated version of the facts, emphasizing the dismissals of Poindexter and North. His most forthcoming comment on the Contra disclosure was: “I was not fully informed.” It underwhelmed; the press wasn’t about to be placated. The diversion of funds was a bombshell. They wanted answers. Reagan didn’t intend to accommodate. He appeared unrepentant, strangely defiant in the face of such damning news. And he had a prior commitment—his annual lunch with the Supreme Court—which gave him an excuse to run off. After the briefest exchange, he left Ed Meese to mop up the press corps’ questions.

  As he turned to leave, a reporter called out: “Did you make a mistake in sending arms to Tehran, sir?”

  “No,” the president answered testily, “and I’m not taking any more questions.”

  Now that that was over, he’d be out of the media glare for a while. The next morning he was scheduled to fly to Santa Barbara, where he’d spend a long holiday weekend at the ranch with extended family.

  It was November 26. There was little to give thanks for.

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  New polls were published on December 1, 1986, showing a drastic plunge in the president’s approval rating—from 67 to 41 percent. A 26 percent drop—a modern-day record. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll revealed that a meager 28 percent of the public approved of his handling of foreign policy. And the president’s private pollster, Dick Wirthlin, reported that 60 percent of the American people felt he was not telling the truth, which confused them because they liked him personally. “The administration is in disarray,” Vice President Bush acknowledged in his diary, and most knowledgeable onlookers agreed. “Your Presidency, sir, is teetering,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned in a response to Reagan’s weekly radio address. “Reagan has surrounded himself with second-rate minds,” echoed an editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News. Bob Dole urged recalling Congress for an inquiry into the mess. Time wondered how Oliver North, “a furtive 43-year-old member of the NSC staff . . . had arranged the Contra scam without the knowledge of the State Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House Chief of Staff or anyone in authority” and concluded, “this disaster throws a pitiless light on the way the President does his job, confirming the worst fears of both his friends and his critics.”

  The Reagan administration seemed to be bleeding out.

  Every major newspaper and weekly newsmagazine had, by now, done its homework, and the facts came pouring out—all the seamy names and details: David Kimche, Amiram Nir, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Richard Secord, Dewey Clarridge, Contra leader Adolfo Calero, a list of the weapons exchanged, the shipments, the planes involved and their flight routes, the money that changed hands, the Lake Resources bank account in Zurich. Oliver North! All of it was churned over in account after account, article after article.

  The Israelis publicly denied setting a price for the missiles and any links to the Swiss bank. Covert payments to the Contras—$2 million by Texas billionaire Ross Perot and $10 million by the Sultan of Brunei—were unearthed. The New York Times reported that “the first flight to El Salvador [to supply the Nicaraguan rebels] had to jettison $50,000 worth of cargo over the countryside and nearly crash-landed,” and was followed by “a dozen secret arms drops.” Failed ransom attempts were disclosed, including a swap of $2 million and three hundred Lebanese Shiite prisoners for hostages in May 1986. It seemed that ships laden with weapons parts left under cover of darkness from ports in Sicily. Documents were shredded in the NSC offices. And Oliver North became a cause célèbre. His exploits had a James Bond touch to them that made for good copy. He was cast as a dashing roué, his outsize personality and career splashed across newspapers around the country.

  “Washington is awash with rumor, intrigue, and treachery,” Senator Moynihan cautioned the president on November 29. “I tell you it is deeply dangerous.” The White House had to take action—and fast—to stanch the damage.

  The president announced that if the Justice Department recommended it, he welcomed the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Iranian arms deals and the funneling of funds to the Contras. In the meantime, a special independent review board would be impaneled to arrive at a complete and accurate account of what had transpired. Former Republican senator John Tower was Don Regan’s choice to head this group, balancing it out with a Democrat, Ed Muskie, and Brent Scowcroft, who had been Gerald Ford’s national security adviser.

  No matter what they concluded, however, their judgment would never be as severe as the one being formulated in the White House residence. Nancy Reagan was on the warpath. Her husband was being castigated for the entire Iran-Contra fiasco, and she wanted to spread the blame around to more deserving candidates. Her laser focus trained on Don Regan. She had never liked the blustery chief of staff, never thought he put her husband first. He hogged the spotlight, blocked access to the president, and talked too damn much. The “shovel brigade” comment really set her off. “If that’s how Don saw his job,” she fumed, “what kind of loyalty could Ronnie expect from him on other issues?” Obviously, she thought, he had a hidden agenda. She wanted Regan out of the picture. “I can’t deal with that man anymore,” she complained to the president, urging him to make a change at the top. At the time, the president ignored her appeals. “He genuinely liked Don Regan,” Jim Kuhn says. “They were very much alike, a couple of old-school Irishmen, and Reagan could relate to him. He felt comfortable with him in the Oval Office. There was a strong camaraderie.” With all that was going on, Don’s presence was a soothing factor. None of that carried much weight with the First Lady, who knew best when it came to her husband’s welfare. Don Regan had to go, she decided. It was time to turn up the heat.

  Coincidentally—perhaps too coincidentally—on December 2, Mitch Daniels, the president’s assistant for political affairs, “privately polled large numbers of Republican Party officials and told Regan that without exception they thought he should resign.” Stories were planted in the press quoting anonymous sources that Regan was considering leaving or there might soon be a change in leadership.
“She was behind it all,” says Jim Kuhn. Her sentiment was spreading through Congress. Utah senator Orrin Hatch called for Regan’s resignation, as did Richard Lugar. George Bush tended to agree and conveyed that opinion to Nancy Reagan, although he refused to share that sentiment with the president. It was left to the First Lady, who began laying the groundwork for a defenestration.

  She enlisted two old allies, Stu Spencer and Mike Deaver, to spearhead her efforts to oust the chief of staff. And just in case they didn’t provide enough firepower, on December 4 she invited the former secretary of state William Rogers and the former Democratic Party chairman Robert Strauss to the residence to discuss Regan’s fate with the president. Strauss’s assessment was particularly brutal. “You have a serious Hill problem—Don Regan has no allies on the Hill,” he said. “And you have a serious media problem—Don Regan has no friends there. You have got to get a fresh face in that job.” Strauss expressed an opinion that the crisis was being poorly managed by Regan, but the more he poured it on, the more Ronald Reagan dug in his heels. “Don Regan has been loyal to me,” he argued. “I am not going to throw him to the wolves.” The First Lady was unhappy with the outcome, but she was undeterred. And she was just warming up.

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  Regan felt her hot breath on his neck, but he had other issues to deal with. There was a job to fill at NSC now that Poindexter had vacated the office—the fourth national intelligence adviser to leave in a span of six years. Regan was instrumental in convincing Frank Carlucci, a man who’d already served three presidents with distinction, to accept the job, a first-class appointment lauded by both houses of Congress. But he wasn’t able to persuade the president to admit publicly that he had made a mistake by trading arms for hostages and to take responsibility for it, a concession that aides felt would go a long way toward reassuring the nation and taking the edge off the uproar. The president continued being battered in the press. His credibility and integrity were at stake. His popularity was in freefall, and the White House staff was taking it hard. “Staff morale was very low,” Peter Wallison recalls. “We were in terrible shape . . . working twenty-hour days under very difficult circumstances.” The chief of staff was trying to hold it all together, but he was human. “He was getting wound tighter and tighter.”

  The expanding congressional investigations added to his worries. The truth was a problem to be solved. It was no longer feasible to sentimentalize it using the hostages as human shields. Too many half-truths were leaching out, uncontainable. On December 1, Bud McFarlane had testified before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in a closed-door six-hour session, and had contradicted the White House’s assurance that the president had not approved Israel’s shipment of arms to Iran. McFarlane also let slip that Reagan decided at that time against notifying Congress, as was his legal duty. Oliver North and John Poindexter followed him days later, throwing the White House version into further confusion. To each question the committee asked, both men consistently invoked the Fifth Amendment: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully and regretfully decline to answer the questions based on my constitutional rights.” They refused to incriminate themselves, which only served to undermine the president’s credibility. It also contradicted Reagan’s assurance that his aides would come clean. “I don’t think there is another person in America who wants to tell this story as much as I do,” North announced, making it clear he was holding out for immunity.

  The Senate committee concluded that the White House had been taken in by North and Poindexter, but it could not render a clean bill of health for the president without their testimony. If they received immunity, the committee could probably close the book on the investigation and clear the president, and granting immunity to the guilty before the full scope of the crime was clear was politically fraught. What a mess.

  Bill Casey was scheduled to testify the next afternoon, December 15. The occupants of the Oval Office were holding their breath. All covert operations in Iran and Nicaragua had gone through the CIA. Casey was the linchpin that kept all the moving parts operating. As late as three days earlier, he was still negotiating to trade arms for hostages, offering to deliver more TOWs to Iran and promising to pressure Kuwait to release terrorists in its prisons. Casey had originally told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had no prior knowledge of diversion of funds to the Contras, but now he was headed back for a more rigorous grilling. The senators saw his fingerprints all over the operation and were giving him an opportunity to set the record straight. But as he was preparing to leave for Capitol Hill, Casey collapsed in his office, suffering a powerful seizure that rendered him incapacitated. Don Regan took Casey’s place on the witness stand and gave a credible accounting of what the president knew and when he knew it, contradicting McFarlane’s testimony and shoring up Ronald Reagan’s defenses.

  Nancy Reagan still wasn’t satisfied. Not only did she want Regan removed from the scene, she turned her animosity on Bill Casey as well. The seizure stemmed from previously diagnosed brain cancer. In her eyes, a sick Casey was just as much of a threat as a healthy Casey. She was convinced that he “was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair” and that his brain cancer had affected his judgment, imperiling her husband’s presidency. Politically, he remained a liability. “He’s hurting Ronnie,” she told Don Regan. The way she saw it, the job fell to the chief of staff to immediately find someone to replace Casey at the CIA. Regan told her that such an action was “unwise as well as inhumane,” given that the man was critically ill, most likely dying. Regan knew “it was obvious that Casey would not continue as Director, but the question of common decency remained.” Doctors were in the process of trying to save his life by operating on a cancerous tumor. Besides, Regan insisted, the president wouldn’t want it, not now, not like this. Despite his objections, she bombarded Regan with phone calls—her direct line to the Oval Office, “WH 1,” blinked with increasing regularity—demanding Casey’s dismissal, each one ignored, each instance of being ignored another blot on her Regan scorecard.

  The president was beleaguered by her persistent carping. She wouldn’t let up: fire Regan, fire Casey. Wash your hands of Poindexter and North. Listen to Mike Deaver and Stu Spencer. Listen to me! “Nancy made it clear to us, the White House staff, that we had to get him thinking along those very lines,” recalls Jim Kuhn, who spent all day at the president’s side. “‘You need to start working on Ronnie,’ she told me. ‘I want you to do that.’”

  Kuhn broached it gently with his boss in mid-December. “All these stories about Don won’t go away, will they?” he prompted during a quiet moment in the Oval Office.

  “No, they won’t,” Reagan answered reluctantly. “But I’ve been very pleased with him as chief; he’s worked hard for me. Still . . . that photo.”

  Photo? The president admitted the photo of Regan squeezing himself into the frame with Gorbachev in Geneva still rankled. Kuhn suspected that the First Lady continued to make a case about it—and that, finally, she was having some impact. The president seemed “in a daze . . . tentative and deferential.”

  The next weekend, just before the Christmas vacation, the tension between the couple came to a head. Nancy started in on her husband again during their weekend getaway to Camp David: fire Regan, replace Casey. Jim Kuhn removed himself to a desk in the pantry to get away from the bickering. “Then there was an explosion,” Kuhn says. “I heard Reagan scream at her—‘Get off my goddamn back!’ It was so loud, the whole cabin shook.” In her memoir, Nancy Reagan dismissed the scream as fiction, but forty years later, as Kuhn recounts the episode, his face betrays undeniable truth. The man who idolizes both the Reagans is hesitant about sharing a confidence he was privy to and shudders visibly as he recalls the scene. “I’d never heard him yell like that. It scared the hell out of me.”

  She was not about to be deflected from her objective of cleaning house of the turncoats and slackers by an outburst. In thi
s time of crisis, she intended to speak up, to hold nothing back. During a Christmas party at Walter Annenberg’s in Palm Springs, the First Lady cornered Cap Weinberger. She expressed her “disgust” with Poindexter and North. “They should be court-martialed,” she said. She aired views on other issues as well that dogged the administration—the independent counsel charged with unraveling the facts of the Iran-Contra case, the question of offering immunity to renegade aides, the upcoming State of the Union address, and, of course, Don Regan, Don Regan, Don Regan. She had no intention of letting up on him. The president, on the other hand, retreated when it came to shoptalk. Throughout the vacation he seemed withdrawn. George Shultz, who joined him on the golf course, said, he “just didn’t seem ready to engage.”

  No doubt the crisis had taken a lot out of him. There is a time every enterprise needs to do serious self-examination and to regroup, and for the Reagan administration this was it. Things had broken down. The administration’s troubles ran much deeper than anyone imagined. If it was going to rescue the remainder of the president’s second term and fulfill the goal to pass meaningful legislation, the New Year—1987—had to set a new course. There were too many loose ends, too many loose cannons, too many loose lips sinking ships. It was time to tighten the steering on this ship. The question was whether the president had the wherewithal to do it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  RECLAIMING THE SPOTLIGHT

  “Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives.”

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

  The first thing on 1987’s agenda was getting the president’s story straight. He was due to appear before the Tower Commission later in January, and it was essential that he be well prepared. Don Regan and Peter Wallison were enlisted to help stimulate his memory “about what he knew and what he did” so that he would face his inquisitors in command of the facts. In a diary entry for Sunday, January 3, 1987, Ronald Reagan furnished his usual, sunny outlook: “Put together some sequence of events on the Iran affair by comparing our memories.”