Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Whoever first raised the subject, Reagan agreed that Baker made the most sense. But the appointment didn’t sit well with the loyalists. Lyn Nofziger distrusted Baker from the start. “The President is elected to do certain things,” Nofziger said later. “He has made certain promises, certain commitments. He has a certain philosophy of government. If you hire people who don’t believe that, and who at best are not going to work very hard for it and at worst are going to work against it, then you’re hurting. You’re hurting the guy you came to serve.” Baker was no conservative, as his preference for Ford and then Bush over Reagan had demonstrated. How could he serve a president committed to conservative change? Nofziger considered Baker an unreliable opportunist. “Jim Baker was there for Jim Baker,” Nofziger said. He added, “Jim is a very competent individual. I would never say that he’s dumb or anything else. But I just think he’s basically dishonest.”

  Baker recognized the animus against him. But he considered it foolish and counterproductive to the new administration’s goals. And it didn’t bother him, because it wasn’t shared at the top. “President Reagan understood what many of his followers did not: that it’s more important for the chief of staff to be competent and loyal than to be a so-called true believer,” he said, adding parenthetically, “I had more faith in his ideas than I was given credit for, and that faith grew stronger over the years.” Reagan had another insight, Baker said. “He also understood that one of the most important tasks of a White House chief of staff is to look at policy questions through a political prism. After watching me at work in 1976 and 1980, he apparently believed I could do this.”

  BAKER’S DEPUTY WAS Deaver, chosen for his loyalty to Reagan and, no less important, to Nancy. “Of all the advisers who have worked for my husband over the years, I was closest of all to Mike, who was my link to the West Wing,” Nancy wrote. “Ronnie and I go way back with Mike, who served as Ronnie’s deputy executive secretary during the Sacramento years. From the very start, the three of us hit it off. By the time he came into the White House, he really knew Ronnie and understood when to approach him, and how. Mike was never afraid to bring Ronnie the bad news, or to tell him when he thought he was wrong.”

  Mostly Deaver thought Reagan was right, if not necessarily simple to fathom. “At times, Ronald Reagan has been very much a puzzle to me,” he wrote later. “I had never known anyone so unable to deal with close personal conflict. When problems arose related to the family, or with the personnel in his office, Nancy had to carry the load. Literally, it was through working with Nancy that I came to know her husband.” Deaver took charge of what he and others on the staff called the “Mommy watch.” He remarked, “I probably found the phrase more amusing than Nancy did. She might have been upset, if she thought it was true, this suggestion that anyone needed to be assigned the job of humoring her.”

  Yet humoring Nancy was the way to handle her husband. “Ronnie Reagan had sort of glided through life, and Nancy’s role was to protect him,” Deaver said. “She accepted almost total responsibility for their family and home, and at the same time remained his closest adviser in public life.” Deaver had watched other wives of famous and powerful men, but Nancy was something special. “It’s not just that she knows or understands her husband as no one else does. Most wives do, or think they do. She has made him her career, and the White House did not change or enlarge her methods or motives. For as long as I have known them, she has used her persuasion with care, knowing when and how hard to apply the pressure. If he resists, she will back off and return to that issue at another moment.”

  Nancy’s agenda was her husband, not politics or policy. But protecting and promoting her husband often had political and policy implications. “She has not gotten involved at all, it should be noted, unless there is a controversy around him, or he needs to be convinced that an action is unavoidable,” Deaver said. “She knows you cannot barge in and tell him he has to fire Dick Allen or James Watt or Don Regan; that someone he likes has lost his effectiveness or has ill served him. She will wage a quiet campaign, planting a thought, recruiting others of us to push it along, making a case: Foreign policy will be hurt, our allies will be let down.” In her quiet manner she weighed in on some major issues. “She lobbied the president to soften his line on the Soviet Union; to reduce military spending and not to push Star Wars at the expense of the poor and dispossessed. She favored a diplomatic solution in Nicaragua and opposed his trip to Bitburg.” Her methods didn’t always work, but they often did—and for good reason, Deaver said. “Nancy wins most of the time. When she does, it is not by wearing him down but by usually being on the right side of an issue.”

  ED MEESE HAD to settle for the post of counselor to the president. He wasn’t at all happy. “Ed reacted as I would have expected Ed to react,” Stuart Spencer observed. “He was in a little bit of shock about this decision.” The job of White House counsel let Meese weigh in on matters of policy, and Reagan eased the blow by promoting that job to cabinet rank, giving Meese a seat at the administration’s head table. But a seat at the table wasn’t the same as an office next door to the Oval Office. Meese resented James Baker’s sudden importance, and he immediately challenged the chief of staff. “I don’t know what the term is: fight back,” Spencer remarked. “He was going to protect his property.”

  Baker took his cue from Reagan. “I want you to make it right with Ed,” Reagan told Baker. Baker tried to do so but without yielding any ground. Being a lawyer, and knowing that Meese was a lawyer, he drafted what amounted to a contract delineating their responsibilities. Tactfully, or tactically, he listed Meese’s first: “Counselor to the President for Policy (with cabinet rank). Member Super Cabinet Executive Committee (in absence of the President and Vice President preside over meetings). Participate as a principal in all meetings of full Cabinet. Coordination and supervision of responsibilities of the Secretary to the Cabinet. Coordination and supervision of work of the Domestic Policy Staff and the National Security Council. With Baker coordination and supervision of work of OMB, CEA, Trade Rep and S&T. Participation as a principal in all policy group meetings.”

  Baker’s responsibilities, per this memo, were seemingly more modest. He claimed nothing on the foreign policy side, leaving that large part of the president’s portfolio to Meese and the National Security Council. Yet he insisted on “hiring and firing authority over all elements of White House staff” and “coordination and control of all in and out paper flow to the President and of presidential schedule and appointments.” And he would “operate from office customarily utilized by Chief of Staff.”

  Meese was suspicious. He feared that Baker’s proximity to the Oval Office would work to his—Meese’s—disadvantage. He insisted that Baker write in a clause at the bottom of his side of the memo: “Attend any meeting which President attends—with his consent.” Baker agreed—and wrote the same clause on his own side.

  Baker was pleased with the pact. “You’ve got the policy; I’ll just make the trains run on time,” he told Meese. But he knew that running the trains was a prerequisite of implementing policy. The memo of understanding didn’t exactly amount to a schedule of departures, but it might prevent wrecks. “It was a good, lawyerly way to mark our territory at the beginning,” Baker recalled. “That way, we could spend our time working together for the president, each on his own portfolio, rather than quarreling over who was on first.”

  To reporters Baker spun the arrangement as best for the president. “Who’s boss?” one reporter asked. “You or Meese?”

  “Ronald Reagan is the boss,” Baker answered. “Ed Meese and I are to serve him in complementary capacities.”

  Meese adopted the same line, less happily. “The president liked the issues brought before him,” Meese later recalled. The divergent opinions among the “troika,” as the Baker-Deaver-Meese arrangement was called, ensured that the president heard all sides of important arguments. Meese acknowledged that the differences gave rise to friction. But he att
ributed these to honest disagreements over policy. “At the outset, I think, the President was well served by such differences.”

  Others close to Reagan thought the friction was personal. “It was primarily because Baker wanted to be numero uno,” Lyn Nofziger declared. “Anything he could do to move Meese to one side or cut him down, he would do. I don’t think there was much in the way of policy. I think it was just Jim Baker wanting to control the place, and Meese was there as the guy who’d been closest to Reagan.”

  Baker agreed with Meese that the troika formula served its purpose—that is, Reagan’s purpose. “It really worked well for the president,” Baker remembered. “He got the benefit of all sides.” But the division of responsibilities took a toll on the dividers. “It was tough. It was very difficult.”

  BEYOND THE WHITE House troika, Reagan had to construct a cabinet. The secretary of state is the senior cabinet member and has often been the most important of a president’s picks. It was not so important under Reagan, who had spent a decade decrying the diplomacy of détente and had no desire to restore the State Department to the influence it wielded under détente architect Henry Kissinger. Reagan’s choice for secretary of state was Alexander Haig, the holder of perhaps the most impressive résumé in American government at the time. Haig was an army man; he had served with Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War and been decorated for valor in Vietnam. He worked in the Nixon White House, rising to chief of staff amid the chaos of Watergate. Returning to the army, he headed NATO forces in Europe. Reagan intended a muscular form of diplomacy; having General Haig at State sent the right flexing signals.

  More important than State, in Reagan’s estimate, was the Defense Department. Jimmy Carter had stolen some of Reagan’s thunder by requesting and receiving a large boost in defense spending during his last year in office, but Reagan intended to continue and accelerate the expansion. He did not intend to start any wars; hence substantial military experience, such as Haig’s, was not a requirement at Defense. More essential was facility with numbers and budgets. Reagan knew just the person. Caspar—“Cap”—Weinberger had been Reagan’s budget director in Sacramento before heading Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget and then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. At HEW he acquired the sobriquet “Cap the Knife” for his willingness to slice social spending. In Reagan’s Pentagon his mission was just the opposite: to spend more money, a great deal more. But his reputation for wielding a sharp pencil provided preemptive cover against allegations of wastefulness in what would be the biggest defense buildup in American history.

  Reagan hoped to make cuts in most other areas of government besides defense, and he aimed to start by cutting taxes. The Treasury Department oversees federal taxes, and Reagan wanted someone reliable there. Nixon recommended William Simon, who had held the post under him and then Ford. But Simon wasn’t thrilled about a second tour unless he received more authority than Reagan wanted to give him. So Reagan turned to Wall Street, in the belief that no one knew more about money than the masters of finance. Donald Regan headed Merrill Lynch, and though Reagan knew him not at all, he seemed a good bet for the job initially held by Alexander Hamilton, the founder of Wall Street’s oldest bank and every Republican’s model of what a Treasury secretary ought to be.

  The Office of Management and Budget resided below the cabinet departments in seniority, but its director had more influence on the course of government than most cabinet secretaries. To head OMB, Reagan took a chance on a whiz kid half his age. David Stockman was a congressman from Michigan, an ardent fiscal conservative, and conspicuously brilliant. “He was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known,” said Phil Gramm, a Stockman colleague from Congress and his partner in the budget wars of the Reagan years. James Baker agreed. “He was extraordinarily talented,” Baker said of Stockman. Stockman had stood in for Jimmy Carter in Reagan’s debate preparations, and he had given Reagan all he could handle. Reagan now reasoned that Stockman would be equally effective battling the opponents of smaller government. He waved aside worries that Stockman was too young and full of himself, and he named him head of OMB.

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  MOST DEPARTMENTS AND agencies of the federal government anticipated the approach of Ronald Reagan with trepidation. For decades Reagan had railed against the bloated federal bureaucracy, and after his landslide victory at the polls, the bureaucrats had cause for concern.

  A few parts of the government, however, hoped to benefit. The Defense Department anticipated bigger budgets and all the leverage and perks more money entailed. But it was the CIA that breathed the largest sigh of relief at the election results. After the Church Committee had chastised the agency for its illegal, unsavory, and embarrassing activities, Jimmy Carter took the opportunity to clean house. He appointed Stansfield Turner, a former admiral and no enthusiast of the clandestine service, to head the agency. In what came to be called the “Halloween massacre,” Turner fired hundreds of senior officers and put the fear of termination into the rest. The Turner regime coincided with additional revelations, some by disaffected former agents, of CIA misdeeds. Frank Snepp detailed the dismal last days of America’s involvement in Vietnam, in the process baring secrets even Turner wanted to keep. The agency tried to silence Snepp, but its efforts merely stirred media interest in what he had to say. The CIA, the celebrity child of the early Cold War, became an object of popular horror and derision: horror for the assassination plots and the dirty tricks against Americans, derision for its inability to succeed in those plots and to keep its own secrets. Morale at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, plumbed depths never touched before.

  Reagan’s election promised to reverse the trend. Agency officials knew he had defended them against the Church Committee; some of the older ones recalled his cooperation with the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities against communists in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. They gained additional reason to expect greater sympathy for their mission when Reagan chose one of their own, or at least one after their own hearts, to head the agency. William Casey had worked with the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor, running spies in Europe during World War II, and he believed, as Reagan did, that intelligence operations were essential to the conduct of war and diplomacy. He was clearly smart, having built a successful New York law practice and chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission. But no one could tell how smart he was, for his habit of mumbling made it impossible for most people to figure out what he was saying. As the manager of Reagan’s successful campaign, Casey was in a position to get almost any office he requested. He wanted the State Department. “It would cap off an extraordinary, illustrious career,” Martin Anderson observed. Anderson had worked in the Nixon White House before concluding that Reagan was the future of the Republican Party; he advised candidate Reagan on policy during the 1976 and 1980 campaigns and President Reagan on policy starting in January 1981. Anderson knew Casey from work in government and on the campaign, and he thought him well suited to being secretary of state. “His background and experience, his demonstrated ability to manage, and his brilliant, crafty mind easily qualified him for the job.” But others around Reagan thought Casey’s mumbling and general demeanor and appearance made him a poor choice to be America’s top diplomat. “He was tall, somewhat stoop-shouldered, bald with wisps of white hair on the sides and back,” wrote Robert Gates, who would serve as Casey’s deputy at the CIA. “He had a receding chin, large lips, a crooked smile, and piercing eyes. He dressed expensively and formally. Even on weekends, when he would come in to the office, he almost always wore a jacket and tie. His shoes were always well-polished. With all that, he usually looked as if he had just concluded an all-night plane trip. When he walked, it looked like a committee of bones and muscles all trying to amble more or less in the same direction.” Casey elicited a negative reaction in many of those he met, including legislators. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee sat in on a Casey briefing marked by the usual mumbling. Reagan turned to
the senator and said, “You know, I’ve never been able to understand Bill.” “Mr. President,” Howard Baker replied, “that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  So the State Department went to Al Haig, whose mien was as impressive as his résumé, and Casey had to settle for the CIA. “God, he must have been bitter,” Martin Anderson remarked. “Most people seemed to view Casey’s appointment to the CIA as a juicy political plum”—a chance for the aging Wall Streeter to relive his youth by playing spy once again. Casey didn’t interpret his appointment this way at all, Anderson said. He saw the CIA as a consolation prize. “It was a bitter, vengeful old man who grudgingly accepted the job as the best he could get at the time.”

  Casey determined to make the most of his job. “Bill Casey came to CIA primarily to wage war against the Soviet Union,” Robert Gates remarked. Casey viewed the 1980s through his experience during the 1940s, with Russia replacing Germany as America’s mortal foe. “Casey wanted information and analysis that provoked action,” Gates observed. “Not for him assessments that were simply ‘interesting’ or educational. He wanted information that would help target clandestine operations better, or be useful for U.S. propaganda, or assist military operations, or put ammunition in the hands of negotiators. For Casey, the United States and CIA were at war, just like when he was young and in the OSS.”

  WARS REQUIRE WAR plans. The CIA readied Reagan for overseeing intelligence and foreign affairs by bringing the president-elect up to speed on the state of the world. Just days after the election, agency officials inquired of Reagan’s staff as to his preferences in intelligence. Stansfield Turner invited Casey and Ed Meese, along with Richard Allen, Reagan’s choice for national security adviser, to his office in downtown Washington. Turner said the agency wished to tailor the president’s daily briefing (PDB, in CIA-speak) to make it most useful to President Reagan. “The DCI”—Director of Central Intelligence Turner—“showed our visitors the PDB and described its function, making the point that the PDB is done to the President’s specifications and we would hope to use the period between now and inauguration to determine how the President-elect would like it done,” the note taker for the meeting recorded. “The only comment made”—by the Reagan team—“was that a larger typeface would probably be in order.”