Then came another crisis. On December 15, the day before CIA director Casey was to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he suffered two seizures and collapsed in his office. Surgery three days later revealed a brain tumor. Casey was partially paralyzed, could not speak, and would be dead within five months. The CIA director was believed, then and now, to have been central to setting up the Iran arms sales and to engineering the diversion of the proceeds to the contras. He worked closely with the gung-ho Oliver North, whose office was down the hall from his, in a part of the Old Executive Office Building known as “spook alley.” So devoted was Casey to the operation that he tried to keep it going even after it had been revealed and Poindexter and North had been fired. In retrospect, Nancy believed his illness had affected his judgment, but his incapacitation was catastrophic. He was one of the few people who could have provided details of what Ronnie knew about the scheme and when he knew it.
Back in 1980, Casey had been the man to whom Nancy had turned when she needed someone to put her husband’s teetering presidential campaign back on track. But as the severity of Casey’s condition became clear in the weeks after he was rushed to the hospital, Nancy made no room for sentimentality—or compassion. Right before Christmas, she called Regan and demanded to know what he was doing to get rid of Casey and find a replacement to lead the CIA. Regan pleaded for time and sympathy, saying that Casey and his wife did not yet realize how serious his prognosis was. Regan claimed Nancy snapped back: “You’re more interested in protecting Bill Casey than in protecting Ronnie! He’s dragging Ronnie down! Nobody believes what Casey says, his credibility is gone on the Hill.” Casey did not resign until late January.
Nancy also wanted the head of Patrick J. Buchanan, the White House’s fiery communications director. The arch-conservative Buchanan was making wild statements that were all over television. He told three thousand cheering Cuban American and Nicaraguan supporters in Miami that it was fine to violate the law for the right cause. “If Colonel North broke any rules, he will stand up and take it like the fighting marine he is,” Buchanan declared. “But I say, if Colonel North ripped off the ayatollah and took thirty million dollars and gave it to the contras, then God bless Colonel North.”
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Buchanan lashed out at the media and denounced the Republicans on Capitol Hill for not reflexively rallying to Ronnie’s defense: “Is this how they repay the leader who has done more for the Republican Party than any American since Theodore Roosevelt, who brought us back from Watergate?” White House officials claimed that Buchanan, the man who was supposed to be in charge of their message operation, was “soloing.” Press spokesman Larry Speakes told reporters: “The president does not agree or condone the breaking of the law by any individual, and he does not in any way believe that the president, whoever he might be, is above the law and has the right to pick and choose what laws may or may not be broken.”
When Nancy called Regan to demand he fire Buchanan, the chief of staff assured her that this was only a temporary problem. Buchanan, who was thinking of running for president, had agreed to leave by February (though he would not depart until a month after that). Nancy moved to limit the damage he could do in the meantime. She insisted that Buchanan and his communications shop not be allowed to draft Ronnie’s State of the Union address, which was scheduled for the end of January. “His ideas are not Ronald Reagan’s ideas,” Nancy told Regan.
Upon her insistence, the job went to Ken Khachigian, the speechwriter she and Deaver had recruited to write Ronnie’s address at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Khachigian was both talented and tolerant of Nancy’s demands. “You just couldn’t put Ken with the Reagans enough. He just was such a smart guy, such a wordsmith. He loved the Reagans,” Jim Kuhn recalled. Over the next month, Nancy became heavily involved in shaping the speech. The weekend before Ronnie was to deliver it, she summoned Khachigian to Camp David to go over the draft. Nancy insisted that the part about Iran be cut back because it was “too long, and it’s not appropriate. Ronald Reagan’s got to be shown to be in charge.”
Though Nancy continued to push for Buchanan’s ouster, the communications director did have some sound tactical instincts. Early on in the scandal, Buchanan had figured out that the White House was too dysfunctional to both deal effectively with a nebulous situation and continue to get the regular business of governing done. He had been a special assistant to Nixon during Watergate and also knew that even the slightest appearance of a cover-up would be fatal. In a December 12 memo to Regan, Buchanan urged the appointment of a temporary “special counselor” to manage the White House’s responses to the multiple investigations that were under way. This person, he suggested, should be someone highly regarded and credible, who should operate independently, with standing equal to the chief of staff and direct access to the president.
The day after Christmas, Ronnie summoned David Abshire, who was serving as his NATO ambassador, to return to Washington and fill the new role, which they also agreed would be given Cabinet rank. Abshire was a West Pointer known for his tact and intellect, and had helped found one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In his first meeting with Ronnie in the Oval Office shortly after the new year, Abshire was shocked at what had become of the president in the thirteen months since he had last laid eyes on him: “Behind the desk sat a frail, pale, and thin Ronald Reagan, dreadfully different from the vigorous, commanding presence I had last seen at the NATO heads-of-government summit.”
Part of it may have been that seventy-five-year-old Ronnie had undergone surgery for an enlarged prostate just a week before, but Abshire sensed that what he saw was a congenital optimist whose spirit had been crushed. Ronnie looked so bad that Nancy and Regan later ordered that the official photo of his first meeting with the new special counselor not be released to the public. What worried Abshire even more was the fact that Ronnie continued to insist, against growing evidence to the contrary, that he had never intended to trade arms for hostages and that the sales were solely part of an effort to make a diplomatic breakthrough.
At first, Abshire was reluctant to have anything to do with Nancy. He had heard the stories about how difficult and demanding the first lady could be, and he didn’t want to antagonize Regan. Word had also gotten to him that she misunderstood his role. Nancy expected Abshire to act as the president’s public defender against the media and to blunt the criticism Ronnie was getting on Capitol Hill. Abshire was determined to stay focused on his actual job, which was to serve as an internal investigator charged with restoring credibility to the White House. The last thing he thought he needed was a tussle with a protective, interfering presidential spouse. Both Strauss and the Reagans’ old friend Charlie Wick advised Abshire that he was wrong about Nancy, and that he would be making the same mistake Regan did if he did not consult her regularly. So, Abshire reached out to the first lady through Wick. He received a reply within minutes: come to the family quarters at three in the afternoon on February 3.
* * *
Abshire had been on the job for twenty-nine days when he stepped off a small elevator and into the sunlit yellow-and-white sitting room where Nancy rose from the sofa to greet him. The first thing that struck him was how tiny this supposedly intimidating woman was—he towered over her by at least a foot. The second was how eager she was to hear his perspective. Right away, he relaxed. He explained patiently that his mission was to find out what actually happened, which was no small challenge given the murkiness of the information available to him.
“She—along with many others in Washington—had a misconception of what I was about. She had apparently assumed that I would produce and judge the facts and put the case to rest,” Abshire recalled later. “Our role, however, was not to reach judgment but to see that the independent investigating bodies were able to make the judgments; to see that the flawed process which got us into the Iran-contra mess was now met and matched
with due process. Mrs. Reagan quickly understood that important difference.”
To save the president, he told the first lady, it was necessary to restore credibility to the presidency itself. And that couldn’t happen if Ronnie’s team kept responding to every incoming attack with incomplete—and sometimes inaccurate—information. Nancy realized immediately that in Abshire, she might have found the internal ally she needed. She told him that Regan was isolating her husband, weakening his judgment by cutting him off from outside advice and contacts. “The only other adviser with access is you,” she said, a look of hope rising in her eyes. Nancy warned Abshire that too many became intimidated when they entered the Oval Office and held back from giving Ronnie the advice and information he needed. He should not be afraid to do that. She added one more caution: “You must not let Don into your meetings with the president.”
Nancy also complained to Abshire about her running battle with the chief of staff over the president’s schedule. Regan was trying to push Ronnie too hard, she said. He thought the president should try to quiet his critics by traveling around the country and talking about other issues: the Strategic Defense Initiative, US-Soviet relations, the need to balance the budget. Regan was also pressing for more news conferences. Nancy believed it was far too soon for that kind of activity after Ronnie’s surgery. Plus, though she didn’t mention it, her astrologer had deemed this to be an inauspicious month for such an undertaking.
Abshire agreed with Nancy that it was a bad idea for Ronnie to be getting out in public too much, but for a different reason. Though the president might try to change the subject, the scandal would follow him wherever he went. As Abshire put it later: “To undertake such a campaign of speeches and press conferences when we were still unclear on some of the Iran-contra facts would be a formula for disaster, comparable to the charge of the Light Brigade. He would be hounded with questions that neither he nor even the investigators could now answer.” Ronnie’s performance in his testimony before the Tower Commission so far had been halting and unsure—he had contradicted himself at several points. His memory was bad, and Abshire believed he was being manipulated by Regan and others, who wanted to line up his recollections with theirs.
Nancy and Abshire talked also about what to do after the release of the Tower report, which was expected within weeks. Abshire had been putting together what he called a “comeback plan.” It involved both imagery and substance. The president must give a nationally televised address to show he was in charge and then undertake a reorganization of his administration that would start with repairing his fractured national security team. Lines of authority must be clearer. There had to be an end to the squabbling and turf battles between Shultz at the State Department and Weinberger at the Pentagon. The CIA and the National Security Council could no longer operate as independent actors. In the military, Abshire told Nancy, the first principle of strategy was “unity of command.”
“This is the first imaginative idea I have heard since Mike Deaver left the White House,” Nancy exclaimed. She told Abshire that she would arrange with Kathy Osborne, Ronnie’s secretary, for his next session with the president to be a long one. And once more, she warned him: “Don’t you let Don Regan in the room.” Regan became furious when he saw that meetings with Abshire were being put on the president’s calendar without his knowledge. After one, he summoned scheduler Fred Ryan to his office.
“Where did he get the authority?” Regan demanded.
“Mrs. Reagan,” Ryan answered.
“You’re fired!” the chief of staff said.
Ryan thought to himself: “I’m right in the middle of something here.” But he assumed Regan would calm down, which he did, and an aide to the chief of staff soon phoned Ryan to assure him that he still had a job.
Abshire’s strategy for navigating the crisis was spelled out in a February 19 memo to Regan and Frank Carlucci, who had replaced Poindexter as national security adviser. “In my judgment, the Tower Board report will be devastating in its criticisms of process, and will reinforce an image of the President as detached and not in command. We must recognize that the strong Presidency is in great danger,” he wrote. “I believe the President can use the occasion of the Tower Board report to seize the initiative in the foreign policy process, demonstrate how he is the Commander in Chief, show he is ready to go beyond the report in the Iran-Contra matter, and get on with his larger foreign policy goals.”
Abshire and Nancy would have many more private meetings, usually in the late afternoon, when the last rays of sunlight streamed through the lunette window on the west end of the residence. As they grew to know and trust each other, Abshire became more and more impressed with how astute she was about the problems within the White House and how clear-eyed she was about her husband’s strengths and weaknesses.
Meanwhile, her running battle with Regan continued to play out in the media. There were strategic leaks, no doubt with Nancy’s blessing, that the first lady and the chief of staff were no longer speaking. Her allies were making increasingly vigorous denunciations of Regan in public. On ABC-TV’s This Week with David Brinkley, columnist George F. Will said of Regan: “I think nothing in his deplorable conduct of his office has been as contemptible as his clinging to it when his usefulness to the president, whose service he was supposed to be rendering, ended many, many months ago.”
Ronnie’s seventy-sixth birthday came three days after Nancy’s first meeting with Abshire. To lift his spirits, she arranged for a surprise celebration with the White House staff. The president entered room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building thinking he was there to speak to a visiting business group and reached into his pocket for his remarks. He was greeted by the Marine Band playing “Seventy-six Trombones,” from The Music Man. Nancy wheeled in a giant birthday cake, and together the Reagans blew out the candles. That night, Nancy planned a small, morale-boosting gathering with friends. But before the guests arrived, Ronnie watched a tough piece on NBC News in which correspondent Chris Wallace talked about the dismal state of the presidency and suggested the aging chief executive might be slipping. Ronnie was despondent. “Nancy blamed me for ruining his birthday party and didn’t talk to me for a year,” Wallace told me.
About a week and a half later, however, Wallace got a tantalizing tip from Nancy Reynolds, an intimate of the first lady since their Sacramento days. Reynolds told the NBC reporter that Regan had recently gotten into an angry argument with Nancy over the telephone—once again, over the chief of staff’s insistence that it was time for the president to hold a news conference on the Iran-contra affair. Regan had actually hung up on her. That was, indeed, the case. The February 8 call ended with Regan slamming down the receiver on the first lady. Regan’s wife, Ann, who had been reading the paper at the time, looked up quizzically: “Was that Nancy Reagan you were talking to in that tone of voice?” Regan acknowledged it was. He told Ann he recognized that his days were numbered as chief of staff, but that for the sake of his own reputation, he wanted to stick it out at least until the Tower Board issued its report at the end of February.
Presumably, Reynolds had Nancy’s approval to tell the network reporter about Regan’s abusive behavior toward her. Arranging for the story of that explosive phone call to be broken by Wallace was a shrewd play on the first lady’s part. The Reagans watched the news on NBC every evening as they ate their dinner together on tray tables in the family quarters. On February 19 Wallace went on the air with his report. He said it wasn’t the first time Regan had hung up on Nancy. Wallace also quoted a source “very close to Mrs. Reagan” as saying, “In fact, Mrs. Reagan purposely leaked the story that she is no longer talking to Donald Regan… to try to force Regan to step down.” Of course, Nancy could have told her husband herself about the rude treatment she had received from Regan a week and a half before. But she knew it would pack a bigger wallop if Ronnie heard it this way. And she was right. Ronnie was horrified. “Is that true?” he asked Nancy.
Nancy wro
te in her diary the following day: “I feel like I’m going through a nightmare—a long, unending nightmare. And I can’t even see any light at the end of the tunnel. I’m beginning to wonder if this is going to last until the end of Ronnie’s presidency. God, I hope not.”
If Regan still had even the slightest chance of hanging on to his job, it ended when he tried to blame Nancy for a fresh public embarrassment that had nothing directly to do with Iran-contra. The White House had named John O. Koehler, a veteran Associated Press executive, to replace the departing Buchanan as communications director. Nancy was said to be enthusiastic about the choice, which had been made on the recommendation of their old California friend Charles Wick. But no one had looked very carefully into Koehler’s past. It turned out he had briefly been a member of a Nazi youth group during his boyhood in Germany. At the daily White House staff meeting a few days after NBC reported his furious phone call with the first lady, Regan blamed Nancy for the fiasco over Koehler’s hiring. “That nomination came right out of the East Wing,” Regan told other senior White House officials.
The moment that White House counsel Peter Wallison heard Regan utter those words, he knew the chief of staff was a goner. Wallison looked across the table at staff secretary David Chew, and they both rolled their eyes. What was said at White House staff meetings had a way of leaking into the media, and if there was one thing Ronnie wouldn’t tolerate, it was anyone trying to make Nancy the heavy. “I would have started packing my bags at that point,” Wallison told me. Sure enough, the whole thing was in the next day’s Washington Post. For Ronnie, this was the last straw. “Press reported that Don R. had told the Staff that Nancy was responsible for the appointment of Jack Koehler,” the president wrote in his diary that weekend. “That does it—I guess Monday will be the showdown day. Nancy has never met J.K. and certainly had nothing to do with his appointment.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 53
