Indeed, Ronnie finally set the wheels in motion on Monday morning, February 23. “George, I’m going to have to do something about Don,” he told his vice president. “If I won’t stand up for my wife, who will? A certain honor is at stake.” Bush went to Regan and told him that the president wanted to speak to him. It was a painful conversation. Regan agreed to resign, but he and Ronnie did not iron out the distasteful details of precisely when and how. They agreed only that Regan would depart some time the following week. Regan wanted to stay on for a while past the release of the Tower Board report on February 26, so that it would not look as though the chief of staff was culpable in the scandal. He also assumed the president would publicly thank him for his six years of service and give him an opportunity to express his own gratitude for the opportunity to make a contribution to the success of the administration. Nancy called Abshire in a panic, worried that Regan was actually maneuvering to hang on. She wanted him out before the next round of Sunday shows.
Then came Thursday—the day the Tower Board’s report was released. A reckoning was at hand. Ronnie and top White House officials got their copies of the three-hundred-page document at ten in the morning. Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft presented it to them in the Cabinet Room, and then Tower, as chairman, gave a forty-five-minute briefing on its major points. It concluded flatly that the administration was trading arms for hostages. As the New York Times reported the next day, the findings portrayed the president as “a confused and remote figure who failed to understand or control the secret arms deal with Iran, and who thus had to ‘take responsibility’ for a policy that in the end caused ‘chaos’ at home and embarrassment abroad.”
It also noted that Ronnie had been ill-served by his top lieutenants, particularly Regan, who had given him poor advice and who had failed to grasp the risks of the covert operations being run out of the White House. More than any chief of staff in memory, it concluded, Regan had “asserted personal control over the White House staff,” and therefore “must bear primary responsibility for the chaos that descended upon the White House.” Regan bristled and began to object to that characterization of his management. “Look, Don, you got off easy,” Tower replied.
That same morning, Bush met with Regan, and once again brought up the subject of his resignation. Regan exploded and told the vice president he was being fired like a shoe clerk. He also informed Bush that the entire White House schedule “was in the hands of an astrologer in San Francisco.” Bush was shocked, and said, “Good God, I had no idea.” Regan stormed out. Fifteen minutes later, Regan had calmed down and returned to Bush’s office. He said his resignation would be on the president’s desk Monday morning.
Meanwhile, Ronnie was already sounding out possible replacements for chief of staff. His first choice, former transportation secretary Drew Lewis, turned him down, as did the Reagans’ old friend Nevada senator Paul Laxalt, who said he was thinking of running for president. Laxalt suggested former Senate majority leader Howard Baker, who agreed to take the job.
At least, that was the official version of the story. When Laxalt proposed Baker’s name to Ronnie, his selection was already pretty much a fait accompli. Press accounts suggest that Nancy cast the deciding vote on who would be the new chief of staff. The Wall Street Journal wrote a story about Nancy’s “behind-the-scenes maneuvering” that described the president’s involvement in the choice as “minimal.” Reporter Jane Mayer quoted an unnamed “friend of the first lady’s” as saying: “It was worked out beforehand and then presented to him. He just had to sign on.”
However it came about, Nancy thought the Tennessean was an inspired choice: “He was calm, easygoing, congenial, and self-effacing. He was politically astute. He had credibility with the media. And after serving three terms in the Senate, he had many friends on Capitol Hill. Howard was a complete change from what we had, and he gave us a chance to restore some morale to the office.” Not incidentally, Baker was the figure in the Senate Watergate hearings who had asked the famous question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” His acceptance of the top staff post would be seen as a signal of confidence in the rectitude of the Reagan White House.
Regan tried to manage his impending exit with as much grace as he could. On Friday he held a series of background interviews with prominent White House reporters. He told them he planned to resign the following Monday, of his own volition, and that he did not know who his replacement would be. As Regan was wrapping up with David Beckwith and Barrett Seaman of Time, his secretary buzzed him. Then she buzzed him again. And again. The new national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, was waiting outside his office and urgently needed to see him. Carlucci told Regan that the news was out. CNN was reporting that the chief of staff had been ousted and that Baker was coming in to replace him.
Regan didn’t have to ask where the network got the information. This one last act of retribution had Nancy written all over it. Indeed, her office issued a statement welcoming Baker before Regan’s departure had formally been announced, something her spokeswoman later claimed was a “technical” mix-up.
Regan returned to his office and dictated a one-sentence missive. It read:
Dear Mr. President:
I hereby resign as Chief of Staff to the President of the United States.
Respectfully yours,
Donald T. Regan
Then the soon-to-be-former chief of staff walked out of the White House. Ronnie caught up with him by telephone and assured Regan that he still planned to put out their face-saving cover story, which was that Regan had planned to resign shortly after the 1986 midterm election but loyally stayed on for nearly four additional months to help the president through the Iran-contra crisis. “I hope you’ll go along with that, Don,” Ronnie added.
“No, Mr. President, it’s over,” Regan replied. “All that’s left is for me to say good-bye.”
“I’m sorry,” Ronnie said softly.
The two of them never spoke again. Baker arrived at the White House an hour later and announced he would be on the job Monday morning. Over the weekend, Regan cleaned out his office.
* * *
Nancy had finally pushed her recalcitrant husband into getting rid of Don Regan. But for him to survive this scandal, she still had to budge him on one more thing; something more important in the eyes of the American people. He had to own up to the obvious, which was that he had traded arms for hostages. He had to admit that he had made a mistake. Never would Ronnie give a speech more crucial than the nationally televised address that was scheduled for March 4. As Abshire wrote in one memo circulated among top White House officials: “Under no circumstances should the president give a hastily prepared speech. This speech must be superb.” Abshire argued that Ronnie must accept the conclusions and recommendations of the investigatory board, and then sketch out a vision for a future in which he would be more firmly in charge.
Nancy was afraid to entrust this crucial endeavor to anyone in the West Wing. She handpicked the person to write it: Landon Parvin, the outside consultant who came up with the lyrics for her song for the 1982 Gridiron Dinner and the speechwriter she would choose for Ronnie’s first big AIDS address later in 1987. The president’s secretary, Kathy Osborne, called Parvin about a week before the Tower Board report came out and told him that the president wanted him to draft his address to the nation.
“The truth is, I knew immediately who was behind it,” Parvin told me. He dialed back the White House and asked to speak to the first lady. The operator put him right through. Parvin told Nancy that his formative political experience had been watching Watergate swallow a presidency. He saw many of the same forces at work here and couldn’t be sure who—if anyone—in the West Wing was telling the truth.
“Who do I trust?” Parvin asked her.
“You can trust David Abshire,” she told him.
“At some point, I may need your help, and I will need to talk to the president,” Parvin said.
“Just
let me know when,” Nancy replied.
Parvin pored over a proposed draft that had been put together by the White House counsel’s office. It maintained, as Ronnie still did, that the purpose of selling arms to a terrorist nation was “to open lines of communication” with moderate factions in Iran. One sentence in that draft made this laughable claim: “Even if no American hostages had been held in Beirut, I would have still have [sic] welcomed the Iranian contact, and I might still have approved limited arms sales to Iran.” Parvin told Nancy the version of the speech being proposed by the counsel’s office was far too detailed and legalistic. It was a point-by-point reimagination of the whole arms sale operation. Ronnie could never pull it off, Parvin said, and the first lady agreed. “He wouldn’t do that well,” Nancy said, “and it’s not who he is.”
The speechwriter talked to key figures on Capitol Hill and consulted pollster Richard Wirthlin to get a sense of where the public was with regard to the scandal. They all seemed to agree: Ronnie had to accept responsibility and acknowledge having traded arms for hostages.
The morning after the Tower Board report was released, Parvin called Nancy again.
“I need to see the president now,” he said.
The first lady replied that Parvin should come to the residence that evening at five thirty. She added mysteriously: “There will be two other gentlemen there.”
As he drove to the White House, Parvin heard over the radio that Regan had quit and stormed out and that Howard Baker was being brought in to replace him. So he assumed that Baker and perhaps Abshire were the two “other gentlemen” Nancy had mentioned. Instead, he encountered Stu Spencer as he came in the East Wing entrance.
A much bigger surprise was awaiting Parvin when he reached the spacious sitting room in the residence. On the couch between Ronnie and Nancy sat none other than John Tower, the chairman of the commission that had just issued its scathing report. Tower’s presence there was highly unusual and, arguably, improper. It would not look good for the head of the ostensibly independent commission to be coaching the president on how to respond to it. Bringing in Tower had been Spencer’s idea. So that no one would see the former Texas senator arrive, Nancy had arranged for Tower to be ushered through the semisecret tunnel from the Treasury Building, which was located next to the White House at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was the same way that Strauss and Rogers had come for their private session with Ronnie in December.
Both Spencer and Parvin described the subsequent scene to me. While the three visitors were dressed in business attire, the president was wearing a jogging suit. He had spent the day at home reading the board’s report and had gotten all the way to the appendices. Nancy was going back and forth between the sitting room and the den where the television was, catching the latest reports on Regan’s resignation.
“John,” Spencer told the former senator, “tell the president what’s going on.”
For the next two hours, it fell to Tower—a longtime supporter and admirer of Ronnie—to explain to the president, in the bluntest of terms, what his investigation had uncovered. Tower told Ronnie that this scandal could destroy his presidency. He even warned that the president himself could be facing criminal charges and should consider retaining an outside lawyer. The only thing that could save Ronnie now, Tower insisted, was admitting what the public knew already about the real reason for the arms sales.
They also spoke a bit about the human toll the scandal had taken. Two weeks before, on the morning that Bud McFarlane had been scheduled to testify before the Tower Board, the former national security adviser had attempted suicide by downing more than two dozen Valium. When paramedics arrived at McFarlane’s home, his distraught wife was holding a note he had written, which she refused to show them. A Valium overdose is rarely fatal, unless the highly addictive antianxiety medication is mixed with alcohol or other drugs. But McFarlane spent the next two weeks in Bethesda Naval Hospital, during which he was interviewed twice by the Tower Commission. That he could have been driven to such a desperate action weighed heavily on those in the family quarters that day. Parvin recalled that someone—he can’t remember who—remarked that of those who had been swept up in the scandal, McFarlane “was probably the most decent and conscientious of the lot.”
Ronnie listened largely in silence as Tower finished delivering what Parvin described as the “hard truth” of what his commission had found. Then, as the meeting concluded and Tower got up to leave, the president did something astonishingly graceful toward the man who had just belted him with a scathing assessment of his performance and judgment. He thanked Tower for his service to the country. The former Texas senator could not hold back his emotion any longer and broke down sobbing.
Parvin finally knew what he would write: the words that Ronnie was at last ready to say. The president delivered them from the Oval Office the following Wednesday, March 4, which also happened to be the Reagans’ thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” he said in the twelve-minute speech. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true; but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower Board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran, deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind. There are reasons why it happened, but no excuses. It was a mistake.” Ronnie admitted that he had been so preoccupied with the welfare of the hostages that he hadn’t asked the questions he should have or paid enough attention to what members of his staff were doing in his name.
The speech was a success. Veteran journalist R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in the New York Times: “President Reagan spoke to the American people tonight in a spirit of contrition that has not been heard from the White House in a quarter century.… Not since John F. Kennedy took the blame for the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 has any president so openly confessed error.” An overnight CBS News poll showed a 9-point jump in the president’s approval rating, nudging it back into positive territory, at 51 percent to 42 percent. Richard Wirthlin’s internal numbers looked even better.
Ronnie’s presidency had been pulled back from the abyss. And to a degree that he himself most likely had not recognized, Nancy had run the rescue operation. She was more attuned to the danger than her husband was, and a sharper judge of character. Where he was averse to confrontation, she was willing to mow down anyone whose presence became a problem, regardless of how long or how faithfully they had served Ronnie in the past. She had persisted, no matter how hard the president resisted her efforts and her advice. And she had been right. Nancy came through for Ronnie, when so many of the supposedly smart men in his administration had failed him. Nearly two decades later, David Abshire wrote: “When Nancy was brought in after the scandal broke, she was key in the turnaround, bringing in outside advisers, protecting the president from foolish moves on premature public appearances, and—looking long term—bringing in a new chief of staff. Truly it can be said that Nancy Davis Reagan played the crucial role in saving the Reagan presidency and has thereby achieved a special place in the history of first ladies.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Four days after Don Regan stormed out of the White House, Nancy gave a speech to the American Camping Association. In it, she made what she insisted was an innocent reference to her childhood summers at Camp Kechuwa: “I don’t think most people associate me with leeches or how to get them off. But I know how to get them off. I’m an expert at it.”
No one saw that as merely an offhand comment. Nancy’s role in salvaging her husband’s presidency from the wreckage of the Iran-contra scandal reshaped her image, and not in a necessarily favorable way. She had once been dismissed as a shallow dilettante—the “marzipan wife,” in Gloria Steinem’s memorable phrase—and mocked for her adoring gaze and her frivolous, acquisitive enthusiasm for decorating and designer fashion. Nancy was now unders
tood to be a shrewd and powerful operator in her own right. The woman so often labeled Queen Nancy was suddenly being portrayed as a size-2 Lady Macbeth. “If anyone had said six years ago that one day Nancy Reagan would be called power-hungry, we would have cut off his or her bar tab. I’d never seen her hungry, period,” columnist Ellen Goodman marveled in the Boston Globe.
Both the nature of the criticism and the source of it took a dramatic turn. Where earlier Nancy had drawn the contempt of feminists and her husband’s liberal political opponents, she was now under fire from traditionalists, who preferred that presidential spouses hew to a mold they recognized. As so many of her predecessors had learned before Nancy, when the word powerful is used about a first lady, it is rarely intended as a compliment.
Regan had barely cleaned out his desk when the fire began. On March 2 well-connected conservative columnist William Safire wrote on the op-ed page of the New York Times: “At a time he most needs to appear strong, President Reagan is being weakened and made to appear wimpish and helpless by the political interference of his wife.… This is not Rosalyn [sic] Carter, ‘the Steel Magnolia,’ stiffening her husband’s spine; this is an incipient Edith Wilson, unelected and unaccountable, presuming to control the actions and appointments of the executive branch.” Safire, not bothering to disguise the sexism that underlay his diatribe, also referred to Nancy as being at “the top of the henpecking order.” His fellow columnist James Reston suggested two days later that the president should start “putting his own house in order, since nobody elected Nancy.” A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll later that month found that an unusually high 39 percent of Americans thought the president let himself be influenced too much by his wife.
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 54
