At the Top

...They found worse...

...The interviews are not the strongest part of the book...

...Each portrait includes a life history, a survey of the subject's financial connections, stands taken on matters affecting his job, and a rundown of the issues on each department's agenda...

...Brownstein and Easton were looking for conflicts of interests...

...561 FEBRUARY 1983...

...Only the Treasury and Defense Departments were generous with their time...

...Burford, Interior Secretary James Watt, and Environmental Protection Agency head Anne Gorsuch were leaders of Colorado's Coors-financed antienvironmental movement...

...Many top officials, including those in the State and Justice Departments and in the White House itself, refused to be interviewed...

...Several interesting interconnections emerge among Reagan's ruling class, which the authors are quick.to point out: f While the Carter Administration's top National Security officials were drawn from the Trilateral Commission, the Reagan Administration has drafted its replacements from the Committee on the Present Danger, a lobby organized in 1976 to fight detente and arms control...

...The strength of the book is its almost 800 pages of details...

...The interview with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan is easily the best— Regan comes across far more intelligently than in some of his public appearances...

...f In his introduction to Reagan's Ruling Class, Nader describes the Reagan elite as "homogeneous," but it is made up of two interlocking but still distinct networks: the traditional Eastern establishment, led, of course, by Vice President George Bush and including Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige (Hotchkiss and Yale) and Presidential Assistant James Baker (The Hill School and Princeton), and a new Sunbelt mafia, home-grown and educated at state universities...

...Federal Home Loan Board Director Richard Pratt and Education Secretary Terrel Bell are native Utahans, products of the University of Utah...

...It is not bedtime reading, but it will provide a fount of information for journalists or scholars writing about Ronald Reagan's government...

...The authors' own interests and those of the Nader project seem also to have affected profile priorities...

...Reagan's Ruling Class, written by Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton and published by Ralph Nader's Presidential Accountability Group, consists of portraits of, and interviews with, the top 100 Administration officials...

...For instance, Brownstein and Easton devote twelve pages to Raymond Peck, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration director, whom they hold responsible for blocking seatbelt and airbag regulations, while devoting six and three pages, respectively, to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Presidential Assistant Baker— two of the most powerful of the 100.1 found myself wondering whether the Nader people should have devoted all their energies to exposing and criticizing the Reagan deregu-latory apparatus they understand so well (and which provoked the most interesting and heated analyses in this book) rather than trying to cover the whole gamut of the Administration...

...It is as important to know that Robert Burford, once fined by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for grazing his cattle on public lands, is now directing the BLM as it is to know that Raymond Donovan, a former New Jersey contractor, is fending off grand jury probes at the Department of Labor...

...John B. Judis (John B. Judis is political editor of In These Times and a contributing editor of the Progressive...

...Assistant Attorney General Lowell Jensen—a University of Colorado graduate—made his mark when he and Presidential Assistant Edwin Meese, both with the Alameda County District Attorney's Office twenty years ago, prosecuted Berkeley's Free Speech Movement demonstrators in 1964...

...Brownstein and Easton count thirty-three members from the Committee in the Administration...

...But these are minor qualms about an extremely valuable reference work that should be on the bookshelf of anyone planning to keep an eye on the Reagan Administration...

...f The New Right network of large financial contributors, led by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors family, the Hunt family, and Oklahoma's Edward Noble, has financed the careers of a surprising number of Reagan officials, including former Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis, who was initially dubbed a "moderate...

...The Reagan Administration is staffed by administrators like Watt in Interior and Donovan in Labor, who oppose the historic function of the departments they have been appointed to run, and who in turn have brought on people like Burford and Davis to abort those functions...

...Most policy development and execution in the Executive Branch is in the hands of Presidential assistants and Cabinet under secretaries, assistant secretaries, and commission and bureau directors...

...Noble himself is the head of the Synthetic Fuels Corporation...

...One finds that the Secretaries of State and Defense are not the only important Bechtel Corporation officials in the Administration: W. Kenneth Davis, formerly a Bechtel vice president in charge of nuclear development is Deputy Secretary of Energy, a position from which Davis can oversee American nuclear energy development...

...This inaccessibility of some officials seems to have skewed the degree to which their departments are treated—Treasury gets 100 pages, State sixty, and the White House Staff twenty-eight...

...One learns, for instance, that Commerce Department Under Secretary Lionel Olmer and Assistant Secretary Lawrence Brady, both leaders of the attempt to block American and European trade with the Soviet Union, are outspoken proponents of increased trade with China— a stance that puts them at odds with many of their right-wing backers...