What the Scribes Are Saying About Ronald Reagan

...column rather than an even semi-serious biography, that's exactly right...

...For the most part, Barrett reports them fairly, basing his accounts on those invaluable interviews and confidential documents...

...These groans and sighs were precipitated by the Reagan news conference on Central America...

...Reagan as "Ronnie...

...What I find surprising is that Mr...

...The truth, he conceded, is that "those of us in the news media . . . are not scholars or even experts...

...Karl O'Lessker WHAT THE SCRIBES ARE SAYING ABOUT RONALD REAGAN The honeymoon that nearer was...

...Reagan look as bad as possible...

...Reagan vacations more than other Presidents have done (false), and that his advisers make key decisions for him (false again, as most of the book clearly shows...

...Reagan lets others make his decisions for him...

...And earlier this year, in a contretemps with William F. Buckley, Jr., a network anchorwoman found it impossible- to distinguish between the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office, attributing to the former a major function of the latter...

...So, for instance, though he gives the President high marks for the substance of his Middle East peace initiative, he feels called upon to remark that "it was thoroughly in keeping with the Reagan style that he was on vacation in California when his advisers decided that it was time to seize the moment...

...Yet another bonus for campaign addicts is the contrast Hannaford draws for us between the 1976 and 1980 nomination campaign...

...To claim we ignore our own backgrounds and prejudices is pretense...

...To be sure, Barrett is not a member of the lunatic Left...

...Something like two-thirds of the book is devoted to major policy issues and the controversies that swirled around them...

...The point is well made in a recent article in Public Opinion by Michael Robinson, Maura Clancey, and Lisa Grand, using the most advanced content-analysis techniques...

...Somewhere in The Decline of the West Spengler remarked that what Western man needs is not freedom of the press but freedom from the press...

...that they are simply incapable of dealing intelligently with complex policy questions...

...Ford adviser Stuart Spencer quickly assigned staff to research the implications of Reagan's proposal for use in the New Hampshire primary five months down the road...

...In some early-August ruminations on the relations between President and press, columnist Joseph Kraft murmured a different sort of mea culpa...

...Perhaps the clearest insight into them is summed up in his prefatory Author's Notes, where he concedes that he is to the left of Reagan on most issues...

...What Barrett sees as vacillation others may well see, and applaud, as prudent deliberation...

...I confess I approached the book with some trepidation...

...Though a major, and almost successful, effort in every respect, the earlier of the two had an agreeably modest scale to it...

...The Reagan camp did manage in 1980 to avoid anything like the ninety-billion-dollar-transfer catastrophe, but that was the result of bitter experience rather than increased staff size...

...The President, not surprisingly, is portrayed as a good-natured featherweight...

...If Mrs...

...The third (and apparently biggest-selling) of this season's Reagan books, by a reporter and free-lance writer named Laurence Learner, is entitled Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan.** If the title doesn't adequately convey the book's flavor, this will: throughout its entire length the author almost invariably refers to Mr...

...And therefore: "Journalists, being equipped to deal mainly with coherence, cannot come to grips with a leader addicted to romantic fantasy"-i.e., Ronald Reagan...

...If this suggests that the book is an extended gossip **Harper & Row, $14.95...

...Instead, he blames the nation's 1981-82 economic woes on the President's rigidity and naivete...

...Moreover, Mr...

...If there's a bigger deficit then, the man in the street will say, "That's okay, things are better.'" Mr...

...But until then Hannaford's is the best we have and it will always remain crucial to an understanding of those events...

...But only when their own ideological biases are engaged do they become alert to nuance and complexity-and then, more often than not, they botch the story...

...And so when the opportunity is given them to record for posterity evidence of their superior judgment, they would be more than human to pass it up for the sake of exalting Reagan...

...For one thing, the author is intelligent and experienced and (unlike most television reporters) credibly knowledgeable on a broad range of issues...

...A Chicago reporter for the Washington Post wrote a story about the '$90 billion transfer plan.' It ran inside the paper and was not picked up by others in the national political press, indicating they thought it had little significance...

...Happily, it manages to avoid both the tone and substance of that species of political hagiography...

...To cite only one example, Barrett recounts how, during the late fall of 1981 when revised projections about the size of the deficit had persuaded all of Reagan's advisers to insist in meeting after meeting that he approve some new course of action because the "deficit problem had become insupportable," at the conclusion of one such meeting: With an air of resignation, Reagan replied, "That's very obvious, but a larger deficit is the least of our problems...

...To the contrary, there can hardly be any qualities in a President more dangerous than impulsiveness and cocksureness...

...What makes it an uncommon insider's account (and there aren't all that many written by people near the top of a presidential campaign) is Hannaford's circumspection about his own role: he neither tries to persuade us of his own superiority to others in the campaign nor gives us the aw-shucks-shuffle-the-feet routine...

...Coward-McCann, $17.95...

...If they did, it bespeaks a degree of naivete" I should not have thought them burdened with...

...Based on, as both author and publisher proudly boast, more than 400 interviews, it purports to tell the life stories of both Mr...

...Two examples from the Reagan era spring to mind: During the afternoon coverage of the assassination attempt in March 1981, the man whom one of the networks described as its "legal correspondent" was utterly buffaloed by the 25th Amendment-couldn't for the-life of him explain its disability provisions...

...But the reader may well ask, here again, who was right-the President who insisted on staying the course in the interest of a long-term recovery, or the experts and pundits, inside and outside the White House, who were demanding a quick fix...

...That is probably not the impression Laurence Barrett meant to leave us with...

...Hanson writing in the June 1983 Columbia Journalism Review...

...Carter before leaving office...

...Two recent studies support this judgment...

...The essence of it is that, with a very few honorable exceptions, political reporters are so addicted to the gossipy ephemera of the public arena (who's ahead in the polls...

...X he most substantial work to date on the Reagan Administration is Barrett's Gambling with History, and it is about as good as we have any right to expect...

...Reagan as an ill-natured, and deeply selfish, scatter-brain...

...Nonetheless, a few of Reagan's basic policies seem to me necessary, albeit unpalatable...

...Not just once in a while, mind you, not just when talking about the early years or when writing from Mrs...

...Reagan gave a speech to the Chicago Executive Club that, as Hannaford rightly says, "later would nearly wreck his campaign, and, still later, form the philosophical foundation" of *The Reagans: A Political Portrait...

...In a speech of barely twenty minutes length, Ronald Reagan had set forth a plan to alter radically a relationship between Washington and the states and communities that had been going on for four decades...

...newswatcher could doubtless fill the pages of this magazine with illustrations of reportorial incompetence, especially on the part of the electronic media...

...The principal caveat is relevant to the writing of any contemporary history...

...In the present instance this becomes an all the -more serious problem with men such as James Baker and Richard Darman-not because they are anti-Reaganite wreckers and saboteurs but because their own political careees, unlike those of, say, Clark, Meese, and Deaver, were forged independently of Reagan's and will doubtless continue to flourish long after he has retired from office...

...And as Time's chief White House correspondent, Laurence I. Barrett, forth-rightly says in his big new book, Gambling with History, $ it is idle to suppose "that a journalist can really be 'objective.' To carry that off requires a suspension of judgment beyond the ability of most of us...

...The authors analyzed every network news story that mentioned Reagan in the first two months of 1983-a period, let us remember, when the economy was beginning to emerge from the recession and when inflation finally had been brought under control...

...It is thus irresistibly tempting to ask who is the more "addicted to romantic fantasy"-the President striving to prevent the imposition of Soviet client states in Central America or professional newsmen assuring us that neither we nor the people of that region have anything to fear from a Communist takeover there...

...On the other hand there are first-rate accounts of such critically important events as the ninety-billion-dollar-transfer speech and its aftermath, of the firing of John Sears, and of the negotiations that came so close to putting Gerald Ford on the ticket in 1980...

...If the worst flaw of Gambling with History is the author's attempt to portray President Reagan in as unflattering a light as possible, its signal virtue is his success throughout in showing the immense complexity of the problems and processes with which this, or any, administration must grapple...

...Reagan could hardly be more different...

...One other small but revealing point in this connection: the first time Barrett mentions the new ambassador to the United Nations he identifies her simply as "Jeane Kirk-patrick, defender of right-wing dictatorships...

...Did they hope to convert, or even disarm, him...

...Reagan's perspective, but nearly always...

...But unlike such master hatchet-wielders as Robert Caro or Seymour Hersh, who have perfected the hundreds-of-interviews technique, Learner makes no discernible effort to pick and choose among (let alone evaluate) his sources...

...Any reasonably attentive newspaper reader or television Karl O 'Lessker is professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University and a senior editor of this journal...

...The result reads something like what we'd have if the FBI's computers printed out in entirety the undigested raw data files on people who had been subjects of a full field investigation...

...and Mrs...

...especially so when he enters office with a good sense of his own limited experience in important areas...

...Reagan's policy instincts show up in Barrett's account as markedly superior to those of the conventional politicians and journalists who hold the President in such great contempt...

...What gives this finding a special, almost surrealist piquancy is that, as the authors observe, the press has been furiously scourging itself for being too soft on Reagan, for serving cravenly as a "conduit of White House utterances and official image-mongering" (this according to C.T...

...Granted, the author finished his book when the recovery was only just starting...

...And on the evidence presented by Barrett, Reagan's alleged indolence turns out to be nothing more damning than the inclination of every President to find some subjects more engaging and more important than others...

...what White House staffer is trying to knife what other staffer...

...One, mentioned earlier, is by Peter Hannaford, a close associate of Mr...

...firm that had the former Governor as its principal client from 1975 to 1980, and as a top aide in the 1976 and 1980 campaigns...

...Stories in which Reagan was treated unfavorably totaled 8,800 words -a ratio of twenty-two to one negative...

...Yet the most striking aspect of the entire book is how good it makes Mr...

...It is that the individual being interviewed is mainly concerned to make himself look good...

...short, even when bad-mouthing Reagan the news media think they're sweet-talking him...

...The result is a book of some 500 pages of small print that will unquestionably prove a gold mine for historians...

...The first, a widely noted project by S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, showed that members of the "elite" news media are far to the left of the American public as a whole in their political and social attitudes...

...Barrett, of course, doesn't see that response as at all worthy of respect...

...On the ample evidence he provides, however, I'm inclined to think not...

...Reagan's since 1974, as public relations director for the state of California during the last year of Reagan's governorship, as partner (with Michael Deaver) of the P.R...

...In 1980 the issues staff was ten times as large, with offices in both Los Angeles and Washington...

...You get the feeling that old-time pols like Jim Farley or Len Hall would have felt right at home in it...

...Learner's contribution to all this is a pervasive quasi-populist snidery, smirking and tut-tutting his way through every report of Mrs...

...Equally important, if surprising, is that he was granted extraordinary access to key figures in the Administration from the President on down-access that included not only many hours of tape-recorded interviews but the privilege of sitting in on 'meetings of top White House staff and of the Cabinet and being allowed to read and copy confidential staff memoranda and briefing papers...

...What we have to do is get inflation down and business activity and employment up...

...But it's great fun to read Pete Hannaford's fine account of the two campaigns and ponder such lessons for ourselves...

...Reading his highly detailed account, one has to be struck by the complexity of not only the issues but of the decision-making process itself, involving the strongly held views of a number of able and intelligent people...

...Hannaford is too kindly a soul to draw as harsh a lesson as I do from his own observations...

...Some of his peripheral ideas strike me as either inequitable or inane or both...

...On the author's own evidence, I find it hard to believe that later historians will share that view...

...Barrett strain to put the worst face on all Reagan Administration actions that in this same chapter on the Middle East we find him criticizing the brand-new foreign policy team for not rejecting out of hand a National Security Council decision paper drafted in the Carter NSC and signed by Mr...

...It so happened that one of the nation's top political reporters, Martin Schram of Newsday, had been granted the opportunity to ride to the airport with Governor Reagan after the speech and have an exclusive interview with him...

...Put another way, it seems incontestable that a 1976-sized team deploying 1976-magnitude resources would have won the 1980 nomination just as handily as it did in fact...

...To be sure, there are no embarrassing revelations...

...Nothing we read in this book (other than occasional innuendo) lends any support to the allegation that Mr...

...The crucial difference, though, is that nothing Miss Smith says about her celebs can make any conceivable difference to the wide world beyond them...

...Reagan's alleged extravagance or lust for clothes...

...Not a bit of it...

...But the 1980 campaign was a behemoth...

...his is the final say...

...Basic Books, 1981, p. 153...

...Did Schram detect either the substantive or political significance of the speech...

...Interviews of other key participants may enable historians someday to provide even fuller accounts than we have here...

...At the apex of the process sits the President...

...The doubly demeaning implication here is that Mr...

...The politicians in President Ford's entourage, by contrast, knew exactly how significant it was...

...Instead, says a bemused Hannaford, he "concentrated on Reagan's intentions about running and ignored the substance of the speech, although he mentioned it in passing in his story...

...Put another way, their deepest loyalties must be to themselves rather than'to their chief...

...he merely recounts what they have told him, even when, to our stunned surprise, it reflects well on his victims...

...And how long, may we suppose, would that kind of incompetence be tolerated by his network superiors...

...But the best-selling viciousness of Learner's treatment of the Reagans, to the extent an unsophisticated audience may think it bears some resemblance to the truth, can only add to a cup already overflowing with cynicism and alienation-a state of affairs for which the elite news media of the nation, their congenital ignorance compounded by almost monolithic left-liberal bias, must bear a far greater share of the responsibility than all the mistakes of Vietnam and deceptions of Watergate combined...

...Time and again the President is seen to have worked at and mastered complex situations...

...And the chapter-length account of President Reagan's hospi-talization after the assassination attempt is as good as any we have, with every new detail strengthening one's admiration for the extraordinary grace and courage of Mr...

...But Barrett seems to find him blameworthy for vacillating at a number of points...

...Having done so and having then spoon-fed the story to the somnolent news media, the Ford people were able to turn what had appeared to be certain defeat into a narrow victory, and thus deliver a blow to the Reagan campaign from which it was never to recover...

...Nor is he much more generous to her in later sections of the book, particularly in the lengthy accounts of the Haig-Kirkpatrick imbroglios which Barrett bases largely on detail supplied by General Haig himself...

...So one reads the book as one reads a Liz Smith gossip column, being titillated, amused, offended, and not for a moment worrying whether this or that bit is true or not...

...Even their campaign coverage is a scandal: a careful study of the 1972 presidential election found that paid political advertisements "gave more than five times more coverage to the major issues of the day than did the evening network news programs, [which were] given over to campaign trivia, hoopla, polls and 'horse-race' estimates, " But it is these same political reporters and TV anchormen who have the between-campaign responsibility for providing us with information about public policies...

...Two other recent books on President (and Mrs...

...More importantly, the temper of the country had shifted decisively in four years toward candidate Reagan's own long-held views about our national needs...

...Many of the confidential documents Barrett was allowed to see may end up in the archives and be available to others in the future...

...Barrett's besetting sin is his apparent determination to make Mr...

...Though unabashed in his admiration of the Reagans, Hannaford doesn't let sentiment interfere with his telling of a good story, and the result is an uncommonly dispassionate insider's account of a six-year-long quest for the presidency...

...All of which goes a long way toward explaining the wretchedness of most of the reporting about the Reagan Administration...

...Reagan emerges from these pages as an altogether solid and thoughtful man...

...Did sheer size spell the difference between success and failure in the two campaigns...

...It seemed all too likely that it would be nothing but an extended puff-piece-the sort of book you gag over even if you're well disposed toward its subject...

...Indeed, so hard does Mr...

...Lest anyone think this is not a serious fault, I ask him to consider how he would regard a sportscaster who didn't know the difference in football between a tight end and a running back...

...One small measure: in 1976, Hannaford remarks, "the issues team consisted of Martin Anderson and me, augmented by frequent, hurried phone calls from pay booths to academic and policy experts who, if we could catch them at their desks, had agreed to share their views...

...Far from being a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy, Mr...

...These mordant reflections are stirred by an incident in Peter Hannaford's new book about his longtime boss and client Ronald Reagan.* In September 1975, shortly before the formal announcement of his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr...

...He claims to have been a Young Republican many years ago and it seems likely that his present attitudes are those of your garden-variety Eastern Establishment Republican...

...and so the reports of them in this book-subject to appropriate caveats-constitute an invaluable source of insight and information...

...Little did that gloomy Teuton realize, in his own more literate age, that in the late years of this century our principal source of information about public policies would be journalists- political reporters, in fact-people as biased as college professors but far less well informed about substantive policy areas...

...Reagan, with rather more space given to the latter, from childhood to the present...

...We cannot, accordingly, be original sources of light...

...Except for being written in the first-person it reads for the most part like a case study by an outside observer...

...They are redeemed, if at all, only by their love for each other...

...Reagan and his associates accorded such privileges to a man who is by no means sympathetic to Reaganism...

...We depend, heavily if not entirely, on what other people tell us...

...Reagan's response to the trauma of a bullet in his chest...

...Yet in fairness I should report that there are lots of good stories, quips, and anecdotes scattered throughout the book...

...It is a tribute to his skill as a reporter that that is how it comes out...

...In short, no kamikaze enemy, but hardly a friend either...

...Having classified the stories as either positive, negative, neutral or ambiguous, they counted the total number of words in all and found: Stories in which Reagan was treated favorably totaled 400 words-two John Chancellor commentaries of 200 words each...

...Hannaford doesn't address the question directly...

...But the tape-recorded interviews with, among others, Reagan, Meese, Baker, Deaver, Darman, Haig, Clark, and Stockman, will not be...

...But surely the other top-flight journalists present, even without Schram's advantage of an exclusive interview, understood the importance of what they'd heard...

...Neither comes off very well...

...Reagan look-hardly the impression Barrett was hoping to leave...

...Reagan had temper tantrums or if the Governor behaved boorishly toward his staff, we don't learn about it here...

...his efforts as President to reform the federal system...

...In Cited in Larry J. Sabato, The Rise of Political Consultants...

...Most national newsmen are bitterly opposed to President Reagan on almost every major issue, and their reporting and commentary show it all too clearly...

...One wonders how loudly Barrett would have complained if the Reagan people had rejected the PD 63 approach without long and careful consideration...

...Can Barrett's antagonism to Kirkpatrick have anything to do with the fact that she is one of the few high-ranking members 6f the Administration whom he did not interview...

...He could not have foreseen that in August 1983, as this article is being written, economists of every stripe would be worrying that the economic upsurge was perhaps too vigorous, or that inflation at the wholesale price level would be the lowest in 15 years...