What the Hell Is Going On? Reagan, Iran, and the Presidency
Wildaysky, Aaron
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 20, NO. 4 / APRIL 1987 Aaron Wildaysky, with a reply by James David Barber WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? REAGAN, IRAN, AND THE PRESIDENCY An exchange between two...
...This one is seriously concerned that the government of the United States fails to work effectively for peace and justice and liberty out there in the real world...
...Presumably we would bring a knowledge in depth, calling on the experience of previous presidencies, yet that is exactly what is missing or we would be spared all this nonsense (and narcissism) about how we are uniquely put upon, as if Presidents have never acted on their own, or as if the onlyparallel was with Richard Nixon...
...Suppose we were to devise a plan to make the Soviet Union forever peaceful...
...Opinion polls reveal not only a decline in support for the President but a corresponding loss in esteem by the media...
...It is only in that sense that his personality is "fatally flawed," as you put it...
...Therefore, I believe that the charge of triviality and nonsensicalness does not carry weight...
...Of course, Jefferson may well have been mistaken, as I think President Reagan was this time...
...As you revile him, praise us, for we knew it all along...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 17 bombing of Libya, and the Strategic Defense Initiative" are "things [that] turned out all right...
...What would you say of our relations with the Soviet Union or with the NATO nations or with Japan if Iran is "the most sensitive area...
...Is it likely the French Premier and President did not know...
...Far from failing to perform its representative functions, Congresses may well have exceeded them by tying the President's hands in so many ways that they create additional incentives not to have themselves informed...
...T here is an awful lot of absolutist talk going around as if people were purely good or evil or actions were either all of one thing or all of another...
...So if it is true that the President saw a value in the Iranian venture that turned out to be illusory, it is also true that his critics have been similarly mistaken and arguably on matters of much greater magnitude...
...How could (and, I would add, why should) a President know what they are doing in fulfilling an agreed purpose, subject to a presidential Finding...
...The President is famous for paring his agenda down to the minimal essentials...
...Observation of contested cases reveals that neutral observers of the same incident often give clashing accounts...
...What the President thought he was doing was not allowing events to take their course, not allowing the market of international relations to dictate what would happen, not merely reacting to events...
...Presidential candidates get better and better at playing to the press's professional obsession with novelty and immediacy...
...LBJ in 1964, RMN in 1968, etc...
...T hen there are matters in which theoretical concerns are laced with the factual ones...
...The anti-third term amendment already creates unnecessary pressure to speed up action so as to shoehorn events into the last years...
...The President has taken the pledge but others who should, have not...
...Lots of luck...
...The only difference between now and before, unless one is utterly insensitive to barrage after barrage of criticism, is that this time the charges stuck...
...Since it must be one or the other, we are told, he is deceiving us whichever way he chooses to explain his behavior...
...As usual, the implications run two ways: the charges were unbelievable before but in this instance they are believable...
...I think the people are sending a dual message: Don't do it again, Mr...
...I agree with Alex George that multiple advocacy is a good idea and with Janis that groupthink is a danger...
...Like you, I think this was a strong sign it ought not to have been done...
...I would like to join in the great American sweepstakes over what the President should tell the people that would get him off the hook once and for all...
...It happens all the time, and not only to Presidents...
...And that the quality of discourse has degenerated as far as it has...
...Why would anyone want to pay attention to commentators like us or like anyone else...
...Evidently, it is easier to say what should not be done—make this case a capital crime—than to say what should be done...
...Whether this trust had previously eroded, I do not know...
...Conservatives would conclude that they could not rely on the ballot box not merely to elect but to keep the people's choice in the White House...
...Since I think that near-zero nuclear disarmament holds out the best hope for us, I cannot join you in rejecting the President's instincts to try at least to do the most helpful thing as compared with the paltry prospects for traditional arms control measures...
...Correct...
...There are dozens, hundreds even, of top people...
...T he demand for total harmony between words and deeds is understandable, but it will not withstand, the slightest serious scrutiny...
...And who will there be to respond...
...One possible reason is that there were now so many restrictions, restrictions that would not have applied in earlier times, that the operation could not have been run elsewhere...
...The policies have been reversed, the NSC reformed, a high political price What you are actually disposition of opinion President not do what which would give him exacted...
...The incremental illusion is also common...
...Indeed, one could imagine, reading your columns and those of many other people, that the ideal President, the one who knew everything about most things, and who was a great detail man, was none other than the nationally beloved Jimmy Carter...
...Similarly, if any violation is the same as the grossest violation, I cannot think of any President, or of any human being, who could make the grade...
...Since the President lives by his deep intuition of the American public, it is not inappropriate that he should suffer when this insight leaves him...
...Nixon's offenses were brought out in the summer of 1972, to very little effect...
...False charge, I reply...
...I believe the French operatives have left New Zealand for a mess of pottage or, more accurately, a piece of the lamb import quota...
...Did the President ship arms to Iran to free hostages, or to intervene in its internal affairs...
...Why, they want to know, did the President say one thing about hostages (no deal) and do another...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 15 were those who gave their subordinates the freedom to make mistakes, who encouraged them to make creative improvisations, subject only to general guidelines...
...Subordinates who require detailed supervision are not worth having...
...The Iran policy has been reversed, the NSC has been reorganized, and the President's popularity has plummeted...
...similarly that "the military significance of the arms shipments was small" would not seem so to the Iraqis...
...Iranamok" should not become a historical designation for how we made a bad situation much worse...
...But I do not agree with your apocalyptic statements about the decline of Mother Nature, at least not in the developed countries, which do a lot better job at taking care of their patrimony than the others...
...moreover, it appears to be wrong...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 grievous faults...
...What of the Belgrano affair in which a boatload of Argentinians were shot out of the water and where responsibility can never quite be determined...
...Senator Nunn's criticism is mind-boggling...
...in which the rules, the tests, the challenges are fundamentally different...
...Another effort to impeach or to force a President to resign, thus reversing the result of the election without recourse to the people, would create a crisis of legitimacy...
...What more...
...Meanwhile, he was doing the opposite...
...Well, enough said...
...On the contrary, the history of the Reagan Administration thus far is one of extraordinary caution, the sole exceptions being Grenada (which I approved) and Lebanon (which I didn't...
...If the President says he did not approve or know of the diversion of funds to the contras, and someone else says he did, how will we be the wiser...
...I do not say this to absolve the President...
...that "the history of the Reagan Administration thus far is one of extraordinary caution, the sole exceptions being Grenada . . . and Lebanon...
...y ou mention Reykjavik as an example of "chaos at the top...
...If there must be agreement on everything before agreement on anything, I leave you to assess the prospects...
...President, and, Ms...
...REAGAN, IRAN, AND THE PRESIDENCY An exchange between two distinguished political scientists, sparked by a pair of op-ed pieces by Mr...
...Whatever happened to the Greenpeace affair in which a life was taken...
...This will not do...
...and Lincoln left virtually the entire panoply of domestic economic policy, including vast and far-reaching measures, such as the first introduction of an income tax, entirely to Congress, refusing to get involved in the slightest way...
...Others may not know but you as a scholar do know how often Presidents, even our greatest (Jefferson and Lincoln come immediately to mind), disavowed adherence to strict canons of legality in order to preserve the essence of liberty...
...When you say that "at the moment, the economy is doing fairly well . . ." I suppose you mean that we don't have a depression going yet, or some such, but is the economy doing well with those twin deficits...
...As all students of the subject know, but are strangely reluctant to say now in regard to this episode, there is no ideal mode of organization that fits all people or Presidents or that guarantees good results or the avoidance of basic errors in all situations...
...Surely the dissenters did not lack weight within the Administration...
...Aaron Wildaysky James David Barber replies: D ear Aaron, I'm glad to get your commentary about the Reagan/Iran business...
...On the contrary, the evidence we have reveals that the internal deliberations were appropriate and that all the major players had their opportunity to say their piece...
...Our mythical analyst would undoubtedly advise that there are indeed problems with secret services that cannot quite be done without and yet are difficult to keep compatible with democratic life...
...By me too...
...When a President vigorously advocates a thrust of policy opposite to what he is actually pursuing, he rips up trust...
...It's always what's next, not what is...
...But why do you want to lay this on Ronald Reagan...
...Either the President had failed to override them before, to his regret, or, more likely, he had done so before, when horrible consequences were predicted, only to discover that things turned out all right...
...You gloss over the profound differences between the Reagan Administration and the Democratic Congress on what our foreign policy ought to be...
...Now we know better...
...An apologetic (cringing, Uriah Heepish) President would hardly be believable or followable in the future...
...and the public interest in getting the facts could well be served by three rather than four investigations...
...Or do we go on, as you do, to claim a fatal flaw...
...The result is that surveillance is inevitably diffused...
...You have interesting comments on why the teflon fell off at just this point...
...This is not done, I fear, because it would show that ours is a teapot among tempests...
...When a President makes war while pumping peace, describes his compassion while he supports butchers, trumpets a war on drugs as he cuts the budget for it, advocates a balanced budget as he knocks it farther off its balance than ever before—that kind of disharmony is what erodes trust domestically and worldwide...
...You make ac-curately the point that he has received lots of competing advice and thus "at a minimum, the President has to choose among advisers...
...Unlike Stockman, I did not go to theology school, so I am humble when it comes to deciding how long U. S. Grant should spend in purgatory, etc...
...we-the-media did not hit Ronald Reagan hard enough early enough and we told you so...
...But why would the President give so much leeway to a mere lieutenant colonel...
...is true...
...The objectives one has in mind are both long- and short-run, general and concrete...
...Like Taft and Harding, he is more dependent than any other Presidents on his inner circle...
...But I cannot imagine any other President, except possibly Harding, who would not have wanted to know that new millions were being switched into that fight...
...If he lifts a pinky, it is a nonstarter...
...Can the current premier of Israel, when he was head of its Mossad, not have known of the killing of a terrorist...
...There is in fact no evidence of this, at least none that you or others have provided...
...In any case, the theory is not that he collapses before every Tom, Dick, and Harry who walks into the Oval Office, but that he is comparatively much more attuned than other Presidents to maintaining harmony with those he sees day by day, including the Mrs...
...That Reagan is professionally responsible for the contra war, supporting the Chilean torturers, bucking up Botha, etc...
...Iwo hundred forty-one dead boys in Lebanon is quite an exception, but it seems to me that to characterize this Administration as otherwise one of "extraordinary caution" one would have to deal with quite a range of stories from Stockman on supply-side chaos, through the Falklands and Bitburg, and much else, not to mention the scores of directly and radically counterfactual statements Reagan has pronounced—with serious demeanor—on matters of high significance (and sensitivity...
...Should Reagan have known about the diversion of funds to the contras...
...To me, what was appropriate, given the result of tax cuts, was not tax reform but tax rise, for which tax reform turned out to be a convenient substitute...
...For this political failure there has been substantial political punishment...
...Nor do I think that the odds of nuclear war have greatly increased from what they have been for a very long time...
...What have liberals (who think of themselves as the party of positive government) to gain by weakening what our colleague Nelson Polsby has called The Presidential Branch...
...It is said that we had a teflon President who either mesmerized the public with nonsense syllables or was apparently so charming that nothing could stick to him...
...If things go badly, as with Iran, then bad times are here...
...Or are we to conclude that the chief of staff was not strong enough because this matter apparently did not go through him...
...He was urging the Europeans to unify around a strong policy, a hard change from what they had been doing, arguing that only if we all stick together in stonewalling ransom demands can we beat back the kidnappers...
...But I remind you that in the past the President had triumphed by going against his main advisers...
...The first two did not turn out all right for the dead and maimed and the third has put the arms race in space, despite the great majority of experts who do not ridicule it, but find it too dangerous for them to make money off of...
...One way to do this would be to strip the White House of all the accretions it has developed in past decades...
...I just wrote a lengthy chapter about the major tax reform recently passed...
...Indeed, the Administration could presumably have undertaken large-scale weapons shipments and that would not have been the same as the amount of arms that were actually sent...
...It is easy, and I think mistaken, to disparage people whose form of intelligence differs from ours...
...he has only to reaffirm his identification with the rest of us Americans by acknowledging that we-the-people had good reason to feel there was a hostage swap, even as he felt there wasn't...
...The people I know don't like to be taken for fools...
...When David Stockman tried to get the President to raise taxes, the director of the budget failed over and over and over again...
...Apparently we left our European allies out on a limb by giving them only twelve years to create sufficient conventional force...
...But there may yet be worse to come...
...Scholarship suggests not only perennial disagreement about the division of power but also that conflict over who is constitutionally empowered to act is part and parcel of disputes over what kind of action should be undertaken...
...But if they go well, doom is around the corner...
...But it was utterly false...
...Evidently, the degree of trust necessary to make the intelligence committees work has been damaged, if not lost...
...This is overheated...
...There are many examples of him speaking nonsense long before this, so I can't see the plausibility of the explanation that the people are noticing he is just starting that...
...How does one prove a negative...
...I think you trivialize the Iran thing too much...
...But none of that is solvable by restructuring alone...
...But how and, more importantly, at what cost...
...Tentatively, I think the switch from the early flock of California richies who moved into the Watergate to shape him along, to the next bunch—the pragmatists—Baker, Meese, Darman, Deaver, who helped him con Congress through the tax cuts, and on to Regan's monopoly of communication—those shifts in close advisers help to explain shifts in presidential policy...
...How often have students of policy observed that the long-run and general (Iran after Khomeini) often give way to the short-run and specific (the hostages...
...This is a mistake of the sociologically inclined political scientists who think they can organize character out of the presidency...
...But even here, sticking strictly to Iran for the moment, critics cannot show even that much...
...I read that Zbigniew Brzezinski, as NSC head, read over forms describing what the fifty or so people reporting to him were doing every day...
...It is true that the United States, like so many other nations, finds itself in the midst of vast economic change that it neither fully comprehends nor can quite figure out how to cope with...
...Alternatively, commentators could provide analysis in breadth comparing the Iran affair with other contemporary instances of executive power...
...I am impressed, as you can tell, with how many things we used to believe about administration, the presidency, foreign policy, human behavior (and more) that we go against when Presidents we do not like on wholly other grounds are involved...
...What critics must show is that this system is flawed over a large number of instances and not merely that it fell down in a particular one...
...Soon enough, calls for presidential action will be heard...
...Barber last fall...
...I think of it as "creative ferment," potentially the most creative of the Reagan Administration...
...Presumably, Presidents are not expected to know about everything, in fact most things, going on in government...
...Washington felt he had to appear to act much more forcefully than he actually could...
...Oh, well, these countries may like intrigue more than we do...
...No, ends cannot be separated from the means re-quired to accomplish them...
...Why might a President feel it desirable to override his Secretaries of State and Defense...
...that Reykjavik was no example of "chaos at the top," despite what George Shultz had to say about it at Two hundred forty-one dead boys in Lebanon is quite an exception...
...Did Congress agree in advance to Roosevelt's destroyer deal or was that not in fact, or could it not have been interpreted to be, a violation of the Neutrality Act...
...and Mr...
...Surely the time spent in surveillance of associates, aside from its denigration of their loyalty, would be a waste of presidential time...
...Wasn't aid to the contras on your list of the major controversies between the President and Congress, and an issue the polls showed had the public against him...
...Do we say this is bad judgment and pass on to the next matter...
...Probably...
...If he fails to campaign for it, or to give support in Congress, it dies...
...they are a lousy way to get information...
...In many other places, the question really is simply a matter of evidence...
...But for this President to turn over the office to Regan (in my vision of it) is dangerous, especially, interestingly, because Regan is in a different way as lacking in substantive conviction as Reagan is—a managerial analogue to the directable actor looking for a script...
...Is Reagan "easily led...
...Certainly these are the conditions under which you and I would like to work...
...Surely this visibility, as President Carter discovered, highlights the impotence of the Administration...
...pursuit: the Hippocratic oath does not say do no harm...
...If they are really prisoners of undeclared wars, why do the media keep building up their importance...
...The congressional mantra—we've always done it this way—does not move me...
...It is that kind of lying, not the interesting deviations you describe from previous Presidents, that fundamentally undercut the trust on which effective political leadership depends...
...I don't buy that...
...W hat should President Reagan do...
...American hostages obviously create problems for our people and politicians . . . from Korea to Vietnam to Daniloff in the USSR to Iran...
...And will you, my friend, justly famed as a student of political psychology, looking in the mirror, deny the element of pleasure, even glee, at Reagan's fall from grace...
...I'm not sure that's the way to go, and would welcome more thoughts of yours on it...
...Why, then, is this operation located there...
...Aphorisms abound: "The measurable drive- out the more important but impalpable...
...Except this way: Presidents are given enormous benefits of the doubt...
...I am pleased to confirm that our people have a reasonable sense of discrimination...
...Johnson's Tonkin fakery got exposed long before Congress turned against him...
...But as you suggest, there are still lots of gaps in the whole Reagan story, particularly Iranscam...
...At a bigger philosophical level, I think you and other political scientists should take a long and serious look at what you mean by "success" in politics...
...Which of us has not discovered himself swearing he would put only so much effort or money or trust into a venture only to go further and further on the grounds, sometimes valid, usually not, that doing a bit more would bring home the grand prize...
...If this sounds like Alphonse and Gaston (a President and a people groping toward mutual understanding) or Abbott and Costello (whose misunderstanding came first...
...Yet here we persist in setting up a procrustean category—at once too short and too long—so the President is condemned whichever one he chooses...
...There is nothing wrong with (and much to be said in favor of) delegation so long as it works...
...At the moment, the economy is doing fairly well and aircraft accidents are at al all-time low...
...You are right that Reagan has been subject to criticism all along, his lies and fantasies repeatedly noted in the press and, indeed, in bound books of his misstatements...
...while we claim to know that the context in which we put them is all important, people like us have an unfortunate tendency to look down on others who do not know so many essentially trivial facts and who like to get their information orally rather than in written form...
...those who ridiculed it (and Ronald Reagan, who gave it life) have had to recognize it has had far greater value than they, in their sense of superiority, ever imagined...
...That point I think is symbolized best in "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which right up until the little guyblows the whistle, all the king's men pretend they can't see his nudeness through his imaginary robes...
...Such a system would stultify every White House, not merely that of the incumbent President...
...You say that the people and the press have been too easy on this President's Since the President lives by his deep intuition of the American public, it is not inappropriate that he should suffer when this insight leaves him...
...We should hope, however, this analyst would observe that these other democratic nations are pro-leadership systems, prone to explain away rather than condemn, prone to make allowances for the demands of office, whereas the support for leadership in these United States is wafer-thin...
...Let St...
...As above, structure won't do the job...
...Over a wide range of issues, I think the accusation does not stand up...
...Perhaps...
...You (plural) are trying to have it both ways...
...But if it is the case that Reagan was genuinely engaged in it, even if he did not, as you say, deal with the details, that is going to be a very interesting story, particularly if your facts show him directing the show in person...
...It feels like a pretty speedy expression of thoughts you have been mulling for some time, so it may be some of our differences are merely literary angle problems, as when I call the Middle East "the most sensitive area" of Reagan's foreign policy and you think I mean most important...
...Would we say, then, that the policy objective was great but its implementation left something to be desired...
...As an observer of a wide range of policies, I think that broad, delegation does work for this President most of the time, and that is all one can ask of any procedure...
...Stand firm, he said...
...The flipside of the coin is that the President was apparently making sense to the people before, but I hear very little about this...
...Easy...
...we also know that they are retrospectively rationalized to suit our future behavior...
...Hence the policy, the means and ends taken together, is wrong...
...T he other day on the radio, I heard a local congresswoman, Barbara Boxer, say that Congress must act to assure that no illegality ever occurs again in the White House...
...Were we to take a more dispassionate view, difficult as that appears to be, we would say that Presidents should choose advisory systems that both suit their own needs and that will give them better results over the largest number of instances...
...But we have other evidence on other matters...
...The point is that a number of your judgments on this business lean hard against the empirical observations of most others, before and after the revelations, and thus would depend on startling new discoveries—sure to make the front page of the New York Times—about the operations of Reagan's regime...
...The few who slipped by Regan (e.g., 011ie North) seem (only that) to have had quite an impact on Reagan...
...In any event, Presidents who acted otherwise have not, by and large, fared too well...
...Insofar as we know, the Secretaries of State and Defense were opposed to this Iranian venture while the Attorney General and the Director of Intelligence were in favor...
...You're right that none of us can achieve "total harmony between words and deeds," but most of us blunder along with the words and deeds pointing in roughly the same direction...
...Is there, then, more than one Reagan...
...Other problems are fascinatingly empirical...
...To say that Iranscam is "a small temporary problem" seems to me already run over by the facts...
...Must he always be right...
...The President thought of arms for hostages as a partial retreat from a policy that otherwise stood in force...
...While this analysis does not excuse, it does make explicable the self-flagellation for what, in a comparative or historical sense, so far as we know now, is pretty small potatoes...
...But when informing others becomes the equivalent of being unable to undertake a policy, the stage for distrust is already set...
...that must be why it cannot quite make it past a weekend in the British media...
...Peter judge this "Man of God," as Larry Speakes calls him...
...When one reads in the funny papers that the President either is lying or ignorant, the same effect is secured: whatever we find out, he is damned...
...Yet I keep hearing portents of disaster...
...Or the stories about the efforts of MI5 to destabilize the Wilson Labour government...
...True, he does not deal with "details," having Darman and Baker to do that for him, but at every strategic step, without which there would be no reform—insisting on revenue neutrality, trading higher effective taxes on business for lower individual rates—Ronald Reagan was the creative force...
...A major reason we have security leaks, I think, is that we classify far too many things and require clearances for far too many people...
...Endless hearings have begun to fray everyone's nerves...
...Obviously, self-protection is not the main thing in the President's mind...
...It's hard for me to believe you think the President should not or need not have known about the diversion of funds to the contras...
...My policy design was good, he keeps saying, but its execution was flawed...
...The NSC was involved...
...And the military significance of the arms shipments was small...
...Building on success—eight years as governor, six years as President—the President evidently had confidence not only *in what he was doing but in the advisory system that was helping him do it...
...I don't agree...
...the best our government has to offer, Paul Nitze, was there along with other knowledgeable and talented individuals...
...Or would he never send our boys to war...
...Yet, if an action were left out, how would he have known...
...Should we say that an advisory system that falls down badly in one case is to be scrapped even though it served this President well over a larger number of cases...
...Yet I still think the President should say what the American people believe, knowing also that they believe him to be human, i.e., flawed, desiring to serve his country, yet capable of error...
...Is the messenger being blamed for the bad news...
...Can you say that you thought that when Ronald Reagan became President you would be in the seventh year of his presidency and have only to report these two minor military ventures...
...If a little is the same as a lot, we lose an importantsense of discrimination...
...The problem is partly facts, but more using the sense they should get from observing the actualities of characters in the Presidency to assess characters who want to get in there...
...Running for President and being President are now separate ball games I'm not into rating Presidents as humans but as Presidents...
...But I don't think you will find in my blatherings statements which contradict any of that...
...Indeed, when the economists of the nation were lined up insisting that the President abandon his most important policy, he consistently and persistently refused...
...Journalists claim not to want to be psychologists as they go about psychologizing every day...
...Because this is America, where strict adherence to hierarchy is not the norm, we escape the sclerosis that affects gerontocracies...
...Indeed, what you are actually urging, given the disposition of opinion in Congress, is that the President not do what congressmen dislike, which would give him no foreign policy at all...
...It used to be that good executives It seems to me that you are setting up the President so he cannot come out well...
...Are we to conclude from this accusation that the problem was that everything had to go through a single person...
...Watergate in its time was properly regarded as an aberration...
...How much less likely, then, would an unauthorized action, such as fund diversion, come to presidential attention...
...I try to use language fairly precisely, so I have no trouble at all pledging allegiance to many of your statements, such as that "there is no ideal mode of organizationthat fits all people or Presidents or that guarantees good results or the avoidance of basic errors in all situations," and that Presidents should not get lost in detail and that a short agenda is a good presidential idea, and that we need a strong President (provided he's good) and that other Presidents have bent the law and that there is more to knowledge than facts, etc...
...The same charge surfaced there...
...alas, the only hitch would be that this requires destroying its population...
...that's a dimension I don't get into...
...The President came on loud and clear to the nation and, even more important, to the world: no deals with terrorists...
...So what went wrong...
...I'm not into rating Presidents as humans but as Presidents...
...In sum, I still don't think that the short-answer theory of the presidency—he who scores highest would be best—is the right one...
...Neither did Socrates...
...This critic of Reagan, who has been such through all those years when political science conferences one after another puffed him up, this one is not laughing...
...Why, then, do we hear that the White House should be full of people constantly reporting to the chief, looking back to see who is gaining on them...
...The latest This Constitution cites Jefferson's justification for condoning serious extra-legal action done to curtail Aaron Burr's activities: "To lose our country by scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself with life, liberty, and property . . . thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means...
...that is exactly what gives this episode its farce-like appearance...
...Without Reagan, there is no reform...
...None of them had an easy time with Congress on foreign policy...
...The President undertook an action that, when it became known, would be rejected by the vast majority of the citizenry as well as political elites...
...This one is not out with "I told you so...
...Hamstringing our common heritage, the presidency, is not, I think, a worthy legacy...
...Is the President, as you and so many others say, "disengaged...
...Maybe I've got your message wrong...
...The President does not have to apologize for being human...
...I say "nothing" partly because he has done and said most of what can be done and said, partly because anything he says will be interpreted unfavorably by some, and partly because he cannot be conclusive about the contra affair...
...Because competent people were taking care of it...
...He is a professional politician and public official responsible for his actions...
...Because it wasn't much money...
...If it breaks down, however, is one better off shoring it up or engaging in detailed supervision...
...I have said nothing about the diversion of funds because sufficient facts are not yet evident...
...Jefferson had to pretend to be doing nothing while doinga great deal...
...something terribly wrong with the chief of staff system in the White House...
...Need I remind you, as a student of the presidency, that most of these units have been put there at the insistence of Congress, including, as I recall, the NSC...
...But when there is utter dissensus, as in Central America, one finds quite the opposite...
...Rather, believing hewould save the nation much greater difficulty should the Iranian regime collapse and Communist elements take over, the President wished to anticipate this danger by taking preemptive action...
...Or should the President have tapped their phones...
...It is judgments about those responsibilities which lead to the conclusion that he should not have been President, not judgments about his personal morals...
...But I do not think you make a case that the President's personality or organizational apparatus is fatally flawed...
...It depends on a President who is curious and realistic, neither of which this one is...
...I think I have been through every significant Reagan biography and have tried to keep up with the journalism on him...
...You write further that "major military moves were undertaken without even the obviously appropriate deliberations...
...We should not exchange a small temporary problem for a large permanent one...
...In a system loaded against leadership, I think Reagan is right...
...Media, don't report it again and again and again...
...D ear Dave, In our local paper I read that the President is easily led...
...In the normal course of events, we speak of motives invariably being mixed...
...A reasonable conclusion would be that when the President speaks sense to the people they go along with him, and when he appears to speak nonsense, 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 whether this is about the Daniloff swap or the Iranian swap of arms for hostages, the people reject what they are being told...
...I do look forward to what you will write about tax reform...
...I will wait for further information before making up my mind on the President's part, if any, direct or indirect, in the funds transfer...
...Those and similar statements are commonsensical thoughts worth stating again, because people tend to forget them in the hurly-burly of the current daily revelations...
...After all, we did not have lightweights there...
...first, Don Regan after his spin succeeded, and even Henry Kissinger—but the question is what actually happened there, not some theoretical judgment...
...Now that the Reagan tide has turned, it is your turn to lean against it, as I have been leaning from the start...
...How about the White House...
...For most of Reagan's time, a good number of political scientists who found his policies substantively cruel and idiotic nevertheless lauded his success in getting them through...
...Though no one intends to do so, the result is to condemn Presidents either for weakness or recklessness (poor Jimmy Carter got it both ways...
...When there is such agreement, as in regard to the Philippines, then you do find them working together...
...The President thought he was acting in the national interest...
...Indeed, this episode has all the hallmarks of classical planning...
...Repeatedly we are told that there is Aaron Wildaysky is professor of political science and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley...
...You're right that there is no one ideal staff system—I agree (and have so written...
...While I am not among those who think readily of moderates in the Iranian administration, a dispassionate observer would point out that the Israelis, who are known for hard-headed thinking, and who are certainly in touch with the minute facts regarding these matters, thought this a good idea...
...James David Barber is professor of political science at Duke University...
...I got that into print on his Inauguration Day in the Washington Post and in a long chapter in PC III in 1985 [The Presidential Character, 3rd edition, Prentice-Hall, 1985...
...A more powerful explanation, I suspect, is that denigration of one major national institution exacts a price by a loss of trust in others...
...Of course, one can trivialize the matter by saying that Presidents should know about all illegal actions...
...You speak of ". . . wild risk taking by Reagan executives...
...You write that Reagan is obviously not a man in charge: ". . . in the face of his own revelations that he did not know what his National Security Council was up to regarding the most sensitive area of his entire foreign policy...
...Evidently we cannot countenance illegality...
...W hat I learn again from all this is the profound necessity of choosing the right President in the first place...
...As for the punishment angle, as to whether Reagan has been substantially punished ("suffered enough...
...You and I are fact-mongers...
...But as my mind searches for parallels, I am less inclined to be censorious...
...Especially not in the White House...
...The reaction to SDI tells us something else that is wellto keep in mind...
...He has taken full responsibility without admitting that the Iran policy was wrong...
...Then, in a paradigmatic shift of focus, suddenly everybody notices—and remembers that he was raw naked before, too...
...The President has to admit that, though he didn't start out to make a swap, he understands that is what his Administration ended up doing and looking to its people like it was doing...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987...
...The failure in Iran is political...
...One thing and nothing...
...Carter did get too immersed in detail...
...Recently I have been working with a graduate student on early American Presidents from Washington through Lincoln...
...H ow did the President and his NSC staff get sucked ever deeper into this morass...
...The most powerful explanation for the public lashing out in two directions simultaneously is that people feel they have been let down twice, once by their President trading with the enemy, and again by the media taking so much pleasure in it...
...Do you teach your students that Presidents and Congresses agree on who has the power to do what...
...If the government is then not allowed to do what is required to get them back—ransom them or invade the offending nation or take hostages of our own—why are their families given so much publicity, thus suggesting action ought to be taken...
...Absent something splendid to do beyond what has been done, with each cure far worse than the disease, we have our negative clue: adopt the policy version of the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm...
...Between the President's review panel, the special prosecutor, and Congress, a joint committee would have been more than enough...
...I will be very surprised, however, if your views on the following are ever confirmed by evidence: •that "the invasion of Grenada, the urging, given the in Congress, is that the congressmen dislike, no foreign policy at all...
...Now there is a serious matter...
...On Congress's role in recovery, I'm thinking more and more that we need to move toward closer White House-Congress cooperative policy-making, to get past the dangers of isolated Presidents going bananas...
...Obviously, the more such operations are located outside the executive office, especially the inner sanctum of the White House, the easier it is for the President to disavow them...
...Or is he responsible for AIDS too...
...At a minimum, the President had to choose among advisers...
...At long last, many in the media appear to be saying, everything we have been trying to tell you dim-witted, slow-learning boobus Americanus all along—your President is an idiot—is now confirmed...
...I agree with your other article that "Human Rights Violations Continue to Spread Throughout the World...
...It seems to me that you are setting up the President so he cannot come out well...
...How much worse it would be for chief executives to follow their people around (or have them followed...
...What should be done...
...But my theory is that the passive/positive is most likely to go along with those he is closest to—physically—day by day...
...The only way to assure that an institution will do no harm is to render it powerless...
...Perhaps the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya, and the Strategic Defense Initiative fit that mold...
...My point, rather, is that the errors in regard to Iran are not extraordinary, revealing of exceptional incapacity, but of the garden variety by which the high and mighty, as well as the rest of us, are brought low...
...As his wife and many others have said, he does not like conflict up close...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
