Thou Shalt Not Commit Conservatism
Barnes, Fred
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 21, NO. 2 / FEBRUARY 1988 Fred Barnes THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT CONSERVATISM How Nancy and Mike kept the White House safe from the right. A t a nationally televised...
...He calls Buchanan "a tough, talented, outspoken wordsmith, a purist when it comes to the conservative faith, far enough to the right that he considers school lunches a subversive plot...
...She's never thought much of Meese...
...Yet he goes on to describe in detail how Nancy intruded in both policy and personnel matters...
...He's got power, and they relish sharing it with him...
...Reagan "knew how to delegate and when to monitor," says Bell...
...He saw no hope in any policy that relied on trusting the Russians, argued against any attempt to improve that relationship, and did what he could to slow it down," writes Deaver...
...Their worst fear was being realized, an unscripted Reagan holding forth on live TV...
...Certainly James Baker III was as chief of staff from 1981 to 1985...
...When she does, it is not by wearing him down but by usually being on the right side of an issue...
...Deaver marvels at Nancy's method...
...Nonetheless I was apprehensive about the ideologues I had agreed to, for I realized I was bringing potential trouble into ED," he says...
...He spent a whole weekend at Katharine Graham's place on Martha's Vineyard, where he met Jackie Onassis (a "flirt" and a "world-class charmer...
...Despite the long service, he fails to understand that ideological commitment is a big part of Reagan's appeal...
...They see him as an innocent who must be protected from himself and from right-wing advisers, what few there are...
...Three things do...
...What produces this strange situation, a movement conservative with a non-conservative circle of advisers...
...eaver is a classic of the type...
...I forget exactly what Reagan said...
...Second, there's Nancy Reagan...
...Worse still, they leaked to the press that Bell wasn't getting his choices approved at the White House...
...In his book, Deaver doesn't bother to mention the President's conservative policies, except those that he thinks went too far...
...Obviously power has something to do with this...
...Feel free, the President said...
...She does not set policy or attend Cabinet meetings or promote her own agenda...
...Bell says he sent his resignation to the President by special courier...
...rin errel Bell, who was Education Secretary from 1981 to 1985, is not a Nancy idolator, but he matches Deaver in his disregard for Reagan the conservative...
...Meese, Deaver writes, "devoted most of his public life to Ronald Reagan and never really understood his strengths and weaknesses...
...After Reagan's re-election, Bell was surprised to discover that his department would not be spared further retrenchment...
...At the last minute, Meese and William Clark, the departing national security adviser, intervened, and Reagan stopped the Baker-Deaver move as blithely as he'd initially approved it...
...And that exhausts the list...
...Reagan didn't know Bell before appointing him...
...In his new book, Behind the Scenes,' Deaver explains that Clark was obsessed with the Soviet Union...
...I never heard a word...
...In his book, he recounts paranoid delusions about them...
...This was doubly bad for Deaver...
...He concludes that "we need more artistic people in government service...
...You can make the case that Reagan got what he deserved in Bell...
...It was clear there was a deliberate movement under way to destroy my credibility...
...They see him as a hot political property whose views can and should be pushed aside in favor of their own...
...Worse, they prevented him from filling the major positions at the Education Department with non-conservatives...
...And he might candidly express his beliefs—commit conservatism, in other words...
...As deputy White House chief of staff, Deaver got invited to chic parties...
...Some of the other senior aides are effective political operatives...
...Bell congratulates himself for compromising on appointments, agreeing to bring in some conservatives in exchange for White House approval of some of his choices...
...Then they tried Hanna Gray, the president of the University of 'The Free Press, $19.95...
...Not many people, says Deaver, "knew how close she was to the writer Truman Capote...
...To him, conservatives serving under the most conservative President in at least a half-century represented trouble...
...But now Reagan was in uncharted territory...
...In contrast, Deaver gratuitously zings Pat Buchanan...
...But that's as far as Bell goes...
...Of course, she never swings into action"unless there is a controversy around him, or he needs to be convinced that an action is unavoidable...
...He gives the speeches after (if all goes well) they formulate the policies...
...She once arranged to have Meese get Capote out of jail in California, where he'd been arrested for disorderly conduct...
...He's a nice man who is popular with folks, but he's untutored...
...They shared horror stories about the rest of us, and I knew they had labeled me philosophically unfit for a high-level position from the day my appointment was announced...
...She felt strongly that it was not only in the interest of world peace but the correct move politically...
...But they aren't conservatives, and this makes them leery of Reagan's conservatism...
...Bell was thunderstruck at the thought that Reagan harbored a few conservative goals after four years in Washington...
...When you don't give a hoot about who works for you, you wind up with people who don't give a hoot about your policies...
...He records disapprovingly Reagan's comment that she was an unrepentant Stalinist...
...He is oblivious to Reagan's political background in the conservative movement and to the circumstances that brought about his election...
...First, there is Reagan's extraordinarily lackadaisical attitude toward personnel matters...
...Meese and Reagan's transition officials first offered the education post to John Silber, the president of Boston University...
...Sure, there are always a few conservatives around...
...In 1985, the President didn't bat an eye when Baker, still chief of staff, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan came to him with a plan to switch jobs...
...His set answer had been fine...
...Chicago, who wasn't interested...
...He writes that it was important to keep Buchanan "the hell out" of the flap over Reagan's visit to Bitburg cemetery in Germany...
...No one telephoned...
...And, in fact, Bell was the fourth choice for the job...
...But that's another story...
...When Bill went to Nancy, and was told point-blank that I stood with her, he decided it was time to go home...
...On top of all this, he went to dinner at the home of novelist William Styron ("a 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 compelling fellow...
...In the first term, there were Edwin Meese, who served as White House counselor and spent considerable time in the Oval Office, and Lyn Nofziger...
...The President used the issue of educational reform to help win a second term, but still wanted to pare spending and eliminate the Education Department...
...Let the record show that she acted, when she acted, only to protect the president...
...A press release announcing this change was written...
...One of Deaver's aims in writing the book, Deaver says, was "to debunk the myths about the iron matron, in the designer gown, who orchestrated her husband's political career...
...She "lobbied the president" not only "to soften his line on the Soviet Union," but also to cut military spending and "not to push Star Wars at the expense of the poor and dispossessed...
...But as he yakked on I remember glancing to the back of the East Room and spotting several White House aides...
...Naturally, he felt equally hostile to the conservative themes on which Reagan has campaigned...
...After the 1980 election, Reagan intended to make Meese his chief of staff, but Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...In the second term, Patrick Buchanan was around for two years as communications chief...
...Maybe not, "but once into an issue, she was like a dog with a bone," according to Deaver...
...He simply doesn't care much who works for him...
...Their respect for Reagan is minimal...
...They had looks of sheer terror on their faces...
...They'd rehearsed that...
...He had a laid-back style, but this did not mean he was not effective...
...She was also instrumental in the sackings of Richard Allen and his successor, Clark, as national security advisers, and Interior Secretary James Watt...
...So, says Deaver, "she will wage a quiet campaign, planting a thought, recruiting others of us to push it along, making a case: Foreign policy will be hurt . . . our allies will be let down...
...Like Deaver, she "is not uncomfortable among free spirits and intellectuals . . . she enjoys reaching out to new people of whatever political coloring...
...She would buttonhole George Shultz, Bud McFarlane, and others, to be sure that they were moving toward that goal...
...He bitterly opposed spending cuts in education programs...
...He was too busy...
...While Reagan has homebody tendencies, preferring to put on his pajamas early in the evening and watch TV, "Nancy is more aware of the finer things and of the subtleties of human nature...
...After economist Thomas Sowell rebuffed an overture, Reagan's aides turned to Bell, who had been recommended by Richard Wirthlin, the pollster...
...Third, non-conservatives—or pragmatists as they are known in Washington—love to work for Reagan...
...Reagan does not need anyone to the right of him," says Deaver...
...Bell thinks the only reason Reagan might harbor a conservative thought is that Meese or David Stockman or some other right-wing adviser put it in his head...
...She and Deaver "became a team, united by our shared belief that Reagan needed to be protected, whether he wanted it or not...
...Besides, Meese "refused to play the Washington game, could not or would not take the press into his confidence, and would, as a matter of loyalty or conviction, sit there and deny something he knew to be true...
...If you think that means the conservative side, guess again...
...It was Nancy who pushed everybody on the Geneva summit [in 1985...
...Oddly enough, Reagan has surrounded himself in the White House with senior aides who regard his conservative views as a source of trouble, not popularity...
...He quit...
...And so is Tom Griscom, the current communications czar...
...She favored a diplomatic solution in Nicaragua and opposed his trip to Bit-burg...
...He felt betrayed . . . when Nancy and I were able to persuade the President to tone down the 'Evil Empire language Clark had favored...
...She cares enormously about who advises her husband, and serious conservatives give her the willies...
...Deaver calls himself a "conventional conservative," but you'd never know it from his advice...
...Now, the conservatives-in-residence are domestic advisers Gary Bauer and Kenneth Cribb...
...In 1983, he readily agreed to let Baker shift to national security adviser and have Michael K. Deaver take over as chief of staff...
...Fortunately for her, there always seems to be a controversy...
...The group was like a secret society," he says...
...He wasn't sold on Reagan's goal of eliminating the Department of Education—he had testified publicly in favor of creating it a few years earlier—but he agreed to go along...
...Morrow, $17.95...
...Bell was superintendent of higher education in Utah at the time, a functionary in the education establishment...
...Indeed, it enabled him to be effective...
...He lost a good job that would have kept him from leaving the White House, becoming a lobbyist, and getting convicted on three counts of perjury...
...As luck would have it, Deaver says, "Nancy wins most of the time...
...It turns out that Reagan is as uninterested in who leaves among his advisers as he is in who shows up...
...Well, at least she found some use for Meese...
...He went to work for Reagan shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 and stayed with him until 1985...
...In Washington, Bell devoted his days to battling Meese, Stockman, and other conservatives...
...They are "zealots," "extremists," "ultraconservatives," "the extreme right faction," and so on...
...Deaver found a soulmate not in Ronald Reagan, but in Nancy...
...They looked after each other...
...She just didn't give up...
...And she "knows" it wouldn't work for her to demand someone's dismissal...
...In The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet Memoir,' he tosses off superficial praise of the President...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 15...
...Reagan had betrayed him, he says...
...Reagan's conservatism is no impediment to them...
...He uses all the buzzwords to tar them...
...At one, he took a shine to Lillian Hellman, the playwright...
...was easily persuaded to install Baker instead, though Baker had been the campaign manager for his only serious foe for the Republican nomination, George Bush...
...Three days later the president announced to the press that I had resigned for personal reasons...
...He simply doesn't care much who works for him...
...A t a nationally televised press conference during his first term, President Reagan finished a pat answer to a question, paused a moment, then kept on talking...
...He urged Reagan to take a softer line toward the Soviet Union and not get too involved with the Nicaraguan contras...
...They are often eccentric, but their virtue is that, unlike generals, they want to blow up only themselves...
...And he is critical of Reagan's conservative advisers...
...First, there is Reagan's extraordinarily lackadaisical attitude toward personnel matters...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
