For the Record / Speaking Out
Regan, Donald T. & Speakes, Larry
In a perverse way, these books are reassuring. If things are as bad at the White House as Don Regan and Larry Speakes claim, it's amazing the Reagan presidency didn't collapse years ago. But the...
...T he third shortcoming is Nancy 1 Reagan, who had a free rein and may still...
...I doubt it...
...This will be...
...son Reagan didn't manage is that he was lazy and didn't think it was as much fun as making speeches or lolly-gagging around the West Wing...
...Regan says it amounts to a "guesswork presidency...
...These how history regards Reagan...
...He got away with it, but he could have done better...
...Reagan, for sure...
...The national security adviser didn't report to the President through him...
...Imagine if he'd mastered the intricacies of nuclear arms negotiations...
...Among Buchanan's sins was "always pushing right-wing ideologues to assume more and more of the speechwriting duties...
...the tidbits to know there were weird She leaned on Speakes, Deaver, Regan, goings-on in the Reagan White House...
...She didn't want her husband associated with too many unfashionable conservative positions, like opposition to abortion or the belief that the Soviet Union is an "evil empire...
...They're bound to taint want to fire Regan as chief of staff, but the public's view of Reagan and his re-she did...
...True, there's a tradeoff, but did it require that Reagan abandon the management side entirely in order to be a magnetic national leader...
...Imagine if Reagan had taken an interest in how his policies were being implemented...
...But the opposite happened: Reagan is successful...
...He says "a conservative with intelligence" is "a rare species...
...David Stockman was free to blab to William Greider, impugning Reagan's policies, without losing his job...
...His breathtaking indifference to governing held him back...
...All of them were too afraid of her The books will also marginally affect to complain to the President...
...And in some cases, he'd never heard of them until he was well into his second term...
...Regan argues repeatedly—and Speakes backs him up—that he wasn't the boss of Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, and 011ie North...
...Don't count on it...
...Improvement in all of them might have made him a great President...
...Since Reagan imposed no discipline on his subordinates when they were in his administration, he certainly couldn't once they'd left...
...Reagan stressed the inspirational side of the job, what Regan calls "the outer presidency," moving people and altering the Zeitgeist...
...They also confirm that graded too much, but Reagan himself she's had an enormous influence...
...If Jimmy Carter could do all these things, so could Ronald Reagan...
...But there's a flaw in this reasoning...
...In other words, they winged it...
...Regan says he was "flying by the seat of my pants" as treasury secretary for four years...
...Her claim was always that she was protecting her husband, checking up to see whether he was being overworked or embarrassed...
...One fellow who'd never have gotten a job if Reagan paid attention to hiring and firing is Speakes...
...Day proclamation, perhaps the only worthwhile step Barnett ever took...
...He wouldn't have had to keep tabs on the White House tennis courts, after all, just the National Security Council staff...
...That made Rea- gime...
...And who was the better President...
...Rigorous management had nothing to do with the President's success...
...Speakes notes that Allen, Reagan's first national security adviser, "was the first person in the Reagan Administration to be hounded out of office by the press...
...He calls Weinberger ("Whiny") one of the worst officials in Reagan's Cabinet...
...Imagine if he'd practiced and practiced and transformed himself into an answer machine at press conferences...
...James Watt, Ray Donovan, Richard Darman, Ed Rollins, and Pat Buchanan could tell a lot of wild and spicy tales out of school, but haven't...
...At Cabinet meetings, officials openly contradicted Reagan's "ideas and promises," says Regan, and the President seldom spoke up and never chastised them...
...She intervened in press affairs, in policy matters, in personnel, in scheduling...
...It was absent...
...In his waning days in the White House, Reagan finds himself surrounded by senior aides who are strangers...
...In 1985, State Department officials agreed to cut off aid to the mujahedeen once Soviet troops began pulling out of Afghanistan, even if the Soviets continued to aid the puppet Afghan government...
...She forces it on ev- after official and gave her astrologer a eryone at the White House, and now veto over his schedule...
...charge guy...
...Given Reagan's airy, no-hands approach to the presidency, this must mean that his conservative policies had an awful lot of merit...
...The astrology business, while nothing to sneer at, was the least of the problem...
...By then, Speakes had been hired as deputy press secretary...
...He didn't Plenty, I think...
...Of course not...
...The president never told me what he believed or what he wanted to accomplish in the field of economics...
...Aides are given extraordinary latitude...
...These made for awkward moments with her socialite friends...
...Too many two books reinforce the notion that juicy details are now on the record to Nancy is out of control, what Regan be ignored by historians...
...But hardly the last, and Reagan acquiesced each time...
...Improvement in any of them would have made Reagan a better President...
...Orders and instructions don't often come from the President...
...He says Buchanan "caused more trouble in only two years than anyone else who worked closely with Reagan during the first six years...
...People won't conclude suddenly gan look like a marshmallow...
...But they'll remember enough of came to Nancy's unrelenting activity...
...If you don't provide loyalty down, you can't expect loyalty up...
...Ten weeks later, he became chief spokesman when Jim Brady was shot during the assassination attempt on Reagan...
...That's hairsplitting...
...Speakes is no liberal, but he's not a Reaganite conservative either...
...He admits to being on the make in 1980, hoping to be White House press secretary to any Republican who won...
...In his first term, Reagan had blithely acceded to the appointment of Baker as national security adviser, only to abrogate his decision when Caspar Weinberger, Bill Casey, Bill Clark, and Jeane Kirkpatrick objected...
...The arms sales might have gone through, but not the diversion of money to the contras...
...Carter emphasized day-to-day activism in running the government...
...I had to figure these things out like any other American, by studying his speeches and reading the newspapers...
...pear henpecked and weak...
...Reagan simply took the course of least resistance...
...Reagan knew practically none of them before he became President...
...EvFOR THE RECORD: FROM WALL STREET TO WASHINGTON Donald T. Regan/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$21.95 SPEAKING OUT: INSIDE THE REAGAN WHITE HOUSE Larry Speakes with Robert Pack Charles Scribner's Sons/$19.95 Fred Barnes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 43 erything she did made her husband ap- What's the impact of these books...
...The President, says Regan, "trusted his lieutenants to act on his intentions, rather than his spoken instructions...
...Nancy's machinations backfired...
...The Reagan calls "the random factor" in the Ad- Administration may not be down-ministration...
...I'll go along with that, but I think there were several other things missing—discipline and accountability, to name two...
...Speakes thinks the invasion of Grenada "could have been as big a public relations disaster for the Reagan Administration as the Iran-contra arms deal became three years later...
...The first is Reagan's utter indifference to personnel...
...This wasn't what Reagan wanted, but it was the kind of result his management style inevitably produced...
...The second shortcoming is Reagan'srefusal to take charge of the White House...
...That he's a takethe whole world knows...
...Is Speakes really what Reagan wanted in a press secretary...
...I think she was also protecting herself...
...Reagan is a success in spite of himself...
...The way to think about Reagan, I believe, is not how well he's done, but how much better his presidency might have been...
...When he got wind of a private session between Reagan and, say, Clark, Baker would find out what the subject was...
...Baker made sure he did during Reagan's first term...
...Regan was happy but nonetheless appalled that the President almost instantly, and without a second thought, approved the job swap between Regan and James Baker in 1985...
...To me, the surprise is not that so many kiss-andtell books have been written, but so few...
...But that Reagan was another failed Presimostly he was out of the loop when it dent...
...But Reagan was too detached to insist on anyone else...
...If he had, there'd have been no Iran-contra, or at least it would have been less damaging...
...In an editorial on the kiss-and-tell books about the Reagan White House, the Wall Street Journal declared that the missing ingredient in the Administration is loyalty...
...The result is weak loyalty to Reagan—and from him...
...But imagine what might have happened if he'd actually run the White House, instead of leaving everything to folks he barely knew, played no role in hiring, and declined to give instructions to...
...Reagan should have taken the trouble to see that his chief of staff in the second term was doing the same...
...She prevailed...
...Appointees being pulled down by "the Beltway maw," from Richard Allen to 011ie North, were not defended...
...Speakes says Jack Kemp is a pest...
...The reaFred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...A little bit of Carter, or Nixon, or even Ford, would have made Reagan a more effective President...
...As a student at the University of Mississippi, he criticized Governor Ross Barnett for refusing to sign a U.N...
...His achievements—deep tax cuts, a military buildup, the Reagan Doctrine, the Strategic Defense Initiative, sustained economic growth without inflation, virtually full employment—overshadow the one glaring disaster of his administration, the Iran-contra affair...
...rr he books by Regan, who was treasury secretary and White House chief of staff, and Speakes, Reagan's chief spokesman for six years, underscore three shortcomings in Reagan's style...
...Except for a brief encounter during the 1976 presidential campaign, Speakes hadn't met Reagan until January 19, 1981, the day before Reagan took office...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...
...The argument Reagan apologists have made is that there's a tradeoff involved...
...He gushes that "the secretary of defense of my dreams would have been Lee Iacocca," probably the most overrated man in the Western world...
...I don't think SO...
...Is it too much to ask for Reagan to satisfy himself that his chief of staff is really in charge...
...Speakes cites Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter of dazzling talent, as an example...
...Regan should have known what the NSC staff was up to...
...What can historians say about would be fine if she limited her advice a President who let his wife fire official to Reagan alone...
...And Reagan's "finest hour," according to Speakes, was when he nudged Ferdinand Marcos out as president of the Philippines...
...So the Iran-contra mess wasn't in any way his fault, despite what the Tower Commission said...
Vol. 21 • July 1988 • No. 7
