The Ghost of Administrations Past
FRUM, DAVID
The Ghost of Administrations Past George W. Bush will not be the second coming of Gerald Ford. BY DAVID FRUM Those long feature columns on the left and right side of the Wall Street Journal's...
...Ford had better instincts than he is usually given credit for: He wanted to free energy prices, control government spending, and aid the anti-Communists in Angola...
...Meese, Kirkpatrick vs...
...The short answer is that those old number twos have either wandered off to the private sector for keeps or else left government on terms that make it impossible for them to return...
...But there's another, and it is one that conservatives ought to keep in mind before getting unduly optimistic or unduly pessimistic about the staffing of the incoming administration: The Reagan service medal is not necessarily a badge of merit...
...The incoming secretary of agriculture held the number two position in the department during the presidency of Bush's father...
...That's one answer to the question, Where are the Reaganites...
...it's the Reaganite Powell who has in the past been most cautious...
...If the idea of Bush as Ford II is so misplaced, why is it getting so much traction...
...Washington journalists seem to be evaluating the Bush administration in the same light-hearted spirit...
...A third, treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget...
...It's the Ford legacies, Cheney and Rumsfeld, who are likely to be the most robust members of the Bush foreign policy team...
...interior secretary Gale Norton worked as a lawyer in the interior department...
...Perhaps because it is a roundabout way to phrase a stronger allegation: that Bush's appointments have broken faith with the Republican party's Reaganite inheritance...
...However, the casting of Bush II as Ford II overlooks the overwhelming number of cabinet and cabinet-level nominees with no connection to Gerald Ford at all...
...himself quipped that he was a Ford, not a Lincoln...
...Anne Burford and Ed Meese— the list goes on...
...Burt, Stockman vs...
...You've revived an old leader...
...It is, as Christopher Wren said of his own legacy, all around us...
...on this slight base has been erected a towering structure of pun-ditry to the effect that the Bush administration represents the second coming of Gerald Ford...
...concessions to the liberal wing of the Republican party like health and human services secretary Richard Schweiker...
...trade representative Bob Zoellick was a deputy assistant secretary of the treasury...
...Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman observed more brutally that it would be Ford's ultimate destiny to vex generations of schoolchildren yet unborn with the question whether it was he or Martin Van Buren who fought the French and Indian War...
...The Reagan administration was an unusually fractious one...
...It ignores the startling difference between the circumstances of the mid-1970s (rampaging Soviets, inflation, unemployment, energy shocks, and huge Democratic majorities in Congress) and those prevailing now...
...BY DAVID FRUM Those long feature columns on the left and right side of the Wall Street Journal's front page are known inside the paper as "leaders...
...Only one of Bush's appointees, Colin Powell, held a senior job in the Reagan administration...
...Weinberger, Darman vs...
...As for Ford, if everyone in his administration had served the nation as redoubtably as Rumsfeld and Cheney, that administration would have bequeathed a record of which conservatives and Americans could be more proud...
...Much of its history can be told in terms of its legendary feuds: Baker vs...
...Michael Deaver and Lyn Nofziger prosecuted for their lobbying...
...people of self-destructive temperaments like Ed Meese and Al Haig...
...On spending, Paul O'Neill may yet turn out to have a stiffer spine than some of the supply-siders who mistrust him...
...Reagan's legacy isn't found in the resumes of the people who served him...
...Ford was not a success in office, and the people who draw comparisons between him and Bush mean the latter no compliment...
...For many years, reporters at the Journal joked that if you had a fact, you had a leader, and if you had two facts, you had two leaders...
...There's a Washington saying that personnel is policy...
...Reagan-vintage number forty-threes are drawing top jobs...
...By January 1989, the Reagan administration looked like a British regiment returning from the Somme: limping, bloodied, missing half its officers...
...Why not Reagan-vintage number twos...
...everybody...
...It's the philosophy of the president, the themes of his campaign, the mandate he won, as much as the backgrounds of his staff and officials, that determine the character of his administration...
...ditto for the incoming secretary of veterans' affairs...
...In those respects, Bush offers a complex and unique mix of reasons for hope and for worry...
...But he was never the man for the job...
...Two members of the administration held senior posts in the Ford administration: Dick Cheney was chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld was secretary of defense...
...What's missing is the broad band of people in the middle...
...More than in any previous administration, the people who served in Reagan's were wounded and scarred by the use of ethics accusations as a weapon: Think of Richard Allen resigning because he forgot a gift watch in his office safe...
...He David Frum is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...That may also prove true this time around...
...Where are the assistant secretaries of the Reagan years, the deputy commissioners, the division heads...
...Haig, Per-le vs...
...That administration contained its fair share of duds: anti-free-enterprise businessmen like the protectionist transportation secretary Drew Lewis...
...Got three facts...
...A handful of others held posts much lower down the organizational chart: Economic adviser Larry Lindsey was a White House staff economist...
...He was gullible about the radical social movements of the 1970s, picked bad judges, and compromised with Democrats in Congress when he could have achieved more both in political and in policy terms by taking his differences with them to the country...
...It fails to take into account, too, the difference in experience and acuity between a twice-elected governor of the country's second-biggest state and a politician who had never previously won an election outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan...
...But that cynical wisdom can also be an excuse: Personnel will adapt to policy, if there is a policy to adapt to...
...But the hard truth is that the thing that Ford will probably be remembered longest for is his refusal to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House after the great dissident's expulsion from the Soviet Union...
...It was the unclear intentions and weak will of the first President Bush, as much as the squishy political backgrounds of his aides, that undid that administration...
...And sometimes it was the establishment Republicans whom conservatives most distrusted who served Reagan and conservatism best: George Shultz, for instance, and, yes, James Baker...
Vol. 6 • January 2001 • No. 19
