Power Game (102 page)

What’s more, Reagan’s well-advertised preference for consensus among his advisers rewarded obstinacy. A holdout knew the president was reluctant to move without his assent. In his first term especially, Reagan’s urge for collegialism made it hard to formulate policy. It increased the power of obstruction.

“It’s almost impossible to move because the American position has to be checked with so many people: State, Defense, Joint Chiefs, NSC, White House, the Arms Control Agency,” groaned a top Reagan aide, exhausted by internal strife. “The biggest problem in government is that there are too many overlapping functions. Too many people are doing the same job. That creates turf problems and infighting, and you can’t get anything done.”

Policy by Preemptive Strike

One case of prolonged paralysis was the epic bureaucratic battle fought in the Reagan administration over the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty signed by President Carter in 1979. It took Ronald Reagan nearly
six years
to decide what to do about that treaty, known in the arms control fraternity as SALT II.

What makes that prolonged delay so amazing is that for Reagan,
SALT II was anathema. He and his partisans reacted to it viscerally, as did the Committee on the Present Danger, a bipartisan conservative group that supplied many top-drawer policymakers for Reagan. The SALT II treaty, never ratified, was nonetheless being observed by Washington and Moscow in 1980. It was the prime symbol of what Reagan and company felt had been wrong with arms control. They had even disliked the SALT I Treaty signed by Nixon in 1972.

In the 1980 campaign, Reagan condemned the Carter treaty as “fatally flawed.” What galled Reagan and his hawkish advisers was SALT II’s acceptance of the nuclear status quo. They felt the treaty legitimized Moscow’s huge arsenal of heavy, multiwarhead missiles and created a “window of vulnerability” for American land-based ICBM’s—years when the American force was vulnerable to Soviet attack. Reagan vilified SALT II as false arms control because it sought only arms
limitation
—limits on future buildups—but not actual
reduction
in existing nuclear arsenals. Late in the campaign, Reagan pledged to negotiate a new treaty. The implication was that he would quickly discard SALT II.

But paradoxically, once Reagan was in office, he got hooked into keeping Carter’s treaty by failing to understand how the foreign policy game is played. He got trapped by a typical bureaucratic skirmish—because the White House did not grasp its significance. This was one of those quintessential behind-the-scenes Washington episodes that barely causes a ripple in the press and is often missed entirely by TV. Yet its outcome established an important policy line for nearly six years.

That first skirmish was a microcosm of the foreign policy game: ploy and counterploy between some of very sharp policy players. On March 3, 1981, just five weeks into Reagan’s term, John Lehman, the outspoken Navy secretary, fired the first official Reaganite salvo against SALT II. Under President Ford, Lehman had been deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, under Fred Iklé; together they had helped block Kissinger, then secretary of State, from achieving a SALT II treaty before the 1976 elections. In 1980, Lehman had helped draft the anti-SALT II Republican party platform. Now, Lehman at Navy and Iklé, number three in Reagan’s Pentagon as undersecretary of Defense for Policy, were bent on killing Carter’s treaty.

Even though arms control was not his bailiwick, Lehman made the opening move. He told reporters that the United States should stop complying with both SALT I and SALT II. Technically, SALT I had expired in 1977, and Lehman contended that Carter had extended it illegally—without Senate approval. Since SALT II had never been
ratified, Lehman said he would recommend that the Reagan administration stop adhering to it informally.

It was a bold opening gambit. Lehman was not high enough ranking to be on the National Security Council. But as a savvy power player, Lehman was short-circuiting the policy hierarchy by going public.

At State, the press agency report carrying Lehman’s remarks rang alarm bells. State saw Lehman invading its policy turf and attempting unilaterally to force policy action—before there had been high-level discussion of arms policy.

Ranking State Department officials favored SALT II. They saw benefits in the limits it imposed on Soviet multiwarhead missile deployments and believed it helped the United States monitor and predict Soviet weapons development. Some State officials, having helped develop the SALT I and SALT II agreements, had a personal stake in them. As a former NATO commander, Secretary Haig knew that West European governments liked the SALT treaties because they set a climate of accommodation between East and West. Also, Haig reasoned that it was unwise to scrap an existing treaty without something to replace it.

Haig reacted swiftly to Lehman’s encroachment on his turf; he decided to “countermand” Lehman’s statement. Otherwise, Lehman’s comments would gain legitimacy; they would be read in government circles and foreign embassies as the authoritative word on Reagan’s policy. There was no time—and for that matter no inclination at State—to check with the Reagan White House, where both National Security Adviser Richard Allen and his boss, presidential counselor Edwin Meese, shared Lehman’s antipathy to SALT II. Haig acted on his own, using newspapers to fix a policy line. Haig had his spokesman phone a statement to
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
, just before their evening deadlines. That timing insured headline play for the State Department, repudiating Lehman and setting out Haig’s policy.

The statement crafted by Haig and two high officials, Larry Eagleburger and Richard Burt, was a masterpiece of bureaucratic gamesmanship, for it was disarmingly simple but it had major policy impact. The statement said that arms-control policy was being reviewed and that “no decision has yet been taken on our adherence to existing SALT agreements.” Then it added: “John Lehman’s statements on SALT, as reported by the press, were not authorized, nor did they reflect administration policy. While we are reviewing our SALT policy,
we will take no action that would undercut existing agreements
so long
as the Soviet Union exercises the same restraint [emphasis added].”

Technically, that did not commit the administration to abide by every detail of SALT I and SALT II, though it did promise not to take any action that would permanently abrogate the treaties.

Haig’s statement, issued anonymously, landed on the inside pages, only a few paragraphs in the
Times
and the
Post
. It deserved more play, for Haig was unilaterally declaring that SALT I and SALT II remained in force for the foreseeable future—and, as it turned out, that policy stayed in force until mid-1986.

In the foreign policy game, Haig had two trump cards that Lehman lacked. First, Haig had enough rank to disown Lehman’s statement; second, Haig had command of the State Department’s worldwide network of communications. He could—and did—send cables to all American embassies, instructing them to brief foreign governments on his statement. Those briefings reinforced Haig’s policy. Only the president could reverse Haig.

Indeed, the next morning, Reagan was perplexed by news reports of anonymous officials saying that the United States would not undercut SALT II. “Who in the world is saying that?” he demanded. No one had forewarned him. When Reagan learned Haig was the source, he let the matter drop, not sensing its importance. Reagan’s White House aides, still relatively new to high-level infighting, felt powerless to overrule Haig at that point.

“There was nothing we could do,” protested one anti-SALT official. “We would have had to get another cable countermanding Haig’s cable. But we would have had to get Haig to sign it. No chance. We protested, but we found out what a weak link Dick Allen would be. Allen complained and groaned, but would do nothing. Ed Meese took a legalistic approach: There was no way to punish Haig.”

It was a case study of how policy can be set by one official’s preemptive action—so long as other policymakers remain passive. The episode also illustrates why experienced players such as Haig, Eagleburger, and Burt were so quick to react to Lehman, and why all agencies immediately fire back at bureaucratic rivals: to protect themselves from policy invasions.

That early skirmish was a critical moment for the Reagan presidency, though few people then recognized it as such. It showed that Reagan came into office lacking a master plan for foreign policy; he was preoccupied with his domestic economic program. So when SALT II came up quickly, neither he nor his White House aides had a policy framework for dealing with it.

Moreover, in his desire to avoid the foreign policy squabbles of the Carter presidency, Reagan had deliberately weakened and downgraded the role of national security adviser, any president’s personal protector on foreign policy. He had picked Richard Allen, who was no match for Henry Kissinger, Carter’s Zbigniew Brzezinski, or Alexander Haig as a strategist or bureaucratic infighter; so Reagan was underprotected. Nor was Reagan prepared, as an alternative, to anoint someone else—Haig, for example—as his foreign-policy czar. That left the field wide open for hit-and-run tactics. On this first big issue of SALT II, the White House let control of policy dribble away.

The Elephant vs. the Terrier

From my observation, there are four paths to dominance on national security policy for a secretary of State. Path number one is to be clearly designated by the president as the policy architect, the president’s alter ego. This is what President Truman granted two secretaries of State, George Marshall and Dean Acheson; it is what Dwight Eisenhower did for John Foster Dulles. Truman and Eisenhower exercised supreme power occasionally, but on most issues they let their secretaries of State reign. Except for Henry Kissinger in the mid-1970s, more recent secretaries have lacked this clearcut mandate.

Path number two is to grab power by bureaucratic fiat and preemptive policy moves. That was Haig’s tactic in 1981: seizing the initiative before his rivals had learned the power game. It won Haig some skirmishes. The risk, as Haig found out, is that this tactic makes a policymaker look power hungry to his president and to rival officials, who find ways of getting even.

Path number three to policy victories is to end-run cabinet rivals and privately sell the president on a policy action, without having to answer the counterarguments and crossfire of other officials. George Shultz did that on occasion and so did Caspar Weinberger, not to mention Reagan’s national security advisers. In fact, the end run became a trademark of the foreign policy game under Reagan—on arms control, Central America, strategic defense, and most notably, on the Iranian arms deals.

But equally typical of the Reagan period, and other administrations, is path number four: marshaling bureaucratic alliances and waging a campaign to sway the president with support from cohorts in other agencies, in Congress, and among allies abroad.

The long-term policy jousting over the SALT II treaty was just such
a marathon tug-of-war between rival policy clans. It was classic bureaucratic tribal warfare, with Shultz and Weinberger deploying forces like tribal chieftains.

For five years that pair clashed over almost every major policy line: the use of American Marines in Lebanon, air reprisals against Arab terrorists, the proper strategy on Central America, summitry with the Soviet Union and American negotiating terms, and interpretations of past arms treaties. Even lie detectors: Weinberger used them to battle press leaks in the Pentagon. When Reagan ordered using them throughout the government, Shultz trumpeted his opposition: “The minute in this government I am told that I’m not trusted is the day that I leave.”

At least two of Reagan’s national security advisers, Bill Clark and Bud McFarlane, despaired of the collisions and machinations of Shultz and Weinberger and their paralyzing deadlocks. I have heard Clark and McFarlane complain about their inability to control the feuding cabinet barons; I know that the internecine combat was one reason why both security advisers quit. The Shultz-Weinberger feud took on the crusading passions of holy warfare. Sometimes, other officials said, one or both would take more extreme positions to oppose the other. Shultz privately expressed dismay to aides. “He told me that he was surprised by the viciousness of arms-control politics in this administration,” an official close to Shultz revealed. “He said he’d been around this city a lot, in government, but he’d never seen anything as intense and vicious as that.”

Reagan himself was upset by the testy wrangling between Shultz and Weinberger. “He knows about their fighting,” one presidential intimate told me. “It bothers him. But he doesn’t want to do anything about it. He doesn’t like those kinds of personal confrontations.”

The rivalry between Weinberger and Shultz had an unusually long history, one in which Shultz usually had the upper hand. “George tends to dominate everything and everyone around him,” said a former Shultz lieutenant. “He takes the reins of power and doesn’t appreciate sharing it.” Twice, Weinberger was cast as Shultz’s subordinate, and playing second fiddle apparently left him determined to prove his parity in the Reagan cabinet. White House officials detected that Weinberger was not only aggravated at Shultz for assuming that power was rightly his, but also that Weinberger felt he was brighter than Shultz, despite Shultz’s academic pedigrees as an economist.

In 1970, Shultz became Nixon’s budget director and the White House installed Weinberger as his deputy. Shultz tried to make his own
favorite, Arnold Webber, the de facto number two. Weinberger was so frustrated that he finally wrote a memo for Shultz to sign, naming Weinberger as acting director whenever Shultz was away. After Shultz signed the memo, Weinberger secured his status by circulating the memo to other agency officials. Later when Shultz became Treasury secretary, word went out that Shultz would still conduct the annual budget briefing. Weinberger, the new budget director, was crushed because he expected to do it. But he was evidently too awed by Shultz to phone him directly. An intermediary worked out a joint press conference.