Power Game (58 page)

Darman was bright and brash enough to have spotted holes in Reagan’s economic program early on; to warn that the Reagan defense buildup would not match the administration’s ambitious rhetoric but would still be more than Congress would buy; to tip off Baker on how to control the White House machinery and to beware of being cast as a compromiser while conservative purists attacked him from behind. Darman’s job seemed focused on process, but Darman knew there is no dividing substance and politics from process. In charge of process, he provided the substantive understanding of policy that Baker needed.

Rule Three:
Always go for the best talent that will work loyally for you. In this case, that was not merely Baker’s doing but a sign of Reagan’s strength as a leader, and of his personal self-confidence, that
he could be surrounded by aides like Baker, Darman, and Gergen, despite past differences. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who had circled his wagons with young Georgians inexperienced in Washington and who suffered the consequences, Reagan knew he needed “outside” talents—people drawn from outside his California circle. That exasperated his right-wing but it served Reagan well.

Fourth, what made Baker personally so valuable to Reagan was his political sixth sense, his knowledge of Washington’s power networks, his instinctive sense of how issues will play, where the votes will fall, what the pitfalls are. (Significantly, many in Washington said he would have saved Reagan from the Iran disaster had he remained at chief of staff in Reagan’s second term.) From the outset, Baker understood the multidimensional Washington power game and began immediately preparing for it, building networks in the political community while Meese basked in the limelight. Meese assumed Washington was merely a bigger Sacramento and that he could operate there in the same way. But he knew only part of the arena—the Reagan entourage—where he was initially top dog. Baker played a waiting game, saying little in the early transition meetings, downgrading himself as the “new kid on the block” and letting Meese make pronouncements. Eventually, Meese got stretched too thin, with his cabinet councils, his elaborate planning groups, and all the paper he generated. No item seemed too small for his attention. His own partisans complained that he had a hard time setting priorities and making decisions. The common joke in the White House was that “once something gets into Ed Meese’s briefcase, it’s lost forever.”

By contrast, Baker’s expertise was strategy, leverage, and priorities. He was constantly working to narrow the focus, pick the action sequence, get rid of problems, forge pivotal alliances. While Meese was busy ideologically tutoring the new cabinet in Reaganism, Baker was moving in the vital political arena, forming the essential political partnership with Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and drawing close to House Republican Leader Robert Michel. Within the administration, Baker spotted Stockman, the budget director, as the driving force behind the largest, most immediate policy issues and quickly made him an ally. Stockman had brains, speed, and practical experience enough to run circles around Meese’s policy shop. What is more, Baker, sensitive that congressional right-wingers were skeptical of him, quickly established a reputation for accessibility to all sides. He paid special attention to Lyn Nofziger, a pet channel of Reaganite conservatives, and he returned congressional phone calls fast. That built support.

Moreover, the Baker side of the House—Baker, Deaver, Darman,
Gergen—understood the vital role of the press in the power game. They assiduously cultivated television and print reporters and columnists, publicized their case, explained their strategies, undercut their rivals. Meese, whose real love is law-and-order issues, police work, and criminology, had a district attorney’s wariness of the press. His style was to make announcements and brush problems under the rug. He was accessible but less candid than other White House officials, and his press relations withered. Deaver was the master press agent. Knowing that perception is often reality, Deaver deftly built up Baker and himself as Meese’s equals, furnishing detail for pieces on the Reagan troika. He used photographs to convey the message—not only to the public but to Congress and the bureaucracy. It was Deaver, for instance, who arranged photo sessions for my
New York Times Magazine
cover story on the troika in April 1981, photos showing all three together, with Baker—not Meese—in the center.

Rule Four:
Develop political networks in Congress and the press and work them constantly.

Finally and most tellingly, Baker understood that in the chaotic, hothouse world of Washington, there was no such thing as separating strategy from tactics, long-term policy planning from short-term actions, policy from politics. He knew they had to be integrated and that often tactics can drive strategy and the immediate can overcome the long-term. He was action and result oriented. Meese, on the other hand, had great faith in organizational charts and long-term planning and little operational skill in Washington. His Office of Planning and Evaluation was supposed to set the administration’s policy agenda, but it did not work out that way.

“Meese had a textbook notion of how government should be organized, and he assumed people behaved the way that organization charts suggested,” observed one of Baker’s allies. “That is utterly naïve.”

While Meese busied himself with the architecture of the supercabinet (which never came into being), Baker quietly created the Legislative Strategy Group (LSG), an informal forum for battling out policies and strategies for getting the Reagan program through Congress. The LSG was Darman’s idea; it became the vehicle to Baker’s ascendancy over domestic policy in the first term. Its members included the Baker crew—Deaver, Darman, David Gergen, Max Friedersdorf and his congressional-liaison aide Kenneth Duberstein, plus David Stockman, and sometimes Dick Wirthlin, and as appropriate, cabinet secretaries such as Donald Regan at Treasury or Drew Lewis at Transportation. Baker never openly challenged Meese—for that risked losing the fight. Meese was invited to LSG meetings and often came. What gradually happened
was that the tactics of how to deal with Congress or the press came to dominate White House decision-making, and Meese’s more elaborate structure simply fell behind.

Rule Five:
Once the ball game starts, move onto the field. There’s no time to build imposing new grandstands.

By the peak of Reagan’s legislative blitz in mid-1981, Baker was controlling the important levers of power and speaking out with authority rivaling Meese. He masterminded the passage of Reagan’s economic program, still the overarching political achievement of Reagan’s presidency. (On the domestic side, the only comparable achievement, in 1985–86, was the passage of the tax-reform bill, also managed by Baker, as Treasury secretary.) The triumphant passage of the 1981 budget and tax bills both marked Baker’s ascendancy and assured his future influence with Reagan. By the end of 1981, even Meese partisans worried that their man was being eclipsed as a power broker, although his advice still carried strong personal influence with the president.

The sharpest public blow to Meese came in January 1982, when Dick Allen was replaced as national security adviser by William Clark, a tall, low-key, soft-spoken, boyish-looking Reagan crony for fifteen years. Clark, who had been on the California Supreme Court, was given to riding horses, ranching, and wearing western boots with his gray flannel suits. His only experience in foreign affairs was one year at the State Department as Haig’s deputy. Yet Clark, who had preceded Meese in California as Governor Reagan’s chief of staff, would report only to the president. (Allen had reported to Meese.) When Clark took the national security portfolio, he took half of Meese’s empire out from under him. The troika became a foursome. The whole power situation became less stable. For actually, the cooperation among Meese, Baker and Deaver had been unusual in the first year. Baker’s rise had come during a time of relative harmony. By early 1982, Meese was feeling bruised, one friend said, and deeper rifts lay ahead for the Reagan household. But the president seemed unknowing, and unprepared, when they struck.

The Staff Coup That Failed

The sixth key to White House power, and probably the most important axiom for power anywhere in the American system, is to tame your personal hunger for power. The inebriating atmosphere of the White House feeds that malady even among the wisest of power players, such as Jim Baker. Political overreaching is always damaging. Unbridled ambition set up Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as targets for the
press and other politicians; it led to Alexander Haig’s downfall and contributed to the ouster of Donald Regan, as Reagan’s second term chief of staff.

Steve Bell, a battle-scarred former congressional aide, is fond of warning politicians not to be too clever in hatching plots or laying traps for adversaries. “When you dig a grave for your enemy,” says Bell, “dig two—one for yourself.” It was a warning that Baker and Deaver should have heeded before their White House plot to expand their power.

Deaver, who had worked for Clark in Sacramento and teamed with him to smooth out problems with Haig, had looked to Clark as a potential ally as national security adviser. But Deaver misjudged Clark, who had a long personal relationship with Reagan and now commanded an independent apparatus and a direct channel to the president. Moreover, Clark felt that Baker, Deaver, and Stuart Spencer, Reagan’s favorite campaign adviser, wanted to use him to ease Meese out as cabinet coordinator; he claimed they had sounded him out on taking over Meese’s White House office as a first step. Clark threatened to go to the president to block them, for Clark had ties to Meese, both as a fellow California Reaganite and as a kindred conservative. Meese was a hard-liner on social and law-and-order issues, as Clark was on foreign policy.

Thus, Clark’s arrival in the White House sharpened the internal power rift. Over time, Clark’s secretive, independent power plays produced frequent and bitter clashes, between Clark and the Baker-Deaver axis.
⁵⁴
Deaver was stunned to learn that Clark had given President Reagan a plan in early 1983 for reorganizing the White House staff, eliminating Baker’s job as chief of staff, naming Meese the administration’s spokesman, and making the foursome all coequals. When Reagan showed Clark’s plan to Deaver during a flight on
Air Force One
, with Clark sitting nearby, Deaver objected strenuously. “It won’t work,” Deaver told the president. “If you do this, I’ll have to leave.” After that, Deaver and Clark were no longer on speaking terms.

Clark angered Deaver and Baker—and exasperated secretaries of State Alexander Haig and George Shultz—by keeping them in the dark on foreign-policy moves. He would work directly with the president on ideas such as launching a bid to meet Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in mid-1982, or drafting an explosive executive order in October 1983, requiring top officials to undergo polygraphs to fight news leaks. Clark even toyed with opening a diplomatic back channel to Moscow through Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, without telling Shultz.

The climax came in October 1983, when Interior Secretary James Watt resigned. Clark, who told friends he was sick of the bitter White
House infighting and exhausted from the strain of a job for which he had little preparation, privately proposed to Reagan that he move to Interior, a job that appealed to Clark’s western-rancher soul. Baker and Deaver, with support from Mrs. Reagan, also urged Reagan to move Clark to Interior, though they persuaded the president to delay for five days. They had faulted Clark to Reagan for bureaucratic end runs and for hard-line handling of Congress and had argued that he was substantively “over his head” on arms control. I was told that Secretary Shultz had also complained to Reagan that Clark’s office was a bottleneck, slowing State Department papers for the president. But Shultz, like most of political Washington, was taken by surprise when late on Thursday afternoon, October 13, Reagan named Clark to be secretary of Interior.

It was a moment that Baker and Deaver had been awaiting; for they prepared the next step—Clark’s replacement. They had proposed to Reagan that he install Baker as national security adviser and make Deaver White House chief of staff. These shifts would fulfill both their ambitions. Baker had long wanted a top foreign-policy post, secretary of State or Defense or CIA director—for a new challenge and prestige, said a colleague. For Deaver, this would fulfill a long personal climb to the top, though pro-Meese officials contended that Baker actually planned to run the whole White House apparatus.

Two Reagan intimates told me that Nancy Reagan had urged the president to adopt the Baker-Deaver plan. Stuart Spencer also helped sell Reagan. Other White House officials said that Vice President Bush had endorsed the plan and possibly Secretary Shultz, too. Darman, who was to be Baker’s deputy national security adviser, drafted a press release for the president personally to announce these important shifts on Friday. White House reporters were alerted to wait for an important four
P.M
. announcement. But the announcement never came.

Reagan first had to attend a one-hour National Security Planning Group meeting with Clark, Shultz, Weinberger, Casey, Meese, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Ordinarily, Baker would have attended and Deaver could have, too. Instead, they decided to wait in Baker’s office, in what other officials later called a classic blunder: surrendering close control over the president. But Baker stayed away deliberately, to avoid putting the president in too obvious a squeeze. Deaver felt that by arming Reagan with the press announcement, they had presented their rivals with a fait accompli. It was a factional coup, the pragmatic faction of Baker, Deaver, and
Shultz besting the more hard-line faction of Clark, Weinberger, Casey, Meese, and Kirkpatrick.

According to the Clark faction’s account, Reagan did not actually carry the press release with him. But walking down the hall to the national security meeting, Reagan pulled Clark aside and said, “I’ve got your successor already chosen.”