Power Game (60 page)

In the grand scheme of American government, the paramount task and power of the president is to articulate the national purpose: to fix the nation’s agenda. Of all the big games at the summit of American politics, the agenda game must be won first.

For the effectiveness of the presidency and the capacity of any president to lead depends on focusing the nation’s political attention and its energies on two or three top priorities.

From the vantage point of history, the flow of events seems to have immutable logic, but political reality is inherently chaotic; it contains no automatic agenda. Order must be imposed. Events erupt: a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, an American frigate shelled in the Persian Gulf, the emergence of a dynamic new Soviet leader, the quadrupling of oil prices, new shocks in trade competition with Japan. All these clamor for attention, and no question is more crucial to the exercise of power than determining which questions get top priority, what issues will be attacked first.

Our recent history shows that a president who cannot set and hold to a clear agenda loses the momentum of his election victory and fails to realize fully the potential of his presidency. For without vision, focus, and direction, government falls into disarray and the country falls adrift.

The Founding Fathers originally expected Congress to set the course of policy; the president, as the nation’s chief magistrate, was supposed to implement congressional policy. But Congress is a teeming brawl of vying factions and competing committees, all feeling the insistent, divergent pressures of lobbies. Congress does initiate policies on occasion, but enormous natural advantages lie with the single voice in the White House—in historian Edwin Corwin’s phrase, the “American people’s one authentic trumpet.”

As the head of the vast executive apparatus, the president has a unique opportunity to act as a unifying and purposeful force. A shrewd and forceful president can be the chief architect of policy and the catalyst of action. Television has magnified the president’s unparalleled platform for leadership. “Only he, by attacking problems frontally and aggressively and by interpreting his power expansively, can slay the dragons of crisis and be the engine of change to move this nation forward,” observed political scientist Thomas Cronin.
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The mere mantle of office, and even such personal popularity as John F. Kennedy enjoyed, do not guarantee political success, as the flawed presidencies of Kennedy, Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon attest. Yet Ronald Reagan, in his remarkably successful first year, established his agenda and his personal dominance. As no president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and Lyndon Johnson in 1965, Reagan set the terms of debate and political action in 1981. And yet, strangely, Reagan failed badly at the agenda game in 1985, after his landslide reelection. The contrast between his record in 1981 and his record in 1985 demonstrates that Reagan did not have unbeatable magic and that electoral victory does not guarantee a president will dominate the action. In short, 1981 was a classic lesson in how to win—with a smooth, fast-opening game plan, and 1985 was a mirror-image lesson in the disasters of starting unprepared.

First impressions are critical. In the agenda game, a swift beginning is crucial for a new president to establish himself as leader—to show the nation that he will make a difference in people’s lives. The first one hundred days are the vital test; in those weeks, the political community inside the beltway and the public measure a new president—to see whether he is active, dominant, sure, purposeful.

Franklin Roosevelt, with his famous New Deal legislative blitz in 1933, generated the modern presidency and created the model for focusing national initiative in the White House. FDR set the mark for subsequent presidents. The day after his inauguration, Roosevelt summoned Congress into extraordinary session to confront the nation’s black despair over economic depression. To halt the run on the banks, Roosevelt got Congress to order them temporarily closed. There followed a slew of emergency measures to lay the foundations of the welfare state, with public-works jobs and new agencies, a score of press conferences, and the first couple of FDR’s famous radio “fireside chats” to bolster the nation’s spirits—all within Roosevelt’s famous one hundred days. Although depression deepened, Roosevelt’s reputation had been established, surviving setbacks and shortcomings later on.

Dwight Eisenhower struck a strong note even before his inauguration, by flying to Korea after his election to honor the central promise of his campaign: to end the bloody, inconclusive war in Korea and to restore peace and prosperity. Lyndon Johnson, in his early months as president, used the nation’s grief and sympathy after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 to push through the civil-rights bill and the tax-cut program that Kennedy could not get passed. Johnson, reelected in his own right, achieved a surge of Great Society legislation in 1985: a war on poverty, aid to education, and programs to revitalize cities and establish Medicaid and Medicare for the poor and elderly. With that outpouring of new programs, the greatest since the early New Deal, Johnson established his mark as the master of Congress.

Understanding the limits of presidential power, Johnson knew the need for a quick start while Congress was still in the thrall of a new president’s election victory. “You’ve got to give it all you can, that first year,” Johnson told Harry McPherson, a top aide. “Doesn’t matter what kind of majority you come in with. You’ve got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves. The third year, you lose votes.… The fourth’s all politics. You can’t put anything through when half the Congress is thinking how to beat you.”
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What lay behind Johnson’s words was an instinctive feel for the rhythm of the presidency, a rhythm as natural to politicians as the seasons are to migratory birds. The first honeymoon year gives way to a more trying second year, as members of Congress jockey for reelection. The third year, free of election worries, offers a new opening, but normally a president must compromise or must turn more to foreign policy because of his party’s losses in Congress in the midterm elections.
If a president does well in his third year (as Reagan did), he has a good shot at reelection, but if he does poorly (as Carter did), his chances are much slimmer. In domestic policy terms, the fourth year is largely lost to election politics. Reelection wins the president a new platform for action in his fifth year, and sometimes his sixth. But in the last two years, he is at his weakest; his time is running out, and usually his party loses ground in his sixth-year elections. (The Republicans lost the Senate in 1986, Reagan’s sixth year. In 1966, the sixth year of the Kennedy-Johnson presidency, the Democrats lost forty-seven House seats and four Senate seats.)

In short, power ebbs and flows with the calendar. Even John F. Kennedy, glamorous and highly rated, was afflicted by the built-in rhythm of American government. He got the Peace Corps and Food for Peace established quickly in 1961, his first year, but his presidency was hurt that first spring by the disastrous failure of the CIA-backed exile invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. What is more, Kennedy retreated in March 1961 on his first big legislative initiative—aid to education—and he never mastered Congress after that early retreat.
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He missed the 1981 honeymoon and got into a logjam when he mounted a legislative offensive in 1963, his third year. He failed to ride the natural rhythms of maximum presidential influence.

Kennedy has been so romanticized in memory that few people recall that the keystones of his legislative program (tax cut, civil-rights bill, aid to education) were passed by Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s death. Indeed, one week before the assassination, James Reston wrote in
The New York Times
that “there is a vague feeling of doubt and disappointment in the country about President Kennedy’s first term”—not because of any failure to capture the nation’s heart or its media, but because Kennedy had not mastered “how to govern.”
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Richard Nixon was forever embroiled in battles with Congress because he could not sell his agenda for cutting back government or for reform of the nation’s welfare system. Like Kennedy, Nixon later recovered with foreign successes (his opening to China, his summit meetings and arms agreements with Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev), but Nixon’s early clashes with Congress in 1969 on domestic affairs set a pattern of enmity and bogged down his domestic program. In 1974, Gerald Ford too was impaled politically by his early pardon of Nixon after the House had voted articles of impeachment against Nixon. The early storm was a prelude to Ford’s two years of stalemate with Congress.

But it was Jimmy Carter, promising a political revival after the
Nixon-Ford years, who most tragically epitomized the failure of a president to forge a clear agenda and to lead a Congress dominated by his own party. Carter’s failure set the stage for the stunning success of Ronald Reagan, whose politically brilliant opening revitalized the presidency and restored public confidence in the nation’s highest office—until the Iran scandal broke, toward the end of his fateful sixth year.

Takeover: The Moment of Truth

The contrast between Carter and Reagan and their two political teams illustrates the crucial importance of the agenda game in fixing the image and power of a new president. Both leaders were intent on proclaiming national renewal after a time of turmoil. Each was eager to grasp the levers of power, and each was given to using symbolic politics to convey his fundamental political messages. Jimmy Carter strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue to stamp his presidency with a common touch and to show that he was doing away with the imperial presidency. Reagan staged his inaugural on the Capitol’s West Front—a break with the tradition of holding it on the East Front—signaling a new, optimistic manifest destiny for the nation. Both had come as outsiders to seize the citadel of power in Washington, but the Reagan team understood what that entailed better than did the Carter crowd.

The contrast between these two beginnings, even in the very first hours in office, carries crucial lessons for future presidencies, vital clues as to what works and what does not work in governing America and in the Washington power game.

Carter’s senior staff, fresh from the inaugural ceremonies and elated by their campaign conquest, gathered in the Roosevelt Room of the White House at around four o’clock. The mood was informal and casual, in keeping with Carter’s deliberate effort to “depomp the presidency,” as Press Secretary Jody Powell put it. But the nonchalance of Carter’s staff also betrayed the lack of hierarchy and the absence of a clear Carter game plan.

In fact, divisive staff rivalries and Carter’s distaste for hierarchy left him without a chief of staff. After conferring with presidential experts and past White House officials, Jack Watson developed a transition plan, only to be jealously blocked in its execution by Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s senior political lieutenant. As the master campaign strategist, Jordan was brilliant, but he had thought little about the substance of governing and had little taste for Washington. Oddly, Jordan seemed to resent being in government. In seniority with Carter, he was the
natural chief of staff, but he was neither ready to take charge nor to let anyone else do so, especially Watson. Carter did not resolve the problem. At this critical first moment, therefore, no one was clearly in command. It was a harbinger of troubles to come.

Carter’s top staff chatted amiably that first afternoon, smiling and enjoying their collective rise to power—and yet, I was told, they shifted uneasily, too, fidgeting, not quite certain what to do or who would take the lead. After a few minutes—which seemed like hours—Robert Lipshutz, Carter’s lawyer, spoke up. “I guess because I’m the oldest one here,” he said, “I’ll call this meeting to order.” As he moved to the head of the table, there was an awkward silence because Lipshutz was really a secondary player. Others ignored him.

Frank Moore, another veteran from Carter’s gubernatorial staff, turned to Hamilton Jordan and gave voice to the general uncertainty. “Ham, what do we do now?” Moore asked.

People laughed nervously. There was no order. No one giving instructions. No one taking notes. Moore’s question got no answer, according to Mark Siegel, an experienced Democratic party worker who was relatively new to the Carter camp.
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Someone else asked, “Should we have a staff meeting every day?”

“We’ll have a meeting when there’s something to meet about,” Jordan replied offhandedly.

When Congress was mentioned, Frank Moore remarked naïvely, “It’s just like in Georgia. Ham, you remember Senator …” mentioning some member of the Georgia legislature whom Jordan and Moore had outfoxed during Carter’s term as governor, when they had handled his legislative liaison. Georgia’s legislature was vastly more pliant than the proud, assertive, two-party Congress that now confronted the Georgians, but Moore and Jordan seemed oblivious. They fell into congenial reveries about Georgia legislators. The meeting dribbled on. After a while people left, without coming to any decisions or conclusions. “My God,” thought Siegel, “what would the KGB think if they could see us now?”

Obviously, there was ultimately much more substance to the Carter presidency than emerged from that first staff meeting. President Carter, earnest and relentless as a law student cramming for bar exams, was determined to master every subject. He opened with a flurry of activity—in fact, too much, shooting off in too many directions. His campaign had raised high expectations for a fresh political beginning, and his early pronouncements piled those expectations even higher, too high to fulfill. Carter was an idealist, a good-government moralist, who
had trouble connecting ends and means and converting his high-minded goals into politically salable programs.