Power Game (80 page)

Shultz added to Reagan’s image problems by defending the principle of deception. “Frankly, I don’t have any problems with a little psychological warfare against Qaddafi,” Shultz declared. He recalled Winston Churchill’s justifying deception against Hitler during World War II: “In time of war, the truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

That story line not only sharpened Reagan’s growing credibility problems, but it did not sell among Shultz’s official family. Respected congressional figures in both parties castigated the operation. The hardest blow was the protest-resignation of Shultz’s State Department spokesman—Bernard Kalb, a former CBS, NBC, and
New York Times
reporter. “Faith in the word of America is the pulsebeat of our democracy,” Kalb said. “Anything that hurts America’s credibility hurts America.”

But the Libyan disinformation plot was an inside-the-beltway tempest. The devastating disclosure of Reagan’s duplicity on his secret dealings with Iran was the coup de grace, echoing elements of the Watergate scandal, with some abuses of executive power, official attempts at cover-ups, shredding documents, and above all, the president’s personal policy deception. Across the nation, this affair shattered Reagan’s carefully crafted political image. His political magic melted.

Within the month after disclosure in early November 1986 of the Iranian operation, Reagan’s extraordinary public standing plummeted—from sixty-seven-percent to forty-six-percent approval in
The New York Times
/CBS News poll. Sizable majorities who had taken Reagan’s word on so many other things distrusted his disclaimer that he had not known about the diversion to the Nicaraguan
contras
of millions of dollars from profits made on the American arms sales to Iran. The political debacle was compounded by Chief of Staff Don Regan’s crass boast that image-game manipulation could dispose of the Iranian affair, just as White House P.R. had sloughed off three earlier setbacks: the Libyan “disinformation” controversy, the collapse of the Reykjavík summit, and the Republican loss of the Senate in the 1986 elections.

“Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follow a parade down Main Street cleaning up,” Don Regan told Bernie Weinraub, White House correspondent for
The New York Times
. “We took Reykjavík and turned what was really a sour situation into something that turned out pretty well. Who was it that took this disinformation thing and
managed to turn it? Who was it took on this loss in the Senate and pointed out a few facts and managed to pull that? I don’t say we’ll be able to do it four times in a row. But here we go again and we’re trying.”
⁶⁷

Three months later, the president pushed Don Regan’s shovel brigade out the White House door.

But the president had fabricated his own catastrophe. He had violated the cardinal rule of the image game: acting contrary to the image he had developed for himself. He was a victim of his own effective salesmanship. As president, Reagan had cast himself as a firm and unflinching foe of precisely what he was now caught doing—dealing with a terrorist state. Reagan had built the arguments against such double-dealing with Iran. He had castigated Carter harshly for pragmatism and patience in negotiating the release of earlier American Embassy hostages in Iran—a course Reagan derided as weakness.

Reagan’s fall from grace was so swift and sharp precisely because so much of his popular appeal had ridden on image: his image of steadfastness, his image as a man of principle, his image of uncompromising refusal to deal with the devil. Suddenly he was none of those in reality. Public disapproval fell hard on Reagan when he was exposed as willing to traffic in arms with Ayatollah Khomeini’s closest henchmen to buy freedom for three American hostages, because Reagan’s actions did violence to the image he had created.

In
Death of a Salesman
, Arthur Miller has one character say about his protagonist, Willy Loman: “For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.”
⁶⁸

As Reagan demonstrated in late 1987, he still has a following and can strike arms agreements with Moscow. But in the Iranian quagmire, he lost credibility with millions of people. He had risked his most precious political asset for a single highly dubious strand of policy. For a long time, Reagan had stretched the truth on his Nicaraguan policy, officially pretending to Congress that his goals were limited and only belatedly admitting that his real objective was to force the Sandinistas to “say uncle” and give up power. And he had lived the fiction that his administration had not instigated the arming of the
contras
during the congressional ban on such action. But never before had Reagan been caught so baldly in a policy lie—saying one thing publicly about Iran and doing the opposite in private. Reagan violated a basic rule of
the image game: The story line has to match reality, or come far closer than Reagan did, or the image game is mere gloss. After Iran, nothing else Reagan pushed would sell as well as it had before. What helped him hang on as well as he did was his personal popularity—his shoeshine and his smile.

Over the longer run, the unmasking of Reagan’s secret Iranian policy—along with Gary Hart’s political collapse over stories about his extramarital relations and Joe Biden’s political plagiarism—may have fostered new public skepticism toward slick public relations and glitzy political image making. For in the 1988 election season, the pendulum was swinging back toward more emphasis on personal integrity and political competence—away from the strongly symbolic politics with which the Reagan era began.

As Ronald Wilson Reagan was taking his oath of office as the fortieth president of the United States in 1981, Senator Howard Baker was sitting a few seats away, trying to make up his mind. Reagan had certainly not been Baker’s first choice as president. In 1976, Baker had backed Gerald Ford against Reagan. In 1980, then in his third term as a senator, Baker had run against Reagan himself and would fashion the damning metaphor that Reagan’s ambitious tax cuts were a “riverboat gamble” for the nation.

As Baker had hopped across Iowa and New Hampshire in 1980, seeking votes, he had asserted that Reagan might understand Sacramento after eight years as governor of California, but he lacked the experience for Washington. What is more, Baker was a mainstream Republican, one of those Washington insiders roundly denounced by Reagan.

Now, Reagan was taking the oath that Baker had wanted to take himself. As the leader of the new Republican Senate majority, Baker had a choice to make: He could either operate as an independent force,
using the leverage of his position, judgment, and experience to challenge and modify Reagan’s messianic conservatism, or he could become a loyal lieutenant to the new president.

In manner, Baker is as warming as the southern sunshine, as mellow as a Tennessee country waltz. But his mellowness can be misleading, for Baker has grit. The fires of presidential ambition still burned in him. There were, he reflected then, precedents for using his new post of majority leader as a springboard toward the presidency. Lyndon Johnson had done that in the late 1950s. Closer to Baker, as a Republican, was the example of William Knowland, an ambitious, old-guard California conservative and a prickly, jealous champion of congressional prerogatives as majority leader under President Eisenhower in the mid-1950s. Knowland had told Eisenhower repeatedly that the Senate should not merely be a rubber stamp. He struck an independent course, especially on foreign policy.

Glancing at the wintry skies and out over the inauguration throng toward the spire of the Washington Monument, Baker mused about another model, another Republican Senate leader, the late Everett McKinley Dirksen, his own father-in-law, whose gold watchband Baker was wearing. Dirksen had revered the presidency, even when the opposite party controlled it. Privately, Baker confessed a newfound respect for Reagan—he had beaten a field of Republican rivals and then vanquished a sitting president. But Baker still wondered how to deal with Reagan.

“I was listening to his speech, and I have to confess that it sounded a little like every other presidential Inaugural Address I’d ever heard,” Baker later recalled. “He was making a lot of promises about this, that, and the other. But there was one difference, it seemed to me, and that is that he was promising to make fundamental changes—not incremental changes, but fundamental changes in policy. His reduction in the rate of growth of government, if not the size of government itself, reduction in taxes, vast increase in level of armaments, and the reduction of regulations. All the good things that he talked about in the campaign, he was saying those things.… I sort of toyed with the idea, sitting there, about whether I was going to stake out a different position on some things or not.

“But the striking difference to me between this and every other Inaugural Address I’d heard since I went to the Senate in 1966 was that we had a Republican majority in the Senate for the first time in twenty-six years. And that I was the majority leader and that man up there was making those promises for me, too. And I guess it was at that
moment that I made sort of an unconscious decision that I’m going to carry his flag. That doesn’t mean that you’re forever going to stifle any concern or question about what he’s doing.… [But] I decided that the Bill Knowland example was a disaster. He tried to be president in a way. He was always griping and scrapping with Eisenhower and finally went off to California and got beat. But he was never happy, never cooperative, and never really was sympathetic to the Eisenhower program. There are two roles for majority leader in the Senate: One is the president’s spear-carrier, and the other is an independent force. And I chose to be a spear-carrier. And I have no apology for it.”
¹

Howard Baker’s private decision on Inaugural Day was critical to the success of Reagan’s presidency, for Baker became one of the most effective Senate leaders in decades. His decision was symptomatic, too, of the Republican mood in the afterglow of their 1980 election victory. Multiply Baker by fifty-three Republicans in the Senate and 192 in the House, and you have the solid core of the Reagan coalition that voted time and again to produce Reagan’s stunning 1981 budget and tax victories, shaking Democrats accustomed to running Congress for a quarter of a century.

The coalition game—building coalitions and making coalitions work—is the heart of our system of government. Although the coalition game is usually ignored during the passions of American election campaigns, no president can succeed unless he can build a governing coalition. For limited periods, presidents can act on their own: devaluing the dollar as Nixon did, negotiating an arms treaty with Moscow as Carter did, sending American Marines into Lebanon or working secret arms deals with Iran as Reagan did. But eventually a president must come to Congress to fund his programs, approve his treaties, finance his wars, or sanction his secret diplomacy. If he cannot bring Congress along—cannot form a governing coalition—his programs founder, his treaty must be shelved, the Marines must come home, his diplomacy must halt. Coalitions are the necessary engines for sustaining policies.

Triumphant coalition makers are rare: Franklin Roosevelt at the start of the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Other presidents, such as Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, and Gerald Ford did pass pieces of legislation or got particular treaties ratified, but they did not pass their major programs because they could not make coalition government work. Solid congressional majorities eluded them. Over the past half century, with Congress usually in Democratic hands, Democratic presidents
have had an advantage. Roosevelt and Johnson, for example, built their legislative achievements on big partisan Democratic coalitions. But Kennedy never managed that, and Carter labored like Sisyphus with precious little to show for it because he could not pull the Democrats together. Republican presidents, normally faced with a Democratic Congress, usually have to take the bipartisan route to coalition government. Eisenhower did that fairly effectively, but Nixon and Ford were hamstrung by divided government—Congress in the hands of the political opposition.

Reagan, in his first, most triumphant year, chose to build his coalition with partisan hardball, not with Eisenhower-style bipartisan compromise. In 1981, Reagan did woo conservative southern Democrats and get some to vote with him against their own congressional party leadership. But Republican unity was Reagan’s Gibraltar. That is the primary lesson of American politics—rule number one of the coalition game:
Secure your political base first
. Much was required for Reagan’s first-year coalition: the President’s wide popular appeal, his knack for lobbying Congress, some tough grass-roots politicking, and of course a winning idea to rally a coalition. But Republican unity was the anchor. With unity forged by Howard Baker and House Republican Leader Bob Michel of Illinois, Reagan made his legislative mark. Without that unity, he would have been destined to one-term mediocrity.

Republican solidarity was far from preordained, nor did it endure. In 1980, Reagan had run against Washington; he had been the populist candidate attacking the system, the radical western Republican overthrowing his party’s mainstream eastern establishment, the citizen outsider mocking the inside political game. Now inside this den of power, he needed allies.

Historically, American presidents have turned to their political parties to rally support. But years of revolt and reform in the late 1960s and 1970s had weakened the cohesion of the American party system. Congress had been torn asunder, faction by faction, region by region, interest by interest. Congressional leaders had little patronage to bind followers to them. Many members ran almost independent of party. As Reagan came to power, few people prized the vital cohesion offered by parties, which for so long had served as crucibles of compromise and pulled together coalitions.