Power Game (97 page)

Finally, on May 24, the House voted to release funds for MX development and flight testing—and forty-four House members who had opposed MX in 1982 swung over to join the 239–186 pro-MX majority. Reagan now had what he had wanted. The House moderates watched to see whether Reagan kept his part of the bargain by making his arms-control position more flexible.

On June 7, Reagan made some modest changes in his arms position, lifting his proposed cutbacks in missile launchers from 850 to 1,200. That was easier on the Soviets and more in keeping with Gore’s notions of the right ratio. But there was a hitch—the Pentagon showed no enthusiasm for the Midgetman missile. Moreover, some House moderates said that the one hundred MX missiles recommended by the Scowcroft Commission were only “bargaining chips” to be traded with Moscow, but Weinberger insisted they had to be deployed. The bargain was fraying.

The trading game developed a pattern that went this way: The Democratic moderates made demands on Reagan, dickered for concessions, traded their votes, and monitored Reagan’s actions.

The next round was quickly upon them. No sooner had Congress released funds for developing the MX than Reagan and Weinberger wanted more money to start building MX missiles in 1984. The moderates were still dissatisfied with Reagan’s strategic-arms proposals, fearing that their pet—the single-warhead missile—was unlikely to get anywhere without an arms agreement. So they resumed demands for more flexibility from Reagan, in exchange for another round of votes for MX.

By late summer, Senate moderates had moved into the game, too. Senators William Cohen, a moderate Republican from Maine, and Sam Nunn, a Georgia conservative and the Senate’s most influential Democrat on defense issues, were pushing Reagan to accept their idea of a “build-down”: a scheme to decrease the size (and threat) of Soviet and American arsenals, even as the arsenals were being modernized. Like Gore, they wanted to push toward safer ratios. Both Nunn and Cohen were highly respected by their colleagues. Cohen had written an article for
The Washington Post
back on January 3, 1983, pushing the build-down concept, and Reagan had phoned Cohen to say he liked the idea. Cohen was trying to give a fresh twist to the nuclear freeze. Since both Moscow and Washington wanted to bring new weapons into their nuclear arsenals, Cohen argued they should accept some overall ceiling and then each pay a price for modernization that would help arms control.

“We could, for example, agree with the level of strategic weapons contained in the [1979] SALT II treaty and then insist that for every new weapon added to the force by either side, two older, less stabilizing weapons must be eliminated,” Cohen had written. “This guaranteed build-down, while not offered as a panacea, would raise the nuclear threshold to a higher, safer level, improve the prospects for lessening world tensions, and reassure our citizens that we recognize the peril of arms escalation.”
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To Cohen, Nunn, and forty-three Senate cosponsors of build-down, it fit with Reagan’s call for arms reductions. By making the reductions gradual, the senators hoped this would appeal to Moscow, more than Reagan’s drastic cuts did. But build-down could translate into very significant sacrifices in Reagan’s program. For building one hundred MX missiles with one thousand new warheads would require throwing away two thousand warheads, old warheads—or dismantling the entire American force of Minuteman and Titan ICBMs.

The Pentagon balked at build-down even though Reagan and the Scowcroft Commission endorsed the idea. Cohen and Nunn, joined by Senator Charles Percy, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, accused the administration of dragging its feet. They combined forces with Aspin, Gore, and Dicks to bargain with the White House as the “gang of six”—four Democrats and two Republicans who epitomized the leverage that centrists can achieve in the power game. Reagan could not win without the swing group in Congress that they represented.

Reinforced by the senators, the House moderates played hardball to get their way. In late July, they attached riders to Reagan’s bill authorizing
MX production. One Aspin amendment tied procurement of the MX to the pace of work on Midgetman. Another rider, by Gore and Dicks, cut back the administration from twenty-seven to twenty-one MX missiles in 1984. Support for MX was shrinking in the House, giving more leverage to the gang of six, who were pushing new arms proposals. By late September, the six were negotiating intensely with William Clark, Reagan’s national security adviser, and his deputy, Bud McFarlane.

For one thing, they wanted Reagan’s promise to pursue build-down vigorously. For another, they wanted assurances that American arms proposals would promote the safer single-warhead Midgetman and penalize multiwarhead missiles. Third, they wanted Reagan to make arms concessions in areas where the United States was ahead of Moscow: strategic bombers carrying nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Chief arms negotiator Ed Rowny was talking about building up to eight thousand air-launched cruise missiles, nearly four times the level permitted by the 1979 SALT II treaty. To achieve progress in the arms talks, the gang of six argued, Reagan would have to trade off areas of American advantage for areas of Soviet advantage, and not just demand Soviet concessions.

The White House found it hard to accept trading American advantages in bombers and cruise missiles for Soviet advantages in ICBMs. Reagan always drew a distinction between “fast flyers”—meaning missile warheads that can cross oceans in thirty minutes—and “slow flyers”—meaning bombers and cruise missiles which take hours. Bill Clark tried a fuzzy-sounding proposal on the gang of six on September 30, but Cohen brushed it aside as “weasel worded.”

“That isn’t good enough, it’s no commitment at all,” he complained. “It’s got to be made a lot firmer.”
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When Clark tried coaxing, Cohen refused to be budged.

“We can’t satisfy this guy,” said Clark in some irritation.

“Not with crap like that,” Cohen retorted.

Ron Lehman, an aide to Clark, suggested that the administration had gone the last mile; Cohen shot back: “You’d better not have, or you’re not going to have me with you.”

At another point, Nunn declared. “We’re in a position to provide support now, but not if the administration doesn’t keep its part of the bargain.”

Three days later, Reagan himself met the gang of six. Again, they pressed him to pledge that his negotiators would “seek” trade-offs of American bomber cuts for Soviet missile cuts. A new White House
memo said only that American negotiators would “explore” the subject. Cohen was still dissatisfied.

“I want the administration to actually go out and do this,” he insisted. “I know what
explore
means in diplomatic language. It’s like mercury on a mirror. Nothing gets resolved.”

To bridge the gap, Ron Lehman suggested saying that the administration would “negotiate” a bomber-missile trade-off. Reagan bought it; so did the others. Once again, the moderates had shifted Reagan’s stance—at least on paper.

The very next day, Reagan announced that he was incorporating a “series of build-down proposals” into his strategic-arms package and “we’re also prepared to negotiate limits on bomber and air-launch cruise missile limits below SALT II levels.” That meant about two thousand, a far cry from Ed Rowny’s eight thousand. Also, Reagan said he recognized “there will have to be trade-offs” between areas of Soviet and American advantage. His public statement sending American negotiators back to Geneva was a paean to bipartisan consensus. Pleased by those shifts, the House moderates helped defeat an attempt by liberal Democrats to block initial MX production. On November 18, 1983, the House voted $2.1 billion for production of the first twenty-one MX missiles.

That was the high-water mark for the trading game of the House Democratic moderates, for partnership across party and philosophical lines is hard to sustain: The moderates felt their arms proposals never really got a fair hearing in Geneva. “They were dumped in the Atlantic on the way over to Geneva,” Cohen groused. The Russians, frustrated by American deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, walked out of the arms talks, not to return until 1985. By then, President Reagan’s commitment to strategic defenses had become the central issue, overshadowing build-down and the single-warhead missile.

By 1984, the collaboration of House moderates and the White House collapsed under the partisan pressures of an election year. No issue exists in a vacuum. Several key participants, including Brent Scowcroft, felt the fragile partnership on MX was derailed by Reagan’s zigzags on the use of American Marines in Lebanon and Speaker O’Neill’s feeling that Reagan double-crossed him. In 1983, O’Neill had prevented the MX from becoming a highly flammable partisan issue. But in 1984 and 1985, O’Neill and his House Democrats beat Reagan on the MX, and there is reason to believe that happened because O’Neill felt burned on Lebanon.

In the fall of 1983, the speaker had taken the heat for Reagan by
getting the House to pass a resolution authorizing deployment of the Marines for eighteen months, O’Neill faced down sharp criticism from other Democrats, saying he had pledged Reagan his support. It was a mark of O’Neill’s traditionalism, his loyalty to the presidency on foreign policy, wherever possible. Reagan and McFarlane convinced him the Marines were on a peacekeeping mission that would stabilize the pro-Western Lebanese government and lead to withdrawal of Syrian and Israeli armies from Lebanon.

“They hoodwinked me into going along with a bipartisan matter to put the troops in,” O’Neill recalled bitterly. “But they never told me the Marines were there for guarding of the airport. They were there as a symbol. Everything was supposed to have been put together and peace was going to come, but it never happened.”
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O’Neill’s disillusionment deepened after the bombing of the Marine barracks on October 23, 1983, that took 241 lives. For several weeks, the White House denounced pressures for withdrawing the Marines as cowardly “cut and run” tactics. At the White House on January 25, 1984, O’Neill and Reagan got into a shouting match over the situation. Six days later, O’Neill and other Democratic leaders formally urged the “prompt and orderly withdrawal” of the Marines. The speaker told me he had protected Reagan as long as possible, and he went along with a withdrawal resolution only after being tipped off by a high administration official that Reagan had already approved a phased pullout and “the orders had been given and that it had been settled.”
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Reagan reportedly signed the pullout order on February 1—the very same day that White House spokesman Larry Speakes questioned the “patriotism” of Democrats calling for a pullout.

What enraged O’Neill was a personal slam at him by President Reagan in
The Wall Street Journal
on February 2. Asked about O’Neill’s call for a pullout, Reagan snapped, “He may be ready to surrender, but I’m not.” Then he added: “If we get out, that means the end of Lebanon. And if we get out, it also means the end of any ability on our part to bring about an overall peace in the Middle East. And I would have to say that it means a pretty disastrous result for us worldwide.”

Six days later, on February 8, the White House officially announced that Reagan had ordered the fourteen hundred Marines in Beirut to begin what was termed a phased redeployment—taking them out of Lebanon. The incident deeply embittered O’Neill. He operated by the old Irish school politics which say: Don’t get mad, get even.

Politically, the MX was a good issue for O’Neill’s settling the score

with Reagan. Since mid-1983, the pro-MX majority had shrunk. In the election year, O’Neill could turn up the partisan heat. Swinging a handful of votes was enough to fence the funds for MX missiles in 1984. The centrist swing group was dwindling. Foley and Cohen were unhappy with Reagan’s arms positions. Others, such as Nunn, Aspin, and Gore, felt gulled by the Pentagon’s endless delays on Midgetman. It took until December 17, 1986, for the administration to move ahead on full engineering and development of Midgetman. By then, the positive-sum game had collapsed. Reacting to Reagan’s failure to keep his part of the bargain, both Nunn and Aspin helped impose a ceiling of fifty MXs in 1985. Both sides, White House and moderates, accused the other of welshing on the deal.

Even so, the trading game had paid off enough for both sides to get half a loaf—Reagan, fifty MXs; and the moderates, both Midgetman and some flexibility in Reagan’s arms positions.

Rostenkowski: “To Get Along, Go Along”

O’Neill’s head-to-head fighting with Reagan was a classic opposition game. The swapping game of the House moderates on MX illustrates a contrary strategy. Danny Rostenkowski played a third style of opposition game on tax reform on 1985. Rostenkowski’s game was a throwback to the opposition politics of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson with President Eisenhower. Rostenkowski found he could not force Reagan to retreat, as O’Neill had in 1982, and he could not afford to let Reagan overrun him or smother him in a Republican-run partnership that would hurt congressional Democrats with the voters.

With the oncoming recession in 1982, O’Neill had had an advantage against Reagan; in 1983, the House “MX moderates” had a similar built-in advantage. In both cases, President Reagan had to meet the terms of the opposition. He was on the defensive, at the low ebb of his first-term power.

But Reagan’s tide had turned by the time of the power struggle over tax reform in 1985. Reagan’s enormous landslide reelection in 1984 made him look invincible once again. Also, Rostenkowski had tried wrestling Reagan in 1981 and had been brutally rolled. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the big Chicago congressman had tried to bargain, but Reagan had rebuffed him. Then he tried to compete by offering an alternative tax-cut package, but Reagan had outbid him. The battle had bruised Rostenkowski.

In 1985, Rostenkowski was again on the defensive. The Reagan
crowd, Pat Buchanan at the White House and Congressman Jack Kemp, were trumpeting tax reform as a “realigning issue,” destined to lift Republicans to national dominance.