American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But one grand asset Reagan retained—political luck. The recession came early enough for some Reaganites to blame it on the lingering effects of Carter policies, early enough too for the White House to wait it out and hope for recovery by election time. The very spending that Reagan condemned in principle while authorizing in practice, combined with such anti-inflationary developments as an oil price decline over which the White House had little control, brought a strong recovery. Although large pockets of poverty and unemployment persisted, the recovery remained vigorous enough to project Reagan toward his massive reelection triumph of 1984. It was hard enough for Walter Mondale, leading a divided, irresolute party, to take on an incumbent whose personal popularity remained high, who had managed to maintain his electoral coalition despite sporadic complaints from both movement conservatives like Viguerie and liberal and moderate Republicans in the Senate. But former Vice President Mondale, forced to share some of the blame for failed Carter economic policies, also faced a Republican Santa Claus who continued to disperse federal money to thousands of vested interests and welfare projects even while preaching economy and thrift and budget balancing. He faced a chameleon who alternated between attacking government and exploiting his government. It was no contest from the start.

  Reagan’s big reelection set the stage for a major piece of unfinished domestic business, tax reform. For some time the Administration had been tracking proposals by Republican congressman Jack Kemp, an early booster of supply-side economics, for further cuts in personal rates, and by two Democrats, Senator Bill Bradley and Congressman Richard Gephardt, for lower rates combined with a slash in deductions. The President virtually stole the issue from the Democrats during the 1984 campaign and made it his own. A few months later, in his State of the Union address to Congress, he made tax reform the central domestic initiative of his second term. “Let us move together with an historic reform of tax simplification for fairness and growth,” he proclaimed, promising to seek a top rate of no more than 35 percent. Evidently having taken to heart the lessons of his first-term setbacks, Reagan showed a good deal of flexibility in bargaining with congressional leaders and factions over the specifics of his tax proposal.

  Again and again the Administration measure seemed to die on Capitol Hill, only to be resurrected by a President absolutely committed to tax reform and ever ready to make political forays out into the country to channel public pressure toward Congress. White House leadership was crucial; while three-quarters of Americans in a poll favored a simplified tax system and almost three-fifths considered the existing system unfair, they listed the tax system fifth in importance among economic problems, behind the deficit, unemployment, interest rates, and inflation. The Administration had to fight off lobbyists who put heavy pressure on legislators. The bill curtailed consumer interest deductions, and she had a Chrysler plant in her district, a congresswoman said. She thought she should vote no, but “I couldn’t do it.”

  Reaganites were proud that they had overcome “Lame-Duck-Itis,” as they felicitously called it. Historically, however, the problem of the presidential lame duck was less the second term than the second two years in each term, following the congressional midterm elections.

  It was clear even as Reagan took command of tax policy that he must share leadership with committee chieftains and party lieutenants in Congress, which retained its constitutional authority over revenue measures. In foreign policy, on the other hand, the Chief Executive had held the dominant role both under the Constitution and by custom. If many conservatives had been sorely disappointed by Reagan’s compromises over taxation and domestic policies, hawkish right-wingers had been entranced by his fulminations against communism. Rhetorically, at least, he had entered the White House as the most bellicose peacetime President since Theodore Roosevelt. While TR had tended to strike out in all directions, however, Reagan had eyed the reds with the steely hostility of a frontiersman targeting a band of Indians.

  Reagan’s anticommunist rhetoric had long been unbridled. He wrote in a 1968 volume: “We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.” Junior-partner communists were just as bad: the North Vietnamese, of course controlled by Moscow, were “hard-core, hard-nosed, vicious Communists” who were going to “fudge, cheat and steal every chance they get.” Americans should have stayed in both Korea and Vietnam, gone all out, and won. Reagan liked to talk about Lenin’s “plan” to “take Eastern Europe,” organize the “hordes of Asia,” about Lenin’s “prediction” that eventually the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, would “fall into our outstretched hand like overripe fruit.” For some hawks it was as rousing as a Hollywood scenario. Would Ronald Reagan ride to the rescue?

  Many Americans were apprehensive when this fire-breather entered the White House, but experienced President watchers professed not to be worried. The reins of power, they said reassuringly, would tame the rider. It was one thing to rant outside the While House, something else to handle the perplexing everyday questions that took on all the grayish hues between black and white. Wait until he had to consult with heads of state, foreign envoys, wait until he had to read cables bristling with the endless complexities of real-life international politics. After all, hadn’t Teddy Roosevelt in the White House become a conciliator, mediating the Russo-Japanese War and even winning the Nobel Peace Prize?

  For a time the new President did indeed moderate his oratory. He preached peace sermons, called the nuclear threat “a terrible beast” before the West German Bundestag, told the British Parliament that nuclear weapons threatened, “if not the extinction of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it.” Hedrick Smith of The New York Times and other journalists wondered whether he was deserting his sharply ideological, anti-détente rhetoric for a more moderate, centrist foreign policy. Soon, however, the President returned to his rhetorical battles, like an old soldier pulling his saber down from over the fireplace. In a March 1983 speech to Christian evangelists in Florida, he labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” called totalitarian states the focus of wickedness in the modern world, and warned that America’s struggle with communist Russia was a struggle between right and wrong. “Adopting a perspective very similar to John Foster Dulles in the fifties,” Betty Glad wrote, “Reagan has not changed,” even though technological and political change had undermined the old assumptions of a Pax Americana.

  Was it perplexing that this genial, charming, worldly septuagenarian could label as diabolical the creed of a large portion of humankind, that he sounded like the Ayatollah Khomeini when the Iranian revolutionary castigated the United States as “the great Satan”? Not if one kept in mind the old actor’s love for white hat--black hat scenarios, his authentic fears that the communists might stamp out the kind of individualism he had absorbed in Dixon, Illinois, or—in the view of some biographers—his displacement of earlier insecurities and embarrassments, such as his father’s alcoholism, onto the treacherous world outside.

  But the main reason for Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric may have been much simpler. He did not really mean it—mean it in the sense of converting ideology into action against powerful opponents. In divorcing his foreign policy from his rhetoric he was carrying to the extreme the tendency of recent American leaders to enunciate vague and lofty values without reducing them to operating principles, policy choices, clear priorities. Reagan’s 1988 summit with Gorbachev typified the President’s bent for high rhetoric—now friendly, now hostile to the Kremlin—that had little relation to the skimpy policy results of the meeting.

  It took anticommunist hawks a long time to recognize Reagan’s separation of rhetoric and reality, in part because he gave them occasional swigs from the heady old ideological bottle, in part because Carter had moved so far toward an aggressive anti-Moscow posture after 1979 that his successor could offer no sharp break in policy even had he wished to. By the end of his first term, however, the anticommunist true believers were
expressing keen disillusionment. Why did a President who attacked the “evil empire” lift the grain embargo that was destabilizing the Soviet economy? When the Polish authorities declared martial law and cracked down on the Solidarity movement, why did not Washington bring the crisis to a boil by declaring Poland in default for failure to pay interest on its debts to Western banks? Why not step up support for “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan and Angola? Why not do more for the Nicaraguan Contras despite the Boland Amendment? Why perpetuate the Democrats’ abandonment of Taiwan, even if Peking was a counterweight to Moscow? In the Persian Gulf, why put America’s commercial concerns about oil so far ahead of anti-Soviet militance? In Europe, why not try harder to stop the Western subsidy of an oil pipeline that would help the Soviet export economy? Could George Will’s quip be true—that the Administration loved commerce more than it loathed communism?

  Still, Reagan largely held the support of far-rightists even as they grumbled. His huge reelection sweep was a tribute to his continued coalition-building skills. To be sure, some in the extreme right sat on their hands, but they had no other place to go: the ballot offered no Strom Thurmond, no George Wallace, for whom they could vote in indignation. And certainly Reagan was better than Carter, better even than Nixon. The hardest test of loyalty came after the Iran-Contra revelation late in 1986. While many conservative Republican politicians recoiled in dismay, it was the movement conservatives who rallied to their leader’s support.

  The Iran-Contra hearings dramatized the price of stances not converted into operating policies. Bizarre initiatives, fouled-up communication, cowboy-style forays, even a little private enterprise for profit, were the colorful parts of the story. But behind it all was a lack of clear guidelines from the White House, even more a lack of knowledge in the Oval Office. The whole affair was a caricature of the incoherence and inconsistency that characterized the Reagan Administration in foreign policy. After eighteen months Alexander Haig had quit as Secretary of State in part because he could not deal with the protective cordon around Reagan, in larger part because he felt unable to “restore unity and coherence” to foreign policy. These qualities continued to elude the Reagan White House—and all the more as it moved into lame-duck status.

  The Structure of Disarray

  “The true Reagan Revolution never had a chance,” wrote David Stockman as he reviewed his White House years. “It defied all of the overwhelming forces, interests, and impulses of American democracy. Our Madisonian government of checks and balances, three branches, two legislative houses, and infinitely splintered power is conservative, not radical. It hugs powerfully to the history behind it. It shuffles into the future one step at a time. It cannot leap into revolutions without falling flat on its face.”

  Stockman had come belatedly to a revelation that had struck many of his fellow practitioners years before. During the Carter presidency, several score former senators, cabinet officers, governors, mayors, women activists, as well as scholars, journalists, and lawyers, had begun meeting from month to month only a few blocks from the White House to assess the health of the American political system. The frustrations and deadlocks that most of these politicians and administrators encountered in merely trying to make the government work rivaled Stockman’s more ideological disappointments. Early in 1987, even before the full import of the Iran-Contra scandals was known, this group made public its bleak diagnosis of the present condition and future prospects of the American political system.

  As befitted its name—Committee on the Constitutional System—the group concentrated on structural and institutional disorders. In the bicentennial year of 1987 it found serious strains and tensions in the nation’s governing processes. The committee pointed to the huge, “unsustainable deficits” that defied the good intentions of legislators and President. It pointed to foreign and national security programs, where focus and consistency were frustrated “by an institutional contest of wills between Presidents and shifting, cross-party coalitions within the Congress.” It pointed to presidential-Senate conflict over treaty-making. Over forty pacts submitted to the Senate for ratification since World War II either had been rejected or had never even come to a vote. Among those not voted on were SALT II, treaties on underground nuclear tests, several human rights conventions, and a variety of trade, tax, and environmental pacts. Just as the President’s threat of veto often chilled measures in Congress, so the Senate’s threat of inaction or negative action could freeze the ratification process.

  Other monitors found the disarray outside the constitutional system even more serious than the delay and deadlock within it. They pointed to the falling-off of voter turnout at almost all levels of government, reflecting widespread apathy toward matters political and pervasive distrust of government, which was also indicated in poll after poll. They deplored the dominance of media and personality politics, the power of interest-group politics coupled with the decline of parties, the huge and ever-rising costs of running for office, the endless campaigns that maximized problems of campaign finance while boring the public. Critics noted the hypertrophy of some organs of government in the midst of the weakness and disarray— the rise of the “imperial presidency” and of the equally imperial judiciary.

  The 1987 monitors willy-nilly had joined one of the country’s oldest vocations—criticizing the system. The Framers’ failure in 1787 to add a Bill of Rights had left hundreds of state and local leaders suspicious of the new constitution. The most striking turnabout on the Constitution was conducted by some of the leading Framers when they had to run the government they had planned. After all their denunciations of “party spirit” and their careful engineering of a system of checks and balances designed to thwart popular majorities, Hamilton and Madison and their allies in the 1790s fashioned and captained party factions in Congress and the Administration that unified government to a degree.

  During the early 1800s abolitionists attacked the Constitution for countenancing slavery and women leaders condemned it for failing to grant their sex voting and other rights. Southerners flailed it for encouraging centralizing tendencies in the national government, tendencies legitimated by the decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall and his nationalist brethren in cases striking down state interferences with national economic power. The victory of the North in the Civil War and the passage of the Reconstruction amendments consolidated national—and for several decades Republican—predominance in the constitutional system. Early in the new century, as progressives and radicals assessed the suffering and wastage caused by a virtually unregulated system of private enterprise, the Constitution came under attack as a conservative and elitist frame of government still designed to thwart the aspirations of the masses of people.

  Progressives during the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eras managed to democratize the Constitution. Under the Seventeenth Amendment all United States senators would be directly elected by the voters rather than by state legislatures. Many states adopted the initiative, referendum, and recall. Under their own indomitable leadership, women won the right to vote in national elections. Political parties were “purified” and “democratized” by the adoption of reform measures substituting party primaries for nominating conventions, establishing nonpartisan elections in many cities and even states, and eliminating straight-ticket voting that had encouraged less informed voters to ballot for the whole party slate with one check mark. Progressive-era democratization turned out to be a largely middle-class effort whose main result was not purifying politics but curbing the impact of party leadership and party policy on government. Since political parties were often the only “lobby” or “interest group” that low-income workers, immigrants, blacks, domestics, the jobless, the very young, and the very old possessed, the decline of party meant a major alteration in the foundations of government power.

  For a century and a half the constitutional frame of the government remained intact, like some grand old pyramid towering serenely over the desert storms. It was
a tribute to the wisdom of the builders of 1787 that their edifice, despite wear here and erosion there, carried on its main role of institutionalizing the checks and balances among President, two houses of Congress, and the judiciary. In a century when a number of upper houses were abolished or defanged in other Western democracies, the American Senate retained its panoply of powers. The absolute veto of House and Senate on each other remained, as did the qualified vetoes of President and Congress on each other. A Rip Van Winkle returning to Washington a century after the Capitol was built and proceeding from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, would have found the same several branches, separated from one another, everything quite in place, just as the Framers had wanted.

  Within this structure, however, powers shifted, processes changed, with the ebb and flow of political combat. The presidency had assumed far more massive power than the Framers could have dreamed—and yet had lost control of large sections of the executive branch when regulatory commissions, the Federal Reserve Board, bureaus supported in Congress and the country by special interests, were cut off from supervision by even the most vigilant of Presidents. Even within the Executive Office itself, the President’s control was not absolute, as the Iran-Contra revelations disclosed. The Senate held a veto on the rest of the government but still was subject to internal veto by a few determined filibusterers. The House of Representatives, once a relatively disciplined body under Speakers called “czars,” was fragmented by party factions, committee and subcommittee chairpersons, activist staffs, and interest groups and their lobbyists.