Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Rogers said little beyond predicting that the storm would pass. Nancy found his words unhelpful. Strauss was more to her liking. “Mr. President, let me tell you about the first time I was up here in the residence,” Strauss said. “LBJ was in office, and a few of us came to see him about Vietnam. When my turn came to speak, I held back. I didn’t tell the president what I really thought. Instead I told him what I thought he wanted to hear. When I went home that night, I felt like a two-dollar whore. And I said to myself: If any president is ever foolish enough to invite me back, I hope I show more character. I came to see Carter on many occasions, and I always told him what I thought.”

  Strauss paused, then continued. “Now, I have no quarrel with Don Regan. But you’ve got two serious problems right now, and he’s not helping you with either one. First, you’ve got a political problem on the Hill, and Don Regan has no constituency and no allies there. Second, you’ve got a serious media problem, and Regan has no friends there, either. It makes no difference how earnest he is, or how much you like him, or how well the two of you get along. He’s not the man you need. You’re in a hell of a mess, Mr. President, and you need a chief of staff who can help get you out of it.”

  Nancy Reagan was gratified by Strauss’s words. She called him that evening to thank him for being so direct. “Unfortunately, Ronnie wasn’t responsive to Bob’s message,” she recalled.

  Nor did he respond to her. “I said to him: I was right about Stockman. I was right about Bill Clark. Why won’t you listen about Don Regan?” Reagan loved his wife but on this subject heeded his own instincts. “Until the very end, Ronnie continued to believe that the problems with Don were going to work themselves out,” she wrote.

  DON REGAN SAW the end coming. Recalling the news conference at which Reagan and Meese revealed the diversion of funds, Regan wrote, “As revelation followed revelation and the reporters, shouting and leaping and gesticulating, began to understand the magnitude of the event, their excitement created an atmosphere that can only be described as primal. Fundamental emotions came into play. The many minds in the briefing room seemed to be thinking a single thought: another presidency was about to destroy itself. The blood was in the water.”

  The blood wasn’t Regan’s, but he didn’t think the sharks could tell the difference. The media speculated how long he could last, with the balance of opinion predicting days or weeks rather than months. The Democrats predictably demanded his resignation, but so did many Republicans.

  Regan thought he could survive the criticism from outside the White House, but he wasn’t sure he could stand the carping from within. He recalled the novel about the Roman emperor Claudius by Robert Graves, in which Claudius asks his grandmother, the scheming Livia, whether she prefers fast poisons or slow ones. She replies that slow poisons are better, as they give the appearance of ordinary disease. “Without stretching things too far,” Regan remarked later, “it can be suggested that the most popular poison in twentieth-century Washington is bad publicity. In massive doses it can destroy a reputation outright. When leaked slowly into the veins of the victim it kills his public persona just as certainly, but the symptoms—anger, suspicion, frustration, the loss of friends and influence—are often mistaken for the malady. The victim may realize that he is being poisoned; he may even have a very good idea who the poisoners are. But he cannot talk about his suspicions without adding a persecution complex to the list of his faults that is daily being compiled in the newspapers.”

  Regan didn’t identify his Livia explicitly, but he didn’t have to. Everyone in Washington knew that Nancy Reagan distrusted and despised him; most assumed she was trying to have him fired. Regan interpreted a series of leaks damaging to himself as coming from the First Lady and her staff. “Longtime Reagan Advisers Seeking Regan’s Ouster,” a typical headline asserted in the Los Angeles Times. The accompanying story, citing “sources close to the president,” explained that Michael Deaver and Stuart Spencer would be meeting with the president. “Deaver and Spencer, supported by First Lady Nancy Reagan, plan to advise Reagan that his presidency will be seriously hampered during his final two years unless he ousts Regan and takes other strong steps to address the Iranian arms-and-hostages scandal, the sources said.” The article added helpfully, “Deaver, Spencer and Nancy Reagan have collaborated in the past on crucial personnel problems confronting the president.” And it quoted one of the unnamed sources as saying of Regan, “He’s got to go because absolutely nobody’s for him. Even some of his own staff would like to tell him he has to go, but they don’t dare. Everybody’s on board on this one except the ‘old man’ ”—Reagan.

  The sniping had a temporarily paradoxical effect. Regan had been planning to resign after the midterm elections, but he didn’t want to yield to media pressure or give Nancy the satisfaction of driving him from the administration. And he judged that resignation under fire would seem an admission of guilt.

  THE PRESIDENT, FOR his part, was equally reluctant to have personnel decisions made for him by others. He continued to blame the media for the scandal—for spoiling a worthy initiative and grossly exaggerating some venial offenses by his staff. “There is a bitter bile in my throat these days,” he told Time magazine. Switching to the metaphor du jour, he continued, “I’ve never seen the sharks circling like they now are with blood in the water.” Switching again, he added, “What is driving me up the wall is that this wasn’t a failure until the press got a tip from that rag in Beirut and began to play it up. I told them that publicity could destroy this, that it could get people killed. They then went right on.” Asked whether he felt betrayed by Oliver North, Reagan roundly rejected the idea. “Lt. Col. Oliver North was involved in all our operations,” he said. “He has a fine record. He is a national hero. My only criticism is that I wasn’t told everything.”

  Reagan told some visiting Republican lawmakers that he wasn’t going to fire people to appease the media or his critics. “So far, only two have been named”—Poindexter and North—“and those two have been let go,” he said. “If others are named I’ll take action, but I’m not going to change my team.” Following the meeting that had been leaked to the Los Angeles Times, the president wrote in his diary, “Stu Spencer dropped by with Mike Deaver. They are good friends and honestly want to help me but I can’t agree with their recommendation—that the answer to my Iran problem is to fire my people—top staff and even cabinet.”

  AN UNEXPECTED COMPLICATION distracted the president from questions about his chief of staff. Even as the special commission appointed to investigate the Iran-contra affair commenced its work, the Senate and the House launched their own probes. The Senate committee called William Casey to testify, supposing that if anyone knew about secret activities linked to the contras, it would be the CIA director. But the day before Casey was to appear, he suffered a seizure and had to be hospitalized. Doctors diagnosed and removed a brain tumor, which proved malignant. Casey lost most of his ability to speak. Certainly he could not testify.

  Reagan treated the situation matter-of-factly. “Have to begin thinking of a possible Director for CIA,” he wrote. “The prognosis on Bill Casey is not too good. Will now have to have radiation in addition to chemotherapy. If we must, our U.N. ambassador Vernon Walters might be a very good choice.”

  Nancy Reagan wanted her husband to move at once. “With Casey in the hospital, the CIA was left without a director,” she said later. “It seemed to me that this especially sensitive position ought to be filled as quickly as possible, especially during a government crisis.”

  Don Regan pushed back. “It seemed unwise as well as inhumane, I told Mrs. Reagan, for the president to fire a man who was known to be one of his closest friends while the man was lying on what was almost certainly his deathbed,” Regan recalled.

  “Ronnie and I were not old friends of the Caseys, although it was said in the media that we were,” Nancy rejoined afterward. And she continued to press her husband to let Casey go.

  Regan fo
und her meddling distasteful and annoying. “Just before Christmas the First Lady rang to ask, for the third or fourth time since Casey’s surgery on December 18, what I was doing to get rid of him,” Regan recalled.

  “Nothing,” he responded.

  “Why not?” she asked. “He’s got to go. He can’t do his job. He’s an embarrassment to Ronnie. He should be out.”

  “But, Nancy, the man had brain surgery less than a week ago. He was under fire before he got sick. This is no time to pull the rug out from under him.”

  Nancy said she had spoken to her stepbrother, a neurosurgeon, who predicted that Casey would never be able to work again.

  “That may well be,” Regan replied. “But I don’t think anyone has told Bill Casey that. Sophie and the family are taking the illness very hard. It’s Christmastime. It wouldn’t be seemly for Ronald Reagan to fire anybody under these circumstances, much less Bill Casey. We’re not going to do it.”

  Nancy grew angry, by Regan’s account. “You’re more interested in protecting Bill Casey than in protecting Ronnie!” she said. “He’s dragging Ronnie down! Nobody believes what Casey says. His credibility is gone on the Hill.”

  “All that may be true,” Regan granted. “But Bill Casey got your husband elected, and he’s done a lot of other things for him, too. He deserves some gratitude and a better break than you’re giving him, Nancy. The time will come when he can bow out gracefully. Please be patient.”

  Regan’s refusal to fire Casey confirmed Nancy’s judgment that Regan himself had to go. She restated her case to her husband until his patience snapped loudly enough for the media to hear. “An informed source said the Reagans quarreled over Regan earlier in the week, with the First Lady pushing for Regan’s dismissal and the president finally saying, ‘Get off my goddamn back,’ ” the Washington Post reported. Reagan’s spokesman denied both the quotation and the context. Nancy was less categorical. “There was some tension between us over Donald Regan, but Ronnie and I just don’t talk to each other that way,” she reflected.

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  DON REGAN SURVIVED into the new year. In January the president underwent surgery for an enlarged prostate. The procedure was neither unusual nor particularly stressful, yet it triggered Nancy’s anxieties, and she hovered closely about him as he recovered. She tried to persuade him to postpone his State of the Union address, but he said he felt fine and went ahead. His solid performance caused Regan to think he was ready for another news conference, and one was scheduled for the end of February. Nancy exploded at Regan. “I was furious, and on February 8 we had a heated argument about it on the telephone,” she wrote afterward. “When it was clear that I wasn’t going to change his mind, I said, ‘Okay, have your damn press conference!’ ”

  Regan had had enough of Nancy. “You bet I will!” he said. And he hung up.

  Nancy was stunned. “It’s quite a feeling,” she wrote. “You’re standing there holding a dead phone in your hand, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do. It’s infuriating. You want to shake the phone and say, ‘Talk to me!’ ”

  She didn’t immediately complain to her husband. Once before, following Reagan’s cancer surgery, Regan had hung up on her, and she had kept the matter to herself. This time she waited several days. Regan eventually called with a backhanded apology. “My wife said I shouldn’t have hung up on you,” he said.

  “That’s right, you shouldn’t have,” she replied. “Don, don’t ever do that to me again.” By her subsequent recollection, what she really wanted to say was “Do you need your wife to tell you that you shouldn’t hang up on people?” She added, in the later version, “That’s when I finally told Ronnie.”

  The fateful conversation took place at Camp David. “I talked with Ronnie about Don Regan,” she wrote in her diary for February 13. “For the first time I think he listened. I told him again how disappointed I was in the whole situation, and how morale had sunk very low in the office.”

  They spoke more in bed that night and again during the next few days. “I think Ronnie finally understands that he has a real problem, and that something has to be done about it,” she wrote on February 16. Another news story prompted her next day’s entry: “It broke tonight on the news that Don and I are not speaking because I want him to leave. It’s true that we’re not speaking, and it’s true that I want him to leave. But that’s not the reason we’re not speaking.”

  Reagan began to distance himself publicly from his chief of staff. A photo session with visiting Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir led to shouted questions from reporters. “Are you going to fire Regan, or is he talking to Mrs. Reagan, or is she talking to him?” one reporter asked.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Reagan responded, laughing deliberately.

  “Not true?”

  “No, not true, and nobody’s getting fired.”

  After questions on the Middle East, a reporter circled back. “Mr. President, you said nobody is going to get fired. Will Mr. Regan be staying on as your chief of staff?”

  “Well, this is up to him,” Reagan said. “I have always said that when the people that I’ve asked to come into government feel that they have to return to private life, that’s their business and I will never try to talk them out of it.”

  “Is that a yes or a no, sir?”

  “That’s a no-answer. That’s not an answer.”

  YET NANCY THOUGHT it was a message. “That’s a pretty broad hint,” she wrote in her diary that evening. “But I don’t think Don will take it,” she added. The report of the special commission, named for its chairman, former senator John Tower, was expected within days. The report’s approach gave Nancy further reason to wish Regan gone. “The Tower report comes in on the 26th and Don wants Ronnie to go on television on the 27th to make a speech. Ye gods! You can’t prepare a good speech in twenty-four hours. Any fool would know that.”

  The Tower report proved to be the catalyst for the long-delayed decision. Regan afterward asserted that he and the president had agreed the previous November that he would leave after the report was published. So he was surprised to receive a visit from George Bush three days ahead of the report. “Don, why don’t you stick your head into the Oval Office and talk to the president about your situation?” Bush said.

  Regan asked Bush why he was offering this suggestion. He supposed the vice president knew about the understanding that he would leave after the report came out.

  “Well, the president asked me if I knew what your plans were,” Bush said.

  Regan went into the Oval Office and sat in his usual chair at the side of the president’s desk. He asked Reagan if he wanted to talk about his situation.

  “I think it’s about time, Don,” Reagan said.

  Regan later confessed to making no effort to ease the president’s task. “All right, Mr. President,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me? Where’s your head on this? What do you think I should do?”

  “Well, good Lord, Don,” he said. “This last weekend the airwaves were filled with all that stuff about Nancy.” A ruckus had arisen around a newly appointed White House director of communications, Jack Koehler, who had not told Regan or anyone else that he had been a member of a Nazi youth group during his boyhood in Germany. The newspapers reported that Nancy Reagan had pushed Koehler’s appointment and that Regan was saying that it therefore should have been her staff’s responsibility to check out his background. The president unsurprisingly took Nancy’s side. “She’s being blamed for Koehler and she’s being seen unfairly,” he told Regan. “I was the one who wanted him. She never met him.”

  Regan didn’t respond. The president was clearly uncomfortable. “I think it’s time we do that thing that you said when we talked in November,” Reagan said.

  “I’ll stick by that,” Regan replied. “I’ll go whenever you say.”

  “Well, since the report is coming out on Thursday, I think it would be appropriate for you to bow out now.”

  Regan recalled being shocked
and answering angrily. “What do you mean now?” he said. “This is the Monday before the report. You can’t do that to me, Mr. President. If I go before that report is out, you throw me to the wolves. I deserve better treatment than that.”

  Reagan searched for a way past the tense moment. “Well, what do you think would be right?” he said.

  “The first part of next week,” Regan responded. “Let the report come out. Let the world see what really happened and where the blame lies. I’m willing to take my chances on that.”

  Reagan consented, relieved at resolving the issue. But Regan had more to say. He complained about Nancy’s meddling in the affairs of the administration. “I thought I was chief of staff to the president,” he said. “Not to his wife. I have to tell you, sir, that I’m very bitter about the whole experience. You’re allowing the loyal to be punished, and those who have their own agenda to be rewarded.”

  Regan recalled Reagan’s reaction. “The president, who dislikes confrontations more than any man I have ever known, looked at me without anger. ‘Well, we’ll try to make that up by the way we handle this,’ Ronald Reagan said softly. ‘We’ll make sure that you go out in good fashion.’ ”

  THINGS HAPPENED OTHERWISE. The Tower Commission had done yeoman work; in three months it interviewed more than fifty witnesses, and though it lacked subpoena power and so could not compel testimony, it got all but two of the most important players to talk. Those two, significantly, were John Poindexter and Oliver North.

  Reagan was among the willing. He spoke to the commissioners in the Oval Office in late January and again in February. Reagan told them in his first interview that he had approved the initial shipment of TOW missiles from Israel to Iran in August 1985. This contradicted testimony by Don Regan, who said the president had not granted prior approval. As Reagan prepared for his second interview, he met with Regan, George Bush, and White House counsel Peter Wallison to review their records and memories to determine who was right. Regan persuaded Reagan that the president’s memory was wrong. The chief of staff said that when he told Reagan about the missile shipments, the president had acted surprised and upset. Wallison pressed Reagan: “Were you surprised?”