Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  The image that presidents project when they go abroad to summit meetings or on foreign missions reinforces this public image of the president as the nation’s political John Wayne. Rare is the time when a president more totally dominates our political landscape than when he is our leader abroad. These voyages become political sagas that capture the public imagination and arm the presidency with the excitement of new adventure, with the glamor of pomp and ceremony.

  Normally, the presidential apparatus is invisible, tucked away in the White House and nearby office buildings. But on a major presidential trip, the entourage—the vast trappings of office—become visible, for when a president moves, legions move with him. In a very real sense, the president never really leaves the White House, he brings most of it with him.

  Many times, as I clambered off planes on presidential trips to Paris or Jerusalem or Moscow or Shanghai and glanced over the tarmac at a sea of people struggling with briefcases and shoulder luggage while the president took a welcoming military salute, I thought to myself, this is our modern imperial retinue. In earlier eras, such a bureaucratic army would have been described by historians as the Napoleon’s camp followers or Caesar’s Roman impedimenta, the human train and baggage of the emperor.

  For if President Carter heads off for meetings with Western leaders in London or Bonn, or President Reagan treks twenty thousand miles across the Pacific to China, their human convoys can number one thousand more. At the core are three hundred to four hundred government officials: the president’s senior staff plus echelons of policy advisers, negotiators, communiqué drafters, military aides, doctors, stewards, personal valets, even the first lady’s hairdresser; plus several cabinet members with their lieutenants, specialists, secretaries, spokesmen, and miscellaneous handlers; and a phalanx of as many as one hundred Secret Service agents ready to form a human wall, if need be, to insure the president’s physical safety.

  Another battalion is the Greek chorus of the press: from two hundred and fifty to one thousand reporters, photographers, television crews, and technicians lugging cameras and sound systems, enough to fill one chartered Boeing 747 and sometimes overflow into another. With us, always, was a vital escort of ten to twenty White House press officials equipped with photocopying machines and one hundred thousand sheets of paper for a torrent of texts and press releases, many of them issued in flight against deadlines for instant filing at the inevitable temporary press center at the next stop.7

  The logistics of transporting this unwieldy caravan are a nightmare and make the Huntsville trip seem child’s play. The president and his most elite advisers and assistants travel on Air Force One, while second-ranking officials travel on an identical backup plane and still other stragglers on commercial aircraft. From the basic aerial convoy something like one thousand pieces of luggage must be carted off and on at each overnight stop. In advance, two or three huge Air Force C-130 cargo planes carry the heavy gear: communications equipment, voice scramblers, coding machines, special cars for the Secret Service, and two bulletproof limousines for the president. In China, for example, there were two limousines, so that one could ferry President Reagan around Peking while a second was jumped ahead to his second stop in Xi’an, whereupon the first one could be leapfrogged ahead to his third stop in Shanghai.

  “When we went to China, Reagan was like a modern-day Marco Polo with all the technology and everything,” commented Michael K. Deaver, who as White House deputy chief of staff was the impresario of presidential travel from 1981 to 1985.8

  Thanks primarily to television, this modern-day-Marco-Polo image gets fixed in the public mind: the American president, on the move, buttressed by a huge retinue whose primary function is to amplify his authority as America’s leader. More than at almost any other time, a president traveling abroad personifies the nation; he engages our national pride.

  Near the climax of the Watergate scandal in mid-1974, Richard Nixon seemed to hope for some rescue in a final summit meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Crimea. Jimmy Carter’s presidency reached a pinnacle with his Camp David mediation effort in 1978 and his pilgrimmage a year later to Egypt and Israel to consummate their peace treaty. For President Reagan, ventures to the Great Wall of China and the commemoration of the D-day landing at Normandy, both in his reelection year, were vaulting political triumphs. The most talented stage managers of presidential travel, such as Mike Deaver, carefully craft itineraries to lift the drama and appeal of presidential diplomacy—to heighten the impression of presidential power.

  The power of the presidency as an office is indisputable. No other single governmental office approaches it, either in terms of legal authority or the platform it offers its occupant for persuading Congress and the public. Even so, the presidential hoopla—most of it as contrived as mass advertising—obscures a true understanding of the real workings of power in Washington. It magnifies and distorts the president’s actual political leverage most of the time. For example, only a few weeks after his Crimean summit with Brezhnev, Nixon had to resign from office; in spite of Carter’s unprecedented negotiating breakthrough at Camp David and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, public confidence in Carter plummeted; Reagan, though a strong president, has repeatedly found his will checked, and the political initiative wrested from him by others, not to mention his being humbled by the Iran-contra affair.

  In short, politics reduced to the level of John Wayne’s Dodge City can be a captivating illusion. It makes for great TV, but it focuses too much attention on the fellow at center stage, while much of the real action in the Washington power game often goes on elsewhere. I myself had to learn that whether the president was Kennedy or Reagan, the glamorous image of medieval jousting or western gun toting simply misses far too much about the fluid, fragmented, and floating nature of political power in Washington.

  In April 1986, when President Reagan was riding a crest in the public opinion polls, after the American air attack on Libya and well before the nation knew anything of the Iranian scandal, Al Kingon, Reagan’s cabinet secretary, his main staff link to the executive branch, lamented to me that the White House “is the most defensive operation anywhere in government—you’re constantly under barrage.

  “You’d think on the outside what a fabulous place to work,” he went on, curling his stocking feet around the edge of his office coffee table. Then, in Brooklyn accent and with some exaggeration, Kingon declaimed: “Power? There ain’t none. What power? I’m being bashed around as I’ve never been bashed around in my life. Every morning when I come in here, the phone rings. Something happened somewhere, and your reaction is, ‘Oh, my God, how do I get out of this one?’ I believe it was Henry Kissinger who said, ‘You don’t have time to think. All you do is expend all the intellectual capital you’ve accumulated before.’ ”9

  Power Reality: Our Rotating Premiers

  The sense of impotence at the very heart of our government has echoes in the past. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, all gave voice to that complaint. Truman, in his final days, made a famous quip after meeting his successor, General Eisenhower. “He’ll sit right here and he’ll say, ‘Do this. Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”10 Truman was talking about the problems any president has in getting his orders carried out by the bureaucracy.

  And since the days of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, organic changes have taken place in the way our nation is governed. Paramount power is now harder to grasp and exercise than it ever has been in our history. Not only has Congress grown much more assertive since the mid-1970s but within Congress itself the old power oligarchy has been broken up by internal reform. Television has given relatively junior members of Congress a platform to become policy entrepreneurs, and the highest ranking leaders on Capitol Hill are sometimes forced to chase after junior back benchers, to find the head of the political parade.

  Government has become so complex and the top leaders so da
unted by its complexity that they have granted enormous powers to staff aides who labor in the shadows. At times, this shadow government makes policy—most stunningly in the Iran-contra affair, when National Security Adviser John Poindexter not only bypassed cabinet secretaries and usurped the authority of the president, but kept them all in the dark. Presidents such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are blocked or overturned by special interest lobbies, which build mass support on pet issues. The power of political parties has been eroded by the rise of independent, ticket-splitting voters, who frequently keep presidents from gaining majorities in Congress to pass their programs.

  In this final period of the twentieth century, we Americans have a more fluid system of power than ever before in our history. Quite literally, power floats. It does not reside in the White House, nor does it merely alternate from pole to pole, from president to opposition, from Republicans to Democrats. It floats. It shifts. It wriggles elusively, like mercury in the palm of one’s hand, passing from one competing power center to another, with the driving leadership on major policies—from the budget to tax reform to military spending and the MX missile—gravitating to whoever is daring enough to grab it and smart enough to figure out the quickest way to make a political score.

  Even our high school catechisms about the division of powers in government, among the executive branch, the legislature, and the courts, miss the elusive fluidity of power these days. The old notion of separation of powers implies, for many people, a seesaw power struggle for primacy, principally between the president and Congress—essentially a variation of the John Wayne metaphor: President wins, Congress loses, or vice versa. Actually, the power float is more like water polo, where the ball is tossed among players trying to keep their heads above water, or fast-action basketball, where anyone can steal the ball, change the flow of the game, and then score from practically anywhere around the basket.

  The old-fashioned seesaw image omits powerful institutions such as the Federal Reserve Board, the primary influence on interest rates, monetary policy, and inflation. The simple notion of Congress versus President overlooks the fact that often, presidents are not challenged frontally by Congress but rather by powerful political alliances that bridge across the executive and legislative branches to alter, outflank, or subvert presidential policy. Jimmy Carter was forced to build an aircraft carrier he did not want—not by Congress alone, but by an alliance between his own admirals and pro-Navy members of Congress. Ronald Reagan had to bow to combined pressures from some officials within his administration and from most of Congress for some sanctions against South Africa. The simple seesaw idea also ignores the fact that the powers of Congress and president often mesh and can only be wielded jointly. As the Harvard University presidential scholar Richard Nuestadt observed, we have not so much a government of separated powers as “a government of separated institutions sharing powers.”11

  Case in point: Ronald Reagan built a reputation as a strong president, and at times he clearly took charge: ordering the invasion of Grenada and air strikes against Libya, pressing budget and tax cuts through Congress in 1981, naming justices to the Supreme Court, or suddenly announcing plans for a space-based defense that few others thought wise or realistic. At these times, especially when dealing with foreign policy, Reagan clearly combined the functions of chief of state and prime minister, both of which are inherent in our presidency. His early legislative victories restored the vigor of the presidency and revived public confidence in the nation’s highest office. Unquestionably, he rekindled the ceremonial majesty of the presidency.

  But for other long stretches of time—not just as a late-second-term, lame-duck president, but even in his first term—the power of political initiative floated away from Reagan, despite popularity ratings on a par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. During Reagan’s passive periods, policy has been driven not by the president but by others.

  This is not unique to Reagan. Eisenhower had to bargain with Democrats Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Nixon, Ford, and Carter all found it impossible to grasp and exercise continuous control and deliver on their pet programs. Each wound up on the defensive, with declining popularity. What is so striking and instructive about the Reagan presidency is the peculiar combination of his overwhelming personal popularity and his frequent lack of matching political leverage. It is as if we had unknowingly slipped into operating like a European parliamentary system, with its revolving coalition governments, while our president reigned above it all, a regal symbol of nationhood.

  “What you have right now is a constitutional monarchy,” asserted Representative Newt Gingrich, a bright Reaganite Republican from Georgia. “What we’ve done is we’ve reinvented Hanoverian kingship without reinventing the parliamentary prime ministership. We have this tremendously nice, likable King Victoria. Everybody likes him but where the hell’s Disraeli? or Gladstone? What I’m saying is that in the age of television, we now have the television-series equivalent of [rotating] prime ministerships.”12

  Michael Barone, writing in The Washington Post, once compared the kaleidoscopic shuffle of political coalitions in the Reagan period to the Italian government, where a relatively small group of politicians shuffle and reshuffle the top government ministries. “Italian politics is often held up to ridicule as comically unstable, with constantly changing ministries, divided responsibility, and splinter parties,” he observed. “But how much different, in practice, is ours?… Functional responsibility—not necessarily the title, but the real decision-making power—gets passed around here as well, to those strong enough to grab it.”13

  Barone’s analogy fits, not only the Reagan years but the modern presidency in general. The president is always part of the power mix but not necessarily the central part. In 1981, when Reagan pressed his budget and tax cuts through Congress, he was at the peak of his power—the prime minister of his own coalition; his leading ministers were his budget director, David Stockman, and his White House chief of staff, James A. Baker III. But by that same fall and into the following year, 1982, the critical role of driving economic policy had passed to Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker’s tight money policies were wringing inflation out of the economy and bringing on a painful recession that the president could not prevent; Reagan deficits compounded the problem.

  In the spring of 1982, a new political coalition emerged to take over policy leadership, a surprising partnership between Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. They forced the president to backtrack and accept a $98 billion, three-year tax increase in August 1982. They eventually pushed through two jobs bills, and they worked out a Social Security compromise with the president. In the spring of 1983, the MX issue was resolved by a new coalition spearheaded by two congressmen, Les Aspin of Wisconsin and Albert Gore of Tennessee, and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. These three Democrats stepped into a foreign-policy vacuum left by Reagan’s inability to move Congress. In the election year of 1984, little happened and the nation was left with a caretaker government.

  Surprisingly, after his landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan did not reclaim the prime ministership in 1985. His one big policy push was tax reform, but that was slow in coming. The start of Reagan’s second term marked a rapid turnover in national political leadership. First came Robert Dole, the new Senate majority leader, who drove the budget process for six months, insisting on austerity for both the Pentagon and Social Security. When the White House pulled the rug out from Dole and toppled his coalition, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, took the limelight by rewriting the president’s tax-reform bill. Reagan’s role was rescuing it from defeat by angered House Republicans.

  The public was still giving Reagan high marks for strong leadership, but in fact, leadership was largely coming from below. By fall 1985, two freshman Republican senators, Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, became the driving forces, the
new prime ministers, for a five-year plan to balance the budget. In early 1986, the stunning turnaround of Bob Packwood, Senate Finance Committee chairman—and not anything done by President Reagan—revived the dying tax reform bill. On the Philippines, Reagan was pushed into a new policy primarily by Richard Lugar of Indiana, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With public accusations of vote fraud, Lugar made it virtually impossible for Reagan not to break with the Philippine government of Ferdinand Marcos and recognize the election victory of Corazon Aquino. Reagan simply got dragged along, as he did on South African sanctions and trade policy.

  When the Iran crisis broke in November 1986, Reagan behaved like a monarch, acting as if he were above the controversy that consumed his aides, ousting chief of staff Donald Regan and others—as if he were a king dismissing a discredited prime minister to spare the crown. By his direction, the national security staff had secretly continued aid to the Nicaraguan contras—but at times the staff ran him, not vice versa. In late 1987, yet another prime minister emerged, House Speaker Jim Wright, taking the policy lead and forcing Reagan to go along with a Central American peace plan. To be sure, through it all, Reagan clung to his Star Wars defense, held summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and signed the medium-range-missile agreement. But what is striking in many other cases is how often the policy initiative came not from the president, but from someone else.

  Reflecting on the record, some of Reagan’s own domestic policy advisers privately admit how frequently power floats out of the White House.