“For … White House assistants there is only one fixed goal in life. It is somehow to gain and maintain access to the president. This is a process which resembles nothing else known in the world except possibly the Japanese game of Go, a contest in which there are very few fixed rules and the playing consists of laying down alternating counters in patterns that permit flexibility but seek to deny that flexibility to the opponent. The success of the player depends upon the whim of the president. Consequently, the president’s psychology is studied minutely, and a working day in the White House is marked by innumerable probes to determine which routes to the Oval Room are open and which end in a blind alley.”4
Reedy could have extended his comment to cabinet members. Under Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz insisted on private weekly meetings with the president, and high Pentagon officials accused him of using these private sessions to sell Reagan on questionable policy moves. On one occasion, I was told, Shultz blindsided both Casey and Weinberger by getting Reagan’s approval for Shultz to undertake a diplomatic mission to Nicaragua on June 1, 1984. On another occasion, Shultz angered the Pentagon by persuading Reagan to endorse a draft communiqué for the 1985 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Similarly, Donald Regan, as chief of staff, used his one-on-one access with the president in early October 1985 to sell Reagan on the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing scheme before Shultz and Weinberger could warn Reagan of the jeopardy to Reagan’s military buildup.
On a less exalted plane, few things inspired more wild jealousy among lobbyists than Michael Deaver’s privilege, after leaving the Reagan White House in 1985, of keeping his White House security pass and getting a daily copy of President Reagan’s schedule. Those two perks—symbols of his continued links to the president—were probably worth millions of dollars to Deaver from clients who wanted to buy his access to Reagan. But there was such a public furor about Deaver’s access being excessive and improper that he had to surrender his privileges.
Politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists covet tokens of access and influence the way Eagle scouts collect merit badges. Senior White House officials scheme and fume over the location of their offices, their parking places, where they ride on Air Force One, and whether they have “POTUS phones”—direct lines to the president of the United States (POTUS). Only cabinet secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and half a dozen other officials qualify for “porthole to porthole”—daily door-to-door chauffeur service. Other high officials on an A list and a B list, divided by rank, can order government cars for official business.
Three or four top White House officials can have lunch served in their offices by Filipino mess boys, dressed like Yale Whiffenpoofs in blue blazers and gray charcoal slacks. The others, in descending order of rank, can eat in:
1. the executive mess
2. the regular White House mess, or
3. the overflow board room.
There are only slight differences in menu; the decor and the dining compartments convey the pecking order. Only about twenty out of probably two thousand people who work in the Office of the President can use the White House gym. And Jimmy Carter himself decided who could use the tennis court on the South Lawn.
But the size and location of one’s office is the main badge of status and a prime indicator of access. In any heirarchy—business, university, or military service—one’s office is an important symbol of rank and eminence; in the White House power game, it has acute significance. Proximity to power is crucial for both real and symbolic reasons. Only those closest at hand can readily walk into the Oval Office or be quickly summoned.
However, as most tourists are probably amazed to discover (I was), the White House is pretty small. Only the cream of the power elite can fit into about a dozen well-appointed offices on the first and second floors of the West Wing. In that highly prized terrain, the territorial imperative is as powerful as in the jungle. Most people in the Office of the President do not have offices in the White House; they work across the street in a handsome, baroque structure that was once the State Department and is now known as old Executive Office Building (EOB).
“People will kill to get an office in the West Wing,” Mike Deaver told me while he was still Reagan’s closest personal aide. “You’ll see people working in closets, tucked back in a corner, rather than taking a huge office with a fireplace in the EOB. God help you if you’re suddenly moved to the fourth floor of the EOB because that’s death row, as they call it over there. That means you’re on the way out.”5
Deaver and I were sitting in his office, adjoining the Oval Office. It is a room handsomely furnished with antiques, several oil paintings by Childe Hassam, a fireplace, and its own private patio. President Carter had made it his study, but Reagan had turned it over to Deaver, the trusted aide he wanted nearest to him. By Deaver’s account, the president had taken him into the study after the inauguration ceremonies in 1981.
“I want you to have this office,” Reagan told Deaver.
“I can’t do that,” Deaver demurred. “Where are you going to go if you want to get away?”
Reagan smiled and gestured toward the Oval Office, visible through the open door connecting the two rooms.
“I’ve been trying to get that round office in there for the last fourteen years,” he said. “Why would I want to get away?”
The Access Itch
When the president travels, the “access itch,” the urge to be physically close to the president, becomes acute. The fewer people who can fit into a plane, a helicopter, a presidential limousine, the more competitive the inner circle becomes.
“Who rides in the limousine with the president is very important,” Deaver said, shaking his head. “People sit on each other’s laps. I finally had to make a rule that you couldn’t put any more than three people in the president’s limousine if the motorcade took more than ten minutes, because the president winds up all scrunched up.
“Jim Baker would always want to be in there as chief of staff. If [then-presidential counselor] Ed Meese was along, he would want to be in there. But if you landed in some state, you had the governor, two United States senators, the mayor, maybe you had a congressman. And you had to do it just from a protocol standpoint—and that would be the governor, who outranks everybody else in the state, and one staff member, and that was usually Baker, and if he wasn’t along, it was me.”6
Long trips touch off a power scramble for choice seating on Air Force One, which carries only about twenty officials; nearly half of the plane’s forty seats are assigned to Secret Service agents and a press pool. Simply traveling in high-echelon quarters of Air Force One is a heady experience for many politicians and visitors. Coming back from an economic summit meeting in Canada aboard Air Force One for an interview with Reagan, I remember being impressed by the high-backed luxury-style seats, the fancy service by Navy stewards in blazers, and by having a telephone plugged into the arm of my seat and a signal corps operator asking, “Where would you like to call, sir?” Mentally, I imagined the click of military heels coming to attention at the other end of the line. Like an overawed tourist, I scooped up souvenirs: matchboxes, napkins, swizzle sticks, any item embossed with the presidential seal.
Little tokens of status and power become enormously important to people who live in this hothouse power environment. Some officials squabble over choice seats near the president’s cabin. Equally important to some high officials is being seen at the president’s side as he gets off the plane. By protocol, only the president and Mrs. Reagan were to use the front exit; everyone else was to use the rear exit. But the TV cameras and welcoming parties were at the front, and the most perk-and-publicity-conscious officials—press spokesman Larry Speakes; Dick Darman, a top presidential aide; National Security Adviser Bill Clark—would violate protocol and get off the front, ahead of the president rather than exit from the rear.
“We tried to temper it by saying that the only person off the front of the plane is the president, or the president an
d Mrs. Reagan, or Reagan and Secretary Shultz,” said Bill Sitman, a Deaver aide whose job was to manage travel arrangements. “You’d see people have a fit. They didn’t want to get off from the back door of the plane. After all, what’s the point of being on Air Force One if people don’t see you get off the front of Air Force One with the president? Larry Speakes would get off the front; Dick Darman would do it; Bill Clark would always go off the front—he couldn’t find the back of the plane if his life depended on it. Senators, congressmen—they’d always get off the plane up front before the president.”7
The proximity crush becomes far more intense when the president travels on his Marine One helicopter. It is a huge Sikorsky VH-3D, but packed with communications gear, it has only ten seats, five taken up by a doctor, Secret Service agents, and military and personal aides to the president. With Mrs. Reagan on board, that left only three empty seats, normally assigned to the chief of staff, the national security adviser, and Speakes or another top White House aide. These arrangements have vexed ego-sensitive politicians looking for a moment in the sun at the president’s side, when flying into their own home state and town, or cabinet officers eager for time with “The Chief.”
One helicopter trip ended unhappily, and ominously, for former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and it underscored the importance of the staff’s proximity to the president. During Reagan’s visit in 1982 to Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, Haig was miffed that he and his wife were left off Reagan’s Marine One helicopter between London and Windsor. There was not enough room for them because Bill Clark, then National Security adviser, was traveling with Reagan. Throughout Reagan’s trip to England and a Western summit meeting in Versailles, Haig and Clark had been feuding, and Clark used the staff man’s inside track to take the prerogative of riding with the president to Windsor on Marine One. Haig and his wife were relegated to a second helicopter, larger, slower, less comfortable, with bench seats.
“There were no other cabinet people on that helicopter,” Bill Sitman recalled. “John Louis, the American ambassador to Great Britain, was also on that helicopter with his wife. They fly those helicopters with the rear door open. Mrs. Haig seemed to take it all right. I guess she’s flown a lot of helicopters, being a military officer’s wife. But Haig didn’t like being put on that helicopter with other lower officials.
“The last straw came as we were leaving Windsor. It was in the morning at the end of the visit. Haig and Mrs. Haig were walking to their helicopter as Marine One was taking off. The backwind blew off Mrs. Haig’s hat. Someone went after it, but the hat was gone. So the Haigs got on their helicopter, and as it was taking off, you could see out this open back door, the hat went waffling across the green at Windsor. That was the last straw for Haig. Mrs. Haig was a saint, but Haig blew his top. He was not a happy man on the helicopter leg from Windsor to London Airport.”
That episode, like Nelson Rockefeller’s lack of access to President Ford, was an ill omen for Haig. At Clark’s instigation, Reagan forced Haig to resign two weeks later, and Haig later howled that one of his biggest problems was the White House staff’s blocking his access to the president.
“Are You in the Loop?”
Timely inside information is a special form of access that gives a power player the chance to make his move before competitors can react. Like inside tips in the stock market, it is the lifeblood of the government policy-maker. Without fresh information a policymaker is forever “behind the power curve,” scrambling to catch up. The question in this part of the power game is not “Who can you see?” but “What are you allowed to know?”
In the national security power fraternity, the put-down comes in the form of one official asking another: “Are you in the loop?” Translated, that means. “Are you on the short list—in the power loop—for getting the most important documents and hottest information,” like the NID (National Intelligence Daily) or the FTPO (For the President Only).
Each morning, the Central Intelligence Agency prepares a top-secret NID—a précis of the most important overnight “take,” or yield, of the intelligence community. It runs about a dozen pages, carries a distinctive red-and-black flag in the upper right corner and a telltale, broad, baby-blue stripe down the side. It comes out six days a week (not on Sunday) and goes only to officials with top-secret clearance or higher, the senior two hundred officials at the White House, Defense Department, State Department, and intelligence agencies.*
I have never read a NID. Those who have tell me that it includes the latest intelligence reports from American agents around the world, the “take” from electronic eavesdropping on foreign leaders, the freshest satellite photography. Reagan has particularly liked maps and photos: “after-action” photos from the American bombing raid on Libya, diagrams of the Iran-Iraq war, satellite coverage of East European freighters delivering weapons to Nicaragua, or Soviet missile tests and deployments.
“There’s a tremendous impact with visuals, a sort of high-level voyeurism,” one NID reader said. “If they have a tape of one world leader talking to another world leader and even if it doesn’t say something of cosmic significance, they run it anyway. The Agency [the CIA] likes to show off to the president and other top people that they have these things.”
Even more rarified, however, is another, smaller intelligence document: the FTPO—For the President Only. White cover, normally only four or five pages of even juicier secret items pegged to the president’s daily schedule, it is likely to have inside tips on the health of a foreign leader whom the president is meeting, reports on that leader’s political troubles at home, or a fresh analysis of some topic due for discussion with a congressional group. Each copy of the FTPO is numbered and jealously guarded. It often contains SCI—secret compartmented information—circulated only on a need-to-know basis because it could expose American spies or collection methods. Sometimes officials have to read it with an armed guard standing nearby, ready to take it away when they’re finished—no copy for their own files. Only about twenty people qualify to see it: the president, vice president, their chiefs of staff, and the innermost of the national security circle.
In this rarified loop, when officials exchange phone numbers, they don’t use normal government extensions. They exchange their three-digit “secure phone” numbers—such as KY 238 or KY 107. These phones are equipped with scramblers: electronic devices that jumble and encode words spoken into a telephone and then ungarble them at the other end. This allows officials to discuss the most sensitive classified information without Soviet electronic eavesdroppers understanding.
Narrowing the Access
Obviously, deciding who gets the most sensitive and essential information also decides who can be a full player in the policy game. Knowledge is power. Some information, such as Oliver North’s messages to his agents in the Iranian arms operation and on weapons drops to the Nicaraguan contras, is too sensitive even for the NID or the FTPO. The loop on those operations was extremely small—so small that word was passed orally or on secure private-line computers of the national security staff. Above all, the Iranian episode dramatized the fact that whoever controls information can control policy. For months at a time, National Security advisers Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter kept both Shultz and Weinberger in the dark about the operation and thus unable to object to specific actions. The cabinet secretaries were “information blind.”
One stunning shock of the Iran-contra operation to most people was that North, Poindexter, and McFarlane, as staff aides, would dare to keep such critically important information secret from cabinet secretaries and the president, deceiving their superiors. Yet however extreme and shocking their behavior, it reflected the game-playing style of career bureaucrats, the established habits of the permanent government, to control policy by operating in secret without fully informing the “in-and-outers”—their politically appointed superiors who move in and out of government. In effect, many careerists are telling their bosses: “You decide the big p
olicies; leave the details to us.” But as the saying goes, The devil is in the details.
Policy gets defined just as much by implementing details as it does by deciding the broad sweep; any president or top policymaker who does not know that just doesn’t understand the game of governing. To borrow an image from basketball or soccer, bureaucrats engage in ball control—controlling policy by tossing the ball among themselves and leaving their superiors out of the loop.
Take the case of the Defense Security Assistance Agency (DSAA), which handles multibillion-dollar arms sales abroad, and the F-16 jet fighters that President Reagan agreed to sell to President Mohammed Zia of Pakistan in 1981. This was a major switch from Carter’s cautious policy toward Pakistan, and a big Reagan thank you to Pakistan for channeling military help to anti-Soviet guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. The White House wanted the arms deal to work smoothly. The DSSA had other ideas, such as cutting costs, taking care of the U.S. Air Force, and protecting its own institutional authority.
A problem developed around a life-and-death gadget inside the F-16, a high-tech item which could detect enemy radar systems as they “lock” onto the American plane. This gadget is the jet fighter’s equivalent of a “fuzz buster”; it gives the pilot a chance to evade whatever is being shot at him. When the deal was made, the F-16 had a pretty good fuzz buster known as the ALR-47. By 1983, when the planes were ready for delivery, the Air Force had the much improved ALR-69 model. The old model simply set off a buzzer in the cockpit telling the pilot to start some evasive action, without saying what kind of evasion. The new model, more high tech, guided the pilot on what evasive action to take by flashing little symbols on his radar screen, telling him whether he was being attacked by another jet fighter or a ground-launched missile—a life-and-death difference from the old model.
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