In his first year as President, Reagan used the cabinet councils to “roundtable” issues, in one of Meese’s pet phrases (shorthand for discussing it around the table). But pretty soon it was apparent that those councils were more a vehicle for White House control of the cabinet than a forum where the president hammered out policy decisions. As former Secretary of State Alexander Haig complained to me, White House staff members managed the council agendas. Ultimately, Reagan got a reputation for taking little snoozes in cabinet meetings. When the press found out, Reagan turned it into a joke. I remember his quipping at one press banquet that he did not have to worry about his place in history because it was already secure. “I can see it now,” he said. “A plaque behind my chair in the Cabinet Room: RONALD REAGAN SLEPT HERE.”
Reagan’s practice, his intimates reported, was to thrash out his key decisions during small skull sessions with his first-term White House troika: Baker, Meese, and Reagan’s close confidant, Michael Deaver, who was deputy chief of staff. One or two other key officials might be there, too—people such as David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget; two less well known but very important aides, Richard Darman (Baker’s deputy), and Craig Fuller (Meese’s deputy). On foreign policy matters, National Security Adviser William P. Clark and his successor, Robert McFarlane, were often participants. Oval Office sessions were usually grouped around the president’s desk or with Reagan sitting in a high-backed wing chair near the fireplace and the others in two facing couches. To me, Darman’s version of those sessions was very revealing.
“It was a seven-vote presidency, with the president having four votes and Meese, Baker, and Deaver each having one vote,” Darman told me. “Reagan was very reluctant to make a decision when Baker and Meese were divided. He didn’t like casting the deciding vote between the two of them. To help them resolve the conflict, they’d call in the others. The rest of us did not have a vote. We were there as friends of the court, to provide information.”33
In the first formative months in 1981, the headlines went to the president, Secretary Haig, and Stockman. But Meese, Baker, and Deaver—who became known as Reagan’s troika—were the nerve center of the administration, orchestrating the Reagan presidency. They guided the new cabinet and the entire Reagan entourage, sifting all key appointments, setting the agenda and the priorities, formulating strategy and establishing links with Congress, helping the president set the tone for his stewardship. Baker and Meese took the substantive lead, and in that sphere Deaver was not their equal. But Deaver was the best at reading Reagan’s moods, delivering bad news, staging him in public, or privately coaxing him into or out of some action the others thought wise or unwise.
The staff’s power was clearly illustrated on March 30, 1981, the day Reagan was shot. The troika set up a command post at George Washington University Hospital. Deaver, who was emotionally closer to Reagan than anyone else, was at his side, catching the president’s jokes, watching him scrawl wobbly notes, including one that asked murkily: “Am I dead?” Baker and Meese (with advice from Deaver) were the ones who decided—not the cabinet or the vice president—that Reagan’s bullet wound and two hours of surgery did not require invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which would have permitted naming Bush acting president until Reagan regained consciousness and strength. When documents for invoking the amendment appeared at a rump cabinet session in the White House Situation Room, another high staffer, Richard Darman, hustled them off the table and into a safe.34
In Reagan’s second term, the main levers of White House power were largely taken over by one figure, Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan. Not only did Regan control the White House machinery, but he was also invariably a participant in the tight little meetings where key decisions were set, and which usually included Vice President Bush, sometimes the most important cabinet secretaries, or National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and his successor, Vice Admiral John Poindexter.
When the president had surgery in 1985 for a cancerous polyp, Donald Regan (at the urging of Nancy Reagan, who did not want her bedridden husband disturbed) told Bush he could not see the president for several days and advised him to stay away in Maine on vacation—advice that Bush ignored. This pattern of staff supremacy was so pronounced that Lee Iacocca, the outspoken Chrysler chairman, protested that “Don Regan is the most powerful man in this country, and none of us ever had a chance to vote on it.” That was an exaggeration, but Iacocca caught the drift.
The Reagan presidency has probably been simultaneously the most centralized and staff-dominated presidency in history. The broad vision was limned by Reagan; and the second-term Cabinet had more power than the first. But overall, the Reagan presidency could be called a staff presidency because Reagan gave so much authority and latitude to his senior staff aides. Budget strategy was the province of Baker and David Stockman in the first term, taken over by Donald Regan in the second term. To get around Congress and sidestep dissent in the cabinet, the national security staff became Reagan’s agents for the Iranian arms caper and for funding and arming the Nicaraguan contras. Where there were political obstacles, Reagan bypassed them by using his staff and then claimed they were immune from the laws of Congress, as he claimed he was. That massive assumption of staff power, not accountable to Congress, provoked an uproar on Capitol Hill. Congress saw the president using his staff to avoid the checks and balances of the Constitution.
The stunning power of the White House staff, quite obviously, was not all of Reagan’s making. It reflects a long-term trend, though Reagan carried it further than his predecessors. Sherman Adams, chief of staff to Dwight Eisenhower, was widely regarded as deputy president after Ike’s heart attack in September 1955. Richard Nixon was largely isolated behind his “palace guard” (John Haldeman, John Ehrlichman) on whom he depended heavily.
Back in the 1920s, presidents had little more than executive assistants and personal service aides, and they looked to cabinet officers for policy advice. Then Franklin Roosevelt used the budget bureau to put a presidential stamp on the sprawling federal establishment—and the modern, centralized apparatus of the White House began to take shape.
Since FDR’s death, “the presidency has been bureaucratized,” as Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution observed.35 Over time, the presidential superstructure came to embrace the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council, the President’s Special Trade Representative, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and other offices, all with sizable staffs. By 1987, the Executive Office of the President ran a budget of more than $114 million and a staff of more than sixteen hundred: 620 in the budget bureau alone and 325 in the White House proper.
But more significant than the prodigious growth of the apparatus is the way in which power relationships within the executive branch have changed. The more the public came to want an activist presidency, the more powers and functions the White House staff assumed. As modern presidents mistrusted the permanent civil service to carry out their policies, they added staff to develop the reach and expertise to impose presidential will on the parochial interests of the departments. In short, to fight the power of the permanent bureaucracy, presidents developed their own bureaucracy. As the lawyers expanded and the White House staff gained policy influence, the clout of the cabinet generally declined.
As far back as Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the policy lines between staff and cabinet began to blur. Later presidents have quite openly treated their staffs as policy advisers. In developing domestic policy, for example, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter looked to their chief White House domestic aides—Joseph Califano, John Ehrlichman, and Stuart Eizenstat, respectively. On foreign policy, national security advisers—such as Henry Kissinger under Nixon, Zbigniew Brzezinski under Carter, and William Clark and Robert McFarlane under Reagan—have rivaled (and Kissinger overshadowed) the influence of principal cabinet secretaries.
Under Reagan, the budget bu
reau became the main instrument for bringing cabinet members to heel. With the budget-driving policy, Stockman was clearly more at the cutting edge of most policy decisions than any cabinet secretary except Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon. The other cabinet members had to come to Stockman, Meese, and Baker, three staff aides acting as a court of appeals on budget disputes.
More broadly, the White House political and propaganda apparatus gained in size and importance under Reagan. Prior to the Eisenhower years, most presidents left legislative relations to the Cabinet departments. But Eisenhower began to draw that function into the White House, setting up a three-man congressional-liaison team. Kennedy and Johnson expanded that operation, and the Reagan team carried centralized control of congressional relations to new heights through a legislative strategy group run by Chief of Staff Baker.
In communications, Nixon was the first president to go beyond the traditional press-secretary operation, to set up a White House Office of Communications. In his second term, Nixon was moving to reach over the heads of the Washington press corps to the regional press, and to tighten White House control over press operations throughout the executive branch. But Watergate stopped that. The Reagan team, which tapped both David Gergen and Pat Buchanan from the old Nixon White House, picked up where Nixon’s operation left off, adding to the central machinery.
But it was in the realm of political appointments that the Reagan White House penetrated most deeply into the province of cabinet secretaries. Presidents such as Nixon, Ford, and Carter had a process for reviewing high-level political appointments, but in practice left much discretion to cabinet secretaries in filling subcabinet positions. The Reagan White House aggressively centralized the appointment process. It insisted on the litmus of Reaganite conservative ideology, pushed names from Reagan’s conservative movement onto cabinet secretaries, and required White House political screening of all appointees. Out of roughly three thousand high-level presidential appointments, earlier administrations were content to review about one tenth; the Reagan team reviewed and approved the full slate, often causing long delays that left agencies decapitated and thus even more susceptible to White House control. In the first couple of years, the Meese-Baker-Deaver trio and Pendleton James, Meese’s personnel deputy, spent thousands of hours handpicking undersecretaries and assistant secretaries. In the process they provided the White House with a political network for monitoring and managing the executive branch.
“They appointed people (to cabinet departments) who would cut their boss’s throat to please the president,” commented Paul Light, a political scientist at the National Academy of Public Administration. “They are an entirely different breed of appointee than in the Carter, Nixon, Ford administrations. They are ideologically committed. There is no allegiance to the department, but to the Oval Office or the conservative cause. No administration has penetrated so deeply.”36
The Staff’s Power of Proximity
In any administration, the power of the White House staff stems from personal links to the president: trust, proximity, and seeing the world from his personal perspective. Trust usually develops from long, loyal association, especially in the victorious campaign, and well before most cabinet officers get to know the president. The proximity of close day-in, day-out contact with the president reinforces the political intimacy of staff with president. The White House staff’s leverage derives from control of the most rudimentary elements of the president’s life: whom he sees, what he reads, what business and what events are worth his time, when he will give speeches and what he will say, what will be said in his name by his press spokesman, and what messages conveyed by his staff to his cabinet and congressional allies.
As former Secretary of State Haig observed somewhat ruefully in his memoir, Caveat, “There are three main levers of power in the White House, the flow of paper, the President’s schedule, and the press.”37 Those vital elements are controlled by the people who are physically closest to him, who sit outside his door or beside him at meetings, who hand him papers and who can pop into his office at any time. So preoccupied were Meese, Baker, and Deaver with being close to Reagan in their early months that one other senior White House aide said “they went wherever the president went. They weren’t in their offices. They trailed around with the president.” With a president as dependent on others for the substance of policy as Reagan has been, proximity gives these people enormous power. A cabinet secretary needs their help just to get into the Oval Office. Essentially, no memo, no policy recommendation, no political appeal could reach Reagan, or any president, without staff approval.
In short, a president’s immediate entourage sets his agenda—obviously subject to his disapproval. In Reagan’s first term, Baker and his deputy, Richard Darman, kept deflecting action on proposals for abolishing the Energy and Education departments, despite Reagan’s campaign promises to do that. They steered Reagan to focus on the economy. In those early months, Baker and Meese also relegated to the back burners the social agenda of the New Right and Haig’s thrusts toward Central America. For Baker and Deaver, this approach suited both political priorities and their personal philosophies; Meese accepted the economic priority, though he did not share the others’ moderate views. By the 1984 election year, Baker and Deaver encouraged Reagan to visit China and to drop his “evil empire” rhetoric toward Moscow.
In Reagan’s second term, Donald Regan kept off Reagan’s desk a cabinet dispute over whether to do away with the government’s affirmative-action guidelines, as advocated by Edmund Meese, who was now in the cabinet as attorney general. Without Reagan’s talking seriously with Shultz or Weinberger, Donald Regan persuaded the president in 1985 to support the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law, although it had major impact on the Pentagon and foreign aid. A year later, at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, Donald Regan got the president to endorse new subsidies for foreign wheat sales, even though cheaper wheat for Moscow was vigorously opposed by Shultz, Weinberger, and William Casey, the CIA director. Regan, McFarlane, and Poindexter, this time with support from Casey, sold the president on making arms sales to Iran over the objections of Shultz and Weinberger. Repeatedly, the influence of top staff prevailed.
This is not to say that Ronald Reagan has simply been a puppet of his staff or that his staff has had a power monopoly. Time and again, Reagan demonstrated that on a handful of fundamental issues he has deep-seated beliefs and he calls his own tune—such as not raising taxes, going for a Star Wars defense, attending a summit meeting, pushing aid for Nicaraguan contras, or selling arms to Iran to free American hostages. A classic case was his stubborn refusal in 1982 and 1983 to trim back his Pentagon budget requests, despite intense urging from Stockman, Baker, and other staff aides—even Meese. In 1983 and afterward, Reagan suffered the consequences: Congress, frustrated by Reagan’s and Weinberger’s refusal to compromise, slashed his defense budgets.
Or for example, the night after he was shot in March 1981, Reagan sat in his hospital bed and wrote out by hand on a yellow legal pad an eight-page personal letter to then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. It was the heartfelt appeal of a man who had just escaped death. A few days later he shared it with his top staff, National Security Adviser Richard Allen and Secretary of State Haig. They met on the second floor of the White House mansion, Reagan in his pajamas. “Fellas, I wrote this, and I’d like you to look at it,” he said. After another few days, Reagan’s advisers offered a revised draft of the letter prepared by Haig and his State Department. It was watered down, much less personal, and written in bureacratic language.
“Wait a minute,” objected Deaver, who was among the group talking with Reagan. “Nobody elected the experts. You’re the president. The experts have been messing it up for years. If that’s the way you want it to go, let it go.”
Reagan thought a moment and, obviously pleased at Deaver’s encouragement, decided to stick with his original letter. “Mike’s right,” he told Haig. “Let it go the way I wrote
it.”38
But aside from his own very broad ideas and within the framework that they set, Reagan has been legendary for bending to the advice of whichever person or group among his trusted advisers was the last to see him. This made it look as if Reagan was being tugged first this way and that way, as if no one was in charge. In his book Caveat, Haig angrily raised the telling complaint that while Reagan set the administration’s general course, “the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm? Was it Meese, was it Baker, was it someone else? It was impossible to know for sure.”39 Such ghostly rule at the top puts a high premium on proximity and frequent access.
John Sears, Reagan’s campaign manager in 1976 and for the start of the 1980 campaign, suggested to me that Reagan’s willingness to place himself in the hands of his staff is the result of Reagan’s training as an actor. He is used to having directors tell him what to do, choreograph his scenes, write his lines. To me, it is as if Reagan has two roles: One, as overall producer who announces his broad goals on budget, taxes, or Star Wars; and two, a role where he steps into his own production and becomes an actor taking cues from his staff.
Reagan has long understood his dependency on his staff and counted on his closest lieutenants to rein in some of his natural instincts to sound off on pet ideas even when they clash with policy. Right after signing the 1982 billion tax bill which increased taxes (mainly corporate taxes) by $100 billion over three years, the president darted off in the opposite direction. Like a mischievous boy, he knew his staff would chide him. “I know I’m going to kick myself for saying this,” Reagan told a Boston audience, “but I’d really like to get rid of the corporate income tax.”
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