Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Tall, trim, thin-lipped, handsome, always impeccably dressed and shined, and cool as a Texas gunslinger, Baker enjoyed politics the way some men enjoy the hunt. Indeed, Baker loves to hunt wild turkeys in Texas, a pastime that requires careful plotting, setting an ambush, endless patience, constant attention, exquisite timing, and fast, sure reaction at the critical moment. All of these attributes are typical of Jim Baker, in politics as in a turkey shoot.51 For Baker is smart, cautious, patient, and decisive. He is savvy; he sees the interrelationships of issues, people, money, and votes, and he marshals his own forces extremely well. As I interviewed Baker or watched him in action, the one word that kept coming to mind was control: self-control, control of the situation, control of others. Baker keeps his intentions to himself or shares them with only a couple of trusted aides; he plots his moves with care and strikes when confident of a kill. He stalks his political prey with his pale-blue eyes set in a squint, gauging the political terrain and counting votes the way he would watch the skies or listen for the telltale rustle of a gobbler. He thrives on challenge. And he exults in the sport of politics and, most of all, in winning.

  Baker was a prosperous and successful lawyer but “caught the bug” of politics rather late in life. In 1970, when he was forty, he gave up law; since then he has run an unsuccessful race for attorney general in Texas, managed two presidential campaigns, served as undersecretary of Commerce under President Ford, and spent seven years in the Reagan administration. And he seems far from done. He won his spurs with Reagan, not only as a masterful adversary, but by later urging Reagan to enter the 1980 campaign debates against John Anderson and Carter when Reagan’s other advisers counseled against debating. By staging live debate rehearsals to prepare Reagan, Baker made the gamble pay off; his stock rose with both the president-elect and Nancy Reagan.

  The Meese-Baker staff “war,” as one Reagan intimate called it, was not unique to the Reagan White House. It had the classic elements of any new presidency: the new boys against the old crowd; the pragmatists against the ideologues; the technocrats against the Reagan loyalists; the political strategists against the true believers. An ideological president like Reagan is prone to parenting such divisions within his staff, but they are common to many administrations. Had George McGovern been elected in 1972, he would surely have had to preside over a schism between the New Left ideologicals and centrist Democrats. Jimmy Carter had to bridge differences between substantive aides such as Stuart Eizenstat, with their connections to congressional liberals, and his more conservative home-state crowd of Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. The next president, whatever his party or philosophical stripe, will have to cope with similar divisions.

  The White House war between Baker and Meese was foreshadowed in the 1980 campaign. As Baker’s stock rose, he and Michael Deaver, Reagan’s public relations specialist, urged that Reagan’s ads attack Carter more vigorously, whereas Meese and Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s poll taker, wanted the ads focused on building Reagan’s positive image. Old California Reaganites sensed Baker overreaching. Meese prevailed.

  What eventually gave Baker his opening with Reagan was Meese’s reputation as a mediocre manager in contrast to Baker’s crisp, decisive style. Meese has a tendency to delay, to study problems to death. Baker’s nature is to plunge quickly to the heart of problems. Deaver, who had long worked as a lieutenant to Meese but now wanted to be an equal, and Stuart K. Spencer, who was Reagan’s oldest, most trusted California political strategist, urged Reagan to choose Baker not Meese as chief of staff. Spencer had been impressed with Baker during the 1976 Ford campaign when Spencer had briefly left the Reagan camp. Deaver and Spencer suggested that Meese, freed of administration, could be Reagan’s chief policy adviser.

  Toward the end of the 1980 campaign, the two of them arranged for Baker to fly on Reagan’s campaign plane to let the two men get to know each other better and “see if the chemistry worked.” Both Reagan and Nancy took to Baker. Mrs. Reagan, who has great influence with the president in personnel matters, championed Baker. Reagan, to his credit, sensed his need for a man with Baker’s skills and Washington experience, despite their past differences.

  When Reagan told Meese on Election Day that he had picked Baker as chief of staff, Meese was shocked and deeply hurt because he had “wanted the chief of staff position in the worst way,” according to one Meese ally. Another Meese associate told me that Reagan’s choice had “completely shattered” Meese. “I don’t think the president himself understood how much he’d undermined Ed in his own mind by picking Baker,” this friend said. But Meese masked his feelings to almost everyone, including Reagan. He adjusted loyally, picked for himself the title of “Presidential Counselor,” and won domination over both domestic and national security policy-making staffs. Baker was given what sounded like the administrative task of “making the trains run on time”—that is, managing the White House.

  To see how this game played out is to understand truly how power operates at the center of our government. Baker came out on top because he understood the five keys to power in the White House.

  The first key is the division of duties: Like many people who are unsure of each other, Baker and Meese actually had a written compact, a one-page memo listing their responsibilities in two columns. One column gave Meese cabinet rank, which Baker did not have. This was intended to allow Meese, in the absence of president and vice president, to preside over the cabinet (and even a “supercabinet,” which was then being bruited about). Under Meese fell “coordination and supervision” of the National Security and Domestic Council staffs—the policy operation inside the White House. Baker was to manage the staff that dealt with the outside world: press office, political office, speech-writers, congressional liaison, the president’s scheduling, appointments, plus the paper flow to Reagan. Beyond that, Baker got the power to hire and fire all elements of the White House staff. And he got possession of the prized West Wing corner office normally used by the chief of staff. The office, a small point, was nevertheless important not only as a symbol to political Washington of Baker’s eventual preeminence but also because, as the largest staff office, it could most easily accommodate the troika’s daily breakfasts and larger strategy meetings. Baker, as host, always sat at the head of the table.52

  The Meese group, as one of them put it to me, felt then that “Ed is taking over the whole government.” But Baker knew what he was doing. He understood Alexander Haig’s “three main levers of power” in the White House: the flow of paper, the president’s schedule, and the press. As Baker later explained during a joint appearance with Meese “ultimately, everything goes through one central point in my office [emphasis added]. The staff secretary will see all paper that goes in [to the president], and he will finally pass on appointments.”53 Meese, not realizing how much vaster, more intricate, and fast-paced Washington was than Sacramento, did not understand the importance of managing the president’s most immediate environment: his movements, his utterances, his sources of information.

  Rule One: Do what Baker did: make sure that you and your people have the last crack at everything going to and from the president.

  The second and perhaps more important key was Baker’s alliance with Deaver, who enabled Baker to develop the president’s trust. Deaver had begun in Sacramento as a man Friday to Reagan. He had worked his way up as scheduler and advance man, eventually becoming expert in public relations and choreographing Governor Reagan’s schedule and then President Reagan’s schedule. As a constant companion of the Reagan, Deaver had become closer to them emotionally—especially to Mrs. Reagan—than anyone else on the staff. In his early forties then, Deaver was like a son to them. He knew their moods, read the president’s hidden tension in the grinding of his jaw, swapped jokes with him. Other people used Deaver to carry bad news to Reagan because Deaver knew best how to couch it.

  Every political campaign, and virtually every top-rank politician, has a Deaver around him. In the crude lingo of polit
ics, while Meese managed the broad world of policy and Baker did political strategy, Deaver’s realm was the “body”—that is, Reagan personally. Deaver rarely got into substance, which made him less than a full equal to Baker and Meese. But having always worked under Meese in the past, Deaver wanted a new power relationship in Washington. He engineered the triangular power game because it suited his purposes. He brought in Baker to neutralize Meese’s influence. Baker likewise needed Deaver to open the way to the president and to buttress his standing until he established his own relationship of trust with Reagan. Officially, Deaver became deputy chief of staff; Baker, chief of staff. The two forged an axis which lasted through Reagan’s first term and enabled them to best Meese, although it cost Deaver his ties with the old California circle, who came to regard him as a renegade.

  Rule Two: If you do not begin with the president’s trust, find an ally close to the president who will pave the way; and especially in a troika, be sure the middleman is with you.

  Baker’s third key was to assemble an extraordinarily capable staff. Meese’s staff, on the other hand, was largely mediocre. Some Meese aides, such as Martin Anderson, an economist in charge of domestic planning, were knowledgeable but too academic for the rough-and-tumble of government. The job of the national security adviser, put under Meese, had been downgraded from previous administrations and its occupant, Richard Allen, was substantively weaker than predecessors like Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Craig Fuller, the cabinet secretary under Meese, was very able but had been in Deaver’s public relations firm before the election and wound up working closely with what became known as the “Baker side of the house.”

  Baker went after top talent and, remarkably, Reagan let him bring in other Republican moderates, some from other campaigns: David Gergen, the director of communications, who had Bush-Ford connections: James Brady, the press secretary, from the campaign of John Connally; Max Friedersdorf, chief legislative liaison, from the Ford administration; and Richard Darman, a former aide to Baker in the Commerce Department and longtime lieutenant of former Defense Secretary and Attorney General Elliott Richardson, an eastern-establishment Republican liberal.

  Darman was the most astonishing choice politically and the most important of the Baker group. For he not only sat at the control point as staff secretary sifting the great flow of papers, deciding which papers Reagan should sign and which should be debated further, but he was superb at strategy. Darman is brilliant, if arrogant. A former professor of government, he simply knew more, studied more than the others. Moreover, he had an intellectual’s fascination with power and process, with puzzling out the conundrums of government, with plotting, planning, drafting, scheming, making the pieces fall into place. Like Baker, he was deeply committed to making government work effectively and able to form alliances with mainstream Democrats as well as supply-side Republicans to achieve Reagan’s broad ends.

  Darman was bright and brash enough to have spotted holes in Reagan’s economic program early on; to warn that the Reagan defense buildup would not match the administration’s ambitious rhetoric but would still be more than Congress would buy; to tip off Baker on how to control the White House machinery and to beware of being cast as a compromiser while conservative purists attacked him from behind. Darman’s job seemed focused on process, but Darman knew there is no dividing substance and politics from process. In charge of process, he provided the substantive understanding of policy that Baker needed.

  Rule Three: Always go for the best talent that will work loyally for you. In this case, that was not merely Baker’s doing but a sign of Reagan’s strength as a leader, and of his personal self-confidence, that he could be surrounded by aides like Baker, Darman, and Gergen, despite past differences. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who had circled his wagons with young Georgians inexperienced in Washington and who suffered the consequences, Reagan knew he needed “outside” talents—people drawn from outside his California circle. That exasperated his right-wing but it served Reagan well.

  Fourth, what made Baker personally so valuable to Reagan was his political sixth sense, his knowledge of Washington’s power networks, his instinctive sense of how issues will play, where the votes will fall, what the pitfalls are. (Significantly, many in Washington said he would have saved Reagan from the Iran disaster had he remained at chief of staff in Reagan’s second term.) From the outset, Baker understood the multidimensional Washington power game and began immediately preparing for it, building networks in the political community while Meese basked in the limelight. Meese assumed Washington was merely a bigger Sacramento and that he could operate there in the same way. But he knew only part of the arena—the Reagan entourage—where he was initially top dog. Baker played a waiting game, saying little in the early transition meetings, downgrading himself as the “new kid on the block” and letting Meese make pronouncements. Eventually, Meese got stretched too thin, with his cabinet councils, his elaborate planning groups, and all the paper he generated. No item seemed too small for his attention. His own partisans complained that he had a hard time setting priorities and making decisions. The common joke in the White House was that “once something gets into Ed Meese’s briefcase, it’s lost forever.”

  By contrast, Baker’s expertise was strategy, leverage, and priorities. He was constantly working to narrow the focus, pick the action sequence, get rid of problems, forge pivotal alliances. While Meese was busy ideologically tutoring the new cabinet in Reaganism, Baker was moving in the vital political arena, forming the essential political partnership with Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and drawing close to House Republican Leader Robert Michel. Within the administration, Baker spotted Stockman, the budget director, as the driving force behind the largest, most immediate policy issues and quickly made him an ally. Stockman had brains, speed, and practical experience enough to run circles around Meese’s policy shop. What is more, Baker, sensitive that congressional right-wingers were skeptical of him, quickly established a reputation for accessibility to all sides. He paid special attention to Lyn Nofziger, a pet channel of Reaganite conservatives, and he returned congressional phone calls fast. That built support.

  Moreover, the Baker side of the House—Baker, Deaver, Darman, Gergen—understood the vital role of the press in the power game. They assiduously cultivated television and print reporters and columnists, publicized their case, explained their strategies, undercut their rivals. Meese, whose real love is law-and-order issues, police work, and criminology, had a district attorney’s wariness of the press. His style was to make announcements and brush problems under the rug. He was accessible but less candid than other White House officials, and his press relations withered. Deaver was the master press agent. Knowing that perception is often reality, Deaver deftly built up Baker and himself as Meese’s equals, furnishing detail for pieces on the Reagan troika. He used photographs to convey the message—not only to the public but to Congress and the bureaucracy. It was Deaver, for instance, who arranged photo sessions for my New York Times Magazine cover story on the troika in April 1981, photos showing all three together, with Baker—not Meese—in the center.

  Rule Four: Develop political networks in Congress and the press and work them constantly.

  Finally and most tellingly, Baker understood that in the chaotic, hothouse world of Washington, there was no such thing as separating strategy from tactics, long-term policy planning from short-term actions, policy from politics. He knew they had to be integrated and that often tactics can drive strategy and the immediate can overcome the long-term. He was action and result oriented. Meese, on the other hand, had great faith in organizational charts and long-term planning and little operational skill in Washington. His Office of Planning and Evaluation was supposed to set the administration’s policy agenda, but it did not work out that way.

  “Meese had a textbook notion of how government should be organized, and he assumed people behaved the way that organization charts suggested,” observed one of Baker’s al
lies. “That is utterly naïve.”

  While Meese busied himself with the architecture of the supercabinet (which never came into being), Baker quietly created the Legislative Strategy Group (LSG), an informal forum for battling out policies and strategies for getting the Reagan program through Congress. The LSG was Darman’s idea; it became the vehicle to Baker’s ascendancy over domestic policy in the first term. Its members included the Baker crew—Deaver, Darman, David Gergen, Max Friedersdorf and his congressional-liaison aide Kenneth Duberstein, plus David Stockman, and sometimes Dick Wirthlin, and as appropriate, cabinet secretaries such as Donald Regan at Treasury or Drew Lewis at Transportation. Baker never openly challenged Meese—for that risked losing the fight. Meese was invited to LSG meetings and often came. What gradually happened was that the tactics of how to deal with Congress or the press came to dominate White House decision-making, and Meese’s more elaborate structure simply fell behind.

  Rule Five: Once the ball game starts, move onto the field. There’s no time to build imposing new grandstands.

  By the peak of Reagan’s legislative blitz in mid-1981, Baker was controlling the important levers of power and speaking out with authority rivaling Meese. He masterminded the passage of Reagan’s economic program, still the overarching political achievement of Reagan’s presidency. (On the domestic side, the only comparable achievement, in 1985–86, was the passage of the tax-reform bill, also managed by Baker, as Treasury secretary.) The triumphant passage of the 1981 budget and tax bills both marked Baker’s ascendancy and assured his future influence with Reagan. By the end of 1981, even Meese partisans worried that their man was being eclipsed as a power broker, although his advice still carried strong personal influence with the president.