One reason is that while Reagan had soared to a personal victory in 1984, he had been unable to lift his party. The contrast with the big Republican gains of 1980 was dramatic—a portent of things to come. In the 1984 election, the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate, narrowing the Republican majority to 53-47. In the House, the Democrats held Republicans to a net gain of fourteen House seats. What was crucial—and everyone who understands the power game saw this at once—was that the Republican gain was not enough to restore the conservative coalition that had generated Reagan’s legislative triumphs in 1981. Perhaps deliberately, the voters left a governmental deadlock, endorsing Reagan without buying all of his policies.
What is more, Congress was less cowed by Reagan than it had been in 1981, and so it cuffed him about. The Lilliputians began cutting up Gulliver. In one early vote, left over from an unsettled battle before the 1984 election, Congress cut in half Reagan’s request on MX missiles, limiting him to fifty where he had wanted one hundred (and Carter had planned two hundred). Reagan was hog-tied over his long-delayed nomination of Edmund Meese for attorney general by farm-state senators, who were filibustering Meese’s nomination in order to force an early vote on emergency farm credit. It was a no-win battle politically for the White House; either Reagan had to back down or, if he won, he offended farm state leaders and voters, while thousands of farmers faced foreclosure.
These were not good issues for Reagan. White House damage control should have disposed of them, but the second-term team was not that skilled. The smart move would have been to work out a private deal on farm credit before Meese’s nomination got tangled in a public fight. However, the farm-credit bill passed, and Reagan, angered by the cost, vetoed it. The problem got worse, for the Senate wrote the same provision into an omnibus spending bill which Reagan signed. Eventually, he had to swallow a mammoth, budget-busting, five-year, $57.5 billion farm program. In 1986 alone, that program wound up costing $25.6 billion—five times its cost in the year before Reagan took office.
In sum, Reagan’s hesitancy and his team’s disarray threw away the golden moment of his reelection landslide. “The period of January to May of 1985 will be viewed as a time when we could have set in place an agenda which could have been driven by the mandate—and which really wasn’t,” lamented Richard Wirthlin. “We walked away from it, and I think we paid the piper.”41
“Reagan had momentum and the high ground,” agreed Kirk O’Donnell, Speaker O’Neill’s political adviser. “He blew his opportunity to dominate the agenda by not going after the tax bill in February. Had he gone after it, he would have dominated the political horizon and the agenda the same way he did in 1981.”42
Late Shake-Up, Slow Start
Reagan compounded these problems by reshuffling his top political team long after the elections—a contrast to the fast start of his first team. After his 1980 victory, Reagan installed Baker, Meese, and Deaver within a day or two of his election and added Stockman within a month. But in his second term, Reagan let things drift for a couple of months and then suddenly, on January 8, 1985, announced a major job swap: Chief of Staff Baker becoming treasury secretary and Treasury Secretary Regan taking over as chief of staff.
This signaled a complete—and belated—changing of the guard at the White House, throwing into turmoil efforts to formulate Reagan’s agenda. Reagan made the mistake of letting the personal ambitions of his staff—Baker, Meese, and Deaver—take precedence over his own objectives. Meese wanted a policy domain all his own at the Justice Department. Deaver, with financial problems, wanted to leave government and set up a public relations firm. Baker’s departure was the most costly to Reagan. Baker had been the linchpin for Reagan’s first term, facing down right-wing charges that his pragmatism had corrupted Reagan and factional clashes with Meese, William Clark, and William Casey.
Baker was bone-tired and wanted a top cabinet post. He had been chief of staff for four years and two weeks. (Only two other men had held the job longer: Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, who had to resign because of the taint of graft; and Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, who went to jail for the Watergate cover-up.) A senior cabinet post would let him show substance and gain prominence, possibly to run for high office. For a couple of years, he had quietly lobbied for a top cabinet job: secretary of State, Defense, Treasury, or attorney general. Treasury was the only real possibility.
Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, knowing of Baker’s ambition, invited Baker over to lunch in his Treasury office on November 30, close to a month after the election.
“I read in the paper where you sort of feel like you’d like to do something different,” Regan told Baker. “So would I. I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse: Let’s switch jobs.”43
“That’s very interesting,” Baker replied. “I’d like to think about it.”
Baker and Regan talked again before Christmas, but not until early January did Baker agree. Deaver sold the job swap to the president and Mrs. Reagan. After one night’s thought, Reagan agreed and announced the shifts on January 8, 1985. What is stunning is how passive Reagan was in all this, as if uncaring who was his chief lieutenant and unaware that revamping his staff two months after his election would play havoc with his game plan.
The president had just broken a cardinal rule of the Washington power game: Time personnel changes offensively. The start of a second term is a good time to make switches, provided the president acts briskly and decisively right after the election. That conveys freshness and purpose. But waiting two months and then reacting to a deal his aides had concocted made Reagan look like a puppet manipulated by lieutenants. The episode tarnished the gloss of his electoral success. More important, it threw his administration into disarray for weeks while Regan put together a new White House staff.
Regan’s first seven or eight months were a period of very rough on-the-job training. He lacked Jim Baker’s well-developed political antennae and established networks. His experience as Treasury secretary and as a Wall Street corporate maverick were not adequate grooming for an inside job that is as much political as managerial. He was nowhere near as good as Baker at spotting troubles on the horizon or protecting Reagan from unnecessary confrontations. Moreover, Regan had a penchant for thrusting himself into the limelight that made him a target for criticism, especially in those early months.
“Don is not accustomed to being a staff man,” one close associate remarked. “He likes to be out front, visible, in charge. He’s the Al Haig of the second term.” A lieutenant to Regan blurted out, “Don doesn’t like to share power with anyone.”
Regan, proud of his financial independence and not afraid of being fired, was fond of telling people, myself included, that he did not need to kowtow to anyone—meaning the president—because “I’ve got plenty of fuck-you money.” Nonetheless, he became known as a yes-man to Reagan, unable or unwilling to press bad news on the president.
Accustomed to the power hierarchy of the corporate world, Regan lacked a natural feel for the interconnections of political issues and strategies. And he lacked the natural instinct for one central rule of the power game: Don’t make enemies, because today’s adversary may be tomorrow’s ally. He was insensitive toward the easily bruised egos of other politicians. Even diehard Republican allies of the president bitched that Regan was inaccessible and treated their ideas with arrogant disdain. “He doesn’t understand that elected officials are different from appointed officials,” one Reagan intimate said. “They have their own interests, their own constituencies, their own agendas.”
Regan’s brash, Irish directness won him a reputation for take-charge toughness within the White House. But his real problem was that he was unsure of himself politically. Congressional leaders complained that Regan vacillated so much on issues and tactics that they could not count on him to set a presidential game plan and stick to it.
“Don Regan is a person of very considerable personal integrity,” said a top admi
nistration official. “The problem, however, is that he hasn’t thought through his own position in sufficient depth for the position to be stable. It’s not because he is trying to be deceitful.… He has gotten himself into a fair amount of trouble by being unstable, for which you can read ‘unreliable.’ If one day of the week you’re a monetarist and another day of the week, you’re a supply-sider; if one day you say the problem can’t be solved without Social Security, and another day you say it can be, that’s really not duplicitous in its motive. He tends to be too quick to articulate. He’s actually a victim of his own directness.”
In 1985, the president paid the price for Regan’s political inexperience. Regan talked initially of a confrontational strategy with Congress patterned after the President’s 1981 blitz? not fully appreciating that the Democrats were too strong in 1985 to be rolled over. Regan zigzagged: In spring, he joined forces with budget-cutting Senate Republicans, encouraging them to take politically risky votes on Social Security; in midyear, he reversed tactics, cutting the ground from under them, which left them infuriated. Regan bowed to national security officials pressing for an early House vote on military aid to Nicaraguan contras,44 but left too little time to prepare for the vote, setting up a defeat for Reagan. Much later, the president won more aid, but he had to settle for half a loaf. $27 million in nonlethal aid.
Regan was given to talking about “a scorched-earth veto strategy,” slapping down Congress on every issue, without reckoning that would destroy the bipartisan partnership needed to pass the president’s tax-reform bill. Some presidential intimates talked Regan out of that strategy before it boomeranged. But Regan’s combative streak was reinforced by Pat Buchanan, the right-wing columnist and former Nixon aide, who became director of communications. Buchanan enjoyed savaging Democrats on Nicaragua. He encouraged Reagan to face down Congress over economic sanctions against South Africa. Buchanan’s sallies left Regan putting out political bonfires.
Over time, Regan turned to more experienced hands to compensate for his own lapses. By mid-1985, he had brought in Dennis Thomas, an experienced Senate aide, and Mitchell Daniels, former Republican senatorial campaign director. And he got strategy advice in private sessions with a coterie of old Reagan hands outside of government: Stuart Spencer, Ken Duberstein, Lyn Nofziger, Bill Timmons, and others. But in the meantime, Reagan’s agenda took a battering.
Bitburg: No Damage Control
No event more epitomized the disarray at the start of Reagan’s second term—or played greater havoc with White House efforts to forge the 1985 agenda—than the president’s visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg in early May. It was a political nightmare—haunting, distracting, enervating the president and his staff with week upon week of searing controversy. It dominated the news. It threw the president off stride. It engulfed his staff in constant worry.
The White House inability to control the political fallout cost Reagan heavily. What began as an effort to bury past enmity and to emphasize modern Allied solidarity unintentionally raked up coals of anguish over Nazi atrocities because of the belated American discovery that there were graves of Waffen SS troops at the Bitburg cemetery.
Amidst the uproar over the president’s including the hated SS, Hitler’s storm troopers, in his tribute to the German war dead, Reagan and his aides kept up a brave front. Publicly, they stuck to Reagan’s commitment to go to Bitburg, out of respect for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. But privately, everyone around the president—especially Nancy Reagan—urged him to back out. Michael Deaver tried to persuade the German government to alter the itinerary.
Just two days before leaving for Europe, the president himself, unknown to all but a handful, made a strong personal appeal to Kohl to drop the Bitburg visit. White House advance men had found a substitute, the memorial to the German war dead at Festung Ehrenbreitstein, a fortress on the Rhine. It had no graves and no links to the SS. In a long phone call, Reagan proposed Ehrenbreitstein in place of Bitburg, but Kohl stiffly refused.
The whole incredible episode came to have high stakes for both leaders: Kohl feeling his government was at stake and Reagan feeling his reputation and the glow of his reelection were at risk. The Bitburg controversy became impossible to unravel because the two leaders had struck a personal bargain from which their aides could not extricate them. Bitburg was a burning demonstration that even a skillful staff cannot protect a president’s agenda or spare him from political damage if that president acts on impulse—even well-meant—and will not change until it is too late. Bitburg was Reagan’s self-inflicted wound.
The Bitburg story was especially ironic because if Reagan, at seventy-three, should have had one advantage, it should have been his personal recollections of the Holocaust and the horrors kindled by the Nazi era. It would have been more understandable for a younger president not fully to have sensed the painful symbolism of an American leader visiting a German cemetery and including the Waffen SS. As the late Arthur Burns, then ambassador to Bonn, commented, “The original decision to go to Bitburg was ill conceived.”45 From that, the plot flowed with tragic ineluctability.
It began with a compact forged by Kohl and Reagan. Kohl personally was the architect and manager of Reagan’s visit to Germany around the fortieth anniversary of the allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1985. The trip to Bitburg was Kohl’s dream. It was to be the American analogue to Kohl’s visit of reconciliation with French President Francois Mitterand to the graves of the French and German World War I dead at Verdun. Photographers had framed the moving symbolism of Kohl and Mitterand holding hands at the Verdun battlefield, with fields of white crosses as their backdrop. Kohl had also been deeply hurt by his exclusion from the Allied celebration of the fortieth anniversary of D day at Normandy on June 6, 1984. On November 30, soon after Reagan’s reelection, Kohl pleaded in tears, top officials told me, for Reagan to agree to some gesture of German-American reconciliation to heal the wound of Normandy and to nourish the balm of Verdun.
“Anything you want,” Reagan responded, not consulting the aides who sat by the two leaders in the Oval Office. According to American officials, Kohl proposed three things: a commemoration at Cologne Cathedral on V-E Day, a visit to a concentration camp, and a joint visit to a military cemetery. Evidently both he and Reagan were unaware that the gesture of Verdun could not be repeated because no American soldiers were buried in German cemeteries. Thus, in agreeing, Reagan committed himself to honor the German war dead alone.
The first hints of controversy came not over Bitburg, but over a story in the German magazine Der Spiegel on January 19, 1985, that Reagan was considering a visit to the Dachau concentration camp. Seeing the idea in print, Reagan recoiled. Mrs. Reagan found such a visit distasteful, one of her confidants told me. She was squeamish about visiting the death scenes and being shown the ovens and photographic displays of bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. Privately, she told aides, “I’ve talked to Ronnie, and that’s not what we want to do.” Der Spiegel implied that the Bonn government also did not want Reagan to visit Dachau. Within days, Reagan publicly indicated his desire not to go there, saying he wanted to stress “reconciliation” not “the hatred that went on at the time.”
“The president was not hot to go to a camp,” one official told Bernard Weinraub of The New York Times. “You know, he’s a cheerful politician. He does not like to grovel in a grisly scene like Dachau. He was reluctant to go. I’m not saying opposed, but there was a coolness. And nobody pushed him on it.”46
When Mike Deaver went to Germany in late February to develop the president’s itinerary, Kohl had fixed on a visit to Bitburg. Deaver wanted a big European swing with stops in Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal, plus something unusual to add political spice: Hungary. The Budapest government was agreeable, but the White House backed off when Janoś Kádár, the Hungarian leader, wanted assurances that Reagan would not embarrass Kádár by baiting Moscow publicly on his European trip. Also, rather than celebrate V-E Day
in Cologne, the White House substituted an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. But Deaver was attracted to the Bitburg cemetery because it was conveniently located near an American Air Force base where Reagan could give a rousing speech to the troops.
It was a cold day, crystal clear, when Deaver and William Henkel, chief White House advance man, were driven out to the Kolmeshohe Military Cemetery at Bitburg by Werner von der Schulenberg, German chief of protocol, and William Woessner, deputy chief of the American Embassy in Bonn. The cemetery was a peaceful glen in a cloister of woods, with a large tower monument at the far end of a small field of gravestones.
“It was very picturesque,” Deaver recalled. “A beautiful little spot. The graves were all covered with snow. I remember saying to our embassy people, ‘I want them [the graves] checked out. Be sure there’s nothing embarrassing here.’ ”47
Woessner remembered asking Schulenberg for assurances there were no war criminals and “that would have certainly included Waffen SS, as far as I was concerned.” Schulenberg sent back assurance there was no problem.48
But there was a problem—a huge gulf between two nations, two memories, two attitudes. The American officials operated on the premise that Kohl’s government, as a close ally, would not knowingly trip up the American president—specifically, that if the German government said there were no horrible embarrassments for Reagan, they could trust the Germans. They assumed that what would be embarrassing to Americans would be embarrassing to Germans. But as Jim Markham, bureau chief of The New York Times in Bonn, explained to me, Germans regard the Waffen SS troops as similar to regular military units, some of them press-ganged into service at early ages and not morally culpable, as the SS were, for the Holocaust atrocities. That is a distinction not made by Americans. Moreover, Markham said, the Germans felt that the reconciliation Kohl wanted from Reagan implied some pardon of the past and accepting the reality of the Waffen SS buried among other Germans. American officials felt bitterly misled.
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