In Reagan’s case, the unraveling of the image game—not to mention the Reagan presidency—came with the explosive disclosure of Reagan’s duplicity on Iran in late 1986 and his ransoming American hostages in Lebanon through arms sales to Iran, despite his vows never to do business with terrorists and his castigation of Iran for “state-sponsored terrorism.” Reagan’s unmasking worsened in 1987 with week upon week of testimony that his aides had been financing and arming the Nicaraguan contras—despite a congressional ban on such actions—and then, as Oliver North admitted, lying to Congress.
There were advance tremors of that political shock, such as the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors in 1984, expanded rules of military engagement in Lebanon in 1983, and the “disinformation” tactics against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 1986. In each case, the Reagan administration was playing at or beyond the fringes of what was acceptable to Congress and the public. In all, there was an assertion of unchecked executive authority, with secrecy imposed to foreclose dissent.
Not only did leaks about these episodes prompt confrontations with Congress and press, but there were violent strains among the Reagan inner circle over both policy issues and the tactics of secrecy. High-level factions were at loggerheads, top officials feeling betrayed by each other.
One important high-level clash came in September 1983, after the American Marines at Beirut airport had come under intensive shelling from Lebanese and Palestinian forces backed by Syria and Iran. Those forces, bent on toppling the American-backed government of President Amin Gemayel, held the Suk al-Gharb ridge line, firing easily downhill at the American Embassy and the American ambassador’s residence, where Reagan’s special envoy, Robert McFarlane, was trying to arrange a cease-fire. McFarlane, Shultz, and National Security Adviser William P. Clark feared the Lebanese government was about to crumble. The Marines had gone to Lebanon as a peacekeeping force; now McFarlane and Shultz were pressing for them to become de facto protectors of the Gemayel government. Congressional Democrats—and the Pentagon high command—were worried about being sucked into another Vietnam. Over one weekend, President Reagan met secretly with his inner circle: Bush, Shultz, Clark, Weinberger, Casey, Meese, Jim Baker, and John W. Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Monday night, September 12, Chris Wallace of NBC disclosed that McFarlane and other top officials had proposed American air strikes from offshore aircraft carriers against Syrian positions in Lebanon “to stun the Syrians and get them to stop causing trouble.” The next morning, my story in The New York Times said that President Reagan had authorized new, wider military engagement, which the White House was calling “aggressive self-defense.” One high official told me the Marines could call in Navy planes and offshore bombardment “to make it more costly for Syria and their surrogates to attack U.S. personnel.” Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported that the decision to authorize air strikes was a signal to Syria that Washington was ready to escalate its firepower in Lebanon. Obviously, high-level leaks were intended to send Syria a message to cool down the fighting. But American escalation risked conflict with Syria, testing congressional tolerance. In fact, our news stories rekindled congressional calls for pulling back the Marines.
Bill Clark was livid. Since taking over as national security adviser, he had fumed about leaks, and he was outraged by this batch. With Casey and Meese, Clark went to the president, charging that these leaks had endangered McFarlane’s life (which McFarlane later denied). Clark demanded an FBI investigation to find the culprits. Evidently, he saw a chance to discredit the Baker faction, whom he assumed to be the leakers. Going behind the backs of Bush, Shultz, Baker, and others, Clark drafted a letter, which he got Reagan to sign, instructing Attorney General William French Smith to have the FBI run lie-detector tests of all officials at the weekend meetings, and to ask for the resignation of anyone who declined to take the lie-detector test.63 It was a stunning order. Neither the president nor Clark, a former California Supreme Court justice, nor Meese and Smith, both lawyers, stopped to realize that it violated the Constitution. For it empowered the attorney general to ask for the vice president’s resignation if he refused a lie-detector test.
Baker learned of the plot accidentally. About noon on September 14, Deaver stumbled on Reagan closeted with Clark and Meese, who were urging him to sign the order. Within the hour, Deaver told Baker as they were riding to lunch at the nearby Madison Hotel. Baker turned the car around, went back to the White House, and barged in on the president, who was then lunching with Bush and Shultz. In some agitation, Baker told the president that his order meant that he was subjecting his closest associates, including the vice president, to polygraphs. Baker reminded Reagan that eighteen months earlier, Reagan had signed an order designating Baker as the official to decide when lie detectors should be used on high government officials. Baker had deliberately sought that power to curb the use of lie detectors and now pointed out that Clark had never checked with him. Reagan seemed taken aback.
Shultz immediately spoke up. “Nobody’d better polygraph me,” he thundered. “I’ll only be asked to take one polygraph”—a clear threat of resignation.
Baker volunteered the same.
Bush also criticized the lie-detector plan.
Reagan, irked by the predicament he’d gotten into, blurted out, “Bill shouldn’t have done that.” He reached for the phone and told Attorney General Smith: “I want that letter back. I want you over here this afternoon. I want to roundtable this thing.”64
That afternoon, Reagan sat down with Smith, Clark, Meese, Baker, Deaver, and Fred Fielding, the White House counsel. It was a tense session. Clark and Meese wanted the instructions left as they were. Baker argued that would be a terrible mistake, a terrible reflection on the president to order the polygraphing of his top advisers. It was highly unlikely, he said, that any official in that meeting had leaked to the press, but they all had to brief their aides, who had probably been the news sources.
“Go ahead and have the investigation,” Baker said, “but don’t strap people up.”
Shultz was not present, but his threat must have rung in Reagan’s ears. Siding with Baker and Shultz, Reagan canceled the lie-detector tests. Clark stormed out of the Oval Office. “I’ve never seen Clark as mad in my life,” said one high official. “He was about as red as that magazine cover.”
The lie-detector issue did not die there. It continued to split the Reagan high command. After a rash of major spy scandals, Reagan secretly signed NSDD-196 on November 1, 1985, authorizing random use of mandatory lie-detector tests on up to 182,000 federal employees and defense contractors with access to especially sensitive information.65 Donald Regan and Bud McFarlane, who had taken over as White House chief of staff and national security adviser, persuaded Reagan to sign the order over Shultz’s objections but with backing from Casey and Weinberger. Jim Baker, then Treasury secretary, was not informed. Shultz, voicing grave reservations about polygraphs, had given Reagan a paper asserting that lie detectors can be misleading—sometimes trapping the innocent and being beaten by trained spies. Moreover, he objected on grounds of principle.
The battle boiled on, internally, until December 11, when Robert Toth of the Los Angeles Times broke the news of Reagan’s NSDD-196. Ten days later, Shultz, who had been abroad, issued a dramatic open dissent. In an emotional outburst, he made the issue one of personal integrity: “The minute in this government I am told that I’m not trusted is the day that I leave,” he declared. The next day Shultz met with the president, and Reagan backed down again. Instead of blanket and random use of lie detectors, a spokesman said, they would be used as a “limited tool” in espionage investigations.
That repaired some damage, but Reagan’s image had been hurt. His willingness to order wide use of lie detectors raised grave concerns about civil liberties, as well as fears that the White House was using the espionage problem to throttle the flow of information and to slip some covert operations past Congress. (In fact, both the
secret arms dealings with Iran and arms drops to the Nicaraguan contras were under way by then.) Moreover, Reagan came across as neither understanding nor carefully reading what he was signing. His backing down when challenged betrayed hasty initial approval—at the urging of some aides, without consulting others. The fact that Shultz felt impelled to dissent publicly foretold new dangers.
Death of a Salesman
The administration’s success in manipulating the media in the first term and the 1984 campaign bred an overconfidence in Reagan’s second-term inner circle that hastened its undoing. For Reagan’s first-term popularity and success had ridden in part on avoiding excessive power plays or quickly repairing the damage when his administration got caught off base. On Nicaragua, Casey at the CIA repeatedly overreached and then banked on Shultz and others, who had credibility with Congress, to bail him out, and bail out Reagan, too. But under Don Regan, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter, the second-term White House team became more willful, and more secretive—a formula for political disaster.
One major storm warning came with the news leak in October 1986 that President Reagan had approved a strategy of disinformation and deliberate deception against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.66 Bob Woodward, writing in The Washington Post, quoted an August 14 memo to Reagan from then–Vice Admiral John Poindexter, who had become national security adviser. Poindexter advocated a plan that “combines real and illusionary events—through a disinformation program—with the basic goal of making Qaddafi think that there is a high degree of internal opposition to him within Libya, that his key trusted aides are disloyal, that the U.S. is about to move against him militarily.” The goal was to topple Qaddafi. The Poindexter memo had a particularity bad ring because disinformation is the Soviet term for planting false information in the press.
In self-defense, the White House sought to draw a distinction between practicing deception toward Qaddafi and using the American press for disinformation. It admitted deception but denied disinformation. At one White House briefing that I attended in mid-November 1986, President Reagan acknowledged Poindexter’s memo and said he wanted to keep Qaddafi off balance. Poindexter insisted, “We did not intend and did not plan or conspire to mislead the American press in any way.” The problem was that many White House reporters felt—with good reason—that they had already been patsies for a planted story line about a phony crisis with Libya.
A high State Department official told me that some of Poindexter’s national security aides fed false information to the American press about Libya, thinking (on the basis of an August 14 meeting with Reagan, Poindexter, and others) that a planted story “might be smiled upon” by Reagan. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on August 25, asserting that Qaddafi “has begun plotting new terrorist attacks” and “the U.S. and Libya are on a collision course again” (though Poindexter’s mid-August memo had said there was no evidence of imminent terrorist attacks). For the record, Larry Speakes had “no comment” on the Journal story, but Speakes insured that its version would be widely repeated, by telling other reporters that the story was “authoritative.” In short, the White House promoted its planted story but kept its hand hidden, leaving reporters furious when the bogus crisis was later exposed by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post.
Shultz added to Reagan’s image problems by defending the principle of deception. “Frankly, I don’t have any problems with a little psychological warfare against Qaddafi,” Shultz declared. He recalled Winston Churchill’s justifying deception against Hitler during World War II: “In time of war, the truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
That story line not only sharpened Reagan’s growing credibility problems, but it did not sell among Shultz’s official family. Respected congressional figures in both parties castigated the operation. The hardest blow was the protest-resignation of Shultz’s State Department spokesman—Bernard Kalb, a former CBS, NBC, and New York Times reporter. “Faith in the word of America is the pulsebeat of our democracy,” Kalb said. “Anything that hurts America’s credibility hurts America.”
But the Libyan disinformation plot was an inside-the-beltway tempest. The devastating disclosure of Reagan’s duplicity on his secret dealings with Iran was the coup de grace, echoing elements of the Watergate scandal, with some abuses of executive power, official attempts at cover-ups, shredding documents, and above all, the president’s personal policy deception. Across the nation, this affair shattered Reagan’s carefully crafted political image. His political magic melted.
Within the month after disclosure in early November 1986 of the Iranian operation, Reagan’s extraordinary public standing plummeted—from sixty-seven-percent to forty-six-percent approval in The New York Times/CBS News poll. Sizable majorities who had taken Reagan’s word on so many other things distrusted his disclaimer that he had not known about the diversion to the Nicaraguan contras of millions of dollars from profits made on the American arms sales to Iran. The political debacle was compounded by Chief of Staff Don Regan’s crass boast that image-game manipulation could dispose of the Iranian affair, just as White House P.R. had sloughed off three earlier setbacks: the Libyan “disinformation” controversy, the collapse of the Reykjavík summit, and the Republican loss of the Senate in the 1986 elections.
“Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follow a parade down Main Street cleaning up,” Don Regan told Bernie Weinraub, White House correspondent for The New York Times. “We took Reykjavík and turned what was really a sour situation into something that turned out pretty well. Who was it that took this disinformation thing and managed to turn it? Who was it took on this loss in the Senate and pointed out a few facts and managed to pull that? I don’t say we’ll be able to do it four times in a row. But here we go again and we’re trying.”67
Three months later, the president pushed Don Regan’s shovel brigade out the White House door.
But the president had fabricated his own catastrophe. He had violated the cardinal rule of the image game: acting contrary to the image he had developed for himself. He was a victim of his own effective salesmanship. As president, Reagan had cast himself as a firm and unflinching foe of precisely what he was now caught doing—dealing with a terrorist state. Reagan had built the arguments against such double-dealing with Iran. He had castigated Carter harshly for pragmatism and patience in negotiating the release of earlier American Embassy hostages in Iran—a course Reagan derided as weakness.
Reagan’s fall from grace was so swift and sharp precisely because so much of his popular appeal had ridden on image: his image of steadfastness, his image as a man of principle, his image of uncompromising refusal to deal with the devil. Suddenly he was none of those in reality. Public disapproval fell hard on Reagan when he was exposed as willing to traffic in arms with Ayatollah Khomeini’s closest henchmen to buy freedom for three American hostages, because Reagan’s actions did violence to the image he had created.
In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller has one character say about his protagonist, Willy Loman: “For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.”68
As Reagan demonstrated in late 1987, he still has a following and can strike arms agreements with Moscow. But in the Iranian quagmire, he lost credibility with millions of people. He had risked his most precious political asset for a single highly dubious strand of policy. For a long time, Reagan had stretched the truth on his Nicaraguan policy, officially pretending to Congress that his goals were limited and only belatedly admitting that his real objective was to force the Sandinistas to “say uncle” and give up power. And he had lived the fiction that his administration had not instigated the arming of the contras during the congressional ban on such action. But never before had Reagan been caught so baldly in a policy lie—saying one thing publicly about I
ran and doing the opposite in private. Reagan violated a basic rule of the image game: The story line has to match reality, or come far closer than Reagan did, or the image game is mere gloss. After Iran, nothing else Reagan pushed would sell as well as it had before. What helped him hang on as well as he did was his personal popularity—his shoeshine and his smile.
Over the longer run, the unmasking of Reagan’s secret Iranian policy—along with Gary Hart’s political collapse over stories about his extramarital relations and Joe Biden’s political plagiarism—may have fostered new public skepticism toward slick public relations and glitzy political image making. For in the 1988 election season, the pendulum was swinging back toward more emphasis on personal integrity and political competence—away from the strongly symbolic politics with which the Reagan era began.
13. The Coalition Game: The Heart of Governing
Putting a majority together is like a one-armed man wrapping cranberries: You can’t get them all in the wrap.
—Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole
As Ronald Wilson Reagan was taking his oath of office as the fortieth president of the United States in 1981, Senator Howard Baker was sitting a few seats away, trying to make up his mind. Reagan had certainly not been Baker’s first choice as president. In 1976, Baker had backed Gerald Ford against Reagan. In 1980, then in his third term as a senator, Baker had run against Reagan himself and would fashion the damning metaphor that Reagan’s ambitious tax cuts were a “riverboat gamble” for the nation.
As Baker had hopped across Iowa and New Hampshire in 1980, seeking votes, he had asserted that Reagan might understand Sacramento after eight years as governor of California, but he lacked the experience for Washington. What is more, Baker was a mainstream Republican, one of those Washington insiders roundly denounced by Reagan.
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