Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  “Are you telling me that I have to get 178 Democrats to pass the bill?” asked Russo, one of Rosty’s chief vote whips.

  “Probably,” Baker said.

  Russo took that piece of intelligence back to the caucusing Democrats. “We can’t get 178 Democrats if we don’t take care of fringe benefits,” he told Rosty.72 That rekindled the revolt of the prolabor group. Rostenkowski tried to stop them, calling for loyalty, recalling his pledge to the business executives, pleading not to upset things when victory was so close. But they called for a show of hands. Rosty lost.

  He tried another gambit of the old-breed power game. It was his bill, his fight, and they were his team. He asked for a chairman’s prerogative. He proposed that when Rangel offered the amendment on fringe benefits, Rosty would call for a voice vote and declare Rangel’s proposal beaten. But if a roll call were demanded, Rangel would win, and Rosty himself would propose raising the corporate tax rate. Team feeling was strong. The other Democrats agreed.

  Formal committee sessions resumed, close to midnight. The Republicans were angry, demanding roll-call votes on everything. Rangel’s fringe-benefit amendment came up. Roll call. It passed with an easy Democratic majority. Rostenkowski proposed upping the corporate rate; the Democrats passed it. They finished the bill close to three A.M. The Republicans were furious.

  With House Republicans in open revolt, Reagan stalled on making any endorsement. Rostenkowski telephoned the president to appeal for Reagan’s support, but Reagan dodged him for four days. Rosty wanted to fly with Reagan to the West Coast over the Thanksgiving break, but Jim Baker headed him off. Reagan finally called Rostenkowski back on November 30—angry that Rosty had bleated to the press about phoning Reagan and getting no answer.

  “You asked me to keep my powder dry,” the president reminded him. “You asked me not to make any comment. Now, I’m asking you to do the same thing. Don’t you make any comment.”

  “Mr. President, I’m your biggest fan,” Rosty replied. “I won’t do a thing. But I think you’re making a mistake by not having endorsed this bill that night.”73

  Reagan delayed several more days; by then it was impossible to quell the Republican mutiny. The shock came on December 11, when 188 Republicans bolted from Reagan and, joined by thirty-five Democrats, prevented the tax bill from coming up for a vote. Rostenkowski was crestfallen. He went into Tip O’Neill’s office, his tail between his legs.

  “You know, Danny, we’re gonna get it through,” O’Neill encouraged him.

  “Jesus, I put too much time on this thing to have it die like this,” Rosty moaned. “Jesus, if they kill it on us, what are we gonna do?”

  “We’re gonna put the challenge on the president,” O’Neill retorted. “We’re gonna make the president go out and get the votes.”74

  Actually, O’Neill could have taken the tack that the bill was dead, the war was over, and Republicans were to blame for killing their own President’s number one domestic priority. But the speaker thought that tax reform made good sense. And seeing a chance for Democrats to score some partisan points, he laid on Reagan the responsibility for rescuing Rostenkowski’s bill.

  “If the president really cares about tax reform, then he will deliver the votes,” O’Neill declared. “Otherwise, December 11 will be remembered as the date that Ronald Reagan became a lame duck on the floor of the House.”

  To be worth another try, O’Neill said, the president would have to deliver fifty Republican votes. Tough but not impossible. If O’Neill had wanted to kill tax reform, he could have said seventy-five or even ninety votes, half the House Republicans. But he did not want to kill the bill; he wanted to make Reagan sweat.

  For six days, the White House struggled desperately. As each day passed, Rostenkowski basked in credit and saw Republicans take a licking in the press. His opposition game was paying off: Democratic success and Republicans humiliating the president were there for all to see. Reagan had to plead for votes, endure the wrath of rebellious backbenchers, and play upon their loyalty. When Republican nose counts reached the magic number of fifty that evening, the White House had its switchboard operators chasing Tip O’Neill. But having taken plenty of beatings from Reagan, O’Neill wanted to savor the time that Reagan needed him so badly.

  “He called me that night that he had the fifty votes, and I was down at the Phoenix Park Hotel eating supper, and I didn’t return the call,” the speaker told me. “Three times he called, and they tell me at the White House he was in a dither he was so upset.” Tip mimicked a pouting Reagan. “ ‘You think he’s [meaning Tip] gonna renege on me? I got the fifty votes. Do you think he’s gonna come up and demand that we have seventy-five votes or a hundred votes?’ And finally when I called him, and I said I’d put the thing on [for a vote], and that I’d trust that he’d have the fifty votes or more, they were completely relieved.”75

  On the next rule vote, Reagan had seventy Republicans. The bill finally passed on a voice vote in confusion. Once again, Reagan was the hero, arriving like the Cavalry to rescue the damsel.

  But it was a positive-sum game. Rostenkowski had also won round five. He had provided the Democrats with a political win either way. He had outwitted the Cassandras by actually producing a tax-reform bill that got 188 Democratic votes. If his bill had died, Republicans would obviously have killed it. Since it passed, Rosty and the Democrats had earned a share of credit.

  In the Senate, the bill was revamped again, much more to Republican liking, as Jim Baker and Dick Darman had predicted. With brilliant maneuvers, Bob Packwood, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, not only got rid of Rostenkowski’s fourth bracket but restored a lot of tax breaks for business. The final result was a bipartisan hybrid.76

  But Rostenkowski had stolen the Republican thunder long enough so that neither Reagan nor other Republicans could fly tax reform as their realignment banner in the 1986 election. Unlike the House moderates whose prime motivation on MX was the substance of the issues, Rosty’s opposition game was a power struggle at heart, matching Reagan’s appeal by shrewd legislative maneuver and some clever Democratic PR. In tandem with Reagan and Packwood, Rosty’s game had worked well enough to pass the tax bill and to give the country a fairer tax law. And it had neutralized the issue politically. For an opposition chairman like Rostenkowski, that was a political ten strike.

  All three opposition games—Tip O’Neill’s confrontation politics, the trading game of the House moderates, and Rostenkowski’s strategy of alliance and remodeling—have importance far beyond the 1980s. Those patterns will crop up again and again in the decade ahead, and beyond. Certainly the tactics, and even some of the very same moves, will be repeated, for these are the basic ways the game is played by opposition leaders and by ambitious upstarts eager to put their mark on policy.

  * Stockman admitted to me that to get the three-to-one figure, he took $50 billion in “management savings” from Reagan’s original budget (which did not materialize), another $50 billion from reduced Pentagon increases (which Weinberger resisted making), plus billions more from Stockman’s optimistic assumptions about economic growth and interest savings on the national debt (which did not work out). Stockman added all that to the real cuts promised by Congress to achieve savings of nearly $300 billion, for nearly $100 billion in tax cuts.

  15. The Foreign Policy Game: Bureaucratic Tribal Warfare

  Nothing ever gets settled in this town. It’s not like running a company or even a university. It’s a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me, and that’s the atmosphere in which you administer.

  —George Shultz, secretary of State

  One enduring myth of American politics is that foreign policy is run—and is supposed to be run—by the secretary of State. It is also a ritual of our presidential campaigns for challengers to denounce the disarray of the existing foreign policy team and to promise reform that will bring unity and clarity. True to form, Ronald Reagan in 19
80 lashed out at the Carter administration’s inability “to speak with one voice in foreign policy.” Reagan promised to restore order and structure and to halt the internal feuding that had hobbled President Carter. He solemnly pledged to make the secretary of State his “principal spokesman and adviser” on foreign affairs.1

  In my early years of reporting in Washington, I used to take such statements seriously. But after following six administrations, it’s one of the first campaign pledges I discount. It has been made by every American President since John F. Kennedy—made, and then broken, by all but one of them.

  Kennedy’s secretary of State was Dean Rusk, but on Vietnam and arms control, he more frequently took his cues from Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. Lyndon Johnson’s pattern was similar. Richard Nixon installed William P. Rogers as secretary of State but Henry Kissinger, as national security adviser, ran policy on Nixon’s behalf. After Kissinger shifted to the State Department, he reigned supreme under President Ford—the first strongman secretary of State since John Foster Dulles under Eisenhower (making Ford the one recent president to let State run foreign policy). Jimmy Carter vacillated between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Vance finally resigning after objecting in vain to Carter’s ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages in Iran.

  Reagan fits the historic pattern. Initially, Reagan picked Alexander M. Haig, Jr., as secretary of State—impressed with Haig’s strong anti-Communist views, his military career, and his White House experience. In a comment that came to haunt Reagan—because Haig took it to heart—Reagan told Haig that on foreign policy, “I’ll look to you, Al.” Even so, Reagan probably did not anticipate Haig’s pronouncing himself “vicar” and “general manager” of Reagan’s foreign policy.2 Reagan and his advisers did not want strong, one-man rule in foreign policy à la Kissinger. They had disliked both Kissinger’s diplomatic style and the substance of his arms agreements with Moscow.

  Haig never got to taste Kissinger’s glories. Just before his Senate confirmation hearings in January 1981, Haig’s policy turf and his role as the nation’s number one diplomat were trampled on by Defense Secretary–designate Caspar Weinberger. Normally, arms control is the province of the secretary of State; Haig intended to move quickly. But Weinberger stole Haig’s thunder. He declared in a press interview that new arms talks with Moscow should wait at least six months, in order to get Reagan’s military buildup under way first. That was an ill omen; the White House and Weinberger frequently blocked Haig’s initiatives. Fuming in frustration, Haig left the administration after seventeen months.

  For all Haig’s idiosyncrasies, the problem was not unique to Haig. George Shultz, the next secretary of State, spent years battling the same forces, trying to control his diplomatic bailiwick. Shultz was constantly reacting to inroads from Weinberger and from four successive national security advisers: Bill Clark, Bud McFarlane, John Poindexter, and Frank Carlucci. Reagan would consult others and blithely bypass his secretary of State and simply inform him at the eleventh hour of major decisions: huge American troop maneuvers in Central America in 1983, which affected regional policy; withdrawal of American Marines from Lebanon in 1984, which drastically altered Shultz’s diplomacy; adopting a new nuclear doctrine with his Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, which altered arms control policy; plunging ahead with his secret arms deals with Iran. Each time, Shultz objected belatedly to the president—to no avail.

  Indeed, as the Iranian arms scandal surfaced in November 1986, Shultz was forced to the ultimate indignity for a secretary of State—admitting on national television that he did not have “the authority to speak for the entire Administration” on its most acute policy issue. In short, he was out in the cold.

  The bureaucratic warfare that beset Shultz was like a governmental migraine—a chronic symptom of problems in Reagan’s foreign policy apparatus. Actually, such institutional battling is normal in most administrations. But Reagan’s apparatus was especially divided, rent from start to finish by personal rivalries and institutional cleavages. Those rifts became ingrained because Reagan as president was so often detached, uncertain, indecisive. In foreign affairs, he had gut attitudes, but Reagan zigzagged. He did not project the sure sense of direction that he had in domestic affairs. His leadership style was laissez-faire, or else policy by impulse.

  In managing foreign policy, a president has two main options: One model is to frame an overall strategy with one chief adviser and have this collaborator put policy into practice, forcing other senior officials to fall in line. Richard Nixon used this formula with Henry Kissinger in withdrawing American forces from Vietnam and in scoring breakthroughs with the Soviet Union and China. Both Nixon and Kissinger had a keen sense of global strategy and the interrelationship of issues. In the early 1970s, Nixon was prepared to sign arms treaties with Moscow that codified a rough nuclear parity. He fixed the bait for a deal with Moscow by his dramatic opening to Peking. As a president with a grand design, he provided a strong sense of direction in foreign policy.

  The other presidential option is to follow an essentially reactive policy, responding to world events, improvising policy strands as opportunities arise or as the public mood—or the president’s own mood—changes, because there is no grand design. Essentially this was Reagan’s approach. His typical method for reaching major decisions—though there were crucial exceptions, among them the Iranian arms deals—was to have his principal policy advisers debate the options in front of him, groping for consensus. In Meese’s image, this cast Reagan as “chairman of the board,” listening and deciding.

  That hunt for a collegial consensus sometimes left Reagan captive to stalemates and policy paralysis because his favorite advisers disagreed sharply—a problem that Carter also had. Any president is buffeted by strong-willed advisers, especially a president who, like Reagan, lacks foreign policy experience, is weak on substance, and has conflicting impulses (both to want arms agreements with Moscow and to mistrust the Soviets). And those failings showed in Reagan’s policies.

  Like Jimmy Carter, Reagan vacillated between policies and policy advisers. The Weinberger faction would prod him to institute an economic embargo against a Soviet natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, and Shultz would later get him to lift the embargo. Shultz and his policy allies would talk the President into sending American Marines into Lebanon, and Weinberger would persuade Reagan to pull them out. The Pentagon crowd pushed a brand new interpretation of the Anti-Ballistics Missile Treaty of 1972, and Shultz raced back from a trip to prevent Reagan from implementing the new interpretation. This endless tug-of-war within Reagan’s inner circle made Reaganism less consistent in practice than Reagan’s speeches sounded.

  Tribal Rivalries

  The factional strife that plagued the making of Reagan’s foreign policy will outlive Reagan—just as it preceded his presidency—because it lies deeply imbedded in our governmental system. Most of the skirmishes of the Reagan period are microcosms of the foreign policy game. They fit a pattern of bureaucratic tribal warfare—institutional conflict fired by the pride, interests, loyalties, and jealousies of large bureaucratic clans, protecting their policy turf and using guile as well as argument to prevail in the battle over policy.

  The clashes between cabinet secretaries such as Shultz and Weinberger are collisions at the tips of bureaucratic icebergs. Their disagreements are an echo of long, bitter feuds within previous administrations, a reminder of the institutional competition built into the structure of the executive branch—some of it healthy and necessary, some of it rancid and futile.

  The patterns of conflict are well established in the national security triangle formed by the State Department, Defense Department, and the White House national security staff. It’s like the old proverb, “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.” Invariably there’s an odd man out, dissenting, battling for the president’s ear. Sometimes all three act like odd men out.

  In some administrations,
the running warfare is mainly between State and Defense. In the Ford administration, for example, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger were scathing adversaries, Kissinger pushing détente and Schlesinger warning of its dangers. Late in Lyndon Johnson’s White House years, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara clashed with Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s loyal pursuit of the Vietnam War. But when the leaders of State and Defense get along reasonably, as they did in the Carter administration, then State is usually at swords’ points with the White House. The running feud between Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was regular front-page news. By Reagan’s second term, two successive security advisers ran the Iranian arms sales right around both State and Defense.

  The truth is that presidential promises to put the secretary of State in charge of foreign policy are virtually impossible to deliver on. Presidents enjoy their own power of diplomatic initiative too much to let control of foreign policy pass to a secretary of State, and White House aides exploit presidential vanity to assert their power over policy.

  What is more, the machinery of American foreign policy has become so sprawling and cumbersome that no one has exclusive domain over foreign and national security policy. In addition to the State and Defense Departments, the inner group on arms issues includes the national security adviser and other presidential aides, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. More broadly, the foreign policy apparatus embraces the Agency for International Development, the United States Information Agency, and the Peace Corps. On economic policy, add the Treasury Department, Commerce Department, Agriculture Department, and the president’s special trade representative. In the intelligence field, the CIA plus State’s intelligence branch, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency (which breaks foreign codes by electronic eavesdropping), and the National Reconnaissance Organization (which runs spy satellites).