I knew that judges had a way of going their own way once they were sitting on the bench. Dwight Eisenhower once told me he believed that the biggest mistake he had made as president was appointing Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court because, in Ike’s view, Warren had changed his stripes and turned into a liberal who took it upon himself to rewrite the Constitution. I’d had a similar experience with one of my appointments in California.
Even though you couldn’t always be certain how the judges you appointed would act once they put on black robes, I intended to do my best to choose the most responsible and politically neutral jurists I could find.
When I was governor, we’d instituted a system for selecting California judges that I was very proud of—independently canvassing lawyers, judges, and key citizens in a community to select the best-qualified candidate for a judicial opening. In Washington, we couldn’t do it that way, because the federal judiciary was so large and covered the whole country. But I asked Bill Smith and Ed Meese to develop within the Justice Department a system for screening potential judges, taking into account input from their peers and applying the same kind of standards we’d used in California. I said I didn’t want politics to play any part in the selection, I wanted the best man or woman for the job. The only litmus test I wanted, I said, was the assurance of a judge’s honesty and judicial integrity. As in California, I wanted judges who would interpret the Constitution, not try to rewrite it.
At a meeting with Bill Smith on June 21, after paring down a list that included several other distinguished women, I made the tentative decision to nominate Sandra Day O’Connor of the Arizona Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Everything we had learned about her during our months of searching convinced me she was a woman of great legal intellect, fairness, and integrity—the antithesis of an ideological judge, and just what I wanted on the court.
On July 1, I met with her at the White House. She was forthright and convincing, and I had no doubt she was the right woman for the job. I appointed her and she turned out to be everything I hoped for.
In early May, FBI agents implicated a Libyan terrorist in a Chicago murder and we responded by ordering the Libyan government headed by Muammar al-Qaddafi to close its embassy in Washington. Qaddafi was a madman who was becoming an increasing concern not only to Western democracies but also to moderate Arab regimes and the civilized world at large. Through terrorism, he was trying to unify the world of Islam into a single nation of fundamentalists under rigid religious control—a theocracy, like Iran, that was ruled by priests and mullahs administering an ecclesiastical form of justice that in its most radical forms was regarded by many in the West as barbarous. He was seeking to accomplish his goal using Libya’s oil wealth, Russian weapons, and terrorism.
Like the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian despot with whom he was allied and often in contact, Qaddafi was an unpredictable fanatic. He believed any act, no matter how vicious or cold-blooded, was justified to further his goals.
Under Bill Casey, whom I had appointed as Director of Central Intelligence, we stepped up covert activities in the region and knew in some detail how the Soviets were supplying arms to Libya and that Qaddafi gave support to a number of non-Libyan terrorist groups around the world. I wanted to let him know that America wasn’t going to tolerate it and we’d do whatever it took to protect our interests and the interests of our allies.
My opportunity to do that came at a meeting of the National Security Council in early June when I authorized the Sixth Fleet to conduct maneuvers later that summer in the Gulf of Sidra, a part of the Mediterranean that indents the northern edge of Libya like a huge half moon. Ships and carrier-based planes of the Sixth Fleet had traditionally entered the gulf during annual summer maneuvers, but Qaddafi during the 1970s had begun claiming that it was legally a part of Libya, not international waters, and he had ordered foreign fleets out of the region. That was as if the United States had drawn a line from the tip of Florida to the U.S. mainland and declared the Gulf of Mexico belonged to America.
The Carter administration, during the period when it was trying to bring home the U.S. hostages in Teheran, had canceled the Sixth Fleet’s maneuvers in the Gulf of Sidra the previous year. Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger urged me to resume the annual exercises, because he said if we continued accepting Qaddafi’s claim that the gulf was a Libyan lake, we would be accepting a precedent that any nation could claim any patch of water outside the conventional twelve-mile limit and interfere with lawful shipping. I agreed with Cap and gave an order for the maneuvers to proceed in August. Then we’d see how Qaddafi responded to our decision.
On the same Sunday that I decided to appoint Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, I had made another decision: Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis came to Camp David that day and told me that the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, whose members manned Federal Aviation Administration airport control towers and radar centers around the country, was threatening to strike the following day because of our refusal to meet its demand for a huge salary increase. Although I had accepted the argument that the unusual pressures and demands in their occupation justified an increase, their demands would have cost taxpayers almost $700 million a year. I told Lewis to advise the union’s leaders that, as a former union president, I was probably the best friend his organization ever had in the White House, but I could not countenance an illegal strike nor permit negotiations to take place as long as one was in progress. I hoped the air controllers realized I meant what I said.
PATCO was one of only a handful of national unions that had backed me in the election. By instinct and experience, I supported unions and the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively; I’d served six terms as president of my own union and had led the Screen Actors Guild in its first strike. I was the first president of the United States who was a lifetime member of an AFL-CIO union. But no president could tolerate an illegal strike by Federal employees. Unions can strike a business and shut it down, but you cannot allow a strike to shut down a vital government service.
Governments are different from private industry. I agreed with Calvin Coolidge, who said, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time.”
Congress had passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees, and every member of the controllers’ union had signed a sworn affidavit agreeing not to strike. I told Lewis to tell leaders of the union that I expected them to abide by it. After our meeting, there was a brief resumption of negotiations. But on the morning of August 3, after the union’s executive board rejected a tentative agreement, more than seventy percent of the FAA’s force of nearly seventeen thousand controllers went on strike.
I suppose this was the first real national emergency I faced as president. The strike endangered the safety of thousands of passengers on hundreds of airline flights daily, and threatened more harm to our already troubled economy. But I never had any doubt how to respond to it. That morning, I sent a directive to FAA supervisors and to those controllers who had crossed the picket lines and were at work in the control towers and radar rooms; I instructed them, above all, to maintain the safety of the airways. Flight operations were to be reduced to the level the system could accommodate safely. Then I called reporters to the Rose Garden and read a handwritten statement I’d drafted in my study the night before.
Citing the pledge made by controllers never to strike, I said that if they did not return to work within forty-eight hours, their jobs would be terminated. I didn’t like disrupting the lives and careers of these professionals, many of whom had spent years serving their country. I don’t like firing anybody. But I realized that if they made the decision not to return to work in the full knowledge of what I’d said, then I wasn’t firing them, they were giving up their jobs based on their individual decisions.
I think that members of PATCO were poorly served by their leaders. They apparently thought
I was bluffing or playing games when I said controllers who didn’t honor the no-strike pledge would lose their jobs and not be rehired; and I think they underestimated the courage and energy of those controllers who decided not to go on strike. The airlines and these hard-working FAA employees, as well as the traveling public, went through a difficult period. But as each day passed, there were more planes in the air; we discovered that before the strike, the air traffic control system had about six thousand more controllers than it really needed to operate safely.
Training a new crop of controllers to replace those who chose not to return would take more than two years, but our air traffic control system emerged safer and more efficient than ever.
I didn’t think of it in such terms at the time, but I suppose the strike was an important juncture for our new administration. I think it convinced people who might have thought otherwise that I meant what I said. Incidentally, I would have been just as forceful if I thought management had been wrong in that dispute.
47
TO GET THE SPENDING and tax cuts we wanted through Congress, we needed the help of a substantial number of Democrats in the House as well as the votes of virtually all the Republicans in both houses of Congress. I spent a lot of time in the spring and early summer of 1981 on the telephone and in meetings trying to build a coalition to get the nation’s recovery under way. Reeling from the effects of years of mismanagement, the economy was falling deeper into recession every day. I knew things wouldn’t get better until we got the recovery program up and running. I met dozens of times with congressmen from both parties, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, trying to explain what it was we were trying to accomplish and to rebut erroneous reports in the press and fictions about the program being spread by Tip O’Neill.
Sometimes I made a convert, sometimes not. I remember one example of the efficiency of the White House operators: We were approaching an important vote on our proposed budget cuts when I asked to speak to a certain congressman. After quite a delay, I got a call back from him and I said jovially, “Where did we find you?” He said, “New Zealand.” I said, “What time is it in New Zealand?” He answered, “Four o’clock in the morning.” I wanted to hang up and pretend I’d never called him; but instead, after an apology, I proceeded with my pitch. When he got back to Washington, he voted with us.
Opinion polls showed ninety-five percent of the American people were behind the proposed spending cuts and almost as many supported the thirty-percent, three-year tax cut. But Tip O’Neill and other Democratic leaders in Congress used every procedural trick they’d learned in decades on Capitol Hill to block this legislation.
That meant I had to dip into FDR’s bag of tricks and take my case to the people.
To his credit, Tip granted my request to speak before a joint session of Congress a week after I left the hospital. I walked in to an unbelievable ovation that went on for several minutes. I explained why I thought tax and budget cuts were essential for ending the economic emergency the nation was facing. At one point, forty or so Democrats stood up and applauded and I felt a shiver go down my spine. I thought to myself: “Boy, that took guts; maybe our economic package has a chance.” Later, I joked to someone, “That reception was almost worth getting shot for.”
With Tip convinced that I was determined to destroy everything he had worked his entire life for, the Democratic leadership really dug in its heels following that speech. He sent out the word that any Democrat who was even thinking about supporting the tax and budget cuts could expect merciless discipline from the party leadership. And every time he got a chance, he went public and accused me of having horns and trying to destroy the nation. I was never able to convince Tip that I didn’t want to deprive the truly needy of the assistance the rest of us owed them; I just wanted to make government programs more efficient and eliminate waste, so that we no longer spent $2 for every $1 of aid we delivered to people.
A few days after my speech to Congress I started to think we might make it. In early May, I wrote in my diary: “More meetings with Congressmen. These Dems are with us on the budget and it’s interesting to hear some who’ve been here ten years or more and say it is their first time to ever be in the Oval Office. We really seem to be putting a coalition together.”
The next day we got tangible evidence we were creating the coalition we needed. Sixty-three Democrats defied Tip and voted along with every Republican in the House for the Gramm-Latta budget resolution, the first of a series of congressional actions that slashed billions of dollars in federal spending in 1981. “We never anticipated such a landslide,” I wrote in my diary. “We felt we were going to win due to the conservative bloc of Dems, but expected Republican defections so that we might win by one or two votes. It’s been a long time since Republicans had a victory like this.”
Joining the Republicans was a group of Democrats who, like Representative Phil Gramm of Texas, called themselves the “boll weevils” and shared our philosophy that government was spending too much of the national wealth and wanted to cut it back. Without their help, we would have never passed the economic recovery program.
As sweet as this initial victory was, we had a long way to go on the two fronts of cutting spending and cutting taxes. I realized I would have to compromise and settle for less than the full thirty-percent, three-year cut I wanted, but got some plums I hadn’t expected: In late May, a group of Democrats announced a counterproposal to our tax plan that rejected the thirty-percent-over-three-years cut, but accepted a smaller cut in personal income tax rates while proposing a reduction in the top rate on unearned income from seventy percent to fifty percent. I’d wanted that in the first place, but figured the Democrats would attack us for pandering to the rich, so we hadn’t asked for it in our package. To get on the people’s new antitax bandwagon, some Democrats also called for indexing income tax rates, so that rates would decline each year in step with inflation and end “bracket creep.” That was something else I wanted but doubted we could get.
I agreed “reluctantly” to give in to their proposals and accept a twenty-five-percent reduction in rates over three years, phased in at five, ten, and ten percent, and hailed it as a great bipartisan solution. “H—I,” I wrote in the diary, “it’s more than I thought we could get. I’m delighted to get the seventy down to fifty. All we gave up is the first year 10 per cent beginning last Jan. to 5 per cent beginning this October. Instead of 30 per cent over 36 months, it will be 25 per cent over 27 months.”
I tried to keep the heat on Congress. I flew to Chicago in early July, ostensibly to speak at a fund-raiser for Governor Jim Thompson, but used my visit to the district of Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to point out to his constituents that he held the fate of the tax-cut proposals in his palm. I urged them to write to him: “If all of you will join with your neighbors to send the same message to Washington, we’ll have that tax cut and we’ll have it this year.” I was told that the speech generated hundreds of letters to Rostenkowski, who subsequently became something of a conciliatory voice among the Democratic leaders in the House as we approached the finish line in the battle over tax reduction.
Matters started coming to a head shortly after that. In mid-July, Nancy flew to London to attend the wedding of HRH the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. “I worry when she’s out of sight six minutes,” I wrote in my diary that night. “How am I going to hold out for six days? The lights just don’t seem as warm and bright without her.” But I had lots to keep me busy.
July 27, 1981, was a Monday, the beginning of a pivotal week that would determine whether our program got off the ground or crashed. Almost everyone following the events, from the members of our staff to the Washington press corps, said the battle was too close to call.
Six months earlier, I’d come to Washington to put into practice ideas I’d believed in for decades. Now it was down to a few hours; Congress had two tax programs before it: the administration plan, and one crafted
by the Democratic leadership meant to respond to the public clamor for tax relief. That plan proposed a fifteen-percent tax cut over two years, distributed most of the benefits to low-income people, and excluded many of the pump-priming features I felt were needed to encourage business investment and give a jolt to the economy. If the economic recovery plan was to work, I was convinced, Congress had to provide across-the-board relief equally for all Americans for three years. I believed this would create millions of jobs and trigger an economic resurgence.
I knew that, if we were going to get it passed, it wouldn’t be enough to make Congress see the light; I had to make ’em feel the heat. That Monday I spent virtually every minute from early in the morning until seven thirty at night on the phone or in meetings with congressmen lobbying for the tax cuts; at eight, I made a televised broadcast to the nation in which I compared the Democrats’ tax relief plan with ours and said: “The plain truth is, our choice is not between two plans to reduce taxes; it’s between a tax cut or a tax increase.” (Under their plan the total taxes paid by Americans would have gone up, not down.) Then I asked the people to make their views known to their elected representatives. The White House switchboard was swamped with calls from around the nation—more than after any speech I had given—and were six-to-one in favor of the administration’s tax bill.
As soon as I got up the next day, I was on the phone again making calls to congressmen; most said their phones had been ringing off the wall since the speech with calls in support of the administration tax bill. “Tomorrow is the day,” I wrote in my diary before going to bed the night of July 28, “and it’s too close to call but there is no doubt the people are with us.”
Wednesday, July 29:
The whole day was given to phone calls to Congressmen except for a half dozen to name ambassadors.
I went from fearing the worst to hope we’d squeak through. As the day went on though some how I got the feeling that something good was happening. Then late afternoon came word the Senate had passed its tax bill [ours] 89 to 11. Then from the House where all the chips were down, we won 238-195. We got 40 Democrat votes. On final passage almost 100 joined the parade making it 330 odd to 107 or thereabouts. This on top of the budget victory is the greatest political win in half a century.
An American Life Page 29