The President’s Men

It is a Washington rite of passage: a member of the President’s inner council leaves under fire. His departure certifies that the new Administration is no longer new. Collisions with reality are forcing changes in personnel as well as modifications of policy. Post-Inaugural hopes and dreams are turning into a series of adaptations to unforeseen pressures and challenges.

That moment of truth has come at last for the Reagan Administration. Richard Allen last week abruptly took administrative leave from his post as National Security Adviser. The Justice Department absolved him of illegal behavior in his handling (or mishandling) of a $1,000 honorarium from a Japanese magazine that interviewed the First Lady last January. But there were other unanswered questions about Allen’s behavior in office, and the betting among Washington insiders was that he would not return to his post. In themselves, Allen’s alleged transgressions amounted to a very minor scandal indeed. His impressive title, and prominence on White House organization charts, substantially exceeded his real influence. The reasons for his temporary exit had nothing to do with the Administration’s long-run goals or even short-term tactics. Indeed, the conflicting and confusing statements put out by the White House damaged the Administration more than anything Allen himself did.

Nonetheless, Allen was one of the small group of advisers and assistants, unelected and sometimes all but unknown to the public, who serve every Administration as the President’s eyes, ears and hands. They bring information to the chief, define the policy choices that he confronts, ride herd on the bureaucracy to see how well his decisions are carried out.

Like the storm over Bert Lance’s financial dealings that broke in the first months of the Carter Administration, Allen’s problems raise a series of important questions. Just who are these President’s men? How are they organized, how do they operate, how do their personalities play off against each other? Above all, how well do they serve their President—and the nation?

Those questions are especially critical in this Administration because Reagan, more than most Presidents, relies on his aides to shape a policy consensus that he can accept, modify or reject. One answer is easy: there is no doubt which aides are most important. The so-called troika of Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese, 50, White House Chief of Staff James Baker, 51, and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver, 42, almost constitutes an inner government. But how they are organized and operate is difficult even for the participants to describe. The troika is a puzzling three-headed creature that defies all the usual rules of orderly administration.

Conventional White House practice is to organize most aides into a tight system reporting through a single, powerful chief of staff. Richard Nixon worked that way. Jimmy Carter, in his first two years, tried a decentralized system, with several different aides reporting directly to him. This was not successful, and Carter reverted to the traditional system.

The members of the troika, in contrast, are in effect—though not in title—three Chiefs of Staff. The duties and powers of the three men are ill defined; they overlap and intersect at a thousand points. The personalities differ in substantive ways. Meese, a cautious lawyer and the most conservative of the troika, specializes in summarizing conflicting arguments without committing himself. Baker, also a lawyer, is a hard-driving organizer with finely tuned political instincts. Deaver, an affable former public relations consultant, is concerned, above all, with the welfare and comfort of the First Family. Californians Meese and Deaver have been working with each other, and with Reagan, on and off since 1967, when both joined the Administration of the ex-movie star who had just been elected Governor of the Golden State. Baker, a Texan, came to the Reagan cast only last year, after doing his best, as campaign manager for George Bush, to prevent Reagan from winning the Republican presidential nomination. But despite these backgrounds, Baker and Deaver find themselves drawing closer together personally than either is to Meese. Says Deaver of himself and Baker: “We have similar instincts. Our guts work the same way.”

Though they have been an operational trio for a year now—they came together shortly after Reagan’s election—some intimates of the President from outside the White House still doubt that they can hold together. Says one: “It’s an unnatural arrangement. I don’t know how it can go on indefinitely.” Says another: “The players aren’t lined up right. It isn’t working, and it can’t last.”

Well, maybe. The handling of the Allen affair does point to subtle strains and tensions within the group. But so far, at least, the troika has put on a spectacular show of unity. Meese, Baker and Deaver are constantly in and out of each other’s offices, as well as Reagan’s. They eat breakfast together in Baker’s large corner office at 7:30 every morning that all three are in Washington, to review problems and options, plus the day’s agenda for Reagan and themselves. Says one White House aide: “That breakfast is the key to the kingdom.”

The three invariably occupy the same positions: Baker at the head of the table, Deaver on his right, Meese on his left. But no one presides; they just talk. TIME White House Correspondent Laurence I. Barrett, attending a breakfast last week, observed that they began exchanging papers and ticking off items on the day’s schedule even before a steward served the first course (cantaloupe for Meese and Baker, grapefruit for Deaver). Early though it was, all three had read the White House daily news summary. Deaver and Baker expressed concern about attacks on the Administration’s prospective new budget cuts at a meeting in Detroit of municipal officials the day before. Meese asserted that some of the grants that local leaders wanted to protect are worthwhile and other items in the budget should be cut first. “We need some priorities here,” he said. The others nodded; it was obvious that Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman would be hearing from the White House soon.

Long familiarity enables the three to talk in a kind of clipped shorthand, and on occasion they even finish each other’s sentences. Over the second course (cold cereal for Baker and Meese, a Western omelet for Deaver) the breakfast talk turned to a prospective White House order allowing striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization to be hired for some Government jobs (though not again as controllers). Meese suggested some precise lawyerly language. Said Baker: “I think the PATCO stuff came out . . . ” Deaver finished: “. . . just the way it should have.”

Nearly all advice reaching Reagan filters through the troika: an issue may be discussed in a Cabinet meeting, but the President nearly always will chew it over privately with the three before deciding. And then he normally will communicate his choice by asserting, at a morning meeting with the three: “I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve decided we ought to do it this way.”

The three nonetheless are distinct personalities who have carved out different niches for themselves. Meese, a former prosecutor who rarely shows strain or annoyance, prides himself on being the principal policy man. He summarizes issues and possible choices at Cabinet meetings and in sessions with Reagan. Says Deaver: “He is superb at articulating options, synthesizing views.” Meese runs meetings with wry humor. At one session the troika had with several Cabinet members, all participants agreed, following a wearying debate, on a paper that summarized positions Reagan would take with Third World leaders at the North-South conference in Cancun. But Secretary of State Alexander Haig then asserted: “I’ve got one last change to make.” Meese replied, deadpan: “No, Al, we’re not going to take out the words ‘the President.’ ” Even Haig joined in the laughter.

Meese has his weaknesses. He takes on too much work. Although a firm believer in, and drawer of, organization charts, he is poorly organized himself. Moreover, Meese often seems insensitive to political and public relations pitfalls. He has a tendency to hold back when aggressive action is necessary. His lax management of operations, when he gets into that, suggests that he should confine himself to his strong suit: counseling the President. Indeed, Reagan created the troika in the first place partly because good friends persuaded him that Meese could not serve as a single, powerful White House Chief of Staff. Meese’s choice of aides often has been questionable, and though he had a reputation for a time as Reagan’s “prime minister,” White House insiders insist they cannot think of a single policy decision on which he has been the prime mover. In part, they say that is because he so rarely indicates his own position when outlining policy choices for Reagan.

Meese denies this. Says he: “A lot of times I’ll summarize the arguments and suggest the course I think we ought to take.” But he adds: “I don’t try to push my view.”

Baker is a hard-driving operations man who specializes in legislative and political strategy. He deserves much of the credit for Reagan’s early, astonishing victories in Congress. He heads the Legislative Strategy Group, which has proved itself superb at counting noses and identifying just which legislators might be won over on, say, the sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia. Baker originally was dubious about joining the troika; he worried aloud to friends about how much real responsibility he would have and how he would fit in with Reagan’s intimates. But his stock is rising rapidly.

Baker’s instinct is for action. He is bored by details, impatient with lengthy memos. When aides get into a windy discussion, he will sometimes leave a meeting and pace restlessly around the White House halls or thumb absentmindedly through papers in a nearby office before rejoining the group. On days when no crisis impends, he has been heard to mutter: “I miss the campaign. This can be boring.” Like a campaign strategist, he often thinks in terms of the next victory. When he tries to go it alone, he I sometimes moves too fast: the results are not always happy. In order to win votes for Reagan’s income tax cuts, for example, he went along with a Christmas-tree type of bill that gives too many breaks to special interests, a move that will help to deepen deficits in the years ahead.

Deaver’s long, selfless service to Reagan has made him, in the words of White House Communications Director David Gergen, “the glue that holds this place together.” Deaver is the expert on everything concerning Ronald Reagan, down to matters as small as camera angles during a TV speech. Far more often than any other aide, he will drop upstairs to the White House living quarters for a drink and a chat with Reagan and Nancy after working hours. Says Deaver of his relations with Meese and Baker: “I’m probably not a threat. I don’t aspire to either of their jobs. If I had wanted either one, I could have had it.” Deaver might not have done either job effectively, however. He is so protective of Reagan’s image that his broader judgment can be skewed.

Deaver’s responsibilities are the most amorphous of the three. He is the keeper of Reagan’s schedule, and is turning into a White House troubleshooter as well. It was Deaver who took over the preparation of briefing papers for both the Ottawa and Cancun summits when it became clear that the State Department and Allen’s staff were not doing the job to Reagan’s satisfaction. Deaver is the bearer of bad news to Reagan, especially during vacations at the California ranch, when other aides approach the President with trepidation. Says Deaver: “Sometimes Baker will say to me, ‘Gee, I don’t feel comfortable about going in and talking to him [Reagan] about this or that.’ He’ll ask me to do it. Ed comes to me to run things by the President too.”

Only rarely does Deaver take a strong position on policy issues. When he does, Reagan listens. Says a White House aide about the troika: “On a day-to-day basis, Baker is becoming more and more important. However, in a showdown with Meese before the President, Meese could still probably win. But Deaver can trump both of them.”

It has not come to that; the three know perfectly well that they have to work together in order to function at all. On the rare occasions when one or the other has embarrassed himself and the Administration, it has been by acting alone. Meese, as duty officer in California last August, told the world that he had decided not to wake Reagan up to inform him of the dogfight over the Gulf of Sidra in which U.S. fighters shot down two Libyan planes. Baker and Deaver, more sensitive to public relations, would surely have told Meese, had they been there, that he was spreading an unfortunate impression of Reagan as a drowsy, do-nothing President.

Relieving Meese at the vacation White House a bit later, and seeking to force action on an issue that had long been hanging fire, Baker told the press that Reagan would consider cuts in defense spending as deep as $30 billion over the next three years. Meese and Deaver doubtless would have counseled him that the President was unlikely to do any such thing, as indeed he did not.

Though the troika has in general given every indication of working smoothly together, some subtle tensions are appearing in the relationship—among their aides, if not among the men themselves. Meese has annoyed assistants to the other two by sometimes spending two days a week in California speaking to not very important groups. Some whisper that Meese’s absences are eroding his grasp of fast-moving policy issues. Says a top White House aide: “I don’t think Ed senses that some things have slid from him.”

The Allen affair has introduced troublesome strains. Indeed, Allen’s presence in the White House was a touchy point from the start. Meese recommended hiring him, after clearing Allen of allegations of impropriety when he had worked in the Nixon White House. Deaver, ever sensitive to anything that might embarrass Reagan, thought that Allen should have been excluded from the Administration, but did not argue very emphatically; each troika member is careful not to touch another’s sacred cows. Other White House aides are less circumspect. Some have complained that Allen should have been eased out long ago because he lacks the intellectual capacity to conceptualize policy and has failed in his most basic task: coordinating the flow of ideas and paper from State, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies into the White House.

When the current storm about Allen broke, Meese wanted to keep his aide. After Meese learned in September that an envelope with $1,000 had been found in Allen’s safe, he first told the President, then Attorney General William French Smith, then Baker; he did not inform Deaver until a day or so later. Meese and Deaver both dismiss the delay as being of no consequence, but some White House insiders say that Meese was afraid Deaver would demand that Allen be summarily fired. Deaver, they add, was upset by his not being told immediately, or at least as soon as Baker. If true, this would be the first hint of one troika member trying to work around another, a practice that could be fatal to the group’s cohesion.

Serious dissension within the troika, in turn, could be paralyzing to the Reagan Administration. Below the top group, talent is disquietingly thin, even though the staff is deceptively large. There are about 350 people on the White House staff; about 40 report to Deaver and 25 to Meese. That most of the others are in Baker’s jurisdiction is no accurate guide to his influence.

A few key White House aides have shown drive and ability. Assistants to the President Craig Fuller, a Deaver protégé who now works under Meese, and Richard Darman, a Baker choice, operate so closely with the troika, passing policy recommendations up and presidential instructions down, that the five in effect constitute a powerful group that has no name and no official existence. Fuller uses an elaborate computerized tracking system to keep tab on all issues moving through the White House machinery. Darman, who first suggested the Legislative Strategy Group, has made himself the master of all paper going to Reagan; he does the final edits on almost everything Reagan sees. On the wall of Barman’s office in the White House basement hangs a picture of Darman and Reagan shuffling papers together. The President has written on it:

“Dear Dick—now what is it that happens if I sign that thing? Or did I already?”

Another highly effective White House aide, Chief Lobbyist Max Friedersdorf, resigned last week. Friedersdorf apparently quit for personal reasons; he had been hospitalized by an asthma attack last summer and took a less hectic job as U.S. consul general in Bermuda. He was replaced by Kenneth Duberstein, one of his chief assistants, who had proved adept at lining up votes for Reagan’s programs in the Democratic-controlled House. Nonetheless, a lobbyist with Friedersdorf’s skill in wooing legislators is bound to be missed.

Some other White House areas are poorly staffed. The Office of Policy Development under Martin Anderson, a longtime Reagan aide from past campaigns, is supposed to coordinate all domestic policy recommendations. But it has merely passed along ideas from others rather than generating many of its own. Says a White House aide: “You ask Marty what he’s done and he’ll tell you ‘immigration cards’ [for alien workers, an idea that Anderson succeeded in killing]. That’s a great record after almost a year in office.”

It was the impotence of the domestic policy group that enabled Stockman to acquire enormous influence over all domestic decisions—and to keep his job. Stockman’s publicly expressed skepticism in the Atlantic Monthly about the economic program he had done so much to shape and sell to Congress would have caused him to be summarily fired for disloyalty from many a past Administration. Indeed, some of Reagan’s aides wanted the President to bounce Stockman, but there was simply nobody to take his place. Says a senior Reagan adviser: “As I sat there at those meetings and they were talking about Stockman going, I said to myself, ‘Hell, he’s our entire domestic policy staff. What are we going to do without him?’ ”

Although Reagan entered office hoping to govern largely through his Cabinet, the idea never flew very high. A few Cabinet members who are longtime Reagan intimates, notably Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Attorney General Smith, can slip in to see Reagan one-on-one and sometimes sway major decisions. But the Cabinet as a body is little more than a discussion group. It has met 35 times; issues are “round-tabled” (a White House buzz word) to give everyone a chance to sound off, and the President delivers what amounts to pep talks. But Reagan almost never announces a decision until he can discuss matters further with the troika and perhaps a few other aides. The President, says a close aide, fears that some Cabinet members are becoming captives of the bureaucracies they head.

Vice President Bush has made himself almost as invisible within the Administration as he is to the general public. He attends Cabinet meetings, is kept informed on all problems he would confront if he should have to take over for Reagan, and lunches alone with the President almost every week. At those sessions, says Meese, Bush offers advice on foreign policy and defense that Reagan values highly. But on domestic policy, the word in Washington is that the way to sway a presidential decision is to lobby Meese, Baker or Deaver, and maybe Stockman—but not Bush.

Reagan himself is not quite the detached Chairman of the Board of popular myth, or so his aides assert. They insist that he studies briefing papers longer and in more detail than the public ever suspects. The President can be fiercely decisive on matters that involve his ideological principles. The troika had to restrain him last August from announcing his decision to fire the striking air-traffic controllers until the strike had actually begun. Reagan has even been known to overrule a unanimous troika opinion on issues about which he feels deeply. The three all thought last summer that the Administration should seek sizable increases in some taxes—sales and business taxes, perhaps—to hold down future deficits. Reagan’s response, as one aide sums it up: “No way. He wouldn’t even consider it.” This President simply hates taxes, period.

On most problems, however, particularly the complex nonideological ones, Reagan does rely heavily on his advisers and, above all, on the troika. It is an approach that enabled the Administration to display enormous drive and decisiveness in its early months. But it also has serious flaws.

For one thing, there is reason to doubt that Reagan and his inner circle are hearing all the policy views they should. At least five Cabinet members early last summer feared that budget deficits would rise far beyond the optimistic projections that Stockman was presenting. (Ironically, so did Stockman, but at that point he was telling only the Atlantic Monthly.) The five were too afraid of being intimidated by Stockman to speak up in Cabinet meetings. Instead, they formed a rump group that met three times in July to voice their complaints to selected presidential aides. They never did get through to Reagan; Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, intended to carry their views to the President, but by then Reagan was hearing the same thing from Stockman.

The troika cannot always keep an eye on everything, and when it lets an issue slip by, the result can be chaos. Secretary of Health and Human Services Richard Schweiker, charged with developing a program to keep Social Security solvent, last May produced with Stockman’s help a proposal to reduce sharply the future growth of pensions for people who retire at age 62. It was rushed to the White House on a weekend so that it could be discussed at a Cabinet meeting Monday morning, and an Administration position could then be presented at congressional hearings on Social Security. Meese and Baker read it hurriedly; Deaver apparently never did see it.

At the Cabinet metting, Reagan uncharacteristically gave a go-ahead on the spot. Nobody checked with Congress, which was so horrified at the notion of offending elderly voters that the Republican-controlled Senate passed a resolution deploring the idea, 96 to 0. Reagan was forced into a retreat that has left the Administration without a position on Social Security to this day.

A final flaw is that Reagan tends to assume his advisers will agree on most major issues; when they differ seriously, the White House machinery simply seizes up. Stockman last summer demanded deep cuts in defense spending and Weinberger resisted any reductions at all. Reagan, who basically thought the dispute was a technical question rather than a matter of principle, let things drift for six weeks in the hope that Meese could get the two to agree on a figure. Deaver finally intervened to get both to present their arguments directly to Reagan, and the President decided in favor of minimal cuts ($2 billion this fiscal year). But precious time had been lost. Without knowing a defense figure, Stockman and the Administration could not give Congress any guidance on which social programs it wanted to reduce and by how much. That lack of guidance was a major factor in the bitter budget battle that erupted between Congress and the White House last month.

For all that, the Administration’s policy gears mesh well most of the time. Reagan’s widely acclaimed decision to embrace the “zero option” in talks with the Soviets on reduction of nuclear arms in Europe—proposed initially by the Pentagon and supported by Meese, who in this case made his position quite clear—proves that. But the Administration is facing a subtle threat, one that is difficult to define.

To a greater extent than Reagan and his advisers may have realized themselves, the Administration’s early dash and decisiveness, and its string of astonishing congressional victories, derived from the momentum of the campaign. Reagan entered the White House with a clear-cut set of positions that in his mind (and the minds of many cowed opponents) had been ratified by his sweeping election victory. The agenda—cut social spending, slash taxes, start a big military buildup, voice a stern anti-Soviet line in foreign affairs—was set. The priorities were clear: get the budget and tax cuts through Congress before anything else.

Now that the initial agenda has been put into effect, many issues no longer present themselves in black and white, right vs. left terms. The promises to raise military spending, slash taxes and balance the budget all at the same time cannot be reconciled (indeed, never could have been), and the Administration must deal with a recession it had not foreseen. Problems are arising for which campaign rhetoric offers no solution. Says one aide: “The President is finding that these decisions are not as easy as the ones he had to make in the first months in office. There is no obvious way to deploy the MX missile.”

In short, an Administration devoted initially to selling and executing preordained policy must now formulate new policy. Reagan himself is uncomfortable when faced with problems where instinct, experience or ideology do not provide a gut answer. The troika on which he so heavily depends is far better at getting things done than determining what should be done. The hard challenges for the President, and his staff, have just begun. —By George J. Church. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Douglas Brew/Washington