Reagan: The Life (72 page)

Regan couldn’t really complain about the substance of the stories, which were accurate enough, including the part about the president keeping clear of the tax reform proposals. Regan himself had suggested that Reagan not rush to endorse them. “Don’t embrace the whole plan right away,” Regan said. “Be cool—watch what happens.” The currently favored interests would fight to preserve their advantages, and if they proved too persuasive with Congress, the president could walk away and blame the fuss on Regan.

But Regan was irked to be preempted, and he thought the leaking undermined the chances that the program would be approved. The president’s aides were too protective of his image, he thought. “Great risks were involved in pushing the plan, and risk-taking is not the language of image-makers.” The resistance revealed their perception of the recent election. “The president had not run on a promise of tax reform but on a wave of good feeling that his advisers believed, with some justice, was a product of their manipulation of the media. Why should they subject the president and themselves to the bruising public battle that tax reform was certain to be? Their hearts simply weren’t in it.”

Regan thought the president was being ill served by such timid advisers. “The good fight for tax reform, like so many issues before it, was degenerating into a squabble in the media rather than becoming a grand
debate on the future of our nation led by the president,” he said. This was simply bad management. “It seemed to me, after four years of living in an environment in which policy seemed to be made on the basis of a belief in public opinion that amounted to superstition, that the presidency was in need of sound management advice. Willy-nilly, Ronald Reagan had achieved great things in four years. What might he do if his office were better organized and his ideas were more systematically transformed into policy?”

Regan’s thinking reached a crucial point following a cabinet meeting as the report on taxes was being finalized. George Shultz shared Regan’s distress at the problem of leaks and had suggested that Regan raise the matter with the president. Regan did so at the cabinet meeting. After he reported on the progress of the tax reform group, he argued strongly that administration staff needed to keep their mouths shut and that violators should be sternly disciplined. The president seemed sympathetic. But in the next morning’s
Washington Post
, Regan read a detailed account of his cabinet comments on tax reform.

“I was infuriated by this treacherous insult to the president and to me,” he recalled. “And at 7:50 a.m., with the
Post
still in my hand, I called Jim Baker and gave him the full benefit of my reaction in Marine Corps terminology. The conversation ended with my shouting something a lot stronger than Go to the devil, Jim Baker! and slamming down the receiver.”

Regan immediately dictated a letter of resignation. He dispatched an assistant to deliver it to the president, with instructions that it not go through
Richard Darman, Baker’s assistant who managed paper flow and who was Regan’s prime suspect in many of the leaks.

A few hours later he received a call from the president. “I got your letter and I’m calling to tell you that I can’t accept your resignation,” Reagan said. “In fact I’m tearing it up right now and burning it in the fireplace.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. President,” Regan replied. “But I meant what I wrote. This atmosphere of leaks and mistrust is simply intolerable, and I want to go.”

“Well, you can’t, Don, and that’s final. You’re the only friend I have around here. If you go, I’ll have to get my hat and go with you.”

Regan withdrew his resignation. “The man is not yet born who could resist words like these from the president of the United States,” he remembered.

B
AKER SOON ARRIVED
in Regan’s office. “It was obvious that he wanted to explain the leak and smooth things over,” Regan said. “I asked him to stay for lunch. My anger cooled, and I was glad enough to have the opportunity of talking to Baker. He seemed tired, distracted. He dropped into a chair, sighed loudly, shook his head, gave a wry smile. I asked him what was bothering him. He spoke the several names of the Lord one after the other and then described some of his behind-the-scenes experiences with the leading figures of American politics and government.” The fight for tax reform was only a small part of the picture, Baker said. The annual budget battle was raging; dozens of causes were being promoted by scores of people who had to be listened to if not agreed with; the media were always complaining; he was constantly having to patch over the mistakes of his staff and other members of the administration.

“You know what the trouble with you is, Baker?” Regan responded. “You’re tired.”

Baker looked at him for a moment. “You’re right,” he conceded. “I really am tired. I’ve got to get away from this.”

“You’ll never do that,” Regan said. “You’re a political junkie. You’re hooked.”

Baker didn’t deny it. They talked a bit longer. Then Regan said, “You know what we should do, Jim? We should swap jobs.”

Regan claimed afterward that he was half kidding. “I tossed out these words without thinking,” he wrote. “But Baker bobbed his head like a man who has been hit with an idea.”

“Do you mean that?” he asked.

Regan thought it over for a few moments. “I guess I do.”

They sat silently. Then Baker rose to leave. “Watch out,” he said. “I may take you up on that.”

“Okay,” Regan said. “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.”

Baker broached the matter with the group he called his own troika: Dick Darman,
Margaret Tutwiler, and
Susan Baker, his wife. Darman and Tutwiler would accompany him to Treasury if he decided to go. Darman worked with Baker to produce a one-page balance sheet of the costs and benefits of staying against those of moving. “
Possible Secretary of State,” the memo listed under the reasons to stay. Baker much preferred the senior cabinet post, and he thought he might get it if he held out for it. Referring to the Treasury job, the memo declared, “Not as good as State.” George Shultz, like Regan and Al Haig, became frustrated with the leaks
in the administration, and one day he might get fed up and resign. But, then again, maybe he wouldn’t. And where would that leave Baker? The Baker-Darman memo observed, “Bird in hand vs. bush.”

The handy bird won. Two weeks later Baker met with Regan again. They talked about tax reform, with Baker asking more questions than a chief of staff needed answered. Regan wasn’t surprised when Baker ended the meeting by inquiring if he was still serious about switching jobs. Regan said he was.

“
How would we approach the Man on this?” Baker asked.

“Hell, I’ll talk to him,” Regan replied.

Baker had a better idea. “We need to get Deaver involved,” he said. “We could never do this without telling Mike.” Baker thought Deaver deserved to know, as he had wanted to be chief of staff and was leaving the administration in part because he guessed he wouldn’t be. No less important, Deaver would sound out Nancy Reagan, whose support for the switch would be crucial.

Baker enlisted Darman to help him write a memo to Deaver. “
It’s time for a change,” the memo began. Baker and Regan were both tired of their current jobs and had spent down their political capital. The switch would reinvigorate them personally and rejuvenate the administration. Regan, the better financial mind, had done a good job developing the Treasury’s tax reform plan; Baker, the better political tactician, would give it the best chance of winning legislative approval. Meanwhile, Regan, the budget hawk, would help hold the White House line on spending. Baker and Darman said they hoped Deaver liked the idea, which they urged him to take to the president and the First Lady but no one else. “Leaks could stimulate conflict, which could destroy one of the main benefits: infusion of momentum.”

Baker and Regan met with Deaver personally. The three had lunch at Baker’s house, away from the prying eyes of the media and their own staffs. Regan launched into an explanation and justification of the switch before realizing that Deaver had already made up his mind—after consulting Nancy. “
In my innocence the thought that Deaver had cleared the plan with the First Lady before discussing it with me, or even with the president, did not occur to me,” Regan recalled. Nancy accepted the idea, and so did Deaver. To Baker and Regan, Deaver observed that the beginning of the second term was the logical time for a change. He added that Regan had been loyal to the president and wasn’t known for any personal
agenda that would raise political problems. “This would be your terminal job, Don,” Deaver said, tacitly inviting Regan, who was about to turn sixty-six, to correct him. Regan did not.

The three decided to wait until after the Reagans took their Christmas vacation at the ranch in California to approach the president. But early in the new year they met with Reagan in the Oval Office. Deaver smiled and said, “
Mr. President, I’ve brought you someone your own age to play with.”

Reagan smiled quizzically.

“Don has something he wants to discuss with you that he’s talked to Jim and me about,” Deaver said. “We think it’s very interesting and we’d like to know what you think about it.”

Regan made his pitch. “Reagan listened without any sign of surprise,” Regan recalled. “He seemed equable, relaxed—almost incurious. This seemed odd under the circumstances. The change I was describing was significant in itself, but it was only the latest in a series of changes that involved the president’s closest aides.” Deaver was leaving, and Ed Meese was slated to be the next attorney general. Now Baker, the third member of the White House troika, would be going to Treasury, replaced by Regan, whom Reagan knew but not well. “In the president’s place I would have put many questions to the applicant,” Regan observed. “How will you be different from Jim Baker? How will you handle Congress? What do you know about defense and foreign affairs? Who will you bring with you and who will you get rid of? What practices will you want to change? How will you handle the press? Why do you want this job?” But the president did nothing of the kind. “Reagan made no inquiries. I did not know what to make of his passivity.”

Regan suggested that he might want time to think the matter over.

Reagan asked Regan to say a bit more. Regan did so, still uninterrupted by questions. “Reagan nodded affably,” Regan recounted. “He looked at Baker and Deaver as if to check the expressions on their faces, but asked them no questions either.” When Regan finished, the president said, “Yes, I’ll go for it.”

Regan couldn’t get over the apparent lack of reflection in the president regarding such a major personnel change. “The president’s easy acceptance of this wholly novel idea of switching his chief of staff and his secretary of the Treasury, and of the consequent changes in his own daily life and in his administration, surprised me,” Regan wrote. “He seemed
to be absorbing a fait accompli rather than making a decision. One might have thought that the matter had already been settled by some absent party.”

Regan again urged the president to think it over. Again Reagan waved him off. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t just go ahead with it,” he said.

T
HE WORLD SOON
learned that the president’s chief of staff and Treasury secretary were switching jobs. And it discovered not much later that Don Regan was no Jim Baker as chief of staff. Baker relaxed in his new life at Treasury, where important decisions didn’t have to be made every day and where, when such decisions
were
made, they often escaped the intense scrutiny the media focused on the White House. Regan, moving in the opposite direction, quickly appreciated why Baker had seemed so worn. A chief of staff had to juggle a dozen balls simultaneously, and despite the efforts of Baker to brief him on what was in the air, some of the balls inevitably slipped through Regan’s inexperienced fingers.

The fumble that first got the world’s attention had its roots in a meeting between Reagan and West German chancellor
Helmut Kohl in November 1984. Kohl traveled to Washington to discuss alliance matters and to lay the groundwork for a meeting of the G7 in Bonn the following May. Kohl confessed that he and other Germans had been offended by their country’s exclusion from the fortieth-anniversary commemorations of the
D-Day landings, and he shared that a subsequent bury-the-hatchet meeting between himself and
François Mitterrand of France at the World War I battlefield at Verdun had yielded good feeling between their two countries and for the Western alliance in general. The chancellor hoped President Reagan would join him in a similar ceremony, perhaps at a wartime cemetery, on his visit to Germany. Kohl was fully aware of
Jewish sensitivities toward anything that looked like a forgetting of the
Holocaust; he suggested that Reagan balance a cemetery visit with a commemoration at Dachau or another concentration camp.

Reagan accepted Kohl’s invitation in principle and turned the matter over to the State Department and the White House staff to arrange the details. The State Department went to work on the briefing papers and other materials that would inform the substance of the president’s German tour; the White House staff took responsibility for the theatrics.

Unluckily, the White House staff was in the middle of the transition from Baker to Regan, and some details didn’t get the attention they deserved. In February 1985, Mike Deaver led an advance team to Germany to examine the sites the president would visit. By this time Kohl’s people had specified a military cemetery in Bitburg, in the chancellor’s home state and in a region of West Germany where a crucial election was about to be held. Deaver and the others visited the small cemetery, which looked inoffensive beneath a covering of snow. One of Deaver’s assistants later claimed to have asked whether any members of the notorious Nazi SS were buried there and been told that there were not. But neither Deaver nor his assistants brushed the snow off the gravestones to see for themselves.

Meanwhile, it was the possibility of a presidential visit to
Dachau that provoked the first objections. The German press suggested that Dachau had been Reagan’s idea; the White House denied the report. George Shultz told Reagan that a Dachau visit would be symbolically important, but Reagan thought the symbolism would be counterproductive. He wanted to look forward rather than back.