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Hedrick Smith's Books> The Power Game: How Washington WorksThe Power Game: Chapter 1Normally, Huntsville is a sleepy, peaceable mountain town (population 519), a classic slice of rural America set in the Appalachian forests of the Cumberland Plateau, nearly three thousand feet above the sea, and a sixty-mile drive northeast from Knoxville on sweeping, curving highways. It is the kind of tight-knit, little country community where, as one frequent visitor noted, "everyone knows when you come into town; and when you leave, they all know what your business was." For well over a century, this upland neck of eastern Tennessee has been so staunchly Republican and so loyal to the Union that when Tennessee seceded during the Civil War, Scott County seceded from Tennessee. For much of this century, the staples of the local economy were strip-mining, lumbering, and prospecting for oil and natural gas. But the local folks say that environmental regulations have squeezed the life out of these industries and that the best jobs these days are making hardwood parquet floors at Tibbals Flooring, or working for B.F. Goodrich in Oneida, about seven miles up the road. Huntsville is home to the Scott County government seat but boasts little else. The center of town, "the mall," is not much more than a grassy area surrounded by a two-story brick courthouse, a municipal building, one school, a grocery store, a drug store, one self-service laundry, a filling station, a community center, a motorcycle dealership, and a gazebo. No stoplight; only a blinker when school is in session. And the locals lament with envy that the nearest McDonald's is over in Oneida. In short, Huntsville has little to distinguish itself from thousands of tranquil towns dotted across the nation-except that one of its sons, Howard H. Baker, Jr., an extremely skilled and amiable hometown lawyer, rose to become majority leader of the United States Senate back in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan moved into the White House. The Baker family had crossed the mountains into Tennessee back in 1790s and achieved some local prominence. Senator Baker's grandfather was elected sheriff of a neighboring county. The Bakers erected the town gazebo in Huntsville. The main highway was named for Howard H. Baker, Sr., who won election to several terms as a republican member of Congress. But no one in the Tennessee family tree quite foreshadowed Senator Baker's eminence as a close confidant and political ally of a president. Nor did anyone dream what their relationship would mean to Huntsville. Because, some months into Mr. Reagan's term, Senator Baker used the occasion of a visit to the White House to propose that the president give a boost to the World's Fair in Knoxville by appearing at its opening in the spring of 1982. Delighted by Mr. Reagan's acceptance, the senator shared the good news with his wife, Joy. But she went him one better. "Well, why don't you go back and ask him if he'll stay with us that night?" she suggested. "That'd be a great thing." For all their years in politics, the Bakers were a pair of innocents. Neither fully anticipated the logistical tornado that is unleashed by an overnight presidential visit. But something else checked Senator Baker briefly. Like most politicians, he holds the presidency as an institution in considerable awe. That made him initially somewhat shy about actually asking President Reagan into his home. Moreover, since the attempt on the president's life in 1981, the security restrictions on Reagan's movements had been so tight that the president had not spent the night in any private residence. "I didn't want to do it," the senator confessed, remembering his hesitancy. "But I finally decided I would. I mentioned it to a couple of his aides and they thought it was a great idea. So I worked up my courage and I asked the president, told him I appreciated his coming down, would he and Mrs. Reagan care to stay with us in our home up in the country outside Knoxville that night? And he said, 'Sure, but I tell you what-Nancy's coming in a day early. Could she stay an extra day?'"2 The Bakers owned a large rambler-style home, which they had built in the 1950s on the family's secluded landholding. The nearest house was half a mile away, and on three sides you could see nothing but virgin mountain forests. What the senator had in mind for the Reagans was a four-room guesthouse, about a hundred yards down a grassy knoll from the main house, with a stunning view of the mountains from a ledge overhanging a gorge on the New River. The guesthouse had been fashioned from barn sidings but was lavishly furnished for a cabin, with porches front and back to let visitors drink in the mountain panorama. For many years, the late Senate Republican leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen, who was Mrs. Baker's father, used the guesthouse when he came to see his grandchildren. The quiet of the place was medicinal. From its high perch, one could hear the gurgling of the river, the evening crickets, and the mountain breeze rustling the oaks. At word of the president's acceptance, Mrs. Baker redecorated the guesthouse and fixed it up fresh. But the white House managers had in mind a much more ambitious overhaul than merely spiffing up the cottage. To the Bakers this might seem just a tranquil overnight interlude for a busy president and his lady, but the White House bureaucracy viewed the Baker homestead as a temporary global command post for the commander in chief. The trappings of power go with the president wherever he goes; they are the instruments of his power. Automatically, the elaborate machinery of presidential travel geared up preparations for the president's coming-for his safety, his movements, his communications, even his food. Nothing could be left to chance or, indeed, to well-meaning amateurs. From the White House view, it takes an imperial retinue to insure the president's safety, his contact with the rest of the world, his access to staff and to the press. The first step was to install sufficient links to the president's global communications network so that from the Baker's rustic homestead, Mr. Reagan and his aides could hook up instantaneously with anyone in Tennessee or in Washington or, for that matter, anyplace on earth. And Senator Baker's ordinary telephone service was deemed grossly inadequate. "They sent a technical crew in there, days ahead of time, and asked for fifty-six telephone circuits into my guesthouse," Senator Baker recalled with a mixture of amusement and irritation. "And the poor little old telephone company out there, which is an independent telephone company, I don't imagine had fifty-six telephone circuits or trunk lines for the whole community. But they dutifully put them in, and they drilled holes in my floor where they ran telephone cables up and which, to this day, are a matter of aggravation to my wife. they brought in a voice encoding machine, you know, one of these secure-line jobs, and put it in the room adjacent to the president's. They set up a tie line, not one, but several direct tie lines to the White House switchboard. They had a direct tie-in to the airport, direct tie-in to the hospital, direct tie-in to the highway patrol." "The phone people really had nightmares," echoed Larry Crowley, chief of the Huntsville Volunteer Fire Department. "For a little town like us, a small company like us, this was out of the ordinary," said Charlie Welch, who put in the lines for the Highland Telephone Cooperative. "There were phones in places you'd never dream of putting phones, like outside the church."3 Then there was a debate over where to put the portable switchboard. The Army Signal Corps, which operates the president's military communications network, arrived with a whole switchboard packed into a communications van, which they wanted to park beside the guesthouse. But Senator Baker, sensing his hospitality desecrated, was adamant against scarring the pastoral setting. "I don't want it here," he declared. So the trailer was duly dispatched to a less prominent site near the senator's dog pens, setting up howls from Mr. Baker's beagle and his Saint Bernard. "The dogs were terribly perplexed by all this," the senator recalled. Although the Baker home seemed a particularly secluded spot in sparsely settled Huntsville, the Secret Service began throwing its security cloak over a large region about ten days ahead of time. Its agents lined up the Scott County sheriff and his deputies, plus the thirty volunteer firemen, to reinforce sizable detachments brought in from outside. Police dogs were sent to sniff for explosives in the Huntsville Presbyterian Church, where the Reagan's were to attend Sunday services. Metal detectors were set up for the congregation. The president's bulletproof limousine was flown to Knoxville and driven up to Huntsville for the short Sunday morning ride from the Baker home to the church. Secure space was set aside for a figure out of Dr. Strangelove: the military aide who carries what White House aides call the "football," a briefcase full of secret codes available for ordering a launch of nuclear weapons, kept near the president twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.4 On the bluff outside the guesthouse, the Secret Service mounted high-intensity floodlights to shine down onto the woods and river below. As May 1, the day of the Reagan's visit, approached, the woods on both sides of the river and all around the Baker property were seeded with heavily armed federal and military security teams. "They had SWAT teams on the mountain, which is more than a mile from my guesthouse," Senator Baker reported. "They had SWAT teams in the road. They had SWAT teams down below the bluff. I never saw so many people." By the time Saturday May 1 dawned, security barriers had been erected on all approaching roads. The fire department's "attack pumper" truck took position on the far edge of the Baker's lawn, the local volunteers flanked by a clutch of Secret Service agents. Some, according to the daily paper in Oneida, were clad in camouflage fatigues "not unlike a SWAT police unit you might see on television."5 The real show was about to begin. About forty longtime friends and supporters joined Mrs. Baker and her daughter, Cissy, around the Bakers' circular driveway. They were about to be initiated into a scaled-down, informal version of a modern American ritual: the Arrival of the President. It is an event staged in waves. First, a huge helicopter landed five hundred yards to the east of the Baker home to drop off forty-five White House reporters and photographers, who were trucked to the president's landing site. Next, a small helicopter touched down near a big red "pillow" landing marker on the Bakers' front lawn to deposit White House aides. Finally, Marine One, the president's huge white-capped helicopter, came into view, roaring in from the east at treetop level, making a sharp ninety degree turn and then hovering for a moment before settling on the high ground near the house. Its throbbing rotors kicked up such a strong prop stream that not only did it flatten the grass and whip up dust, but the people around the driveway had to lean into its backwind to keep from falling down. Neil Sexton, the Bakers' longtime handyman, had been fearful all along that the presidential visit would wreak havoc. To his dismay, the helicopter whirlwind blew the lawn furniture down the hill and unceremoniously unwrapped Cissy Baker's wraparound skirt. "I knew it," Sexton muttered. Whatever the inconvenience, Senator Baker recalled that moment with the satisfaction of a country squire extolling his favorite Tennessee walking horses. "I had a yard full of presidential helicopters," Senator Baker later recalled. "I had three or four of them. Big old things. And people were more intrigued with that than they were with the president, to tell you the truth. They'd stop and stare at the helicopters longer than they'd stop and stare at the president." As soon as the president landed, the senator could not wait to show off to the Reagans his real pride and joy: the picture-postcard view from the guesthouse. "I was just chafing at the bit to show the president that magnificent view off the back porch of the guesthouse, looking over the river gorge to its unspoiled mountain beauty," he said. At the guesthouse, he said, "I started to raise the blinds, and they wouldn't come up. I found out the damned Secret Service had nailed them shut." In rising frustration, the senator whirled on the ranking Secret Service agent. "What have you done?" he demanded. "You've nailed the blinds to the floor." "There might be a sniper out there," the agent replied. The senator dismissed that as ridiculous. "But it's two miles to the nearest hill!" he protested. The agent was unmoved. "Yeah," he said, "but we can't afford to take the chance." Trapped by security demands even in this tranquil setting, Baker, who had made a run for the presidency in 1980 and harbored ambitions for 1988, found doubts suddenly flitting through his mind about whether he really wanted to be president. "I was beginning to think, you know, I don't think it's worth being president if you have to live like a prisoner." But as those second thoughts preoccupied him, President Reagan bent over and started pulling the blinds up, ripping the nails right out of the floor. It was an impulsive act like those of other presidents-Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or John F. Kennedy plunging into crowds against the warnings of the Secret Service, determined to assert their authority and independence. Moreover, it turned out that the blinds had only been lightly tacked down, giving Senator Baker a moment of liberation. "The Secret service was huffing and puffing and carrying on, but we went outside," he recalled with a broad grin, "and at that point, I knew this man is sure enough president." After the Reagan's had duly admired the view, Senator Baker played tennis doubles with some White House aides while the first lady massaged the president's neck and shoulder muscles and the president, in shirt-sleeves, nibbled on grapes. Just before dinner, the security forces suffered another setback. Not only had they closed off all approaching highways and roadways, but they had theoretically erected a security barrier overhead by ordering all air controllers to close the airspace over the Baker homestead. Even so, Dinah Shore, the singer, who is a Tennessean and a friend of the Bakers, slipped through the net. She arrived for dinner by air, unannounced. "She came flying over in the tiniest helicopter I ever saw, directly over the guesthouse, and landed not fifteen feet from the president's bedroom," the senator explained. "The Secret Service was just apoplectic, but they couldn't do much about it." With shades of Oriental food tasters, the security precautions for the Reagan's even affected the Baker's barbecue dinner. Several days beforehand, the White House had obtained two place settings of Mrs. Baker's china and her silverware which were flown off to Washington. "They fixed his dinner at the White House on her china and brought it down, which created a real problem in our kitchen," the senator said. "They brought their own White House stewards, and they were dressed just like the caterer that we had. I don't know whether they brought the food down hot or not, but they cooked it in Washington."6 By the time dinner was over, things were quite relaxed. Dinah Shore suggested that if the president and Mrs. Reagan didn't "mind some pickup musicians, we'll just play a while." Governor Lamar Alexander took over the piano, country-western singer Chet Atkins pitched in with a guitar, and the Reagans joined the Tennesseans in a sing-along with Dinah Shore. Outside in the darkness among the chirping crickets, the Secret Service had assembled an army of about 250 agents, highway patrolmen, military SWAT teams, and local officers. "The irony of the whole goddamned thing," Senator Baker recalled, "is the entire, tiny, town constabulary, which is two or three people, the county sheriff, who had about twenty, and the highway patrol were all gathered up in the intensive security operation for the president, and while the dinner party was going on, somebody robbed one of my neighbor's houses-Ross Faires's-because they knew full well there wasn't a policeman left anywhere around." Quickly he added, "We had a marvelous time that night." The Image of Power: The President as John Wayne The presidential circus that enveloped the Bakers and Huntsville may be a more intimate and amusing glimpse of the chief executive than most people experience. But the Huntsville story fits the public's general image of a Gulliver-sized president. At close range, any president and his entourage are overwhelming-filling every available room, setting up their global command post, tunneling telephone lines, swarming the woods with SWAT teams, commandeering every local deputy within miles, flying in hordes of reporters. Action. Power. Even at a distance, the massive apparatus of the White House radiates the impression of almost limitless presidential power. But that awesome image of near invincibility is misleading. It exaggerates the actual power of the presidency, which is considerably less than suggested by the public attention which gets focused on the single figure at the apex of our political system. Indeed, the absence of hierarchical power in politics baffles and aggravates corporate executives when they come to take political jobs in Washington. Political power does not work the way they expect. As a nation, we focus obsessively on the president, out of proportion with the other power centers. This happens largely because the president is one person whom it is easy for television to portray and whom the public feels it can come to know. Other power centers are harder to depict: The Supreme Court is an aloof and anonymous body; Congress is a confusing gaggle of 535 people; the bureaucracy is vast and faceless. It is almost as if the president, most politicians, and the press, especially television, have fallen into an unconscious conspiracy to create a cartoon caricature of the real system of power. There is a strong urge for simplicity in the American psyche, a compulsion to focus on the single dramatic figure at the summit, to reduce the intricacy of a hundred power-plays to the simple equation of whether the president is up or down, winning or losing on any given day of the week. Television and the viewing millions seek to make a simple narrative of complex events. Television news feeds the public appetite to treat events as binary-good or bad, up or down, progress or setback, winners or losers-and to push aside more complex layers of reality. The temptation is particularly strong to treat the president (especially Ronald Reagan, who invented it) as if he were a political John Wayne, strapping on his trusty six-shooters in the morning and heading out for a duel in the OK Corral with his latest rival. Typically, the outcome of the encounter is painted in black and white. If the president strides back down the dusty street alive, the implicit presumption is that he and the nation were victorious and the audience can sit back to await the next episode. While President Reagan has been far more adept at video politics than his immediate predecessors, the image of president as knight in shining armor was hardly Reagan's invention. I can remember coming to Washington as a green reporter in the early 1960s and being captivated by the first press conferences of President John F. Kennedy. Scotty Reston, bureau chief of The New York Times, would call a dozen reporters into his office several hours ahead of Kennedy's press conference for a "prayer meeting"-an exercise devoted to debating the most pressing issues and formulating questions with the precise wording deemed most likely to lance President Kennedy's verbal armor. Then, Reston would ship a group of us to the State Department in a rented limousine and sprinkle us around the auditorium for a jousting match with the president. Time and again, we learned that Kennedy was the master of the press conference, the easy victor, the gallant young champion of those encounters. The image that presidents project when they go abroad to summit meetings or on foreign missions reinforces this public image of the president as the nation's political John Wayne. Rare is the time when a president more totally dominates our political landscape than when he is our leader abroad. These voyages become political sagas that capture the public imagination and arm the presidency with the excitement of new adventure, with the glamour of pomp and ceremony. Normally, the presidential apparatus is invisible, tucked away in the White House and nearby office buildings. But on a major presidential trip, the entourage-the vast trappings of office-becomes visible, for when a president moves, legions move with him. In a very real sense, the president never really leaves the White House, he brings most of it with him. Many times, as I clambered off planes on presidential trips to Paris or Jerusalem or Moscow or Shanghai and glanced over the tarmac at a sea of people struggling with briefcases and shoulder luggage while the president took a welcoming military salute, I thought to myself, this is our modern imperial retinue. In earlier eras, such a bureaucratic army would have been described by historians as Napoleon's camp followers or Caesar's Roman impedimenta, the human train and baggage of the emperor. For if President Carter heads off for meetings with Western leaders in London or Bonn, or President Reagan treks twenty thousand miles across the Pacific to China, their human convoys can number one thousand more. At the core are three hundred to four hundred government officials: the president's senior staff plus echelons of policy advisers, negotiators, communiquŽ drafters, military aides, doctors, stewards, personal valets, even the first lady's hairdresser; plus several cabinet members with their lieutenants, specialists, secretaries, spokesmen, and miscellaneous handlers, and a phalanx of as many as one hundred Secret Service agents ready to form a human wall, if need be, to insure the president's physical safety. Another battalion is the Greek chorus of the press: from two hundred and fifty to one thousand reporters, photographers, television crews, and technicians lugging cameras and sound systems, enough to fill one chartered Boeing 747 and sometimes overflow into another. With us, always, was a vital escort of ten to twenty White House press officials equipped with photocopying machines and one hundred thousand sheets of paper for a torrent of texts and press releases, many of them issued in flight against deadlines for instant filing at the inevitable temporary press center at the next stop.7 The logistics of transporting this unwieldy caravan are a nightmare and make the Huntsville trip seem child's play. The president and his most elite advisers and assistants travel on Air Force One, while second-ranking officials travel on an identical backup plane and still other stragglers fly on commercial aircraft . From the basic aerial convoy something like one thousand pieces of luggage must be carted off and on at each overnight stop. In advance, two or three huge Air Force C-130 cargo planes carry the heaviest gear: communications equipment, voice scramblers, coding machines, special cars for the Secret Service, and two bulletproof limousines for the president. In China, for example, there were two limousines, so that one could ferry President Reagan around Peking while a second was jumped ahead to his second stop in Xi'an, whereupon the first one could be leapfrogged ahead to his third stop in Shanghai. "When we went to China, Reagan was like a modern-day Marco Polo with all the technology and everything," commented Michael K. Deaver, who as White House deputy chief of staff was the impresario of presidential travel from 1981 to 1985.8 Thanks primarily to television, this modern-day-Marco-Polo image gets fixed in the public mind: the American president, on the move, buttressed by a huge retinue whose primary function is to amplify his authority as America's leader. More than at almost any other time, a president traveling abroad personifies the nation; he engages our national pride. Near the climax of the Watergate scandal in mid-1974, Richard Nixon seemed to hope for some rescue in a final summit meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Crimea. Jimmy Carter's presidency reached a pinnacle with his Camp David mediation effort in 1978 and his pilgrimage a year later to Egypt and Israel to consummate their peace treaty. For President Reagan, ventures to the Great Wall of China and the commemoration of the D-day landing at Normandy, both in his reelection year, were vaulting political triumphs. The most talented stage managers of presidential travel, such as Mike Deaver, carefully craft itineraries to lift the drama and appeal of presidential diplomacy-to heighten the impression of presidential power. The power of the presidency as an office is indisputable. No other single governmental office approaches it, either in terms of legal authority or the platform it offers its occupant for persuading Congress and the public. Even so, the presidential hoopla-most of it as contrived as mass advertising-obscures a true understanding of the workings of power in Washington. It magnifies and distorts the president's actual political leverage most of the time. For example, only a few weeks after his Crimean summit with Brezhnev, Nixon had to resign from office; in spite of Carter's unprecedented negotiating breakthrough at Camp David and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, public confidence in Carter plummeted; Reagan, though a strong president, repeatedly found his will checked, and the political initiative wrested from him by other, not to mention his being humbled by the Iran-contra affair. In short, politics reduced to the level of John Wayne's Dodge City can be a captivating illusion. It makes for great TV, but it focuses too much attention on the fellow at center stage, while most of the real action in the Washington power game often goes on elsewhere. I myself had to learn that whether the president was Kennedy or Reagan, the glamorous image of medieval jousting or western gun toting simply misses far too much about the fluid, fragmented, and floating nature of political power in Washington. In April 1986, when President Reagan was riding a crest in the public opinion polls, after the American air attack on Libya and well before the nation knew anything of the Iranian scandal, Al Kingon, Reagan's cabinet secretary, his main staff link to the executive branch, lamented to me that the White House, "is the most defensive operation anywhere in government-you're constantly under barrage. "You'd think on the outside what a fabulous place to work," he went on, curling his stocking feet around the edge of his office coffee table. Then, in Brooklyn accent and with some exaggeration, Kingon declaimed: "Power? There ain't none. What power? I'm being bashed around as I've never been bashed around in my life. Every morning when I come in here, the phone rings. Something happened somewhere, and your reaction is, 'Oh, my God, how do I get out of this one?' I believe it was Henry Kissinger who said, 'You don't have time to think. All you do is expend the intellectual capital you've accumulated before.'"9 Power Reality: Our Rotating Premiers The sense of importance at the very heart of our government has echoes in the past. Henry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, all gave voice to that complaint. Truman, in his final days, made a famous quip after meeting his successor, General Eisenhower: "He'll sit right here and he'll say, 'Do this. Do that!' And nothing will happen. Poor Ike-it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating."10 Truman was talking about the problems any president has in getting his orders carried out by the bureaucracy. And since the days of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, organic changes have taken place in the way our nation is governed. Paramount power is now harder to grasp and exercise than it ever has been in our history. Not only has Congress grown much more assertive since the mid-1970s but within Congress itself the old power oligarchy has been broken up by internal reform. Television has given relatively junior members of Congress a platform to become policy entrepreneurs, and the highest ranking leaders on Capitol Hill are sometimes forced to chase after junior back benchers, to find the head of the political parade. Government has become so complex and the top leaders so daunted by its complexity that they have granted enormous powers to staff aides who labor in the shadows. At times, this shadow government makes policy-most stunningly in the Iran-contra affair, when National Security Advisor John Poindexter not only bypassed cabinet secretaries and usurped the authority of the president, but kept them all in the dark. Presidents such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are blocked or overturned by special interest lobbies, which build mass support on pet issues. The power of political parties has been eroded by the rise of independent, ticket-splitting voters, who frequently keep presidents from gaining majorities in Congress to pass their programs. In this final period of the twentieth century, we Americans have a more fluid system of power than ever before in our history. Quite literally, power floats. It does not reside in the White House, nor does it merely alternate from pole to pole, from president to opposition, from Republicans to Democrats. It floats. It shifts. It wriggles elusively, like mercury in the palm of one's hand, passing from one competing power center to another, with the driving leadership on major policies-from the budget to tax reform to military spending and the MX missile-gravitating to whoever is daring enough to grab it and smart enough to figure out the quickest way to make a political score. Even our high school catechisms about the division of powers in government, among the executive branch, the legislature, and the courts, miss the elusive fluidity of power these days. The old notion of separation of powers implies, for many people, a seesaw power struggle for primacy, principally between the president and Congress-essentially a variation of the John Wayne metaphor: president wins, Congress loses, or vice-versa. Actually, the power float is more like water polo, where the ball is tossed among players trying to keep their heads above water, or fast-action basketball, where anyone can steal the ball, change the flow of the game, and then score from practically anywhere around the basket. The old-fashioned seesaw image omits powerful institutions such as the Federal Reserve Board, the primary influence on interest rates, monetary policy, and inflation. The simple notion of Congress versus president overlooks the fact that often, presidents are not challenged frontally by Congress but rather by powerful political alliances that bridge across the executive and legislative branches to alter, outflank, or subvert presidential policy. Jimmy Carter was forced to build an aircraft carrier he did not want-not by Congress alone, but by an alliance between his own admirals and pro-Navy members of Congress. Ronald Reagan had to bow to combined pressures from some officials within his administration and from most of Congress for some sanctions against South Africa. The simple seesaw idea also ignores the fact that the powers of Congress and president often mesh and can only be wielded jointly. As the Harvard University presidential scholar Richard Nuestadt observed, we have not so much a government of separated powers as "a government of separated institutions sharing powers."11 Case in point: Ronald Reagan built a reputation as a strong president, and at times he clearly took charge: ordering the invasion of Grenada and air strikes against Libya, pressing budget and tax cuts through Congress in 1981, naming justices to the Supreme Court, or suddenly announcing plans for a space-based defense that few others thought wise or realistic. At these times, especially when dealing with foreign policy, Reagan clearly combined the functions of chief of state and prime minister, both of which are inherent in our presidency. His early legislative victories restored the vigor of the presidency and revived public confidence in the nation's highest office. Unquestionably, he rekindled the ceremonial majesty of the presidency. But for other long stretches of time-not just as a late-second-term, lame-duck president, but even in his first term-the power of political initiative floated away from Reagan, despite popularity ratings on a par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. During Reagan's passive periods, policy has been driven not by the president but by others. This is not unique to Reagan. Eisenhower had to bargain with Democrats Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Nixon, Ford, and Carter all found it impossible to grasp and exercise continuous control and deliver on their pet programs. Each wound up on the defensive, with declining popularity. What is so striking and instructive about the Reagan presidency is the peculiar combination of his overwhelming personal popularity and his frequent lack of matching political leverage. It is as if we had unknowingly slipped into operating like a European parliamentary system, with its revolving coalition governments, while our president reigned above it all, a regal symbol of nationhood. "What you have right now is a constitutional monarchy," asserted Representative Newt Gingrich, a bright Reaganite Republican from Georgia. "What we've done is we've reinvented Hanoverian kingship without reinventing the parliamentary prime ministership. We have this tremendously nice, likable King Victoria. Everybody likes him but where the hell's Disraeli? Or Gladstone? What I'm saying is that in the age of television, we now have the television-series equivalent of [rotating] prime ministerships."12 Michael Barone, writing in The Washington Post , once compared the kaleidoscopic shuffle of political coalitions in the Reagan period to the Italian government, where a relatively small group of politicians shuffle and reshuffle the top government ministries. "Italian politics is often held up to ridicule as comically unstable, with constantly changing ministries, divided responsibility, and splinter parties," he observed. "But how much different, in practice, is ours?...Functional responsibility-not necessarily the title, but the real decision-making power-gets passed around here as well, to those strong enough to grab it."13 Barone's analogy fits, not only the Reagan years but the modern presidency in general. The president is always part of the power mix but not necessarily the central part. In 1981, when Reagan pressed his budget and tax cuts through Congress, he was at the peak of his power-the prime minister of his own coalition; his leading ministers were his budget director, David Stockman, and his White House chief of staff, James A. Baker III. But by that same fall and into the following year, 1982, the critical role of driving economic policy had passed to Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volker's tight money policies were wringing inflation out of the economy and bringing on a painful recession that the president could not prevent; Reagan deficits compounded the problem. In the spring of 1982, a new political coalition emerged to take over policy leadership, a surprising partnership between Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and House Speaker Tip O'Neill. They forced the president to backtrack and accept a $98 billion, three-year tax increase in August 1982. They eventually pushed through two jobs bills, and they worked out a Social Security compromise with the president. In the spring of 1983, the MX issue was resolved by a new coalition spearheaded by two congressmen, Les Aspin of Wisconsin and Albert Gore of Tennessee, and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. These three Democrats stepped into a foreign-policy vacuum left by Reagan's inability to move Congress. In the election year of 1984, little happened and the nation was left with a caretaker government. Surprisingly, after his landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan did not reclaim the prime ministership in 1985. His one big policy push was tax reform, but that was slow in coming. The start of Reagan's second term marked rapid turnover in national political leadership. First came Robert Dole, the new Senate majority leader, who drove the budget process for six months, insisting on austerity for both the Pentagon and Social Security. When the White House pulled the rug out from Dole and toppled his coalition, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, took the limelight by rewriting the president's tax-reform bill. Reagan's role was rescuing it from defeat by angered House Republicans. The public was still giving Reagan high marks for strong leadership, but in fact, leadership was largely coming from below. By fall 1985, two freshman Republican Senators, Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, became the driving forces, the new prime ministers, for a five-year plan to balance the budget. In early 1986, the stunning turnaround of Bob Packwood, Senate Finance Committee chairman-and not anything done by President Reagan-revived the dying tax reform bill. On the Philippines, Reagan was pushed into a new policy primarily by Richard Lugar of Indiana, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With public accusations of vote fraud, Lugar forced Reagan to break with the Philippine government of Ferdinand Marcos and recognize the election victory of Corazon Aquino. Reagan simply got dragged along, as he did on South African sanctions and trade policy. When the Iran crisis broke in November 1986, Reagan behaved like a monarch, acting as if he were above the controversy that consumed his aides, ousting chief of staff Donald Regan and others-as if he were a king dismissing a discredited prime minister to spare the crown. By his direction, the national security staff had secretly continued aid to the Nicaraguan contras-but at times the staff ran him, not vice versa. In late 1987, yet another prime minister emerged, House Speaker Jim Wright, taking the policy lead and forcing Reagan to go along with a Central American peace plan. To be sure, through it all, Reagan clung to his Star Wars defense, held summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and signed the medium-range missile agreement. But what is striking in many other cases is how often the policy initiative came not from the president, but from someone else. "Part of it is that Reagan's programmatic agenda is simply not the majority agenda," Richard Darman, a senior first-term Reagan White House aide and later deputy Treasury secretary candidly conceded in 1986. "And the American political system is telling him, 'Look, we like you. You're an icon. You represent almost everything we've ever loved about America. You're from the Midwest. You went West. You made money but you're still a small town boy. You love the girl; the girl loves you. You've been a hero of all these different kinds. You survived an assassination. You sure seem to love our country. You make everybody feel good.' That's Walter Bagehot's nineteenth-century English notion of the monarchy, consistent with the living symbol of the nation's whole history and values and all of that. That's a plus. "But the curious thing about Reagan," Darman went on, "is that even though all of this is much loved, his constitutional amendment to ban abortion is opposed seventy to thirty. His constitutional amendment to balance the budget can't get through Congress. His constitutional amendment for prayer in schools runs against the majority feeling. His desire to privatize big hunks of government is not the majority view. All Reagan budgets have been dead on arrival with the exception of the '81 budget. The House of Representatives is particularly in touch with the people. And with power fragmented and information floating widely in the system, anybody anywhere who tries for too long to run against the majority simply will not hold power. To govern, a president has to move toward the middle."14 Those observations were true enough, although they pin too much on Ronald Reagan's shortcomings. He has been a president given to delegating great authority to others, undisturbed at allowing chunks of power to slip away, as demonstrated by the bold adventures of Rear Admiral John Poindexter and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on the covert Iranian arms deals. But the root causes of the modern power float lie well beyond Ronald Reagan-in the political transformations of the past fifteen years that have altered the power game and the way our nation is governed. They await the presidents who take their oaths of office through the rest of this century.
1John F. Kennedy, in Theodore C. Sorensen, Decision Making in The white House: the Olive Branch or the Arrows (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), foreword.
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