It was the early 1980s and Ronald Reagan was under assault.
Yet instead of buckling Reagan wound up providing a classic case
study in presidential leadership
As President Bush’s Iraq policy and his goal of victory comes
under merciless attack from the non-believers, doubters, and
skeptics in official and unofficial Establishment Washington, it is
worth a look back at how Reagan led America to the land of lower
taxes and great prosperity. It wasn’t easy.
While the subject was taxes, it could just as easily have been
something else Reagan believed in because his leadership abilities
were so frequently on display. But the tax example is particularly
relevant today because in recounting this story I have turned for a
refresher to With Reagan, the memoirs of Reagan aide and
later Attorney General Edwin Meese, currently in the news as a
member of the controversial Iraq Study Group.
Elected in a 44-state landslide over President Jimmy Carter, in
no small part because of the Democrat’s abysmal handling of the
economy that had saddled the nation with double-digit unemployment,
interest rates, and inflation, Reagan vowed change. The change was
the then “radical” doctrine of supply-side economics, a philosophy
that correctly understood that low taxes were the key to a sound
and thriving economy.
In retrospect the easiest part of implementing these changes was
getting them passed through a Democrat-controlled House.
(Republicans, on Reagan’s coattails, then ran the Senate.) The
Reagan landslide had gotten the attention of the opposition, and
there were in fact votes to be found for the President’s plan even
in the belly of liberal Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill’s House.
Working the phones relentlessly, aided by a boost in popularity
owing to his conduct in a near-fatal assassination attempt, the
President’s tax cuts passed.
Reagan proudly signed them into law in a fog-shrouded ceremony
at his ranch on August 17, 1981. Then came the hard part.
Federal spending kept going, and the difficulties in roping it
in became apparent to the Reagan team, as Ed Meese freely
acknowledges. But what was particularly notable was a new discovery
that Meese describes this way:
Related to this, on my part as well as on the
President’s, was the assumption that everyone on the Reagan team
had a similar view of the problems we faced and a similar
commitment to solve them, whatever the difficulties. My approach
was that we all knew what the President wanted and that our job was
simply to go out and do it. But as later became apparent, various
members of our team thought otherwise.
In other words, even as the President was suddenly fighting to keep
his newly-enacted tax cuts from being upended before they had even
kicked in, there were those within his own administration who tried
to sabotage his efforts. How did this manifest itself in real
terms? Reagan’s own Budget Director, David Stockman, again per
Meese, “secretly decided we should give up on the Reagan program.
His feelings were not expressed in cabinet meetings, but became
abundantly plain as events unfolded. From a fairly early point,
Stockman decided it was his mission, not to support Reagan’s tax
reduction program, but to maneuver the President into backing away
from it.”
Stockman wasn’t alone, either. He was but one member of the
so-called “Baker group.” (Yes, of course, that would be Baker as in
then White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, currently of
the Baker-Hamilton Iraq study.) Another was Baker aide Richard
Darman. Meese points to the book Gambling with History, an
account of the early Reagan years by Time magazine’s
Laurence Barrett, where confidential memoranda prepared by Stockman
and Darman show conclusively that members of the President’s own
senior staff had decided for themselves “that tax rate reductions
would be calamitous for the economy and (began) setting to work
surreptitiously to change the program.”
SO WHAT DID THE “Baker group” do? They had come to the conclusion,
Meese says, that the President needed to be “educated” on the
failure of his tax-cutting policy, a sentiment that is now rampant
in Washington with regard to Bush and Iraq. But how does a White
House staffer see to it that the President he is serving is
undercut? How does Washington actually go about cutting a President
down to size when he has the audacity to go against the (almost
always wrong) conventional wisdom?
First, you try and isolate the President. Make as certain as you
can that he — and everyone else — comes to believe he is the only
person left who believes in his own policy. In the Reagan example
this meant that Darman and Deputy White House Chief of Staff
Michael Deaver, a key member of the Baker group, went out of their
way to control the “human and documentary” traffic into the
president. In Reagan’s case this meant that supply-side believers
like Congressman Jack Kemp were denied access to Reagan. Instead,
business leaders who favored a compromise on tax cuts were ushered
into the President’s presence.
Then the media was brought into play, as this internal cabal fed
stories to favored journalists who hungered for a way to grind
their liberal axes against the Reagan Revolution. Stockman even
gave lengthy interviews to liberal journalist William Greider for a
story in the Atlantic, telling the only too-delighted
Greider that “supply-side is just trickle-down” economics, the
entire Reagan program nothing more than a “Trojan horse” to give
tax breaks to the rich.
The cry was immediate among Reaganites on the staff for the
President to fire Stockman. Graciously, he did not — but the only
member of the senior staff to urge the President not to fire
Stockman was…Jim Baker.
The fat was in the fire, however, and the idea of, again in
Meese’s words, “government by leak” really took off. Washington was
virtually inundated with stories that the President was the only
one in his administration, not to mention Washington, who just
didn’t understand reality. For example, there was a story in (where
else?) the New York Times that said there was now a
“full-scale battle” underway “for the soul of the Reagan
administration and the mind of Ronald Reagan,” a battle designed to
convince Reagan to give up on his tax cuts. Washington
Post columnist Joseph Kraft reported that various members of
the President’s own staff were trying to bring Reagan out of his
“dream world.” Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak said the
President had “to fight better than two-thirds of his economic team
to save his program.”
Writes Meese of the media blitz by the president’s own people
against their chief: “Daily stories filled the media, quoting
various ‘aides,’ ‘senior officials,’ and ‘advisors to the
President’ to the effect that he would have to change his course if
the nation was to avert disaster.”
WHAT WAS REAGAN’S REACTION to all of this? He never flinched.
Sometimes he used humor to deflect the criticism, repeatedly
telling the story of the two boys who were an optimist and a
pessimist. The pessimist, he said, was shown into a room piled high
with toys, yet within minutes was in tears, having broken them all.
The optimist is shown into a room filled with manure and joyfully
starts digging. When asked why he’s so happy, the optimistic boy
replies that with all this manure “there has to be a pony down here
somewhere.” But behind the Reagan humor was the steel of real
leadership. “No retreat,” he snapped on one occasion as he was
being pressured for the umpteenth time by a staff member. “I will
stand by my word,” he insisted on another occasion.
And he did. Believing that policy should drive process and not
the reverse, Ronald Reagan successfully resisted all the nay-sayers
in Congress, the media — and most importantly, his own
administration. The results, as they say, are now history. Reagan
was proved right. By 1983 the economy came roaring to life, as,
more or less, it has remained to this day.
While this episode involved taxes, Reagan’s leadership qualities
were repeatedly on display when dealing with issues that touched
his core principles and beliefs. Again and again, whether it was
tax cuts, the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, preserving
the Strategic Defense Initiative or walking out of the Reykjavik
Summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan simply ignored the deafening
chorus of his critics. These are moments worth remembering now as
the rubber meets the road on President Bush’s Iraq policy. As with
Reagan, the media is filled with stories that have alleged
presidential allies (and advisers to Bush 41) discussing the
President they serve or nominally support with an eye rolling
contempt. There is no small irony that many of these same people
not only advised the Gerald Ford and Bush 41 presidencies to
humiliating failure but tried — and failed — to do the same with
Reagan, the latter simply refusing to listen to them. As with
Reagan there is an attempt to have process (having the
Baker-Hamilton group reach “consensus”) drive policy, heedless of
whether the consensus is wrong, or worse, as the Iraqi president
has quickly realized, “dangerous.”
At the end of all this is the realization of just what true
presidential leadership demands: the ability to stick to core
convictions on the most important issues of the day — and not
retreat under the veritable hailstorm of criticism that follows. It
is the one decided pattern that links the presidencies of those
considered to be America’s best presidential leaders, from Lincoln
to the Roosevelts, from Truman to Reagan.
RONALD REAGAN UNDERSTOOD WHAT it meant to be a real leader. He “got
it,” and because he did his presidency, once written off by caustic
critics of the day as a failure, is now rated as one of the
greatest.
The fate of Iraq — and the future of both America and the West
— is increasingly in the hands of one man, a man increasingly
being isolated by the media and the Establishment in his belief
that only victory will do. Alone like Reagan, one hopes that with
his core convictions on the line George W. Bush will remember the
trials of Ronald Reagan and the gritty positive attitude that
epitomized Reagan’s leadership, a leadership that led to eventual
— and spectacular — triumph in so many areas.
It’s worth remembering as well Reagan’s daring view about of the
Cold War, a view that sent shudders through the Establishment of
the 1980s. It is a view the Iraq Study Group apparently — if
typically — refused to consider right from the start.
What was that view?
“We win, they lose.”
Exactly, Mr. President.
