Reagan: The Life (41 page)

W
HEN
D
AVID
S
TOCKMAN
arrived in his office in the Executive Office Building, just west of the White House, he noticed two things. The office was huge—“
about the size of my junior high school gymnasium,” he said. And it was filthy. “When I picked up my phone, it almost slipped out of my hand it was so greasy.” Stockman was willing to ascribe the condition to laudable thrift in housekeeping on the part of his Carter administration predecessors at OMB, but one of his deputies declared, “The reason it’s greasy is they spent the last four months of the campaign handing out pork.”

Stockman cleaned up the office and set to work on eliminating the pork. Reagan’s promise to Congress of an economic blueprint compelled long days and sleepless nights by the president’s economic team. Stockman tried to assert control of the process by proposing deep cuts for most cabinet departments. He assumed that because the cabinet secretaries had been chosen by Reagan, they shared the president’s passion for reducing the size of government. In theory they did—theory being when the cuts targeted other departments. In practice—when Stockman’s scalpel came their own departments’ way—they objected.
James Edwards, whose Department of Energy Reagan had promised to eliminate entirely, resisted Stockman’s proposal to unfund the office that allocated oil supplies and end the allocation program. Stockman was astonished. “It was so central to our free market approach,” he said of
deregulation, “that I hadn’t imagined anyone would object.” Edwards wasn’t alone. Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis accused Stockman of seeking power for himself by means of deregulation. “What kind of bureaucracy are you building up over at OMB?” Lewis demanded. Again Stockman couldn’t
believe what he was hearing. “I was flabbergasted,” he said. He wasn’t building a bureaucracy but dismantling it. “He had the equation upside down,” Stockman said of Lewis.

Donald Regan thought Stockman was the one who misunderstood matters. Regan didn’t buy the boy-wonder reputation of Stockman, and he wasn’t going to accept Stockman’s seizure of economic policy. “
Stockman was possessed of one simple idea,” Regan wrote. “He believed that the federal budget should run the economy and thereby shape social policy. This was a philosophical position designed to be executed by bureaucratic means. His plan of action was correspondingly simple: by controlling the flow of money into the cabinet departments, the director of the Office of Management and Budget would starve certain programs (for instance, welfare) and feed others that were more productive in economic terms.”

Regan was no politician, but he thought Stockman’s approach profoundly arrogant and dismissive of the democratic process. “Stockman had things backward,” he said. “What the country needed—and what Reagan had promised it—was not more centralization, but less. Surely, I said to the group”—the interagency group arguing over the budget—“we wanted to discuss the economy first, adopt a policy to avert recession and institute growth, and
then
decide what the budget would be.”

Regan’s problem, and Stockman’s, was that the budgeters were receiving little guidance from Reagan. Regan still couldn’t get a meeting with the president outside the crowded cabinet sessions, and neither could Stockman. Stockman blamed the blockade on the White House troika, especially Ed Meese. “
By now it was clear that Ed Meese was protecting the president from having to choose sides among his cabinet members,” Stockman recalled. “He was seeing to it that Reagan never had to make a disagreeable choice among contending factions. That certainly kept Reagan above the fray, but presidents have to make unpleasant decisions. Whenever there was an argument, Meese would step in and tell us to take our arguments to some other ad hoc forum. The president would smile and say, ‘Okay, you fellas work it out.’ ”

C
ASPAR
W
EINBERGER SMILED
too. His Defense Department, almost alone among the executive agencies, counted not merely on avoiding budget cuts but on receiving major increases in funding. During the decade of
détente conservatives and especially
neoconservatives had made an article of faith of the assertion that the American military was being starved
of funding. They wrote articles and printed graphics claiming that the Soviets had built a dangerous lead over the United States in nuclear and conventional weaponry, and though they never found an active or retired general or admiral willing to swap America’s arsenal for Russia’s, they painted Armageddon as alarmingly nigh. Reagan adopted this view and, as a candidate, promised to restore American arms to their previous condition of unquestioned primacy.

Weinberger became Reagan’s point man for the Pentagon buildup. Weinberger’s hero was
Winston Churchill; he remembered reading Churchill as a boy in the 1920s and then following Churchill’s political fortunes during the 1930s, when in opposition in Parliament he warned his compatriots about Hitler and the need to gird for war. Weinberger tried to enlist in the British
Royal Air Force in 1940, as Churchill was rallying the British against the Nazi onslaught, but was rejected on account of poor vision. Pearl Harbor pleased him for putting the United States into the war beside Britain; as an American infantryman he listened on the radio when Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress and called for Anglo-American solidarity against fascism. Meanwhile, he grumbled and fretted at the old equipment he was forced to train with and even carry into battle in the Pacific, on account of years of stinginess in Congress regarding defense appropriations. “
I would not forget how long it took us to get proper equipment, and how inexperienced we were, and how completely unready to fight in jungles against opponents who knew all about jungles and were remarkably well equipped and trained,” Weinberger recalled. “Thus, when forty years later I was placed in a position to have some ability to help influence events, and I saw what I believed then to be the dangerous downward spiral of our military strength and our national will in the 1970s, I determined to do all I could to prevent America from continuing down that path of drift and self-disparagement and weakness that I was sure could lead to another war.”

W
EINBERGER
’
S INSISTENCE ON
rebuilding the American military, when enthusiastically endorsed by Reagan, made David Stockman’s job immensely more difficult. Stockman didn’t object, exactly. “
I had become a big-budget proponent on defense,” he later said. “Some of my hawkishness had to do with the zeal of the convert. More of it came from watching the grim footage of the charred remains of the U.S. servicemen being desecrated by the Iranian mullahs at the site known as
Desert One”—where
the hostage-rescue attempt had failed. But at a time when Stockman and the other budgeters were projecting 30 percent reductions in tax rates, giving the Pentagon what Weinberger wanted made it impossible to forecast a
balanced budget in the conceivable future with anything like a straight face. Stockman programmed his calculator to tally the bill for what Weinberger was demanding. “I nearly had a heart attack,” he said. “We’d laid out a plan for a five-year defense budget of
1.46 trillion dollars!
”

Weinberger didn’t like or trust Stockman. “
I became a little troubled by the quickness and positiveness with which he would take positions and make his points,” Weinberger said. “Particularly troubling was that he was most positive when he did not yet quite have his facts straight.” Weinberger later accused Stockman of lying; referring to a Pentagon meeting at which defense spending was the focus, Weinberger said that Stockman’s account of the session was “most politely described as fanciful.”

Weinberger could simply have stared Stockman down. He knew that building up defense meant more to Reagan than balancing the budget. Yet Weinberger was canny as well as forceful. He knew that the administration would take heat for expanding defense while slashing social programs. So he arranged for the Pentagon to accept cuts, too. The cuts were notional. Weinberger wrote even bigger increases into the defense budget, then gave them back and called the givebacks cuts. Reagan recognized the ruse but appreciated the political cover it provided the administration.

T
HERE COMES A
moment near the beginning of every presidency when the president feels in a personal way that this new job is unlike any he has held before. The president of the United States has
power
—power greater than that of any other person on earth. The power of a governor, a senator, a corporate CEO, is puny compared with what a president can unleash. By a word he can send armies into combat, launch air strikes, conceivably commence a nuclear war. Candidates for president envision that power, imagine the moment when it will become theirs. Those who have lusted for power look forward to grasping it; the ordinarily ambitious accept it as part of the president’s job.

But they typically misapprehend it. The great majority of presidents have sought the position for reasons of domestic politics. Only a few, as seekers of the office, have put foreign affairs first. Yet it is almost solely in foreign affairs that the president exercises his singular power. In domestic politics presidents are constrained by the Constitution, with its separation of powers; by the habits of Congress, which dictate procedures for the passage of legislation; by the political parties, which inject their own interests into policy considerations; by innumerable interest groups, each with its own agenda; and by the American people, who hold opinions on domestic affairs far stronger than those they have on foreign affairs.

Presidents have
influence
in domestic matters rather than power. Patronage provides one form of influence; favors for friends and allies help grease the gears of government. But the most important form of influence, for those able to exercise it, comes from a president’s monopoly of what
Theodore Roosevelt called the bully pulpit. Presidents command the attention of the country merely by being president; those who can
communicate their views in compelling fashion have an advantage over everyone else in the legislative loop.

Reagan was the most compelling communicator in American politics since Franklin Roosevelt, and he knew it. His mastery of the rhetorical art reflected his long experience as an actor and public speaker. His years with
General Electric taught him to read a room; his time before the camera trained him to see an audience beyond the camera. He mixed humor and pathos, philosophy and anecdote.

But his greatest strength was the focus he brought to his task. His message never changed. Details varied according to context, but the basic pitch was always the same: smaller government and lower taxes.

O
N
F
EBRUARY
18, Reagan mounted the pulpit to pitch his budget proposal. He spoke in the House of Representatives to a joint session with the Senate, but he aimed equally at the millions watching on television. He summarized the grim state of the economy by citing a midwestern worker who had told him, “
I’m bringing home more dollars than I ever believed I could possibly earn, but I seem to be getting worse off.” He reiterated that the country had reached its moment of truth. “We can no longer procrastinate and hope that things will get better. They will not. Unless we act forcefully—and now—the economy will get worse.”

He challenged Congress to enact a four-part plan. Part one targeted government spending. He called for $49 billion in cuts, although he immediately qualified this. The Democrats had preemptively criticized Reagan for eviscerating programs on which millions of Americans depended; he rebutted the criticism by pointing out that the spending reductions were reductions in projected
increases
. “We’re only reducing the rate of increase,” he said. The $49 billion decrease for 1982 would still allow an absolute increase of $41 billion over 1981.

If this weakened the thrust of his argument, he weakened it further when he explained what he was exempting from cuts. “We will continue to fulfill the obligations that spring from our national conscience,” he said. “Those who, through no fault of their own, must depend on the rest of us—the poverty stricken, the disabled, the elderly, all those with true need—can rest assured that the social safety net of programs they depend on are exempt from any cuts.”
Social Security and
Medicare, along with veterans’ pensions and programs for the disabled, would be spared.

Then there was the Defense Department. “It’s the only department
in our entire program that will actually be increased over the present budgeted figure,” Reagan announced. The increase was necessary because America faced unprecedented challenges to its security. “Since 1970 the Soviet Union has invested $300 billion more in its military forces than we have.” Reagan didn’t mention that this figure was disputed, reflecting problematic estimates of wages and prices in the Soviet Union and conversions of rubles to dollars. Instead, he stressed what he took to be the figure’s significance for American security and consequently for the American defense budget. “To allow this imbalance to continue is a threat to our national security.”

Having exempted such big-ticket programs as
Social Security,
Medicare, and defense from cuts, Reagan explained where his ax would fall. Federal aid to education would be reduced, as would federal support for the arts. But there was a silver lining here, Reagan said, for reduced aid to schools would reduce federal control over schools and restore it to the states and local school boards, where it belonged. Cuts in aid to the arts would encourage the charitable giving that had historically supported the arts in America.

Reagan ticked off other cuts. The Department of Energy’s synthetic fuels program would be terminated; private industry could do a better job developing the fuels of the future. The
Export-Import Bank would lose a third of its funding; again Reagan relied on the private sector. The
Economic Development Administration would be zeroed out, for similar reasons. The
Trade Adjustment Assistance program duplicated existing unemployment benefits; it would go. Recipients of
food stamps would be more rigorously scrutinized to eliminate those who didn’t genuinely need the nutritional help. Federal rules for welfare would be tightened and work requirements increased to ensure that the program served those who needed it and not those who didn’t.
School breakfast and lunch programs would be means-tested.
Medicaid payments to states would be capped. The Postal Service would learn to live on a smaller subsidy.
NASA and the
space program must become more cost-effective.