Reagan: The Life (98 page)

Reagan began to distance himself publicly from his chief of staff. A photo session with visiting Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Shamir led to shouted questions from reporters. “
Are you going to fire Regan, or is he talking to Mrs. Reagan, or is she talking to him?” one reporter asked.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Reagan responded, laughing deliberately.

“Not true?”

“No, not true, and nobody’s getting fired.”

After questions on the Middle East, a reporter circled back. “Mr. President, you said nobody is going to get fired. Will Mr. Regan be staying on as your chief of staff?”

“Well, this is up to him,” Reagan said. “I have always said that when the people that I’ve asked to come into government feel that they have to return to private life, that’s their business and I will never try to talk them out of it.”

“Is that a yes or a no, sir?”

“That’s a no-answer. That’s not an answer.”

Y
ET
N
ANCY THOUGHT
it was a message. “
That’s a pretty broad hint,” she wrote in her diary that evening. “But I don’t think Don will take it,” she added. The report of the special commission, named for its chairman, former senator John Tower, was expected within days. The report’s approach gave Nancy further reason to wish Regan gone. “The
Tower report comes in on the 26th and Don wants Ronnie to go on television on the 27th to make a speech. Ye gods! You can’t prepare a good speech in twenty-four hours. Any fool would know that.”

The Tower report proved to be the catalyst for the long-delayed decision. Regan afterward asserted that he and the president had agreed the
previous November that he would leave after the report was published. So he was surprised to receive a visit from George Bush three days ahead of the report. “
Don, why don’t you stick your head into the Oval Office and talk to the president about your situation?” Bush said.

Regan asked Bush why he was offering this suggestion. He supposed the vice president knew about the understanding that he would leave after the report came out.

“Well, the president asked me if I knew what your plans were,” Bush said.

Regan went into the Oval Office and sat in his usual chair at the side of the president’s desk. He asked Reagan if he wanted to talk about his situation.

“I think it’s about time, Don,” Reagan said.

Regan later confessed to making no effort to ease the president’s task. “All right, Mr. President,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me? Where’s your head on this? What do
you
think I should do?”

“Well, good Lord, Don,” he said. “This last weekend the airwaves were filled with all that stuff about Nancy.” A ruckus had arisen around a newly appointed White House director of communications,
Jack Koehler, who had not told Regan or anyone else that he had been a member of a Nazi youth group during his boyhood in Germany. The newspapers reported that Nancy Reagan had pushed Koehler’s appointment and that Regan was saying that it therefore should have been her staff’s responsibility to check out his background. The president unsurprisingly took Nancy’s side. “She’s being blamed for Koehler and she’s being seen unfairly,” he told Regan. “I was the one who wanted him. She never met him.”

Regan didn’t respond. The president was clearly uncomfortable. “I think it’s time we do that thing that you said when we talked in November,” Reagan said.

“I’ll stick by that,” Regan replied. “I’ll go whenever you say.”

“Well, since the report is coming out on Thursday, I think it would be appropriate for you to bow out now.”

Regan recalled being shocked and answering angrily. “What do you mean
now
?” he said. “This is the Monday before the report. You can’t do that to me, Mr. President. If I go before that report is out, you throw me to the wolves. I deserve better treatment than that.”

Reagan searched for a way past the tense moment. “Well, what do you think would be right?” he said.

“The first part of next week,” Regan responded. “Let the report come
out. Let the world see what really happened and where the blame lies. I’m willing to take my chances on that.”

Reagan consented, relieved at resolving the issue. But Regan had more to say. He complained about Nancy’s meddling in the affairs of the administration. “I thought I was chief of staff to the president,” he said. “Not to his wife. I have to tell you, sir, that I’m very bitter about the whole experience. You’re allowing the loyal to be punished, and those who have their own agenda to be rewarded.”

Regan recalled Reagan’s reaction. “The president, who dislikes confrontations more than any man I have ever known, looked at me without anger. ‘Well, we’ll try to make that up by the way we handle this,’ Ronald Reagan said softly. ‘We’ll make sure that you go out in good fashion.’ ”

T
HINGS HAPPENED OTHERWISE
. The Tower Commission had done yeoman work; in three months it interviewed more than fifty witnesses, and though it lacked subpoena power and so could not compel testimony, it got all but two of the most important players to talk. Those two, significantly, were John Poindexter and Oliver North.

Reagan was among the willing. He spoke to the commissioners in the Oval Office in late January and again in February. Reagan told them in his first interview that he had approved the initial shipment of
TOW missiles from Israel to Iran in August 1985. This contradicted testimony by Don Regan, who said the president had not granted prior approval. As Reagan prepared for his second interview, he met with Regan, George Bush, and White House counsel
Peter Wallison to review their records and memories to determine who was right. Regan persuaded Reagan that the president’s memory was wrong. The chief of staff said that when he told Reagan about the missile shipments, the president had acted surprised and upset. Wallison pressed Reagan: “
Were you surprised?”

“Yes, I guess I was,” Reagan said.

“That’s what I remember,” Regan reiterated. “I remember you being angry and saying something like, ‘Well, what’s done is done.’ ”

“You know, I think he’s right,” Reagan said.

Wallison drafted a memo to Reagan to help organize the president’s thoughts for the second interview. “On the issue of the TOW shipment in August,” Wallison wrote, “in discussing this matter with me and
David Abshire, you said you were surprised to learn that the Israelis had shipped
the arms. If that is your recollection, and if the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

Reagan was indeed asked about the discrepancy between his testimony and Regan’s. He told the commissioners he had changed his mind. He had talked the matter over with Regan and been convinced that Regan was right. He had not authorized the shipment in advance, and he had been surprised when he learned about it. As if to confirm his statement, the president stood up and looked toward Wallison. “Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?” Spotting the memo, he grabbed it and read, “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

“I was horrified, just horrified,” Wallison said later. “I didn’t expect him to go and get the paper. The purpose of it was just to recall to his mind before he goes into the meeting that on something that he had been all over the lot on for so long, he had seemed to have come to some conclusions.” Wallison shook his head. “God, it was just terrible.”

The commissioners were astonished and confused. The commission’s chief of staff,
Rhett Dawson, remembered the reaction of the commissioners—
John Tower, former secretary of state Edmund Muskie, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft—after the meeting. “Ed and Tower and Brent slumped on the couch or in their chairs just thunderstruck,” Dawson said. The commissioners’ conclusion that Reagan’s memory, or at any rate his testimony, on the subject was worthless received corroboration when the president wrote the board a letter abdicating all reliability. “
In trying to recall events that happened eighteen months ago I’m afraid I let myself be influenced by others’ recollections, not my own,” Reagan said. “I have no personal notes or records to help my recollection on this matter.” He declined to mention the diary entries that contained repeated mention of arms and hostages. “The only honest answer is to state that try as I might, I cannot recall anything whatsoever about whether I approved replenishment of Israeli stocks around August of 1985. My answer therefore and the simple truth is, ‘I don’t remember—period.’ ”

T
HE
T
OWER REPORT
, released on Thursday, February 26, confirmed what was by then common knowledge: that the administration had traded arms for hostages and had taken proceeds from the arms sales and sent
them to the contras. The report faulted the president himself for not supervising the NSC staff sufficiently. “
The president’s management style is to put the principal responsibility for policy review and implementation on the shoulders of his advisers,” the report stated. “Nevertheless, with such a complex, high-risk operation and so much at stake, the president should have ensured that the NSC system did not fail him. He did not force his policy to undergo the most critical review of which the NSC participants and the process were capable. At no time did he insist upon accountability and performance review.”

The report laid most of the operational blame on Robert McFarlane,
John Poindexter, and Oliver North, all of whom had left the administration. Donald Regan, the ranking staffer of those who remained in the White House, was treated roughly but briefly. “
More than almost any chief of staff of recent memory, he asserted personal control over the White House staff and sought to extend this control to the national security adviser,” the report said. “He was personally active in national security affairs and attended almost all of the relevant meetings regarding the Iran initiative. He, as much as anyone, should have insisted that an orderly process be observed. In addition, he especially should have ensured that plans were made for handling any public disclosure of the initiative. He must bear primary responsibility for the chaos that descended upon the White House when such disclosure did occur.”

R
EGAN SOUGHT A
period of grace before he resigned, to let the world know that the president disagreed with the report’s findings. He didn’t expect Reagan to admit that by giving McFarlane and Poindexter a back door to the Oval Office, he had made it impossible for Regan to do his job. Yet neither did he expect the president to toss him overboard bearing all the blame.

But that was exactly what Nancy Reagan wanted her husband to do. And he largely acceded. Reagan began considering successors to Regan;
Paul Laxalt suggested
Howard Baker, the former Senate majority leader. “
It’s not a bad idea,” Reagan wrote in his diary on the Thursday of the Tower report’s release. “I’d probably take some bumps from our right wingers but I can handle that.” In this same entry, the president added, “V.P. just came up—another meeting with Don. This time totally different”—different from the angry meeting Bush had reported to Reagan a few days earlier.
“He says he’ll hand in his resignation first thing Monday. My prayers have really been answered.”

But Nancy didn’t want to wait until Monday. The next day, Friday,
CNN reported that
Howard Baker would succeed Regan as chief of staff. Nancy didn’t admit that the leak had come from her staff, but interest and evidence pointed to the East Wing.

Regan decided he’d had enough. He dashed off a one-sentence letter of resignation and sent it to the president.
Frank Carlucci, the successor to John Poindexter as national security adviser, urged him to see the president personally. Regan refused. “
I’m too mad,” he told Carlucci. “There’s been a deliberate leak, and it’s been done to humiliate me.”

Carlucci wouldn’t let Regan leave without speaking to the president. So he had Reagan call Regan. Reagan apologized that the Baker appointment had been leaked, but he said he hoped Regan would stay around long enough to help Baker get grounded in the new job.

Regan refused. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I won’t be in any more. This is my last day. I’ve been your secretary of the Treasury for four years and your chief of staff for two. You don’t trust me enough even to tell me who my successor is and make a smooth transfer. I deserved better treatment than this. I’m through.”

Reagan tried to mollify him, but to no avail. “
He was understandably angry,” the president wrote
that night. He signed a gracious letter accepting Regan’s resignation. Regan read the letter and tossed it aside. “
In my time with President Reagan, I had seen many such letters, and so I knew that someone else had written it for him,” he recounted.

Nancy Reagan had her own reaction. “That night, for the first time in weeks, I slept well,” she remembered.

O
N
M
ARCH 4
the president addressed the American people in response to the
Tower report. He had never given a more important speech, and he knew it. The final two years of his presidency hinged on whether he could win back the popular confidence that had been essential to everything he had achieved as president. Never had the people been more skeptical of him, nor with better reason. The evidence of his incompetence or culpability continued to mount, making the case for his policy toward Iran and the contras ever harder to defend. Yet he had to say something.

“
For the past 3 months, I’ve been silent on the revelations about Iran,” he began. “You must have been thinking: ‘Well, why doesn’t he tell us what’s happening? Why doesn’t he just speak to us as he has in the past when we’ve faced troubles or tragedies?’ Others of you, I guess, were thinking: ‘What’s he doing hiding out in the White House?’ ” Yet silence had been necessary, he said, because he didn’t know all the facts of the matter, and he didn’t want to speak until he knew them. “I’ve paid a price for my silence in terms of your trust and confidence,” he acknowledged. “But I’ve had to wait, as you have, for the complete story.” Now that the Tower board had delivered its report, he could break his silence.