Power Game by Hedrick Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

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 made it virtually impossible for Reagan not to break with the Philippine government of Ferdinand Marcos andrecognize 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.
    Reflecting on the record, some of Reagan’s own domestic policy advisers privately admit how frequently power floats out of the White House.
    “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 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 all 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 fortoo 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.

2. The Power Earthquake of 1974: The