Of Mice and Men

For the most powerful political office on Earth, the American presidency is a decidedly amorphous institution. The U.S. Constitution outlines the duties of the President in only the vaguest of terms. Each President has molded the office by his own experience, style and personality.

Few Presidents have been as successful as Ronald Reagan in using personality to mobilize the authority of the Oval Office. The Reagan style has served the President remarkably well in times of success but often has failed in times of crisis--most notably the past month of the Iran arms affair. When beset by personal adversity, President Reagan’s instinct is to blame the press and then withdraw into isolation, to seek solace and counsel from the small circle of friends who have stood by the Reagans throughout his political career.

This is not the Ronald Reagan who can indeed take the heat from political opponents and give it back in kind, but the Reagan who appears to be particularly vulnerable when he senses that his trust and good will have been betrayed, distorted or misunderstood.

Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) may have touched the very core of Ronald Reagan when he observed that “his whole persona is trust.” In a conversation with Simpson, the President lamented the fact that many Americans did not believe their President when he said that he was not aware that profits from the Iran arms deal went to the contra rebels in Nicaragua. “It disappoints me,” the President told Simpson. “It hurts.”

The trust on which the President has leaned has crumbled in another way, too. During his first term, the President was buoyed by a loyal cadre of subordinates who knew him by instinct and were adept at amplifying his strengths and compensating for his weaknesses.

This was important because in a sense the President sets policy by notion. One day when he was campaigning for reelection as governor of California, Reagan chatted idly with reporters about something that he had read somewhere: a horde of mice, miles wide, eating its way across Australia. That very evening, Reagan incorporated that remote--and surely exaggerated--incident into a campaign speech as a policy lesson on the problems of environmental regulation. The lesson was that, in Reagan’s view, overly strict regulations sought by environmentalists would make it impossible to stop an obvious natural menace.

Prior Reagan staff members knew when to translate random anecdotes, hunches and “I-wonder-ifs” into cogent policy that meshed with the overall Reagan program. They knew, too, when to nod politely, answer, “Yes, Mr. President,” and then make certain that such notions were quickly forgotten. These men knew that they had one role: to serve the President. Personal pride, ambition and arrogance had no place.

But the President lost the benefit of such buffering at the start of the second term when James A. Baker III and Richard Darman moved to the Treasury Department and others scattered elsewhere. The new chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, has run the White House like the take-charge Wall Street corporate chairman he used to be, but there can be only one chairman of the board in a presidency.

Lacking the political sensitivity of a Jim Baker, Regan has magnified the we-know-best isolation of the White House. Notion-as-policy became infectious and ran amok. No one seemed to be asking whether the mice really were devouring Australia, or wondering how bombing them with anti-mouse powder might affect our relations with the Australians, or how it meshed with the President’s overall program. Confronted with the fallout, Don Regan seems most interested in preserving his own hide. He refuses to recognize that sometimes the most valuable service that an aide can perform is to resign.

Still, the basic responsibility rests with the President himself. He may continue to believe that Iran “wasn’t a failure until the press got a tip from that rag in Beirut,” but Congress and a majority of Americans do not. Further agonizing over the opinion polls and criticism will serve no purpose. Bringing David M. Abshire, former ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, into the White House may make the investigations of the arms deals go more smoothly, but that will not be enough. What the President needs to do beyond that is simple: Replace Donald Regan and his aides with a top-level staff that will put the White House back on the road to reality.