CONFUSION AT THE WHITE HOUSE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100050031-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: October 9, 1988
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/11 :CIA-RDP99-004188000100050031-3
~- ~~ r : -~ :, ~ ,
Confusion at the
White House
LANDSLIDE
The Unmaking of
the President 198-I-1988
Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus
Houghton Mifflin. 488 pp. 321.95
Reviewed by
Robert Sherrill
F riday, Feb. 27, 1987. The White House was in frozen
chaos. Donald Regan, chief of staff, had just been
drummed out of his job by Nancy Reagan. Howard
Baker, his successor, wasn't supposed to arrive for three
more days. Until then, he was hiding out, taking no
phone calls, especially from the media.
Washington reporters Jane Mayer of the ~b'all Street
Journal and Doyle !t-icManus of the Los Angeles Times pick
up the drama at that moment. "One caller, however, got
through: on the line for Senator Baker was the attorney
general of the United States.
"'Howard,' said the voice on the other end of the phone.
'I think you better get over to the white House. Uun
Regan's left.'
"Baker listened, then tried to put :Meese off: 'F;d, the
problem is that the President doesn't want it out until
Monday. I gage him my word.'
"'fhe attorney general seemed not to hear. 'Howard.' he
said again, slowly. 'I think you better get Deer to the bt'hite
House. "I'heres no one in charge."'
Nu one in charge% 1A'hat about the President? ~~'asn't he
there, and wasn't he in charge% No way. The Irancontra
scandal was raging, and Ronald Reagan was in a psycholog-
ical funk, addled, listless, unresponsi~~e. All he wanted to
do was watch T~' and old movies. To some close to him at
that time, hr seemed to have no interest at all in running
the country. The balloon of his great popularity had
recently been punctured, and he didn't know how to cope.
T'he President who had sworn never to make concessions
to terrorists ur to ransom hostages and who had damned
Iran s gotiernment as "squalid criminals" had been caught
selling arms and paying bribes to agents of the Ayatollah
Khomeini in the hope that it might release some hostages.
K'hat's more, some of those arms profits had been passed
on to the contra forces battling Nicaragua's Sandinista
government, directly flouting Congress' will.
Fur years the generally gullible media had portrayed
lteaKan as a strong leader. But now suddenly he had been,
in Mayer and Mc'~lanus' words, "unmasked" as an easily
manipulated, sentimental bubblehead "who didn't have
the ability to understand what was going on."
?'orse, the 'l'ower Commission, set up to investigate the
Iran-contra scandal, only days earlier had concluded that
The Washington post
The New York Times
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal _
The Chriatlan Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
Chicaa0 Tritfun~
1-I I L
Date _
Reagan committed an impeachable offense by approving
the sale of U.S. property for private profiteering and for the
support of a congressional]y proscribed war in Nicaragua,
and then taking part in the biggest cover-up since Water?
gate.
The unmasking left him "physically and psychologically
drained." Fie sat at briefings in a stupor. Fie would stop in
mid?sentence, forgetting what he was talking about. Fie
told the same long joke over and over.
veteran political aide Jim Cannon, sent ahead by How-
ard Baker that weekend to scout the White House situation,
was so appalled by what he saw and heard that he
suggested Baker might want to invoke Section Four of the
25th amendment, which provides for the removal of a
president "unable to discharge the powers and duties of
his office."
But on ~k,nday Baker decided that the old boy wasn't
much different from the usual.
:\nd E3aker was right: Reagap's condition wasn't new. For
at least two years, since his second term began, the "usual"
F~eagan had been president only in title and as a symtwl. [n
reality'. he had been a nn~?ar fti~ ...:~~:-- - -
Col Oliver North. All this and much more is clearly,
exhaustively' documented in Landslide, Mayer and
McManus' devastating account of
Reagan's second term. Buttressed by
hundreds of interviews with admin-
istration officials, as well as tens of
thousands of pages of testimony and
other documentation, the book is a '
stunning piece of history, as read-
able as Theodore White's best cam-
paign chronicles.
Although its prologue is set in that
critical weekend in 1987, Landslide
really begins more than two years
earlier, as the White House guard
was changing. Reagan's top first-
term advisers -devoted men, such
as Meese and James Baker, who
knew how to concoct a "Reagan pro-
gram" and protect the President
from his worst instincts -were
gone. Commencing his second term,
Reagan had no program, his new top
aides had little loyalty (and, many of
them, little experience), and to satis-
fy their own vaulting ambitions,
they were prepared to lead Reagan
down extremely perilous paths.
Robert Sherrill, author of "The Oil Follies of 1970-1980:
How the Petroleum Industry Stole the Show (and Much
More Besides)," was Washington correspondent for the
Nation from 1%5 to 1982.
ICON~'~~!?~
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/11 :CIA-RDP99-004188000100050031-3
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/11 :CIA-RDP99-004188000100050031-3
a.
He proved to be easily led. He had
few ideas of his own. This became
evident in the 1986 midterm elec-
tions, when he stumped 24,800 miles
through 22 states but "made only one
tactical decision himself during the
entire campaign cycle." It was Nancy
Reagan, according to one White
House aide, who "drew up all the
plans.... He just went. He was pretty
oblivious. He never knew what was
going on."
Landslide's president is a mechani-
cal rubber stamp. Two top aides -
Baker as chief of staff and Regan as
Treasury secretary - decided to
swap jobs; Regan later recalled that
many weeks afterward, when they
finally got around to telling him, the
President simply "nodded affably."
Anything advisers stuck in front of
him, he signed, often without read-
ing it. Speech writers found he had
"unquestioning acceptance of almost
every line." Knowing Reagan's dis-
taste for grubby details, his aides
increasingly ran the presidency as if
he were a senile appendage; they
acted on their own, lied to him or
just left him out. Typically, coming
home from the Reykjavik summit
conference, his counselors plotted
ways to sucker the media into de-
scribing the failure as a success, but
they didn't bother to ask Reagan for
suggestions because he was happily
occupied "in the midsection of Air
Force One playing parlor games that
involved guessing the ages of NSC
secretaries.;'
The presidency, according to the
authors, had fallen into a "receiver?
ship." One of the receivers was his
wife, who controlled even the num-
ber of hands her husband was al-
lowed to shake. Another was, of
course, her archenemy Donald Re-
gan, who, in the words of one col-
league, "figured, if Ronald Reagan
didn't want to be president all the
time, he would be. Probably eighty
percent of the decisions made during
his era were made by Regan."
Each day aides supplied Reagan
with cue cards telling him what to
do, where to walk, where to sit,
whom to talk to, exactly what to say
even in phone conversations. He .
obeyed his cards diligently. -
The public Reagan was hail?fellow;
in private he was remote, aloof. He
could not stand reality's unpleasant-
ness, retreating into his own sunny
make-believe world. Just as he re-
fused to admit to serious illness ("1
didn't have cancer. I had something
inside of me that had cancer in it,
and it was removed"), he also re-
fused to concede that his administra-
tion was so riddled with vicious ri-
valries - as between Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger and
Secretary of State George Shultz -
thatpolicy was often deadlocked and
incoherent.
Reagan hadhittle indterestpn foreign
affairs. Mayer and McManus say that
often in the middle of briefings by
Shultz or Casey or one of his national
security advisers, Reagan would
drift off to sleep. Only because Shultz
demanded it, Reagan gave him a pri-
vate audience of one hour aweek -
one?seventh as much time as the
President spent lifting weights. After
the 1996 Reykjavik summit, Washing-
ton's policy professionals finally re-
alined that "his untutored utopian-
ism may have reached dangerous
proportions" -for Reagan, in his
secret meetings with Gorbachev, had.
offered to get rid of all nuclear weap-
ons, not just some ballistic missiles.
("You couldn't have," a shocked ad-
viser blurted out. "I was there," Rea-
gan replied patiently, "and I did.")
The Reagan White House sounds a
little like an asylum. Never mind
that the President thought a ghost
haunted the Lincoln bedroom and
that his wife believed in astrology.
What really mattered was that na-
tional security adviser Robert
McFarlane a-as driven to nervous
collapse, often bursting into heavy
sobs; his successor, Adm. John Poin-
dexter, was obsessively secretive,
hated the media, considered Con-
gress' laws "an outside interference"
and sometimes seemed incapable of
telling the truth; Regan, if opposed,
would pound the table and scream;
and North by mid-1986 was suffering
mood swings "between manic boast-
fulness and paranoiac secrecy."
Balmy or not, the Reagan White
House was certainly remarkably un-
concerned about conflict of interest
or the appearance of impropriety.
Reagan "openly disdained the post-
Watergate 'ethics in government' "
laws, Mayer and McManus tell us,
while Nancy Reagan accepted many
questionable gifts, and pressured old
benefactors to come across with
more.
Considering
,,, ~_he
encoura ed in~sleaz ti ~u w
mac ;natural that Rea an letd con
men use tm to a somettmes rau u.
'BIiri.r? w
th W
dealin throu h a dis ra
t and an Iranian double a ent
If Mayer and th sides.
us a balanced McManus have given
second term review of Reagan's
pears to be bothand Landslide ap-
searched and laudab~gnificently re?
one of our most Y ?bjective .
will be rated b P?Pular presidents
weirdest and wort ~' as one of our
these good re But why have
to tell us? Porters waited so long
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/11 :CIA-RDP99-004188000100050031-3