CHAPTER 30

The Reagan Revolution

JACK KEMP HAD tipped me off to David Stockman, a thirty-four-year-old Congressman from Michigan, as a smart supply-sider. My first real contact with him was on October 24, 1980, when we both addressed a business convention in Chicago. We had coffee together, and I was attracted to his keen intelligence and warm personality. After the 1980 election, I used the Evans & Novak column to report his likely appointment as director of the Office of Management and Budget, a supply-sider who did not worship at the altar of the balanced budget.

More than five years later, Stockman misrepresented my support in his best-selling memoir The Triumph of Politics. These comments in 1986 should be measured against the fact that our relationship long since had deteriorated, that we had not exchanged a word since late 1981, and that Stockman had soured on the Reagan Revolution and supply-side ideology. In his book, he told of plotting with Jack Kemp immediately after the election toward what then seemed his improbable elevation to the cabinet.

We [Stockman and Kemp] had lunch with Bob Novak. He’s a brilliant, brooding reporter who is known around Washington as “the Prince of Darkness.” Novak has a steeltrap mind and he knew our catechism cold. He wasn’t like many of the other, self-righteous reporters who pretended they were objective but were really liberals.

Novak’s typewriter didn’t even work in the objective mode. Everything which came out was pure bias—in behalf of the supply side. Naturally, I considered that first-class reporting. He was dealing in truth, not just news.

Novak wrote a column saying there was a movement growing to put Stockman in at the Office of Management and Budget. At the time he wrote it, it was a movement of three or four, if you included the minority of my staff that favored the idea. But after his column appeared, it did become a movement of sorts.

Stockman’s account is nearly pure fiction. Jack Kemp, Dave Stockman, and Bob Novak never lunched together at any time—a fact corroborated by my records and those of Kemp’s office.

This is the truth: Shortly after the election, Jude Wanniski phoned to inform me that he, Kemp, and the other supply-siders had decided to promote Stockman for OMB. I said I thought that was a good idea, and I went to work as a reporter to find out whether his nomination might happen, not to promote him. I called Stockman, who told me OMB was the one Reagan administration position he was interested in filling and that he was optimistic about his chances. I placed calls to two excellent sources on the Reagan transition team, who told me Stockman was indeed the leading candidate for OMB. The Stockman candidacy made its way through the bulky Reagan transition bureaucracy, and he entered the cabinet presumed to be the agent of those who wanted Reagan’s presidency to be a revolution.

         

EDWIN MEESE III, the Reagan campaign’s chief of staff and director of the presidential transition, was widely expected to become White House chief of staff. Nobody outside Reagan’s inner circle, however, knew that on the day after the election, Reagan informed Meese that he would not get the top White House post. It would go to James A. Baker III, who had run George Bush’s campaign against Reagan, while Meese would be named counselor to the president with cabinet rank. Meese was devastated but was a good Reagan soldier who stayed on.

On Sunday, January 11, 1981, Rowly and I flew to California for a sales meeting the next morning at our newspaper syndicate, now headquartered in Orange County, and Stu Spencer invited us for Sunday night dinner at his oceanfront home at Newport Beach. Spencer was in high spirits during a prolonged cocktail hour. He was on the inside with the president-elect, his opposition to Reagan’s 1968 and 1976 presidential candidacies forgiven and probably forgotten.

How could Reagan reject his longtime faithful lieutenant and dedicated conservative Meese in favor off the ideologically androgynous Baker, who had vigorously opposed Reagan’s nomination in 1976 and 1980? California conservatives blamed Spencer as Reagan’s Rasputin. True, Spencer was a close friend and fishing companion of Baker and distant from Meese. But Stu told us Reagan was well aware of Meese’s administrative shortcomings and on his own made the change.

Surprisingly, the supply-siders were delighted. Based on Meese’s performance during the campaign and the transition, Jeff Bell and Jude Wanniski both told me Baker would be more aggressive in pressing for tax reduction and less inclined to capitulate to orthodox budget-balancers. I’m not sure Baker ever really understood the theoretical underpinnings of what Reagan was doing, but the tax cuts were passed under his watch without serious dilution—the most important economic legislation since the New Deal.

         

NEVER IN EIGHTEEN years as a columnist had I enjoyed such access to senior officials as I had at the start of the Reagan administration. My appointment book for the first few weeks of 1981 shows private sessions with Jim Baker, Ed Meese, Alexander Haig, Donald Regan, Caspar Weinberger, James Watt, Martin Anderson, Lyn Nofziger, Norman Ture, Paul Craig Roberts, and David Stockman.

Stockman was my best source. For most of a year, he might have been the best high-level source I ever had. By the time Reagan named the unknown young congressman to the OMB post on December 11, 1980, Stockman and I were on close terms. My appointment book shows me meeting with Stockman through the first nine months of 1981 more than with anybody else, on top of innumerable phone conversations.

Early in the Reagan administration, I dined with Stockman at Paul Young’s restaurant in midtown Washington, a favorite hangout for congressmen and lobbyists. Dan Rostenkowski, a lieutenant in the Chicago Democratic political machine who had just become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was at a nearby table with cronies. He came over and a debate over tax policy ensued between the hulking Rostenkowski and the slight Stockman, who a few weeks earlier had been a backbencher in the impotent Republican minority whom Rosty barely recognized. The chairman had no idea he was about to be rolled by a Republican–Southern Democratic coalition to pass Reagan’s tax cuts.

Soon after Stockman took office, we started having breakfast every other Saturday, where Stockman could leak at length in the nearly deserted Hay Adams dining room. He played “Pilgrim” in Pilgrim’s Progress as he described malefactors blocking the supply-side agenda—powerful Democrats in Congress and secret advocates, embedded within the Reagan administration, of a Nixon-Ford restoration.

One of Stockman’s fiercest antagonists was Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis. A millionaire business consultant (who later would head Union Pacific Railroad) and Pennsylvania Republican leader, Lewis turned Transportation from a governmental backwater into an outpost for ideological warfare against the free marketeers.

On Friday, March 6, my supply-side sources at the Treasury Department passed on an internal memo for my edification but not publication. It reported efforts by Lewis to save the ailing automotive industry with a government “industrial policy” based on curtailing foreign imports. I immediately telephoned Stockman, who told me he had a lot to add to this story and we should get together as quickly as possible. We met over breakfast at the Hay Adams Saturday morning at nine a.m., later than usual. Normally a hearty breakfast eater, Stockman contented himself with coffee and orange juice as if he had already eaten (which, I would learn later, he had with left-wing journalist Bill Greider).

Stockman told me the kind of story I have loved to report for half a century. In 1979 President Carter named Charles Swinburne, a career civil servant, as deputy assistant secretary of Transportation for policy and international affairs. Seven days before Carter left office, the Transportation Department released Swinburne’s report calling for reduced Japanese auto exports to benefit America’s automotive industry. Stockman called it a “statist tract” uniting business, labor, and government in a corporate welfare bailout.

Stockman told me Lewis had retained Swinburne, disobeying Reagan’s direct orders to cleanse his administration of officials from the “permanent government.” Lewis went further and embraced the protectionist Swinburne report. “The bureaucracy has completely captured Drew Lewis,” Stockman told me (a quote I attributed in our column to “one critical colleague”). That was not all the information Stockman imparted to me. In a Tuesday cabinet meeting that week, Lewis and his allies had so monopolized the thirty-five minutes allocated to the auto imports question that Stockman and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan had only two minutes to reply in opposition.

That Saturday I told Rowly this was such a hot story that we had to scrap our column for Monday, March 9, already sent to newspaper clients and to substitute this new one. In addition to the inside dope of inter-cabinet wrangling, our column made a serious point:

Whereas Lewis sees reduced imports as bait for labor restraint, his opponents within the Administration think such collaboration between labor, business and government smacks more of Benito Mussolini than Ronald Reagan. They fear cracking down on Japanese imports may inhibit growing realization by trade unions that their own labor contracts contribute to non-competitiveness of U.S. industry.

Five years later in The Triumph of Politics, Stockman gave an inaccurate account. Describing himself in combat against Lewis, he claimed untruthfully he had initiated the column by calling me. He termed the Evans & Novak column “a kind of supply-side dartboard. You could use it to stick somebody in the forehead fast, if you had to.”

Stockman’s 1986 memoir said: “When he [Lewis] found out I was responsible for Novak’s column [of March 8], he went into orbit.” In return for Lewis promising not to fight his battles in the press, “I agreed not to have breakfast with the Prince of Darkness for a while.” That agreement did not preclude frequent phone conversations between Stockman and me during which he did not shrink from continuing to criticize Lewis.

However, at the annual Gridiron dinner on March 28 (where Stockman delivered the Republican speech, thanks to me), the OMB director called me aside during the predinner head table reception. “Drew Lewis is really a terrific public servant,” he said, contradicting everything he had told me up to that point. “Bob, you’re really too hard on Drew. I wonder who’s been downgrading him to you.” I felt like saying, “Why, it was you, Dave.” But I maintained stony-faced silence. I glimpsed Lewis eyeing us from the other side of the room. Stockman had staged a charade for Lewis’s benefit.

The moratorium on Stockman-Novak breakfasts ended after one month. My appointments book shows an eight a.m. Saturday breakfast date with Stockman at the Hay Adams on April 11. I asked Stockman that morning about his struggles with the Republican Senate Budget Committee chairman, Pete Domenici, who was endangering the Reagan tax cut by insisting on a balanced budget. The next Evans & Novak column, assailing Domenici’s “green eyeshade worship of the sacred balanced budget,” was obviously the product of several sources. But in his memoir, Stockman bragged “I posted a message on the Bob Novak bulletin board.”

Of course Stockman was using me, as I was using him. I hope he was astute enough to recognize that I recognized this mutual use. I was happy to get a column exclusively reporting important developments and one that helped an ideological cause that, it turned out, I believed in far more strongly than Stockman did.

         

AMONG THE NIXON-FORD obstructionists named to me by Stockman was David Gergen. He was only thirty-eight years old but seemed to have been around forever as a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford who managed to hang on in the Reagan White House. My image of the six-foot, six-inch Gergen had him hovering over shorter colleagues and bending down to whisper in their ears. Conservatives regarded him as amiable, intelligent, and an excellent writer but a courtier type whose agenda did not transcend his own personal advancement. Although Gergen was reputed to be a prodigious leaker, I had experienced no more contact with him than a handshake at occasional receptions.

So I was surprised late Monday afternoon, February 16, 1981, to get a telephone call from Gergen asking to see me first thing the next morning. He was seated in my little conference room at nine a.m. on Tuesday, and he did not come empty-handed. He opened his briefcase, and took out working papers for Reagan’s historic tax reduction message to be delivered to Congress on Wednesday night. Reagan’s actual message was leaking all over Washington, but Gergen gave me something none of my super-sources in the Reagan administration provided and what no other reporter had: the draft of material for the Reagan message that was not used. It gave me a terrific Evans & Novak column for Friday, February 20, that began:

“Why this is just a supply-side primer,” complained Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, on Friday the 13th, then rolled up his sleeves to rewrite totally the introduction to President Reagan’s economic report that had been drafted by best-selling economics writer George Gilder.

When Weidenbaum and the White House had finished, no trace of Gilder was left in the report—not even the words “supply side” describing the economic philosophy Reagan has adopted as his own….

[D]octrinal justification for tax reduction is put down by everybody in the White House, with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan.

Why would Gergen volunteer this information to a reporter he hardly knew and was not a natural ally? Surely he could not believe I was so naïve that I would consider him a sudden supply-side acolyte. Rather, I think Gergen, the ultimate Washington survivor, was working the source-or-target model with me. Gergen never really became my source, but he was not my target either—which I believe was his intent.

         

ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, March 12, 1981, Rowly and I flew to New Orleans to address a business convention the next day. A week earlier, the New Orleans States-Item cancelled the Evans & Novak column after having bought it for nearly eighteen years. I invited the editor of the States-Item to breakfast to try to keep the business even though my batting average for such efforts was about zero. I wanted Rowly—a better salesman than I—to join us but he refused, contending that it was a waste of time and that he would rather breakfast with Moon Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans.

Our column never got back into the New Orleans market, and the breakfast was unproductive. What made it worse was my glance at that morning’s Wall Street Journal being read by a man at the table next to ours. My eyes still could make out the paper’s old-fashioned banked headline on page one:

         

THE ODD COUPLE

EVANS, NOVAK STILL RILE

READERS AFTER 18 YEARS

OF RIGHT-WING PURITY

———

COLUMN GOES PAST REPORTING

TO PRESS STRIDENT VIEW,

PROMOTE JOBS FOR FRIENDS

         

We had been expecting the Journal piece by James M. Perry after he interviewed Rowly and me at length in our office on February 13. Jim Perry was one of Washington’s best reporters who years later won the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement in journalism. I had trouble concentrating during the next hour on a fruitless conversation with a boring editor, hardly able to conceal my impatience to read Perry’s piece. It turned out to be a pretty nasty article from a previously friendly colleague who had lavished praise on our Johnson and Nixon books.

I thought it was a pedestrian effort by Perry, below his usual standard. He started with the cliche of “the slender, debonair” Evans and “the short, rumpled” Novak constituting “journalism’s oddest couple.” Contending we had “now become the most controversial and talked about columnists in town,” Perry then addressed his basic argument:

What they have been doing…is try to hold the Reagan Administration’s feet to the pure flame of their own increasingly strident brand of conservatism.

They seem to believe that the nation may not survive unless an undiluted supply-side economic program is developed at home and a tougher defense and foreign policy position to contain the Russians is put in place around the world….

It’s the old journalistic conundrum: Should reporters…actually come down out of the press box and take part in the game?

Perry quoted an unnamed “editor of a big-city daily who has dropped their column. ‘They’re out there on the field, blocking and tackling and telling the coach what plays to call. I don’t need that kind of stuff in my newspaper.’” We were being criticized for what columnists do. The real complaint with us was that we were taking conservative positions. This complaint was widely voiced among our colleagues, including my good friend Jack Germond, who was about the only critic that Perry quoted by name. “They do seem to have gotten a little apoplectic,” Germond said of us.

Perry gave me a chance to explain in print why we had become such a target. “We are running against the grain of the conventional wisdom within the journalistic community,” I told him, adding this was particularly true of economic policy. Perry quoted me further: “Most journalists find it hard to abandon the viewpoints they have held for years. If supply-side economics works, it will be the death knell for much of the system this establishment has built up over the last 40 years.”

Only two things about Perry’s piece pleased me. One was mentioning that my fifteen-year-old daughter, Zelda, was a ball girl for the Washington Bullets basketball team. The other was a rare factual mistake by Perry. Rowly and I never revealed how much money we made to any interviewer, because we would be embarrassed by how much lower our earnings were than generally expected. Perry had tried to calculate our individual pieces of income and concluded that we each earned “in excess of $200,000 annually” (which would constitute more than $445,000 in 2007 money). Actually, our joint efforts were bringing in less than $80,000 each. I was delighted to have everybody—including my friends—think I was making big money. Nobody ever asked me about the accuracy of Perry’s figure, and I never volunteered the truth.

         

IN 1981, IT had been nearly ten years since our last book, Nixon in the White House. It was my idea to attempt, immediately after the 1980 election, a quick Evans & Novak book on the coming Reagan administration. Our newly acquired agent, Esther Newberg (a former Democratic activist on her way to becoming a senior executive at International Creative Management) wanted it short enough to be delivered on time for publication early in the autumn of 1981. She got us a good contract with E. P. Dutton, with the book edited by the company’s publisher, Jack Macrae. He was a rising star in the New York world of books and, like almost everybody in the business, was a liberal. I thought the very idea of The Reagan Revolution (the title was my idea) soured Macrae’s stomach, but he was a professional who soldiered on. So did we, and the book was coming in on deadline.

We wanted a verbatim interview with President Reagan as the book’s penultimate chapter, and I had called the president’s press secretary, James Brady, early in March to request one. When Rowly and I walked into the Oval Office at four p.m. on March 23, we were surprised. Usually two or three senior aides are at any president’s side for a private meeting, but Brady was the only other person. There was no sign of bulky White House recording equipment. Every on-the-record utterance of a president normally is transcribed for posterity, but only our own little office tape recorder retained Reagan’s answers. Stranger still, after about five minutes, Brady glanced at his watch and left the room. We were alone with the president.

It was a sunny early spring afternoon, and Reagan’s mood matched it. In the presidency for only two months, he “was obviously having the time of his life” (as I later wrote in the book’s introduction to the interview). Reagan did not betray the turmoil in his official family centering around Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who was engaged in a power struggle with White House staffers headed by Jim Baker. Reagan was able to maintain a cheerful composure in the midst of internal strife.

The purpose of our interview for a book to be published six months later was to probe Reagan’s philosophy and his personal outlook as to how revolutionary his administration would and should be. Rowly asked which philosophical thinkers and writers had influenced him the most. “Oh, boy, Rowly,” Reagan replied. Fearful Reagan was at a loss, Rowly noted that President Carter “used to talk about Reinhold Niebuhr” and then mentioned, without a clear connection I thought, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Spinoza. But those weren’t Reagan’s models, and he didn’t need prompting. He was just collecting his thoughts.

Describing himself as a “voracious reader,” Reagan cited nineteenth-century British free trade advocates John Bright and Richard Cobden and twentieth-century Austrian free market economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. He also said, “Bastiat has dominated my thinking so much.” Bastiat? Rowly and I had to look him up. Claude-Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) was a French political economist who preached against protectionism and socialism. Later in the interview, Reagan talked about liberal clergymen who had been influenced by Reichenbach’s advocacy of big government taking care of the poor. Reichenbach? That sent Rowly and me back to the reference books to look up Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), a German philosopher who belonged to the Vienna Circle of legal positivists. Reagan was better read and better educated than we were.

Without benefit of his famous three-by-five index cards or any notes, Reagan cited from memory budget statistics dating back to Eisenhower (totally accurate, we found, after we checked). More important than demonstrating an actor’s good memory was his personalized understanding of what supply-side economics was all about.

Novak: Why are you so convinced, Mr. President, that your tax rate reduction will work as a means of reviving the economy?

Reagan: ’Cause it always has. It did when Kennedy did it. It did in the time of Coolidge. Andrew Mellon [President Coolidge’s Treasury Secretary] has written about the tax cuts and they worked…. I take my own personal experience in [motion] pictures. I was in that exceedingly high tax bracket after World War II, and I know what I did. I would be offered scripts of additional pictures and, once I had reached that bracket, I just turned ’em down. I wasn’t going to go to work for six cents on the dollar.

He also had his own simplified cold war strategy, embracing a rationale that had eluded the other postwar presidents:

I believe in trying to negotiate, certainly, a reduction in strategic arms, to reduce the threshold of danger. And there’s never been anything like it in the world before, weapons that can literally destroy civilization. But to go to a table to bargain, you gotta have something to give. When you sit down opposite someone who has the superiority that could lead—if they continue this increase—toward the delivery someday of an ultimatum, what do you have to say to persuade them to reduce that strength? But, on the other hand, if you’ve embarked on a course of saying, “We’re not going to let you have that superiority,” strained as they are to provide. We know they can’t provide consumer goods for their people. Now, there would be some reason for them to listen. Because we can say to them, “We can go one of two ways. We can both keep on straining in this direction [arms buildup], or we can mutually agree to some reductions in strength.”

We had gone five minutes over our designated thirty-minute limit when Brady wandered back into the Oval Office and hand-signaled me that time was up. Rowly and I squeezed out another five minutes of q-and-a, ending with a Reagan joke, to make it a forty-minute interview.

One week to the day from our session in the White House, John Hinckley shot Brady and Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. A disabled Brady kept the title of press secretary through the Reagan presidency’s eight years but never was able to perform the office’s duties. I think Reagan missed Brady’s relaxed style. Access to the president was sharply curtailed for all news media, and that included Rowly and me. Larry Speakes, the de facto press secretary, worked for Baker and treated Evans and me like the enemy. When we would write an inside dope column critical of Baker, Speakes would rip us in the morning briefing. Brady, I am sure, would have tried to work with us to get a better column next time.

Although Reagan’s wounds were much less grievous than Brady’s, I think that the president, as well as his press secretary, would never quite be the same after the shooting. Rowly and I caught him at his best on the afternoon of March 23. As outstanding as his performance was in changing America (and the world), it could have been even better were it not for John Hinckley.

         

THE FIRST EVANS & Novak column I wrote after returning from a reporting/family vacation trip to Europe in July 1981 belied Daniel Schorr’s 1980 election night taunting of me as someone who could not criticize President Reagan. By July, I had criticized the new administration for betraying the Reagan Revolution’s principles—but never Reagan himself. In my column of Friday, July 10, I crossed that line. Thereafter, many of the president’s men viewed me as more of a critic than a supporter.

I received a telephone call on July 8 from William Gribbin, a junior White House aide. I met Bill the previous summer at the Republican convention in Detroit where he was editing the party platform. He was intense and very conservative. I think Bill learned to trust me, and that is why he called now to say he had something important. Unlike many leakers, Gribbin was not interested in currying favor with me or promoting himself. He was disturbed by the president’s announcement the previous day, July 7, that he intended to nominate the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice: fifty-one-year-old Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate who two years earlier had been appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals by a Democratic governor. Gribbin and the Christian conservatives who had so vigorously supported Reagan for president considered O’Connor unacceptable because of her positions on abortion.

“Why Did He Choose Her?” was the Washington Post’s headline on our column about O’Connor. The answer was contained in the document Gribbin gave me: a memo written to the attorney general of the United States by his thirty-five-year-old counselor, Kenneth W. Starr.

Gribbin told me that O’Connor’s sponsor was Dave Gergen, who wanted a woman justice to give Reagan a foothold in the feminist movement and distance him from the social conservatives. The formal recommendation, echoing the White House staff, came from Attorney General William French Smith, Reagan’s personal attorney and the weakest member of the cabinet.

Reagan telephoned Smith on Monday, July 6, when social conservatives erupted after O’Connor’s selection leaked—the president’s first inkling of how controversial this nomination would be. The president wanted a quick check on complaints that his first Supreme Court selection was proabortion. Smith did not have a clue and bucked the question over to young Ken Starr. On the next day, July 7, Starr handed his boss the two-and-a-half page memo that Gribbin supplied me on July 8. My column, published July 10, called Starr’s memo “hurriedly prepared” and “error-filled,” but added that it “convinced” Reagan to go through with the nomination.

Starr’s investigation that cleared Judge O’Connor on abortion appeared to consist solely of a telephone interview with her, and she was less than truthful. O’Connor told Starr she could not remember how she voted on a 1979 Arizona legislative bill to legalize abortion. Starr did not look into records showing that Senator O’Connor was a co-sponsor of the measure and voted for it as it lost in committee.

Starr’s memo concluded: “Judge O’Connor further indicated in response to my questions that she had never been a leader or outspoken advocate on behalf of either pro-life or abortion rights organizations. She knows well the Arizona leader of the right-to-life movement, a prominent female physician in Phoenix, and has never had any disputes or controversies with her.” Starr was referring to Carolyn Gerster. I phoned Gerster, and learned that Starr had not called her. “I had an adversary position with Sandra O’Connor,” Gerster told me, calling her “one of the most powerful proabortionists in the Senate.” Gerster harbored an eleven-year-old grievance against O’Connor for burying an antiabortion proposal in the Senate Republican caucus. I wrote in the Evans & Novak column of July 10:

[I]nnocence has departed for right-to-life activists. Dr. Gerster cannot forget a 45-minute meeting with Reagan in Rye, N.Y., on Jan. 17, 1980, in which candidate Reagan promised her that his first appointment to the Court would share their anti-abortion views. She chooses to believe that the President has been misled by advisers.

But the more plausible explanation is that Reagan shares the view of Jim Baker and his other aides that the Moral Majority [the social conservatives] is not vital to his political coalition. He has given that signal by ignoring its sensibilities in selecting Sandra O’Connor.

With this, I burned bridges to the White House, Baker, and maybe the president. Many Republican sources claimed I was overheated and that Sandra O’Connor would turn out fine on abortion. Indeed, Justice O’Connor was a clever politician who in her first years on the court seemed to be voting with conservatives. But before long, she evolved into the swing vote on a five-to-four divided court that nearly always swung left on social issues. In 1993, she voted with the majority upholding the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. From a conservative standpoint, O’Connor was not the worst choice ever by a Republican president for the Supreme Court, but she was pretty bad. Ronald Reagan, Jim Baker, and Ken Starr were wrong about her, and I was right.

         

ALTHOUGH I WAS no lapdog for Ronald Reagan, I applauded much in his presidency—far more than any other president in my twenty-four years in Washington. On July 29, 1981, the House passed the historic Reagan tax cut. I watched from the House Press Gallery, where one of my colleagues said sarcastically, “Well Novak, I guess this is a really big day for you.” The tax bill followed passage of a Reagan-backed budget that curtailed the growth in government spending. I wrote in an Evans & Novak column published two days after the tax bill passed:

The House vote capped the passage of Reagan’s economic package in 200 days, a feat unmatched since Franklin Roosevelt’s 100 days in 1933. It also was a unique personal triumph for Rep. Jack Kemp, who began his tax crusade seven years ago against bipartisan ridicule. But in addition, it revealed profound political misconceptions by the Democrats.

Those misconceptions were reflected in Speaker O’Neill’s bitter closing speech to the House in which he called this “a great day for the aristocracy.” I wrote: “To the very end, Tip O’Neill could not believe that the people really prefer lower taxes to bigger government.” I recall that speech whenever I hear romantic nonsense about the Reagan-O’Neill “friendship” in a golden era of bipartisanship.

Five days after the tax bill passed, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—the only labor union that endorsed Reagan in 1980—broke their no-strike oath. Secretary of Transportation Lewis and Attorney General Smith pleaded with Reagan to negotiate rather than risk national economic chaos. Reagan was adamant, as he made clear over live TV on Monday, August 7, from the White House Rose Garden, where (I wrote in an Evans & Novak column) he taught “the striking PATCO union a lesson they were learning the hard way.”

The lesson: when Ronald Reagan picks a target, he is as blunt and stubborn as a sledgehammer, despite his velvet glove of affability.

Among the 13,000 striking controllers, learning that lesson will cause anguish, tears and probably tragedy after the excitement of early combat wears off…Reagan’s sense of his own rectitude is the real guarantee against retreat.

I concluded that this performance was “likely to reverse the dangerous erosion of presidential power at a time the Western World has maximum need for a strong presidency.” That final paragraph in my August 7 column generated widespread derision that I had lost all sense of perspective. In fact, it was understated. We now know that the impact of Reagan’s resolve in the air controller strike reached into the heart of the Kremlin. A week later, after breakfast with me at the Hay Adams, Lyn Nofziger confided he was advising Reagan that he had made his point and now should let the air controllers go back to work. Reagan refused. He knew better than Nofziger, a hard conservative, that the benefits of his principled position would be lost if he pulled defeat from the jaws of victory.

The tax bill’s passage and the air controller strike confirmed that this was no ordinary presidency. I had a selfish satisfaction. We had sent the final pages of The Reagan Revolution to the publisher in June, before these events took place. Our preview of the Reagan presidency was a gamble that it would not look ordinary when published in September. We won the bet.

         

THE EARLIEST REVIEW of The Reagan Revolution, the first Evans & Novak book in ten years, was delivered orally by Maurice P. Novak. My father tried to read everything that ever appeared under my byline. He did not like The Reagan Revolution.

“It’s too uncritical. You’re too soft on Reagan,” he said. My father was a liberal Republican who just did not like Reagan, even though he had voted for him rather than endure four more years of Jimmy Carter. In contrast, my mother loved the book and felt Reagan was the best president of her long lifetime.

The split verdict by my parents predicted the verdict by reviewers in early September. This was the most ideological book written by Rowly and me. Admirers of Reagan liked the book. Nonadmirers did not.

James Fallows, the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly who had been a White House speechwriter for President Carter, was snide in the New York Times Book Review. He complained about our “near-total enthusiasm for the ‘revolution’ that they describe,” adding: “I suspect (and here I display my own bias) that in future years that they will not look with pleasure on their explanations of how the President will be able to cut taxes and increase military spending without worrying about a budget deficit.” (Twenty-four years later, I still “look with pleasure” at what I wrote.) I think Fallows’s admitted bias was personal. As a Carter speechwriter, he had leaked me material, expressed unhappiness about the way I used it and then anguished that he had leaked against his better judgment.

I had no personal experience with Anthony Holden, an editor at The Times of London who was even more snide than Fallows in reviewing for the Washington Post Book World. Holden was particularly derisive of our interview with Reagan, calling the president “fundamentally inarticulate.” Charles Kaiser produced the nastiest review in the New Republic, asserting that “no one has ever substituted sycophancy for skepticism more successfully” than we did and assailed our “determination to transform themselves from journalists into official publicists for their newest hero.”

In plugging the Nixon book in 1971, I got a gracious reception from Phil Donahue on his new TV talk show, then based in Dayton, Ohio. Donahue, now rich, famous, and relocated to Chicago, greeted me in 1981 with abuse for being a Reagan patsy. He was obsessed by the official White House photograph on the book jacket showing me smiling at Reagan. “Whatever happened to the tough reporter Novak we used to know?” he asked.

On the other side Fred Barnes of the Baltimore Sun (a conservative and friend) took issue with Fallows in the American Spectator for writing “a snotty, barely serious critique.” Edwin M. Yoder Jr., editorial page editor of the Washington Star (no conservative but also my friend) in the Washington Journalism Review called us “masters of the subcurrents of personal fealty and influence that stir beneath deceptively placid surfaces.”

The content of The Reagan Revolution has enjoyed a long shelf life—cited frequently in books about Reagan, particularly its long sections on supply-side economics. But its sales were disappointing, perhaps suppressed by the unprecedented ideological defection of a key Reagan official that threatened to bring down Reagan’s Revolution.