“We can’t afford a weak American president who will be in office another two years.”
—West German spokesman
German politicians were not the only ones worried about the bent legs of Ronald Reagan last week. There were sounds of babbling and scrambling all over Washington, as many gentlemen of a distinctly rodentlike persuasion either quit or got pushed off The Ship. The Reagan Revolution was beginning to look like a second-hand Studebaker with bald tires.
Presidential spokesman Larry Speakes was not the first to go over the side, but his decision to leave government service and seek work in the private sector was seen as a major sign. His new job will be as communications director for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, a brokerage conglomerate. Speakes will triple his White House salary “by jumping to Wall Street,” according to “CBS Morning News,” and he weakly denied all speculation that his departure had anything to do with the specter of President Reagan being driven into an exile worse than Nixon’s by the fallout from the fateful “Iranian Transaction.”
The Big Guy is in big trouble on this one, and he will probably not survive it. He has been a hero all his life, but this time is going to be different. John Wayne is dead, and so is Ronald Reagan. This is the last reel of his last movie, and it is not going to end like the others.
He is a 77-year-old man who was once the best salesman of his time, but now he is like Willie Loman. His friends have deserted him, his wife has turned mean, and his enemies are no longer afraid. The same people who once called him “the greatest American president since George Washington” now regard him as senile—a weak and crazy albatross around the neck of The Party.
The GOP will not win another general election in this century. Ronald Reagan has served his purpose, and now he is left to wander naked and alone, like King Lear, “a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.”
There are players in Vegas today who will tell you that the odds against Reagan serving out the full four years of his second term have dropped from 13-1 to as low as 7-1 or even 6-1 in the last 10 days.
Why should he? The man has done his work. For the last 20 years he has functioned brilliantly as the flag-waving front man for a gang of fast-buck Southern California profit-takers who no longer need him. “Ron is a genuinely nice guy,” said one of them recently, “a truly decent man. But let’s face it—all he needs for early retirement, right now, is one good case of the flu.” It’s entirely possible that he may never come back to Washington in January, after Christmas break.
The Lear connection is all too clear in Reagan’s case. He is an “idle old man, that would still manage those authorities that he hath given away.” (Act I, Scene iii).
There is, in fact, a school of thought in politics that says Reagan is the only innocent player in this degraded, low-rent movie. Some people will tell you that Ed Meese is another one, or that George Bush could pass for smart or human. . . . (but they lie).
Why were all these people—the president, the attorney general, the vice president, the president’s national security adviser and his top aide, the whole ranking insider/elite administration Republicans—so desperately and totally committed to a cause called “the contras” in Central America that they would risk the whole reputation, credibility and the possibility of a humiliated Nixonlike place in history just to send just another $30 million to a fat, inarticulate Latino yuppie named Adolfo Calero in Nicaragua?
Was it worth another Watergate?
Another horror in history for the GOP?
Who is Danny Ortega? And how dangerous is he? Is he so bad that a whole generation of professional Republicans would risk everything (their lives, their truth, their sacred honor, etc.) to wipe him out now?
Who are these “contras” anyway? And why do they need so much money? Are we dealing with berserk patriots? Or common Texas thieves?
Who stood to gain by this hideous political conspiracy? Who had the motive?
Certainly it was not Ronald Reagan. The last thing in life that he needed was a scandalous nightmare of lies, crimes and gigantic money-laundering to haunt the last days of his once-splendorous presidency. No amount of money-profit from a massive and illegal arms deal with anybody—and especially not the cruel and fiendish Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran—could have drawn Reagan into this plot. It was a no-win situation.
Bush, on the other hand, had everything to gain by it, and very little to lose. His chances of becoming president of the United States in 1988 were never good. He was, of course, the vice president. . . . But he had no friends in politics, or at least not the kind he needed: Not even Reagan was going to endorse him; it was going to be another one of those humiliating scenes like Nixon had to go through with Eisenhower in 1960, when he was treated more like a stray dog than the Heir Apparent.
Nixon lost that election to John Kennedy by a margin so thin that you couldn’t even see it, and he knew in his heart that his life would have been different forever, if only Ike hadn’t laughed at him.
“We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.” That is also from Lear: Act I, Scene ii, and Bush should have it tattooed on the palm of his left hand, as he plots his campaign for the presidency.
He will, of course, need a slush fund—not unlike the one Gordon Liddy and Maurice Stans put together for Nixon in 1972. There is never enough money when you have to run for president as a contemptible underdog.
Bush is no stranger to big-time politics. He has been around the track more than any single man except Nixon, who once assigned George to head up the CIA, where he got a crash course in deep-cover “black” operations like the Iranian Transaction.
He is also the only top-level official in Washington—except perhaps for CIA Director William Casey—with provable connections to all the others involved, from Robert McFarlane and Oliver North to Israeli intelligence and Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia and Calero.
The Senate Intelligence Committee will be holding public TV hearings on the arms deal this week, and by Friday afternoon the odds on George Bush being our next president will be about 33-1.
December 8, 1986