WHITE HOUSE CABINET ROOM
WASHINGTON, DC
MARCH 2, 1987
10:58 A.M.
Ronald Reagan is being watched very closely.
The president sits in his high-backed chair at the center of the mahogany table. His son Ron Jr. is a guest at today’s Cabinet meeting, which has put Reagan in a jovial mood. Since their father’s being reelected three years ago, the president’s children have been cashing in on his fame. Ron Jr. has written articles for Playboy and even appeared in his underwear on Saturday Night Live, but he has always been loyal to his father. This is not the case with Reagan’s other children. Daughter Patti has written a book savaging her father and the entire Reagan household. And soon, son Michael’s painful tell-all is due in stores. Meanwhile, the national press has begun a scathing series of broadsides against Nancy Reagan, blaming her for masterminding the recent firing of White House chief of staff Don Regan.
It was a battle so vicious and so public that Saturday Night Live lampooned the schism between the First Lady and Regan. All of this has led to growing criticism that the White House is out of control.1
That is why, in addition to Ron Jr., there are four other special guests at the morning’s Cabinet meeting.
The new chief of staff, former Tennessee senator Howard Baker (no relation to James), is one of those in attendance. He has asked the White House counsel, A. B. Culvahouse, and director of communications Thomas Griscom to observe the president. The final member of the group, sixty-nine-year-old Washington insider Jim Cannon, is the author of a recent report detailing the inner workings of the White House. Commissioned at Howard Baker’s request, Cannon conducted formal interviews with employees throughout the West Wing.
He was shocked by what he learned.
The battle between Nancy Reagan and Don Regan is just the beginning. Cannon has uncovered evidence that the White House is in chaos at all levels. Ronald Reagan’s aides are forging his initials to documents, Cabinet members are ignoring presidential policy to push their own agendas, and down in the White House basement, Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North has spent years illegally selling arms to Iran and then diverting the cash to Contra fighters in Nicaragua. North knew he was breaking the law.
But Ronald Reagan is not engaged in many day-to-day White House activities. He delegates much power to Nancy. Occasionally, he avoids the Oval Office altogether, spending hours during the day watching television reruns in the upstairs residence. Even more troubling, it is no longer a given that the president will take the time to read important policy papers.
After reporting that information to Baker yesterday, Cannon went on to suggest that Ronald Reagan may no longer be fit to serve as president of the United States.
This bold statement is more than mere rhetoric.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that if “the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.”
But Vice President Bush doesn’t know anything about what’s going on.
Only if the four observers decide that Ronald Reagan is impaired will Bush be told.
As radical as this might sound, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment has already been invoked during Reagan’s presidency. On July 13, 1985, the president underwent a colonoscopy to remove a precancerous lesion. At 10:32 that morning, he signed a document handing the presidency over to George H. W. Bush. For eight hours, the vice president ran the country but ceded power back to Reagan as soon as the president emerged from the anesthesia.
But now Reagan seems to be in permanent decline. In addition to the colon surgery and his hearing aids, Reagan recently underwent surgery for an enlarged prostate, which forces him to use the restroom frequently. He will soon undergo another procedure to have a cancerous melanoma removed from his nose. The president is now visibly frail, no longer the robust older gentleman who entered the White House six years ago. His energy level is lower. He naps frequently. His eyes often have a dull look, and he sometimes has trouble recognizing people that he has known for years.
Little does the president know it, but even loyal and uncritical Ron Jr. believes his father is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
So it is that Howard Baker, Jim Cannon, A. B. Culvahouse, and Thomas Griscom sit along one wall scrutinizing the president’s every action. Reagan does not know about Cannon’s report, and the Cabinet meeting does not seem unusual to him.
But it is unusual. If the president shows signs of incoherence, he might not be president much longer.
* * *
Ronald Reagan’s mental and physical woes, however, are not the greatest crisis of his presidency. The real test of his leadership began four months earlier, on November 3, 1986. An Iranian cleric leaked news that the United States was selling arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages throughout the Middle East. Faced with the embarrassing report, Ronald Reagan appeared live on national television and explained that his administration has sold “small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts” to Iran. But the president denied any knowledge of trading arms for hostages.
“Those charges are utterly false,” he told the massive TV audience.
“We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages—nor will we.”
But the people do not believe him. In a poll taken shortly after the appearance, 62 percent of Americans believe the president is lying.
One week later, Attorney General Edwin Meese confronted Reagan in the Oval Office. Meese knows that Lt. Col. Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, have destroyed hundreds of documents connected to the so-called Iran-Contra scandal. In fact, North and Hall shredded so many files that the machine jammed, forcing Hall to smuggle documents out of the office in her boots and panties.
But North and Hall were sloppy, overlooking one key memorandum linking the Reagan administration to the illegal arms sale.2 In hushed tones, Meese informs Reagan of the smoking gun.
Edwin Meese is a Reagan loyalist. Along with Michael Deaver and James Baker, he has advised Reagan on almost every important issue confronting his presidency. Now serving as attorney general, Meese warned Reagan that he faced impeachment if he did not publicly acknowledge that America sold arms to Iran.
Reagan was stunned but admitted nothing. Instead, he convened a presidential commission to investigate Iran-Contra.3
Nancy Reagan was livid. She did not blame her husband for the illegal scheme that took place with his permission.
She blamed Donald Regan.
The sixty-eight-year-old former marine is a tough Boston Irishman who rose to head the Merrill Lynch investment firm. From there, he became secretary of the treasury and eventually White House chief of staff. He likened his job to that of “a shovel brigade following a parade down Main Street.” He said this because he was constantly fighting Nancy Reagan and the messes she created. Nancy’s determination to control the president’s schedule and her reliance on an astrologer to chart her husband’s every move struck him as madness. But she had the president’s full backing, so Regan was powerless to stop her.
Early in his White House tenure Don Regan discovered just how strong an adversary Nancy Reagan could be when she insisted that he fire Margaret Heckler, the secretary of health and human services. Heckler was one of only two women holding high positions in the Reagan administration. She was a timid person, but Nancy despised her, feeling she was an embarrassment to her husband.4 Yet neither the First Lady nor the chief of staff has the power to fire a Cabinet member, especially one who is sitting in a hospital undergoing a hysterectomy.
“I want her fired,” Nancy told Regan in a call to his home one night. The president was completing his regular evening workout. This was her favorite time to call Regan, who got three times as many calls from Nancy as from her husband. Very often, Regan could hear the sound of the president’s rowing machine in the background when he picked up the phone.
“But she’s recuperating from a hysterectomy,” Regan replied.
“I don’t care. Fire her.”
“I can’t do it while she’s in the hospital.”
“I don’t care. Fire the goddamned woman,” Nancy Reagan said, seething.
Regan gave in, and Margaret Heckler suddenly became the ambassador to Ireland—far away from Nancy Reagan.
The same fate befell Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan, White House communications director Pat Buchanan, and CIA director William Casey. Nancy insisted that Casey be fired even as he lay in a hospital bed dying of a brain tumor. “He can’t do his job,” she argued with Regan, who once again questioned the humanity of the decision. “He’s an embarrassment to Ronnie.”
By January 1987, as the Iran-Contra scandal continued to erode Reagan’s credibility, Nancy had taken complete control of the White House.
“The President’s schedule is the single most potent tool in the White House,” Regan will write, “because it determines what the most powerful man in the world is going to do and when he is going to do it. By humoring Mrs. Reagan we gave her this tool, or, more accurately, gave it to an unknown woman in San Francisco who believed that the zodiac controls events and human behavior and that she could read the secrets of the future in the movement of the planets.”
Regan was referring to the astrologist Joan Quigley. Thanks to Nancy’s intervention, Ronald Reagan now goes nowhere and does nothing without approval from Miss Quigley. Nancy is also receiving advice from a second stargazer, Jeane Dixon, but it is Quigley who has Nancy’s ear and who is telling her the president should not appear in public until May because of “the malevolent movements of Uranus and Saturn.”
Donald Regan was appalled. He insisted that the president needed to be seen in public. Hunkering down in the White House at the height of the Iran-Contra fiasco made it look as if he were hiding something. But other than his State of the Union address on January 27, 1987, and some other official business, Ronald Reagan does as Nancy tells him.
The president and Regan actually got along famously, often spending time alone together in the Oval Office, telling jokes. This only made Nancy Reagan more determined to edge out the chief of staff. The sniping between her and Don Regan soon seeped out into the public domain. Twice, Regan hung up on Nancy when she called to hector him. Her power continued to grow, and there was growing speculation that the president was dependent and weak.
“What is happening at the White House?” New Mexico Democrat William Richardson asked on the floor of the House of Representatives. “Who is in charge? A constituent of mine asked, ‘How can the president deal with the Soviets if he cannot settle a dispute between his wife and his chief of staff?’”
As tensions rose, Nancy becomes so insistent on firing Don Regan that the president ordered her “to get off my goddam back.”
This, too, seeped into the headlines. “Mrs. Reagan,” ABC newsman Sam Donaldson asked Nancy on camera, “did the President ask you to get off his back about Donald Regan?”
“No,” she replied curtly.
Donaldson immediately followed up with a different angle: “Have you been fighting over this?”
“No,” she insisted.
Finally, as Nancy knew he would, Ronald Reagan gave in.
“Something has to be done,” Ronald Reagan admitted to Nancy, who had already lined up former Tennessee senator Howard Baker to be Regan’s replacement. The president did not deliver the news to his chief of staff in person. On February 27, Regan discovered he was out of a job when Nancy issued a statement to cable news outlet CNN.
Four days later, Nancy Reagan gave an address to the American Camp Association in which she viciously mocked Regan. “I don’t think most people associate me with leeches,” she told the audience of eighteen hundred, “but I know how to get them off. I’m an expert at it.”
* * *
Soon the storm passes. As the president’s staff likes to say, “He has his good days and he has his bad days.” Today, March 2, 1987, is a good day for Ronald Reagan. Even though his chief of staff has been fired, and the Tower Commission has leveled blame for the Iran-Contra scandal on him, he is in a jovial mood and jokes his way through the Cabinet meeting that his son watches. To the four men observing Reagan, he possesses an easy command of facts while telling his usual anecdotes about his Hollywood days. At lunch, the president is even looser, swapping jokes with new chief of staff Howard Baker and looking every bit the most powerful man in the world.5
Without knowing that he has done so, Ronald Reagan has passed a test.
There will be no invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
But another stern trial is just two days away.