REAGAN OUT OF CONTROL

Christopher Buckley sees no sign

that the President will act, not react, to save himself

Washington IN A few weeks President Reagan will give his sixth State of the Union Address. Quite a bit of preparation goes into these speeches. White House staffers, high and low, are asked to submit potential `themes'. His previous five have tended to sound the line that 'America is standing tall again'. Last year's presented a problem, since the space shuttle Challenger blew up the morning the President was scheduled to speak. (The address was postponed.) The circumstances surrounding this year's State of the Union will be slightly less difficult: no boom, but plenty of gloom.

The meetings to select 1987's `themes' have already begun. One was held in the Oval Office just before Christmas. One Republican member of Congress who attended it reported that 'the President listened, but the whole exercise had an air of complete unreality, because we all knew that he had his mind totally on other things'. Unreal as that meeting may have been, what is most remarkable about the present situation is its air of complete reality.

Even the President's closest friends have long conceded that Ronald Reagan has been a very lucky man. At the eleventh hour of his 1980 campaign, a group including Professor Arthur Laffer, Con- gressman Jack Kemp, and David Stock- man — brought him something called `supply side economics'. Paul Volcker, chairman of the independent Federal Re- serve, tightened the money supply during Reagan's first year in office, causing the inflation which he had run against to plummet — no thanks, really, to him. Batch No. 1 of Americans held hostage by Iran were flown out of Teheran even as he was giving his first inaugural address.

The problem with luck, of course, is that it tends to run out. And six years is a lot of it, for any President. Looking back over some of the failures of the Reagan pres- idency — the deficit, Lebanon, the Soviet oil and gas pipeline, the mining of Nicara- guan harbours, the subsidised grain sales to the Soviet Union, the Daniloff deal, Reyk- javik — one asks: why didn't something like this happen sooner?

In part because for the first four years he had a skilled and extremely devious White House chief of staff, James Baker, now secretary of the Treasury, and his lieute- nant, Richard Darman, also now at the Treasury. Baker was willing to go so far as to sabotage some of Mr Reagan's goals such as social security reform — simply to keep him out of trouble. The result was a missed opportunity, but a re-elected Presi- dent.

For all his luck, Reagan does have a tendency to strew banana skins in his own path. Sooner or later the press gets around to reminding us of the silly roles the President played during his Hollywood days. Thankfully, no one has mentioned the chimpanzee movie lately, or made puns out of 'where's the rest of me?' Not even a `win one for the gipper'. So far, no one has remarked on one particularly unfortun- ate role of his, in The Santa Fe Trail, a 1940 turkey about a group of dashing young West Point cavalry officers who get caught up in the civil war. Errol Flynn as J.E.B. Stewart, Raymond Massie as John Brown the abolitionist, Olivia de Havilland as the woman, and Ronald Reagan as the youth- ful George Armstrong Custer, eventually of last stand fame. As the troop is getting ready to go out and hunt down the evil abolitionist, who, come to think of it, bears some resemblance to the Ayatollah, the boyish and chipper Reagan rounds a cor- ner and runs smack into Flynn and de Havilland in mid-farewell smooth. 'Oh, oh,' he grins, `that's me all over, clumsy Custer.'

Reagan has been, afflicted by crises, certainly, but never quite on the scale of Little Big Horn. Vice-President Bush, artfully toeing his way along the Teheran- Managua tightrope, quipped (after the late Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York): `When I make a mistake, I sure make a beaut.' A beaut it undeniably is.

And how un-Reaganesque. The Amer- ican people never really cared that he was a `hands-off' President, to use the euphem- ism of choice for `uninvolved'. (Asked once if he cared to attend a meeting on the deficit, the President replied: `Heck no, you guys are the experts.') Indeed, they forgave him for an extraordinary detach- ment: the Wednesday afternoons off, the 300-odd days so far spent at the ranch in California. They were even willing to forgive him for policies that resulted in the death of 250 marines in Lebanon.

But they cared, and cared deeply, about what might be collectively be called his song of America: the city upon a hill, the ever greening, kind and pleasant land, this earth, this — well, not realm — citadel of decency, this America. So when the news broke that the choirmaster had been treat- ing with the mass executioners of the Khomeini regime, Americans felt bet- rayed. `There are not five people out there', said the Republican Governor of South Dakota, `who want to send arms to Iran. The only way we want to give them arms is dropping them from the bay of a B1 bomber at 30,000 feet.'

Right. Ninety-two per cent of Americans don't know which side the US Government is supporting, the Sandinistas or the Con- tras (according to a New York Times poll a few years ago). That helps explain why the geopolitics of post-Khomeini Iran is hard to sell — out there.

Ronald Reagan is a man capable of sending bombers to Tripoli, but he was badly shaken upon being told that one of the victims of the raid was a three-year old girl, reported to be Gaddafi's daughter. (New information suggests she was not.) That is relevant here, because the origins of Iragua — Irangate, the Contraversy, as you like — were his sessions with the families of the Beirut hostages. Those left him shaken, too.

Leaving aside for a moment the stickier issue of the diversion of funds to the Contras, why hasn't the President gone on television and said: 'I don't like these People any better than you, but I could not look the wives of our hostages over there in the face any longer and say, truthfully, that I was doing everything in my power to get their husbands back. Yes, I paid a ransom. And yes, maybe I was wrong, but it was a tough call, and my call, and I made it. I hereby apologise to our allies for lecturing them about supporting terrorist regimes, which Iran surely is. And I apologise to the American people and the Congress for the manner in which this was done. I alone am responsible, the blame is mine'?

That would make a fairly dramatic insert into the State of the Union address. It would have been even more impressive at his press conference a week after the dire revelations. But late January might be too late.

Reagan missed the best opportunity to take his medicine at his (disastrous) press conference, a week after the scandal broke. Even the President's enemies would probably have forgiven him at that point. Bloody though the shark-infested waters are, America does not have an appetite for another Watergate. (To paraphrase Mr Wilde, it would take too many evenings.) His enemies would have been content with the carcasses of Colonel North and Admir- al Poindexter and with the tarnish on Reagan's image.

Mr Kissinger weighed in with sound advice in the early days of the scandal. `Above all it is essential that whoever will leave eventually must leave immediately.' The likeliest whoever was Mr Donald Regan, who so far has exhibited the tenacity of an abalone, despite the numer- ous calls for his resignation, even, re- portedly, by the first lady. One report had the President telling her to 'get off my goddam back'. Mrs Reagan had denied it by taking pains to explain to the press that the President never uses the word `god- dam'.

Though Mr Regan is held in contempt by many, this has less to do with the Iran affair than with his conduct over the past two years. He is an arrogant man who insists his subordinates call him 'chief' and who does not deign to return the telephone calls of Senators and Congressmen, who tend not to like that. He has satisfied the Senate committee, despite his previous boasts that he ran the White House with a mailed fist, that he did not know about the illegal diversion of funds. But scandals provide the opportunity to settle old scores, and most want him to go, chiefly for the sin of general incompetence, if not for venality. Everyone, that is, except the President, who is historically loathe to give People the sack. What is not absolutely clear is what would be gained by Regan's immediate departure. One White House staffer told me that his leaving would deflect the heat onto the President, who is already warm enough. The President has told the story again and again of the tragedy of his own father being fired on Christmas Eve. Mr Regan, worth a re- ported $20 million or so, is not Bob Crachit, but that he is still gainfully em- ployed in the west wing of the White House may in part have to do with the President's grim memory of that Christmas past.

The President's pollster has told him that the crisis will last four to six months, 'at best'. If he continues to act as he has so far, that is, to react, he will probably be a figurehead President by the early summer. Even before Christmas there were unset- tling quantifications of the effect of the scandal. His national approval rating plum- metted in just one month by 21 points. Now one poll taken in Iowa shows 55 per cent of Iowans disapproved of his job performance, while one in four of them say he should resign. In a way even more alarming, a mini-documentary series on his life, entitled Reagan's Way and scheduled to run in early February, when he will turn 76, has been cancelled. And a major, non-political magazine which had con- tracted to do a large spread on the White House, is apparently considering cancell- ing it. Those are worrying tea leaves.

All because the President okayed a plan to give arms to Iran? Hardly. The media have picked up the essential scent: the people feel lied to. In an astonishingly revealing remark, the President told Sena- tor Robert Dole — who as a result of all this is now running ahead of George Bush as the 1988 Republican candidate — 'Peo- ple like me, but they don't believe me.' Extraordinary anguish is contained in that simple statement. `There are two ways to hurt Ronald Reagan's feelings,' one of his closest friends said to me. 'Call him a liar or a bigot.'

Reagan has had a lifelong love affair with the American people. Whether or not this will turn out to be a lovers' quarrel, or divorce, depends not on the next six months, but on what he does over the next 30 days. It is a matter of what he does, not what Regan, or the Congress, or Colonel North, or Admiral Poindexter do. The problem is not one of damage control, but of no one in control.

But those around him seem increasingly to doubt his ability to wrestle the beaut to earth. Asked if he would watch his Secre- tary of State give testimony on the scandal before Congress, the President replied, `Only if I can't find a ballgame.' That may say more for his regard for his Secretary of State than his interest in the crisis, but the most ominous note of all came when a friend of the President told the Washington Post, 'He always enjoyed being President. I don't think he finds it fun anymore.'

Those State of the Union 'theme' meet- ings are going to be interesting this year. So too will the question of who to put in the Lenny Skutnik memorial seat. Lenny Skutnik was the young man who in 1982 drove into the icy waters of the Potomac river to help rescue a victim of an air crash. Reagan invited him to watch the address a few weeks later, and saluted him during it. It was an emotional moment, the kind that Reagan understands so well. It was there- fore institutionalised, and State of the Unions ever since have included a tribute to everyday heroes from every walk of American life, sitting there in the gallery next to Mrs Reagan. Who will be there this year: Eugene Hasenfus?

More likely, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, who on 23 December completed their circumnavigation of the globe in their aircraft Voyager without refuelling. For a country that in one year saw seven of its astronauts blown out of the sky and the most popular President in modern history brought, finally, to earth, Rutan and Yeagar touched down just in time.

Christopher Buckley is a writer living in Washington. His most recent book is The White House Mess.