The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

for a year while an independent counsel investigated his financial dealings. Once in the job, Meese would continue to be at the center of controversy as he sought to translate into policy the Reagan administration’s stances on abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and religion. For fighting those battles, Meese would gain a place as a conservative hero. But many of his initiatives were blocked by Congress and the Supreme Court, and ethical questions continued to dog him. His legal difficulties culminated in his resignation in 1988, after yet another independent counsel probe. The prosecutor declined to indict him for filing a false tax return but portrayed him as disorganized and indifferent to appearances of impropriety.

Nancy was glad to see Meese go. His ideological inflexibility had always troubled her, she wrote. “It also made me squirm that he kept getting into trouble in his financial life. He made a series of mistakes which embarrassed the presidency, and some men in his situation would have stepped down. Eventually he did, but in my opinion he waited far too long and weakened both the Justice Department and the presidency.”

From Nancy’s perspective, the departures of Baker and especially Deaver would bring a more unwelcome change. They had been her most crucial allies, the cutouts through whom she could work her will in the West Wing without leaving fingerprints. The shuffle would also put into Baker’s place as White House chief of staff the man who would become her greatest internal nemesis: Donald T. Regan.

Regan came from a blue-collar background in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard on scholarship. As a US Marine in World War II, he fought across the Pacific Theater from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, and then came home to work his way up from stockbroker and become the youngest-ever president of Wall Street behemoth Merrill Lynch. A CEO by temperament, Regan first proposed the idea of a job swap to Baker a few days after the 1984 landslide. Baker jumped at the opportunity. He was exhausted by the irregular hours at the White House and the constant barrage of what he called “javelins” from the Right. Though Baker had his eye on becoming secretary of state, George Shultz wasn’t going anywhere. Running the Treasury Department would also give him a central role in what was potentially the biggest domestic policy initiative of the second term: a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s tax laws. But to make it happen, Baker told Regan, “We need to get Deaver involved.”

Part of it was courtesy. At one point, Baker knew, Deaver himself had wanted to be White House chief of staff. But there was another reason to loop him in: Deaver could make sure the idea went over with Nancy. When Baker arranged for Regan to have lunch with him and Deaver, Regan noticed Deaver “listened to our words with the polite air of a man who had already heard what he was now being told and had made up his mind how to react. I supposed that Baker had sketched in the details beforehand. In my innocence, the thought that Deaver had cleared the plan with the first lady before discussing it with me, or even the president, did not occur to me.”

They presented their proposal to Ronnie in early January in the Oval Office. The president’s reaction struck Regan as surprisingly impassive. Ronnie asked only a few questions and showed little curiosity about how the new arrangement would work. “He seemed to be absorbing a fait accompli rather than making a decision,” Regan recalled. “One might have thought that the matter had already been settled by some absent party.” In fact, Ronnie was relieved. There would now be one person running operations in the White House, rather than three. He wrote in his diary that the job swap had the potential to “resolve a lot of problems.”

Deaver, by then, was well along on his plans to make his own exit. He was forty-six years old and, except for a year as an IBM sales trainee, had never worked for anyone but Ronald Reagan. As Deaver himself acknowledged, he had little interest in the details of policy. But no one was better at figuring out how to stage an event—or, as Deaver put it, “blending the gifts of Ronald Reagan with the proper pageantry.” Still, for all the acclaim he had gotten as “Magic Mike” and “the Vicar of Visuals,” Deaver had come to resent the subtext, which was that he was nothing more than a glorified family retainer; an image maker devoid of any real depth.

When Deaver finally made up his mind to leave, he told Nancy first. She asked him to stay for another year, and he was firm with her that he couldn’t. If he didn’t go now, he might never be able to bring himself to do it. Then Deaver went to the Oval Office.

“You know, Mike, I like to think I’m the only indispensable person around here, but the truth is…” Ronnie began.

Deaver put up his hand. “Please, Ron, don’t say whatever you were going to say. Don’t do that to me,” he said. It was, Deaver would later realize, the only time he had ever given himself license to use the president’s first name to his face.

At one o’clock in the afternoon on January 3, 1985, the White House announced his resignation. It also put out a statement by Nancy: “I’ll miss him, but I think he’ll be nearby.” At Deaver’s going-away party in the Rose Garden, Ronnie made an unusual request of White House aide Fred Ryan. He wanted Ryan to arrange for Deaver, though he no longer worked for the president, to continue to hold a pass that would allow him unfettered access to the White House grounds.

Deaver had promised to stick around long enough to do one last job for Ronnie and Nancy, which was to orchestrate the president’s next big overseas trip. But rather than being the grace note that Deaver had hoped, the trip to