Power Game (54 page)

“We had a lot of hot spots out there,” Battista recalled with a grin. “So I said to the pilot, ‘Okay, point me to the tank.’ And when we came buzzing in, he found the tank. But at a very small fraction of sixty-five thousand feet slant range. He found the tank when he was practically inside the gun barrel.” In short, the heat seeker had been confused by decoy fires and had to get so close to find the tank that the tank would have destroyed the fighter plane before it could have fired its Maverick-guided missile. When Battista reported that to his subcommittee, it slowed approval of the Maverick program.

About a year later, some Air Force brass brought in videotapes of planes using the Maverick system. The film seemed pretty impressive until Battista, tipped off by a Pentagon mole, told Representative Tom Downey, “Make ’em play the sound track.” When Downey made the request, the Air Force generals got flustered. “They’re hiding something,” Downey charged. Finally the sound track was played.

“The reason they didn’t want to play the sound was because it was hard to make out what was being destroyed,” Downey recalled. “In a couple of instances they were blowing up burning bushes and trucks instead of tanks. You could tell from the sound track because you had the pilots talking to one another, saying such things as, ‘Holy shit, you just blew up a truck!’ One guy was very clever. In the tape he was talking about blowing up burning bushes, and he was glad he wasn’t there in Moses’ time, because he would have been responsible for killing God.”
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Again, Battista’s bird-dogging slowed the Maverick program and forced improvements. Battista later lamented, however, that the program was eventually pushed through by heavy lobbying on the Senate
side. Battista had bird-dogged a wounded bird, but the political hunters did not choose to kill the program.

“Big constituency,” Battista explained. “Program worth several billion dollars. It’s a production item now.”

Battista defies other axioms of the staff game. One such axiom claims that staff directors gain clout from powerful committee chairmen. Battista is an exception. He has been powerful for years, but never more powerful than when the R and D Subcommittee was chaired by Mel Price, a feeble, almost absentee boss in his late seventies. Battista stepped into the vacuum. “Tony runs that subcommittee; there’s no question about that,” veteran New York Democrat Samuel Stratton declared with gruff respect.
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Battista also leads with his chin, colliding with senior congressmen such as Stratton. Once he stormed into a hearing of the R and D Subcommittee to protest that Battista was invading the turf of Stratton’s Procurement Subcommittee by investigating the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Since the Bradley was already being bought (procured, in Pentagon jargon), Stratton considered it his worry, not Battista’s. But Battista was not intimidated; he insisted the R and D Subcommittee was investigating how the Bradley was tested. Stratton furiously stalked out.

More broadly, Battista has for years virtually set the R and D Subcommittee’s agenda with his personal report to the subcommittee on the Pentagon’s R and D budget. Normally, the weapons that he says are in trouble get close scrutiny, ones he says are okay pass easily. In 1985, Battista recommended killing twenty-two proposed weapons systems, and the House Armed Services Committee went along on every item, though in conference with the Senate, it backed down on most—but not before imposing restrictions urged by Battista.

Pentagon officials bristle over what they consider Battista’s micro-management of their programs. “What I object to is that Battista runs his own empire,” one thirty-year Pentagon official turned lobbyist angrily told me. “He’s like his own Department of Defense without accountability. Thousands of people put the defense budget together, generals and civilians. It’s a consensus opinion. So it’s sent up there, and here’s one guy, Tony Battista, who hasn’t been elected, who doesn’t have anyone to answer to except the members, and he sits down and says, ‘I don’t like the way they’re doing it.’ In a few months, this one guy changes hundreds of things that thousands of people have worked on for a year. Mind you, he may be right on some items. He’s intelligent. He’s able. But it’s not the right way to run a railroad.”

But in Congress, some members compare Battista to Ken Dryden, the legendary ice hockey goal tender of the Montreal Canadiens; Battista does not let the Pentagon get things past him. “Day in and day out, Battista’s the most honest, most knowledgeable staff guy around, and he’s not afraid to jam some general,” commented Thomas Downey, a Long Island Democrat.
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“In the Pentagon, officers get rotated in and out of these jobs as often as the Yankees change relief pitchers. That always gave Battista an enormous competitive advantage. I mean, he’s a hawk on defense. No two ways about it. But, he doesn’t play favorites. He goes after people who he knows are notoriously ripping off the government.”

Reagan’s “Staff Presidency”

Just as the power of congressional staff has grown overall in the 1970s and 1980s, so has the force and authority of the White House staff—rising even more steeply. But there is an important difference: In Congress, staff power has sprawled and spread into many more hands; the opposite trend has taken place at the White House. The human apparatus of the Executive Office of the President has gained size and muscle since the 1960s, a symbol of more centralized power within the executive branch. And staff power has become more concentrated near the apex: the chief of staff, national security adviser, budget director, and one or two other aides, depending on the style of each president.

The common thread between the White House and Capitol Hill is that the shadow government of staff has gained power at the expense of those formally and publicly assumed to exercise power: Congress and the cabinet.

Never was White House staff power more dramatically demonstrated than in Ronald Reagan’s disastrous Iranian hostage operation. That policy was devised, promoted, and protected by successive national security advisers Robert McFarlane and Rear Admiral John Poindexter and run by their staff aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North—despite the objections of the senior cabinet figures, Secretary of State George Shultz, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. In particular, Poindexter and North skirted chains of command in other agencies, keeping the very top level officials in the dark. Poindexter even usurped the president’s power by deciding to divert profits from the Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan
contras
. He carried staff power to excess, but Reagan’s style of delegating power and his lack of interest in all but the broad sweep of policy invited bold action by his staff.

One of the hollow rituals of American political life is the periodic extolling of cabinet government by presidential candidates and presidents-elect. They love to proclaim their intention to restore collegial rule at the cabinet table. The myth is that cabinet secretaries run the government with the White House staff in the shadows. That is far from reality, but somehow new presidents, especially those who come from state governments, are innocents about this.

In August 1976, I visited Jimmy Carter at his home in Plains, Georgia, just after he had won the Democratic presidential nomination. Quite deliberately, Carter wanted to strike a contrast with the arrogant “palace guard” of Nixon’s White House staff. He told me over mint-flavored iced tea that he would have no chief of staff, would institute genuine cabinet government, and that he was even considering a parliamentary “question time,” where his Cabinet members would appear before the houses of Congress to answer questions.
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Those ideas all fell victim to reality, without much serious attempt to apply them.

Four years later, during a campaign flight from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Columbia, South Carolina, I squeezed into an airline seat beside candidate Ronald Reagan, who explained how his administration would achieve true cabinet government, modeled after his governorship of California.
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Indeed, Edmond Meese, who had run Governor Reagan’s California staff and became presidential counselor in Reagan’s White House, did set up an intricate structure of cabinet councils. But more significantly, Reagan quickly established one of the most powerful and effective White House staffs of the modern presidency under Meese and Chief of Staff James Baker III. Reagan delegated enormous authority to that staff.

In his first year as President, Reagan used the cabinet councils to “roundtable” issues, in one of Meese’s pet phrases (shorthand for discussing it around the table). But pretty soon it was apparent that those councils were more a vehicle for White House control of the cabinet than a forum where the president hammered out policy decisions. As former Secretary of State Alexander Haig complained to me, White House staff members managed the council agendas. Ultimately, Reagan got a reputation for taking little snoozes in cabinet meetings. When the press found out, Reagan turned it into a joke. I remember his quipping at one press banquet that he did not have to worry about his place in history because it was already secure. “I can see it now,” he said. “A plaque behind my chair in the Cabinet Room:
RONALD REAGAN SLEPT HERE
.”

Reagan’s practice, his intimates reported, was to thrash out his key decisions during small skull sessions with his first-term White House troika: Baker, Meese, and Reagan’s close confidant, Michael Deaver, who was deputy chief of staff. One or two other key officials might be there, too—people such as David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget; two less well known but very important aides, Richard Darman (Baker’s deputy), and Craig Fuller (Meese’s deputy). On foreign policy matters, National Security Adviser William P. Clark and his successor, Robert McFarlane, were often participants. Oval Office sessions were usually grouped around the president’s desk or with Reagan sitting in a high-backed wing chair near the fireplace and the others in two facing couches. To me, Darman’s version of those sessions was very revealing.

“It was a seven-vote presidency, with the president having four votes and Meese, Baker, and Deaver each having one vote,” Darman told me. “Reagan was very reluctant to make a decision when Baker and Meese were divided. He didn’t like casting the deciding vote between the two of them. To help them resolve the conflict, they’d call in the others. The rest of us did not have a vote. We were there as friends of the court, to provide information.”
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In the first formative months in 1981, the headlines went to the president, Secretary Haig, and Stockman. But Meese, Baker, and Deaver—who became known as Reagan’s troika—were the nerve center of the administration, orchestrating the Reagan presidency. They guided the new cabinet and the entire Reagan entourage, sifting all key appointments, setting the agenda and the priorities, formulating strategy and establishing links with Congress, helping the president set the tone for his stewardship. Baker and Meese took the substantive lead, and in that sphere Deaver was not their equal. But Deaver was the best at reading Reagan’s moods, delivering bad news, staging him in public, or privately coaxing him into or out of some action the others thought wise or unwise.

The staff’s power was clearly illustrated on March 30, 1981, the day Reagan was shot. The troika set up a command post at George Washington University Hospital. Deaver, who was emotionally closer to Reagan than anyone else, was at his side, catching the president’s jokes, watching him scrawl wobbly notes, including one that asked murkily: “Am I dead?” Baker and Meese (with advice from Deaver) were the ones who decided—not the cabinet or the vice president—that Reagan’s bullet wound and two hours of surgery did not require invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which would have
permitted naming Bush acting president until Reagan regained consciousness and strength. When documents for invoking the amendment appeared at a rump cabinet session in the White House Situation Room, another high staffer, Richard Darman, hustled them off the table and into a safe.
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In Reagan’s second term, the main levers of White House power were largely taken over by one figure, Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan. Not only did Regan control the White House machinery, but he was also invariably a participant in the tight little meetings where key decisions were set, and which usually included Vice President Bush, sometimes the most important cabinet secretaries, or National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and his successor, Vice Admiral John Poindexter.

When the president had surgery in 1985 for a cancerous polyp, Donald Regan (at the urging of Nancy Reagan, who did not want her bedridden husband disturbed) told Bush he could not see the president for several days and advised him to stay away in Maine on vacation—advice that Bush ignored. This pattern of staff supremacy was so pronounced that Lee Iacocca, the outspoken Chrysler chairman, protested that “Don Regan is the most powerful man in this country, and none of us ever had a chance to vote on it.” That was an exaggeration, but Iacocca caught the drift.

The Reagan presidency has probably been simultaneously the most centralized and staff-dominated presidency in history. The broad vision was limned by Reagan; and the second-term Cabinet had more power than the first. But overall, the Reagan presidency could be called a staff presidency because Reagan gave so much authority and latitude to his senior staff aides. Budget strategy was the province of Baker and David Stockman in the first term, taken over by Donald Regan in the second term. To get around Congress and sidestep dissent in the cabinet, the national security staff became Reagan’s agents for the Iranian arms caper and for funding and arming the Nicaraguan
contras
. Where there were political obstacles, Reagan bypassed them by using his staff and then claimed they were immune from the laws of Congress, as he claimed he was. That massive assumption of staff power, not accountable to Congress, provoked an uproar on Capitol Hill. Congress saw the president using his staff to avoid the checks and balances of the Constitution.