Reagan's Cutting Edge

At 7:30 on a Sunday night, David Stockman sits alone at a conference table in the cavernous, ornate sanctum of the director of the Office of Management and Budget, poring with total concentration over computer printouts and tables of figures. When a visitor arrives to keep a dinner date, Stockman appears disappointed. "Is it that time already? I need five more minutes." Before the words are out, his gaze has returned to the papers.

Finally, the OMB director struggles into his jacket and overcoat and starts down the corridor. "We've got just two more weeks," he says over his shoulder. The deadline he is referring to is Feb. 18, when Ronald Reagan plans to announce the details of his fiscal program, including radical surgery on the federal budget.

Stockman, a bachelor, pursues his 14-hour-a-day schedule, which includes lobbying Congressmen and haggling with Cabinet officers, with a special sense of urgency. If the Administration cannot quickly build support for its unorthodox economic ideas, then Ronald Reagan may fail his central domestic test. Stockman, with his knack for hyperbole, has warned of "incalculable erosion of G.O.P. momentum, unity and public confidence," if the Reagan program is not well on its way to enactment by midyear. There is personal urgency as well. Circumstances and Stockman's own aggressive zeal have made him the most visible and influential of the President's economic policymakers. Though Stockman has won praise from many members of Congress, controversy is beginning to build.

Pausing between his antipasto and a large plate of fettucini for one of the five cigarettes he smokes during dinner, he reflects on his image. He is a young man of 34 preaching hellacious economic sermons to other Cabinet members and congressional committee chairmen old enough to be his father. Neither his prematurely gray hair nor his earnest manner adds any years to his appearance. "If this thing doesn't work," he concludes, "I know I'll get the blame." Then he shrugs. "So I'll go to something else."

Thus far, Stockman has never lacked for job opportunities. Raised on a farm near St. Joseph, Mich., he learned local politics from his maternal grandfather, a county official and Goldwater Republican. At Michigan State University in the mid-'60s, he came under the influence of the antiwar movement and a left-wing instructor. "I became a soft-core radical," he recalls. But he remained a faithful Methodist, channeling his antiwar advocacy through church efforts.

His interest in religion brought him to Harvard Divinity School at a time when Cambridge was in a state of ferment. Stockman became estranged from what he calls the "nihilistic radicalism" of the period. He found refuge as a live-in babysitter for Daniel P. Moynihan, then a Cambridge-Washington commuter while serving as an adviser to Richard Nixon. At home on weekends, Moynihan, now a U.S. Senator from New York, treated graduate students to brandy-spiced evenings of political conversation. "I became Moynihanized," Stockman says. "I was looking for an alternative viewpoint that was respectable, while being anti-left."

Politics replaced theology as his obsession, and in 1970, Stockman abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate to join Congressman John Anderson's office in Washington. He soon became a senior adviser on fiscal affairs, learning his economics chiefly from literature of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, and the works of right-wing economists. In 1976 he went home to Michigan to win his own seat in Congress.

Then, last year, came a novel opportunity: he was asked to impersonate Anderson as Reagan prepared for their debate in September. The assertive young Congressman was an excellent sparring partner. Among other things, he accused Reagan of wanting to "throw open the door of Alaska to allow the rape of our last frontier" and of being unconcerned about acid rain. Against such thrusts, Reagan practiced calm parries. He responded to Stockman by saying, "Well, you know, John, I think you need a gas mask."

Stockman was campaigning in his south Michigan district the following month when he received an urgent call for a rematch. Now he was to impersonate Carter as Reagan rehearsed for the campaign's pivotal debate. Said Reagan, after that encounter: "I lost every practice debate with Stockman. After him, Anderson and Carter were a piece of cake." At Thanksgiving, the President-elect phoned to tell Stockman: "David, I've been looking for a way to get even. I think I'll send you to OMB."

Of all the Administration's senior officials, Stockman is clearly the boldest and the most ideological. He often uses sweeping, strident language, as when he called the federal budget an "automatic coast-to-coast soup line." He revels in taking unpopular positions and shows disdain for most economists: "They've been dead wrong, persistently." While he wants the Government to reduce most social welfare programs drastically, he would make even deeper cuts in subsidies for business interests and agriculture. Though Republicans generally blame most of the economy's present difficulties on Democratic folly, Stockman believes that one of the most damaging moves of the past decade was Nixon's decision in 1971 to end gold convertibility. Says Stockman: "That created the conditions for rampant production of paper money all around the world."

Reagan has admonished his Cabinet to avoid timidity, but a few members are wondering if Stockman takes that order too far in acting as the cutting edge of Reagan's economic policies. Says one White House official: "We're hearing gripes from some of the department heads." Reagan's confidence in Stockman is high enough to create a little jealousy on the part of new department heads who know less about their programs and budgets than the youngster who has been studying the budget ever since he joined Anderson's staff. When Reagan watches Stockman perform at private meetings, says one participant, "the President gets that pleased smile that says 'This guy's really got it.'

Washington is wondering how long Stockman can keep "it." Reagan's trust in his lightning rod could weaken if it is struck too often. In the budget battles that lie ahead, what could damage Stockman most is his determination to be more of a Reaganite than Ronald Reagan.

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