Bottom-Line Man

By Hugh Sidey

There is the trace of the fighter in the face of Donald Regan, the urbane stockbroker polished by the Cambridge Latin School and Harvard. But nevertheless there are the wary eyes, the cleft chin, the crooked nose. It goes even deeper. Inside there are the battle traces from Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Guam and Okinawa. He admits it. "No training for anything except fighting," he says, recalling 1946, when he left the Marines to take on Merrill Lynch. He won that engagement too, rising to the jobs of president in 1968, chairman in 1971. Now he is sitting in the large, sunny office of the Secretary of the Treasury, still athletic and tough and, though roughed up in some of the opening skirmishes of the new Administration's strange war of wealth and poverty, relishing the unfolding national battle.

The brilliance of Axman David Stockman, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, has dazzled the Washington Establishment and led to reports that Regan is a diminished, foundering figure. He does not seem that way. Like a wise division commander, he is moving to meld Stockman, the aggressive strike force chief, into an overall economic command structure that in the end will reflect nothing so much as the will and mind of President Ronald Reagan.

Donald Regan is a bottom-line man. Individual reputations mean nothing in a failure. "We've come this far now," says Regan. "Ronald Reagan has his chance. Were he not to succeed in his goal, I'm afraid that an awful lot of America's future would be lost along with it."

That larger interest haunts the Treasury Secretary. Says Regan: "Our test is going to be whether or not the average person in the U.S., looking at all the things that he or she is engaged in, will sublimate the one or two things that are important to them for the overall good of everything ... It is going to take time to get it over. With the Government cutting back, people are going to have to say, well, gee, you know, what am I going to do? Is my county government going to do it? Is my state government going to do it? Who is going to do this for me? And pretty soon it's going to dawn on them that an awful lot is going to have to be done by themselves."

Regan is unabashedly reaching back for the future. His symbol of supply-side economics is Thomas Edison, who developed the light bulb, laid electric lines in New York City and created demand, precisely what the current economic doctrine is attempting.

His history lesson comes from Harry Truman. Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace had predicted that at the end of World War II the Government would have to intervene massively to help create 60 million jobs. "Instead, Harry Truman--bless his soul--decided to go with the free economy," says Regan. "Without understanding economics worth a damn he understood what the country needed economically. He and my predecessor here, John Snyder--the country banker and the country bumpkin--knew more about economics than many sophisticates out of my alma mater or anywhere else. Economics is not a science, it's an art."

Regan's belief that untold riches lie out there for people to discover and create is undimmed, and that probably as much as anything gives him his singular passion, "People say that you can't make wealth any more in this country," he declares with a hint of scorn. "Never believe that." From his Wall Street posts he saw thousands and thousands of people innovate, risk and glean the rewards. Many of them, insists Regan, simply were not noticed in this huge and diverse nation. "The spark is there," the Secretary says, "but it sure as hell hasn't been fanned by anything in Washington." That is what Donald Regan came to Washington to do.

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