A Visionary or a Dogmatist?

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

In the musty corners of the Capitol, Republican leaders now say among themselves that Ronald Reagan has about three months to demonstrate the worthiness of his economic program before a political firestorm engulfs his presidency.

Along the power corridor of the White House, a few steps away from the Oval Office, they put the grace period at six to eight months. But in candid moments, Reagan's men admit that they face a lonely vigil through weeks of high unemployment and business decline.

All Washington, it seems, is pondering the President's mind these days and wondering about this classic drama of leadership. Is he a visionary or a dogmatist? Is he courageous enough to change? Or stubborn enough not to?

There is little question now that Reagan stands at the head of a diminishing band of believers in the battered supply-side theory, which has produced a mix of budget cutting, reduced taxes, increased defense spending and--the sum of it all--huge, debilitating deficits. Rising Republican sentiment on the Hill is to increase tax revenues while continuing budget restraint and somehow reducing defense spending. Kansas' Robert Dole, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, toured boardrooms, banks and the markets and came back to Washington bearing the same message from Reagan boosters in the world of finance: Hundreds of billions in new debt could cause panic. Democrats, confused and flummoxed for a year, are making similar sounds. The old swamp fox of the Senate, Russell Long of Louisiana, tumbled into a limousine the other day with a Republican Senator and drawled, "I want to help the President." Translation: there is a majority forming in Congress, and perhaps the nation, that believes that Ronald Reagan must begin to cut his losses and start to make some deals. And there is the rub.

"One of the tragic impulses of any President," insists Clark Clifford, a Washington insider for 40 years, "is the desire for vindication." There are in history a few examples of Presidents standing in splendor on their ideology and being vindicated finally by events. Lyndon Johnson's fight for a civil rights bill in 1964 was a sometimes lonely road to glory. But our system is not an ideological one. It is based on flexibility, compromise. Clifford recalls Johnson as he sealed his fate in the sweltering officers' club of Cam Ranh Bay in Viet Nam, urging his field commanders to "come home with that coonskin on the wall." L.B.J.'s lust for victory was ultimately to defeat him.

All during January the nation listened to the litany of Franklin Roosevelt's greatness. One theme in the lesson was FD.R.'s desire for results even at the expense of philosophical purity. He quoted an old Bulgarian proverb that says, "You are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge."

"Americans want it both ways," says Harry McPherson, who was one of Johnson's White House aides. "They want a man of convictions, but then they want a man of pragmatism." Conviction is inspiring, but pragmatism operates the Government. McPherson wonders if the beginning of the end for Jimmy Carter did not begin a month after his Inauguration, when Carter, the Georgia puritan in Babylon, sent to the Hill a "hit list" that proposed canceling 17 of Congress's pet water projects.

Reagan has at times demonstrated a remarkable adaptability during his first year in office. He was even tempted to swing away from supply-side doctrine, to walk a bit with the devil on the bridge. He seemed to be ready to raise some taxes to crimp those towering deficits, but then, some say, Reagan was lured back to the faith by the likes of a true-believing supply-side evangelist, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York. Friends of the President's argue that he is possessed by the fear of appearing to be inconsistent, which is what he believes finally destroyed Carter. "We'd rather go over the cliff with flags flying," said a Reagan intimate the other day. In movies, they can walk away from the brink. At the White House, it is not so easy.

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