Just Say Goodbye, Don

By Amy Wilentz

Squabbles between two presidential advisers are common, but they rarely reach melodramatic heights. In recent months, however, a battle between Ronald Reagan's two closest counselors has been airing regularly, like a soap-opera accompaniment to news of the Iran-contra scandal. As the sniping between First Lady Nancy Reagan and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan escalated, it only added to the image of a presidency adrift. "What is happening at the White House?" asked New Mexico Democrat William Richardson on the House floor last week. "Who is in charge? A constituent of mine asked, 'How can the President deal with the Soviets if he cannot settle a dispute between his wife and the chief of staff?' "

When the melodrama came to its inevitable conclusion at week's end, Regan's ouster was yet another reminder that Nancy exerts extraordinary influence on her husband. The President considers her a trusted adviser, especially when it comes to hiring -- and firing. While Reagan avoids unpleasant confrontations, his wife is more hardheaded about staff failures and more willing to deal with them. "It's the eternal optimist in him," Nancy said of her husband a few years ago, "that if you let something go, it will eventually work itself out. Well, it isn't always so."

Initially the First Lady considered Regan's tight management hierarchy a welcome change after the occasional disarray of the troika that ran the first- term White House. But she became annoyed when the overbearing chief of staff seemed to arrogate presidential decision-making responsibilities to himself during Reagan's convalescence from cancer surgery in 1985.

Worse, Regan failed to show Nancy the kind of attention she had grown used to from former White House Aides Michael Deaver and James Baker, to whom she spoke several times a day by telephone. Regan simply did not have the patience and was not astute enough to realize that talking to Nancy was a part of his job. Says one Reagan intimate: "We all know that she isn't the easiest person to deal with. Regan never understood how to handle her. It has a lot to do with how he interacts with women." The chief of staff became notorious in the past two years for his remarks disparaging women's interests and intelligence. In the White House he tended to dismiss the First Lady's advice or, worse, to shunt off her calls to his assistants. "I have never seen a wife who gets into her husband's affairs so much," he told an acquaintance. "It's unfortunate that she doesn't realize how damaging that is to him."

When the arms-for-hostages scandal broke in November, Nancy was quicker than the President to realize its implications. Says the Reagans' son Ron: "She more than he recognized the potential for it to be as damaging as it has become." Still, in December, the First Lady was ambivalent about the need to push Regan out.

One reason: in private, Regan had been hinting he was "feeling tired and burned out" and would soon depart on his own, after steering the President through the January budget presentation and State of the Union address. Says one of Nancy's friends: "She had slightly mixed emotions. She was not the leader ((of the campaign against Regan))." In addition, friends say, the First Lady cooled her campaign against Regan out of concern over the public perception that the President was henpecked. Though some of the President's confidants, including Deaver, Political Strategist Stuart Spencer, former Senator Paul Laxalt and others, remained adamant that Regan had to go, they too quieted their clamoring for the moment.

Soon it became clear that Regan had decided to remain. Says one of Nancy's allies: "After the holidays, the feeling came across to her that everything was being done to protect Don Regan, not Ronald Reagan." Joining her in the renewed "Dump Don" campaign was Stepdaughter Maureen. "The President was getting it from both of them at home," says a source who knows them well.

Much of the recent quarreling between the chief of staff and the First Lady concerned the President's strategy for overcoming the arms-for-hostages crisis. Regan thought his boss should go public, giving speeches and generally presenting a take-charge image on domestic-policy issues. The First Lady felt it was too soon after the President's Jan. 5 prostate operation for him to resume his regular schedule, much less take on a high-energy damage-control agenda.

In a conversation with TIME correspondents as he was preparing to leave the White House late last week, Regan said he had not changed his position on this issue. "My advice to the President," he said, "is to get out and talk to the people, not to talk about Iran, not to talk in terms of past glories but what he's trying to do in competitiveness, in catastrophic health, in welfare reform."

As matters worsened, the dispute boiled over into a battle of leaks. The First Lady became convinced that Regan's office was responsible for an unflattering -- and very likely inaccurate -- news report before the holidays that the President had told her to "get off my goddam back" about the chief of staff. The First Lady thereupon told a number of her friends about two recent instances when Regan hung up on her during telephone arguments. Sensing her husband had heard enough on the Regan issue, Nancy did not tell him about the calls. Instead, she let him read about them in the papers.

The President's family was not the sole influence on his decision to get rid of Regan. Reagan was aware that the chief of staff had become the symbol for all that had gone wrong in Iranscam. In mid-February, the President went into what one intimate calls his "very quiet and contemplative manner," emerging to announce to his wife and daughter, "I've made up my mind. Something has to be done." In retrospect, Reagan feels he should have acted sooner. With a new chief of staff, the First Lady believes, her husband can pull out of what she calls the valley of his presidency. "Ronnie is not about to concede that the Reagan revolution is over," she is telling her friends, "or that he's crippled forever."

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington