Why He's a Target

By Richard Stengel

"Ah, you publishing scoundrel!" That is what the imperious old woman in Henry James' The Aspern Papers hisses at her ambitious lodger when she finds him snooping through her yellowed letters for his own scholarly endeavors. To the old woman, he revealed himself as the lowest form of life. Her reaction is not unlike that of Nancy Reagan and her husband to the publication last week of Donald Regan's For the Record. Like the woman in the story, the Reagans acted as if betrayed by someone whose loyalty they had depended on, as though they were the innocent victims of a dastardly opportunist.

The implication was that For the Record was unique in its venom and singular in its criticism. Yet apart from its astrological revelations and acid-limned portrait of the First Lady, it is not so much in a class by itself as the latest addition to a long, groaning shelf. Deaver. Haig. Stockman. Speakes. Regan. Even two Reagan children, Patti and Michael, have written slap-and-yell books about the First Family. And more are on the way. Helene von Damm, once Reagan's personal assistant and later Ambassador to Austria, has reportedly penned something less than a valentine to the First Family, and a new book by former White House Aide Martin Anderson describes Reagan as resembling a "Turkish pasha, passively letting his subjects serve him."

The White House went on the offensive as For the Record was published and excerpted in TIME. The strategy was to depict Regan as a cad, astrology as harmless, Nancy as vulnerable and Ronnie as aggrieved. "I was taken aback by the vengefulness of the attack," the First Lady said. "It comes through that Don Regan doesn't really like me." At a lunch with Columnist Carl Rowan, Reagan played the angry husband. "I'll be damned if I just sit by and let them railroad my wife," he said. He noted that Nancy was upset for having caused the furor, but Reagan then told her, "No, honey, I brought all this down on you by taking this job."

The White House then began trying to discredit some of the book's claims. In a letter to TIME on White House stationery, Army Colonel John E. Hutton, the President's physician, wrote that Regan's description of the scene at Bethesda Naval Hospital in July of 1985 is inaccurate. Regan had speculated that Nancy may have considered delaying the President's colon surgery on the advice of her astrologer. Not so, says Hutton. Regan points out that he said he only "feared" she was consulting with her astrologer.

Escapees from presidential Administrations have been publishing insider memoirs since Andrew Jackson's time, but never with such haste and malign glee. Traditionally such books were more concerned with the virtues of policy than the vagaries of personality. Rarely were they published while a President was in office. Moreover, the archetypal insider stories were more kiss than tell: most, such as the spate of Roosevelt and Kennedy books, were unabashed hagiographies.

The emphasis on character rather than policy has been a gradual change. In an age when Presidents are elected more for their personalities than their platforms, books detailing the intricacies and foibles of character are the natural result.

But why the rash of Reagan bashing while he is still in office? One reason is that he is the first eight-year President since Dwight Eisenhower, providing enough time for the kissing to end and the telling to make it into print. Another is that this is an era of dizzying advances for tattletales. What price loyalty? Stockman $2 million and Deaver $500,000. Exemplars of Reaganomics, they are merely capitalizing on the literary equivalent of insider information. (Regan has pledged his $1 million advance and subsequent royalties to charity.)

In addition, there is simply more dirt to dish on Reagan and his wife. Nancy's overzealous protection of her Ronnie and his bizarrely inattentive style make lively reading. The number of Reagan Administration members who have had ethical or legal charges leveled against them is without precedent. There is no honor in remaining silent about wrongdoing or horror stories in Government.

Yet there is a more basic factor about Reagan that seems to provoke such books. When the question of whether he had been "disloyal" was put to Regan, the former chief of staff turned it around: "What about their loyalty to me? Loyalty is a two-way street." As another former staffer puts it, "People are not loyal to the Reagans, because they are not loyal."

At first this seems absurd: Isn't Reagan the man who is so darn loyal to folks like Ed Meese and Raymond Donovan and, yes, even Don Regan that he keeps them around longer than is politically wise? But Reagan's apparent devotion arises less from a real emotional loyalty than from his aversion to face-to- face confrontations and personal unpleasantness.

To those close to him, Reagan seems to inspire a genial affection rather than an emotional bond. Many have observed, as Don Regan does, that the President has never formed close friendships, people with whom he shares ideas, feelings or even a beer. He is affably distant. Many staff people wonder whether the President knows their first names, where they sit, or what they do. Many who left under pressure felt they never got a fair hearing, or any kind of hearing, from the President.

One longtime Reagan friend related how all of Reagan's children had to accept the fact that their father was not emotionally available to them, that he was incapable of intimacy, that beneath that sunny exterior was a cold man. "He can't give. He just can't give," the friend recalled. "Over the years, he's never once told me what he thinks of me. He just doesn't know how to be intimate. He can't ever be personal. He can't cry. His kids have cried in front of him. But he can't cry. He can cry about something thousands of miles away, about some story, about some letter he's received. But he can't cry with his own."

As Duke Professor James David Barber notes, the portraits of the President in all of the books have a "remarkable consistency." Regan, Stockman, Deaver and others all play variations on the same theme of a passive, disengaged President. Daughter Patti Davis' roman a clef and Michael Reagan's whiny autobiography depict a father who behaves toward his children much the way the President acts toward his staff: amiable, but ultimately aloof. With his California cronies as with his White House retainers, he is likable and friendly as he swaps old stories and jokes. But the emotional bonds of friendship, the basis for true loyalty, generally seem missing.

The notion of loyalty will pervade the presidential campaign. George Bush wears his loyalty on his sleeve, and treats his unremitting record of fealty to his boss as one of his chief selling points to the electorate. But as more and more of the secret life of the Administration becomes exposed, Bush may appear like the last loyal courtier to the emperor with no clothes. And surely Michael Dukakis will portray Bush's loyalty as a slavish, unthinking allegiance to policies undeserving of such fidelity.

Regan remarks on the President's stunning lack of curiosity about nearly everything. Reagan's much vaunted trust in humanity comes across not as altruistic optimism but as an uncritical and dangerous naivete. During the Iran-contra affair, Regan writes of Reagan, "it never seemed to occur to him that anyone would give him incorrect information." In Regan's book, the President emerges once again as the dutiful actor who believes he is fulfilling his job by attending and then crossing out each event on his daily calendar.

Perhaps the most damning indictment in For the Record is the President's failure to ask a single question of Regan or James Baker when they proposed switching jobs in January 1985. "In the President's place," Regan writes, "I would have put many questions to the applicant . . . I did not know what to make of his passivity." But his passivity was a mistake in a way that Donald Regan does not suspect. The job of chief of staff, particularly in the Reagan White House, is one that demands an almost infinite amount of patience and flexibility, qualities that the rigid, often magisterial Regan does not have in great supply. A more engaged President might have seen that when the two men proposed swapping places.

The Reagan Administration, more than any other in history, has been proficient at creating and projecting images. Regan's book, like the others, reveals how obsessed the White House was with appearances. That may be the final reason Reagan has proved such a mark for Books of Revelation: there has been so great a discrepancy between the image and the reality of his leadership that those who were in on the secret cannot help but expose it. Regan made the point last week that if his book was embarrassing to the Reagan Administration, "it's only because it's true history." Those who live by the image die by the unmaking of it.

With reporting by Barrett Seaman/Washington