Driven To Beat the Budget

By Laurence I. Barrett

Richard Darman was an anonymous White House staffer seven years ago, still struggling to make his place among Reaganauts suspicious of his moderate politics, but he knew what job would suit him next. If his ally David Stockman, then the embattled Budget Director, departed, Darman thought himself a natural for the Office of Management and Budget. Word of his ambition seeped out. A newspaper column scoffing at his qualifications got big play in Boston, and his ailing father saw it. The younger Darman seethed, and not only because of the criticism. Later he confided that he was upset partly because "I still wasn't successful in a way that really meant something to him." Or to himself, for that matter.

The incident spoke loudly of Darman, who already owned an impressive record in and out of government. He also possessed a huge appetite for more responsibility, a need to perform in the political circus' center ring and a perfectionist's burden of self-doubt. That Darman, after some detours, became George Bush's Budget Director last month shows a degree of adroit tenacity rare even among Washington's tribe of striving Type A's. He appears joyful in his new post, though his return to public service dumps him into a sticky triangular paradox. Alone among Reagan advisers, Darman lent his name to a Washington coinage: "Darmanesque" denotes the arcane stratagems he devised to promote Reagan policies. In the process of advancing Reaganomics, he sometimes swallowed his own skepticism about its wisdom. Now Darman must extricate Bush from the tar pit that is Ronald Reagan's fiscal legacy. The incongruity does not diminish his enthusiasm.

It is a challenge fittingly complex for a state-of-the-art public official who, at 45, is working for his fifth President and has served in six Cabinet departments. Darman has been a policy adviser, a crisis manager, an editor of Bush and Reagan speeches, a campaign strategist and, above all, a negotiator of intricate deals. The one he found "most exciting," he says, occurred when, as a young Justice Department official, he helped broker Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. And the most significant? He names the 1986 economic-summit communique, improving policy coordination among the industrial democracies. Years hence, he predicts, that agreement will be seen as historic.

That Darman takes such pride in a pact unfamiliar to nearly all ordinary mortals -- rather than megadeals like the 1983 Social Security rescue or the 1986 tax-reform act -- shows still another of his several facets. He is a relentless future freak. In a town obsessed with the crisis du jour, he frequently peers at the far horizon and tosses off jeremiads about his sightings. Lately he has been preaching against the rampant impulse for instant gratification. Americans "need to reinstill in ourselves a sense of the importance of the future," he argues. No one argues back in principle, but politics pushes back mercilessly. That standoff underscores a fascinating conflict between Darman's strategy and his psyche.

Darman the farsighted analyst has known for eight years about the urgent need for expensive repairs to the country's economic foundations. Darman the ace operative has sometimes papered over that need to serve his President's or his candidate's political purposes. He is widely suspected of secretly itching to impose a tax increase. After denying that vehemently -- though not altogether persuasively -- he produced an innovative budget plan that appears to reduce the deficit with negligible pain.

An internal conflict? Not on this score, Darman insists. He has described himself as "a long-term idealist and a short-term realist." Now, in an introspective moment, he adds, "That's the most important short thing I've ever said about myself." Realism, of course, often serves as a respectable disguise for political expedience. Eight years ago this month, he was the first White House insider to warn his colleagues that Reaganomics was flawed. He and Stockman later considered sabotaging Reagan's 1981 tax-reduction bill. Concessions to assorted special interests, necessary to overcome the Democrats' competing proposal, were becoming prohibitively expensive. Instead he pressed ahead, matching the Democratic version in what amounted to a bidding war, betting that the damage could be repaired the same year with a second budget resolution. Now he concedes error; no comprehensive fix was made in 1981 or later. Yet Darman insists his course was correct because "it was important at the time to preserve the power of the presidency." The same imperative guides Darman today as he serves Bush under more difficult circumstances.

If Darman's negotiations with Congress present serpentine challenges worthy of a Kafka plot, his personality has the dense texturing of a protagonist in a Nabokov novel. Contradictions little and large adorn his life. He owns two racehorses but never bets on them because he doesn't gamble. Last year when his aged Audi expired, he agonized for weeks before acquiring a new Mercedes- Benz. The symbolism of so expensive a car bothers this man of independent means who cuts his own hair (badly) because "it's cheaper and faster." With a reporter he knows well, he can be drawn into conversation about his innermost thoughts. Still, he refuses to confess ownership of the Mercedes.

The aroma of Harvard, where he studied and taught, is redolent in his manner as he discusses economic abstractions. Yet he harbors what he calls primitive views of patriotism. He was comfortable, as a Bush campaign adviser, arguing for continued emphasis on the Pledge of Allegiance issue when even his friend, Campaign Chairman James Baker, wanted to change the subject.

< Bring up the "Darman book," and its author wants to change the subject. A talented writer who enjoys the craft, Darman writes occasional essays, sometimes leavening abstruse material with sports metaphors. He began a major analytical book on the process of governance 14 years ago, during one of his brief recesses from public service. He treated the work as a secret, showing pieces of it only reluctantly to a few friends. Elliot Richardson, his first Washington mentor, recalls it as "marvelously prescient and penetrating," in part because of Darman's gift for dispassionate analysis. Says Richardson: "Dick never allowed his thinking to be colored by how he wished the situation to come out." The tome is now shelved. Darman wants it forgotten. He rebuffed publishers who sought a memoir of his time with Reagan. Reason: a really candid book might limit future opportunities for high office.

Public service became an addiction for him long ago. It isn't for want of a warm personal life. He remains gooey over his wife of 21 years, Kathleen Emmet Darman, a writer who has a Ph.D. in literature. They met, by his account, as teenagers at a "Beacon sociable," where Brahmin calves learned to dance under proper supervision. He sought for years to get her attention, even using ploys that could later be called Darmanesque. She gently scoffs at this romantic notion, conceding only that they met as graduate students at a dinner he arranged for that purpose. They live with their two sons on five secluded acres overlooking the Potomac. Still, Kath says absences from the political arena make him doubt that he is doing anything worthwhile.

When he is underoccupied, his bent for introspection becomes acute. His wife describes it as ongoing "self-examination, making his peace with what he does, making his peace with himself." Darman believes specific victories or defeats give him little elation or despair because he plays out either outcome in advance. "I've thought about the hundred things that can go wrong with the deficit thing," he says of today's mission. "If something starts going wrong, I'd be disappointed in myself if I hadn't already thought of that possibility."

Fear of disappointing himself or others remains a durable chain to his childhood. His conservative, demanding father Morton followed his own sire into the New England textile industry. Morton expected the oldest of his four children to do the same. Jeff Forbes, Darman's Harvard roommate, recalls the genetic imprint: "Dick's father was extremely disciplined, with a view that life was very real and very earnest. Dick took that from him."

In prep school the youngster was the model over-achieving crown prince. He excelled both in the classroom and on the playing field. While trying to secure a starter's place on the football team, he played one quarter with a fractured arm. Eventually he became the team's captain and won letters in three other sports. But although he grew up affluent, Darman also felt the influence of his mother Eleanor, a liberal involved in medical social service. Later Darman mused that he "bumbled" into government work as a means of bridging his father's and mother's impulses.

After earning an M.B.A. at Harvard, he did research on education policy that led to a job at the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Secretary Richardson soon drew him into his personal circle. As Richardson toured the Nixon and Ford Cabinets -- serving as head of Defense, Justice and Commerce -- Darman followed. Richardson, a problem-solving progressive who wore his Republicanism lightly, even served Jimmy Carter as vice chairman of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea. With that political lineage and a wife describing herself as "alas, a good old-fashioned liberal," Darman was hardly a natural fit in the conservative Reagan White House.

That he was there at all was due to James Baker, whom he had met at Commerce. Though the new chief of staff, Baker was something of an alien. He needed loyal, experienced professionals as a bulwark against right-wing rivals. Darman filled that role eagerly. Eagerly, but not comfortably. The older Reaganauts sometimes suspected him of ideological subversion. He in turn took a grandiose view of himself as an all-purpose antidote to the amateurism of some of his elders. "Every single thing that moved," he says, "I felt responsible for." His influence rose steadily, but so did the tension level. He still frets about "all those A words they used about me at the White House," such as arrogant and abrasive. The tag "Baker aide" also grated on the Darman ego, though not enough to keep him from becoming Baker's deputy at the Treasury Department in 1985.

There the atmosphere was more relaxed, and Darman could concentrate on big- ticket successes, such as the tax-reform act and currency-exchange rates. By then Darman had survived some of his conservative antagonists and made peace with others. Twenty-one months ago, he took a respite by going into investment banking. But a Republican victory in 1988, he knew, would be an opportunity for a new assignment. He wanted his own command this time, free of senior patrons, such as Richardson and Baker. Though he lacked a strong relationship with Bush, he was soon an economic adviser. Darman's friends in the Bush camp made sure he had ample access; he capitalized on that by enthusiastically elaborating on the "flexible-freeze" scheme, the core of Bush's fiscal program.

The exposure became intense last fall, when Darman was chosen to play Michael Dukakis in preparing Bush for the debates. "One of the reasons he was picked," says Bush's media adviser, Roger Ailes, "was his reputation for being aloof and arrogant, just like Dukakis." Though tough in the sparring, Darman softened his performances with humor. At the end of one mock match, he entertained Bush by donning a tank helmet like the one Dukakis wore in a TV ad. Next round, he displayed a pair of Heavyhands, the weights Dukakis uses in speed-walking. In the critique sessions afterward, Ailes says, "Darman was great: warm, funny and very sharp." Bush agreed. Despite his earlier doubts about Darman's team spirit, the President-elect told his transition team to forget about a list of prospects for Budget Director; he knew who would serve him best. Darman was delighted. Now he can put off a new version of his book for what he hopes will be many years.