Another Exit

A top Reaganaut resigns

One more leading economic official is leaving the Reagan Administration, and this time the announcement took even some people in the White House by surprise. On his trip to St. Louis last week, President Ronald Reagan, chatting informally with a local television news reporter, mentioned that "one of your own will be returning to St. Louis." When the reporter asked casually, "Who is that?" Reagan replied just as offhandedly, "Well, it is Murray Weidenbaum."

Two weeks ago, Weidenbaum, 55, informed the President that he wanted to leave his job as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in order to return to teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. Reagan accepted the resignation "with deep regret." The premature disclosure forced Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes to insist that Weidenbaum's resignation "is in no way connected with any policy situation whatever."

The affable Weidenbaum never seemed to find his niche in Washington. The last top economic adviser to be appointed in 1981, he discovered that most of the major policy decisions had been made before he arrived. For a while, Weidenbaum was the peacemaker between two policy rivals: Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and Budget Chief David Stockman. Last fall, when Regan and Stockman were fighting so hard over the issue of raising new taxes that they refused to talk to each other, Weidenbaum became the intermediary.

Moreover, Weidenbaum had trouble reconciling the optimistic projections of Administration supply-siders with his own traditional conservative views of the economy. He has already distanced himself, for example, from the Administrations midyear budget review, which will be published this week. It predicts that the economy with grow at an annual rate of more than 4.5% during the second half of 1982, and another 4.5% next year. Said Weidenbaum: "That projection is within the realm of possibility. But my personal forecast would be more on the cautious side."

The resignation comes at a difficult time for the President. Weidenbaum is the third senior economic adviser to quit in the past two months, and critics of the Administration's policies seem to be gaining strength. Publicly, though, Weidenbaum remains optimistic about the eventual payoff of the Reagan policy. He remarked last week that he feels like Moses in the Old Testament. Said Weidenbaum: "He led his people to the Promised Land, but did not quite make it there himself."

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