A View Without Hills or Valleys

By KURT ANDERSEN

Reagan remains sure, serene and startlingly detached

Ronald Reagan is a wonder. Such zest, such zip, such uncontrived bonhomie. The past three years have brought plenty of crises for the country and his Administration, but Reagan cruises along as serenely self-confident as ever. Now is usually the time in a first term when the press trots out the before-and-after photographs, palpably depicting the burdens of the Oval Office: rosy, beaming President-elect vs. haggard, wan incumbent. But Reagan, now the oldest President in history, seems to have grown more robust since his Inauguration. After three years his optimism appears undimmed, his faith in bedrock conservative notions unshaken. "His perspective is unusual," explains one White House aide of the boss's remarkable equanimity. "Someone 35 years old sees hills and valleys every day, but the President just sees dips in the road. He rides above it."

There is nothing wrong with a calm, comfy, Cadillac-smooth ride. But at times President Reagan glides along altogether too smoothly, virtually unaware of the gritty, often bumpy policymaking processes of his Administration. His lapses are more than a forgivable matter of mixing up history at a press conference or misrepresenting a trivial budget figure now and again. Reagan is remarkably disengaged from the substance of his job. His aides no longer dismiss as glib the theory that Reagan has a movie-star approach to governing. "In Reagan's mind," says a White House adviser, "somebody does the lighting, somebody else does the set, and Reagan takes care of his role, which is the public role."

White House aides, adapting to his mellow managerial style, seldom prod the President, nor he them. Instead, Reagan waits for an amiable consensus to develop among his advisers, who work within the boundaries of Reagan's ideology. Except for his unbudging devotion to a military buildup and opposition to tax increases, he often accepts uncritically his advisers' recommendations. Such openness has cured Reagan of certain ideological tics: he now understands, for instance, that the International Monetary Fund is no mere Third World boondoggle. Yet his grasp of important issues is often shaky and, even more troubling, he seems unalarmed by those knowledge gaps. Says one top adviser: "Is he out of touch occasionally? Sure he is."

Even at the most pedestrian level, Reagan can be eerily detached, oblivious. He does not know where most of his closest advisers sit, even though some are only a few paces away from the Oval Office. He is vague about which underlings do what: an aide suggests that Reagan would be hard pressed to describe with any precision how Chief of Staff James Baker's responsibilities differed from those of Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese before Meese was nominated to be Attorney General. (Baker is responsible for press and congressional relations; Meese was nominally in charge of domestic policy coordination.) After three years of almost daily contact with Reagan, one White House aide was not sure that the President knew his first name. At a January meeting with five Governors to discuss acid rain, Reagan repeatedly called EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus "Don."

One unsurpassed perquisite of the office is its access to information: Presidents can find out practically anything they need or simply want to know. Reagan's curiosity, even after three years at the epicenter of events, seems stunted. He is something of a milltary buff, but last fall during his tour of allied fortifications along the 38th parallel, which divides North and South Korea, he did not ask a single question of his U.S. military guide. White House aides cannot remember an instance when the President has asked that they form an ad hoc group to help him thrash out a puzzling policy question.

Technical specifics seem a soporific to him. He occasionally dozes off during meetings, sometimes with outsiders present. In fact, Reagan is not very good at any sort of detail. In a meeting with a foreign leader last year, Reagan pulled out and read from the wrong 4-in. by 6-in. cue cards. The diplomats were aghast. Meeting with a group of Congressmen last fall, Reagan confessed an inexcusable misapprehension as he explained why he had shifted away from his initial, unrealistic Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) proposal. That proposal called for much deeper cuts in land-based missile forces than in air-or sea-launched arsenals. Reagan had not realized, he admitted to the unnerved Congressmen, that the Soviets were certain to reject his formula because their nuclear forces were largely land-based. "I never heard any one of our negotiators or any of our military people or anyone else bring up that particular point," Reagan told TIME last week. So far, Reagan's misstatements to foreign leaders have been manageable, but some officials privately fear that at a U.S.-Soviet summit a blunder could prove irrevocable.

Reagan is happy to let his Executive Branch run by itself. Even when he makes a substantive policy recommendation, he rarely follows through on it. At a staff meeting last year, for example, he suggested that the Administration begin informal "back channel" discussions with Soviet officials. Afterward, according to one adviser, the notion was bureaucratically killed by William P. Clark, then the hard-line National Security Adviser. Reagan simply let the idea drop. While he is not inefficient--papers never pile up on his desk--Reagan does not go looking for extra work. He usually leaves the Oval Office by 5 p.m. "His personal passivity is amazing," says an official.

"Reagan is more assertive in his own life-style stuff, like when he wants to go to Camp David," explains a former adviser. And he intercedes in White House operations aggressively, according to aides, when his public performance is at stake, rewriting staff-drafted speeches to suit his own, superb rhetorical instincts. "No one," an aide says, "can edit a Reagan speech better than Reagan." Even after countless faux pas, however, he still tends to play fast and loose with the facts. In an address to Congressional Medal of Honor winners last December, Reagan told of a World War II bomber pilot who heroically went down with his plane because his wounded gunner could not bail out; the anecdote, which he has recounted more than once, apparently is fiction, based on the 1944 movie Wing and a Prayer.

Reagan's extreme reliance on his staff leaves him badly exposed when they muff their jobs. Last fall Administration officials quietly confirmed that then Middle East Envoy Robert McFarlane favored stepped-up U.S. military action in Lebanon. Clark, overreacting to the leak, drafted an Executive Order mandating polygraph exams to track down the source. The order could have subjected most of Reagan's top associates to lie-detector tests. At least one Cabinet resignation was threatened. "It was a black day around here," says a White House aide. Administration "pragmatists" intervened to get the foolish scheme canceled. Reagan was surprised by all the brouhaha: when he signed the sweeping order, he said, he had not realized that Secretary of State George Shultz, for instance, might be affected. "That order was not very complicated," says an aide with unusual bluntness. "Anybody could understand what it meant."

When his staff is divided, Reagan can be caught in a crossfire. Last October, as soon as Clark resigned to become Interior Secretary, Presidential Advisers Baker and Michael Deaver lobbied Reagan for promotions: Baker wanted to take over as National Security Adviser, Deaver to replace Baker as chief of staff. Reagan genially agreed, despite Baker's lack of foreign policy expertise and Deaver's administrative diffidence. A last-minute revolt by Administration right-wingers stopped the Baker appointment--and then only because he volunteered to withdraw, not because Reagan made a tough decision.

"When the staff chooses up sides," says a White House adviser, "that's when the weakness of the system of delegating power is apparent. That's when it doesn't work."

It does not work because Reagan lacks the temperament, and often the knowledge, to choose between the competing arguments.

There is a fine line between delegating authority and abdicating responsibility.

Reagan's staff applauds his aloofness from nuts-and-bolts details. "He is one of the best executives I've ever met," says Meese. Adds Baker with a swipe at Jimmy Carter's notorious overattention to minutiae: "You don't have to know who is playing on the White House tennis court to be a good President."

The power of Reagan's staff, of course, is enhanced by his loose management. But they seem sincerely protective of him. "Only one or two people around here," says a White House adviser, "are condescending about him. Everyone else treats him more like a national asset."

Reagan's acute intuitive sense, they say, makes up for the analytical flaws. "He focuses his attention on a critical few things," says one aide, who reckons that 80% of what Reagan does not know is unnecessary anyway. "He senses when something isn't working," says another.

Reagan has acquired a basic knowledge in some areas, particularly foreign affairs.

"He's matured substantially," says Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, chairman of Reagan's re-election committee. "In the early days, he'd cling to those note cards like a life preserver."

Hunches, gut feelings and a broad-brush understanding of issues and public opinion: a convincing case can be made that Reagan is thus a true leader and not simply a Government supermanager, that he has a political vision and not just an agenda of piecemeal programs. A President should be able to fine tune domestic policy and negotiate intricate treaties, and Reagan is not very good at either. There are also times when a President needs to paint with bold strokes, and Reagan, an intuitive master of that art, seems content to do what he does best. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Douglas Brew/Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew/Washington