Tired of Moving Elephants

By Ed Magnuson.

Said the President: "You have all been misinformed." The whole notion, scoffed Robert McFarlane, was "nonsense." Insisted Donald Regan: "There was no conflict between Bud and me." All were denying that McFarlane, the efficient pragmatist known as Bud who resigned last week as Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser, had done so because he no longer wanted to work with Regan, the President's take-charge chief of staff.

While the attempt to downplay friction at such high levels was understandable, it was unpersuasive. A driven man faced with internal conflicts, McFarlane had multiple reasons for leaving, including the desire to earn more money and spend more time with his family. But he had, in fact, chafed at Regan's management style and his intrusion into the foreign policy process. Regan, a former Wall Street executive, had in effect replaced the President's White House troika of James Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese in a shake-up that began last January. McFarlane was the last top White House aide who operated outside the chief of staff 's control and the last to have powerful connections of his own to Congress and the Oval Office. With McFarlane's resignation--the third in four years for an Administration that has had notable difficulties with the national security post--Don Regan continued his rise as the gatekeeper of the President's inner sanctum.

The man chosen to replace McFarlane to all appearances poses no similar problems for Regan. Vice Admiral John Poindexter, 49, has been on the NSC staff since 1981 and was McFarlane's top assistant. Poindexter is widely regarded in Washington as a bright, dutiful military staff officer who is not likely to make waves in his new job. Asked last week if he would be able to get along with Regan, Poindexter replied that he did not "anticipate any problems" since "Don and I are good friends." But he added that the chief of staff had personally told him that he would be given "direct access" to the President. In fact, the National Security Adviser has traditionally reported directly to the President; in crediting Regan rather than Reagan for giving assurances on that point, Poindexter gave a glimpse of where much of the power lies.

Poindexter, of course, may grow more assertive. McFarlane did. He too had also been viewed as a superb No. 2 man who provided much needed expertise to his predecessor William Clark before taking over the top job in 1983. Unlike Henry Kissinger, who served Richard Nixon, or Zbigniew Brzezinski, who worked for Jimmy Carter, McFarlane did not carve out a role as an innovative, geopolitical strategist. But he was a methodical thinker able to project the potential impact of diplomatic or military options several steps ahead of the first move. That was a critical skill in a White House where the President delegated much of the decision making and in an Administration beset by differences between the Secretaries of State and Defense.

McFarlane soon found the task frustrating. After getting along well at first with Secretary of State George Shultz, a rift developed over McFarlane's growing assertiveness in pub- lic appearances. McFarlane confided to intimates that he thought CIA Director William Casey had outstayed his usefulness and that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was not adroit at anything other than advocating defense spending. He is known to have told friends that he was getting tired of "trying to move all these elephants around."

On policy matters, McFarlane's differences with Shultz and Weinberger were often tactical rather than ideological. Last August McFarlane wanted to push Shultz and the President away from their support of the Botha regime in South Africa as the antiapartheid protests mounted. He even hinted that if he failed, he might quit. He was the first to fashion a plan to get the Government started on the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars. But he came to see it basically as a means to pressure the Soviet Union toward resuming arms talks and eventually achieving a sharp reduction in offensive weapons. The talks were reopened, but McFarlane was surprised by the way in which Weinberger and the President became wedded to building a defensive system, and disheartened that it seemed to become an obstacle rather than an aid to arms control.

Along with Shultz, McFarlane supported using limited military force to achieve diplomatic aims. This often pitted his advice against that of Weinberger, who is more cautious about taking military risks. He strongly backed U.S. funding of the contra forces opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and lobbied skillfully against the eroding support for it in Congress. His work on the Hill also was influential in saving the MX missile program. He managed to take some of the anti-Soviet sting out of presidential speeches written by Patrick Buchanan, a conservative columnist brought to the White House by Regan. Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, last week called McFarlane "a brilliant, constructive and stabilizing influence in American foreign policy."

Shortly after Regan took over as chief of staff last January, the normally discreet McFarlane began grumbling about his job. He first felt shunted aside by Regan at the European economic summit last spring in Bonn. The National Security Adviser had opposed the President's visit on the same trip to a German military cemetery at Bitburg, where Nazi SS officers were buried, but Reagan went ahead with it. When Reagan was hospitalized for cancer surgery in July, the chief of staff had McFarlane present his daily security briefings to the President in writing, rather than orally. At the same time, Regan visited the President's bedside regularly.

McFarlane countered by becoming more assertive in public, briefing reporters frequently and appearing on Sunday- morning TV interview shows. Beyond promoting his own views, this let him vent some of his frustrations, but it was resented by Shultz.

Much of the difficult task of forging a unified U.S. approach to last month's summit in Geneva fell to McFarlane. He did better than might have been expected in such a fractious Administration. Yet in Geneva, McFarlane found himself slighted by Regan and Shultz, while the chief of staff sat by the President's side and hovered at his ear during discussions with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The internal warfare, which has long come with the job, finally discouraged McFarlane. He told one friend that the infighting was in some ways worse than military combat, explaining, "In combat you can distinguish between friend and foe. At the White House, you can't." Before quitting, however, McFarlane sounded out colleagues, including Shultz, Clark, Vice President George Bush and Senator Paul Laxalt. Although sympathetic, none gave him sufficient reasons to stay on.

Also contributing to the unhappiness of the sensitive and intense McFarlane was that he had never become personally close to the man who mattered most. Reagan occasionally invited McFarlane and his wife Jonda to dine in the White House family quarters, much to the envy of other aides. Nancy is known to have taken a liking to the adviser. But the President enjoys the camaraderie of ^ gregarious, storytelling personalities in private; professionally, he prefers a visceral, instinctive approach to policy. McFarlane's analyses tended to be intellectual, abstract, sometimes pedantic, and were not accompanied by the banter at which Regan and Reagan both excel.

That does not bode well for Poindexter, a rather stiff intellectual who topped his 1958 class at the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the California Institute of Technology. He nurtures such a low public profile that reporters jokingly asked at a press conference last Wednesday whether they would ever see him again. (The laconic response: "Maybe.") The three-star admiral has made few public speeches while at the White House and has published no foreign policy papers. Such a blank public record could be an advantage, since he presents no tempting target for either the right or the left in Washington's high-level skirmishing.

From Robert Cutler under President Eisenhower, through McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Kissinger and Brzezinski, the role of the National Security Adviser has inexorably become more powerful, sometimes troublingly so. In recent years the NSC staff has often resembled a mini-State Department, setting policy on its own. Still, in an Administration so sharply divided at the Cabinet level and so loosely guided by the President, the need for a strong coordinator on security matters is clear. With a second superpower summit scheduled for next year, and basic decisions about arms control and regional conflicts yet to be made, Poindexter will not be effective if he emerges as no more than just an assistant to the chief of staff.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Barrett Seaman/Washington