The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Until now Mike Deaver has been a spectacular alchemist of power, personality and communication. That is the irony of his predicament. "I'm in trouble with my public relations," he said ruefully, eating his breakfast egg as another chapter unfolded last week in his political drama. Did he violate the law with his new lobbying firm, booking megabucks in business within months of leaving the White House? Did he step beyond propriety and soil the presidency? "No, no, no," he declared, and added a few more nos.

But he would not be sitting at breakfast explaining himself if something had not gone wrong. He has not called or seen the President or Mrs. Reagan for weeks. The $18 million proposition for buying the Deaver firm by London's Saatchi & Saatchi has been abandoned.

"I never thought of myself as a lobbyist," he said. "I thought of myself as a strategist. I've never had a client ever ask me to talk to the White House or talk to the President. I've never tried to influence a decision. I've only made two or three calls to Capitol Hill. I don't know that much about it up there. I've coordinated strategy for those corporations and those countries that wanted to understand and deal with the U.S. The opportunity with Saatchi was to do that on a worldwide basis: 95% of my work would have been outside the U.S." There is a tinge of anger. "This week is the first time in eight weeks that any of those three Government bodies investigating me has asked my opinion on anything," he said. "The idea that I can sit over in my office and pick up the phone and get things fixed is naive."

His business life began to change, he says, after he appeared on the cover of TIME in a critical piece on influence peddling and the bid for his firm from Saatchi leaked out. "The long knives came out," he said. "Some of it, frankly, was envy."

Some of it was excess. Deaver admits that now: "I didn't run away from any publicity. I can't deny that I came out of the White House with an aura that was different. I like to think it was based on the fact that I did achieve something on my own, that I did change some perceptions on issues."

That was a mighty salable commodity, particularly when Deaver's 20-year devotion and service to the Reagans was factored into the deals. Deaver may never have understood his own special place in the world of power. Few men in history have had such personal and professional trust from a President. If he had it to do again, Deaver would bend over backward to break cleanly with the White House. "I would keep a lower profile," he said.

He would not, however, change how he has handled his accounts. Canada signed him up because it was impressed by how he helped manage the U.S. approach to the acid-rain problem. And that approach, says Deaver, was designed solely to get the President through the Ottawa summit in harmony with the Canadians. Strange thing, he notes. Everybody seems to love the acid-rain proposal, a public-private cleanup over five years. "You'd think the conservationists would be marching for me," Deaver laughed. "I haven't seen them."

Puerto Rico, another client, wanted to attack the U.S. Treasury to win special tax breaks. "I said no to that approach," Deaver declared. "I said base the appeal on the President's Caribbean Basin Initiative. No nation has ever proposed doing anything that was wrong in principle. But sometimes they have been wrong about tactics. I help with that."

So far Deaver has not lost any clients because of the flap. The world will still need people like him who can convert ideas into reality, he says. One lament is that he became a problem for Reagan. "I feel bad that he has to defend me," said Deaver.