The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan walked into the East Room last week with just the slightest hitch in his stride. The healing from his prostate surgery was almost complete. He stood as straight as ever. Beneath a huge banner, QUEST FOR EXCELLENCE, he gave the 200 assembled businesspeople a talk that was fully ripened Reagan, expertly read from two TelePrompTers.

But the message he brought was just marginally on the minds of his audience. The greater question was about Ronald Reagan's waning presidency. Concern was palpable. Can he revitalize his leadership, so diverted and damaged by scandal and ineptitude?

It is a melancholy moment in the Reagan Administration. The old magic is gone forever, lost not so much to a single shock, the Iran-contra affair, as to the thousand and one arrows that constantly assail leaders, causing them to falter as the wounds accumulate. The Reagan nerve ends, so exquisitely conditioned by the long years of struggling to get to the top, are dulled by the isolation and the sycophancies of ultimate power.

The personal and political heartbeat of the Reagan presidency is now in the hands of five people besides the President himself: his wife Nancy, Chief of Staff Don Regan and his deputy Dennis Thomas, the new press spokesman Marlin Fitzwater and Pollster Richard Wirthlin. They regulate Reagan's energies, shape his moods, provide his information, schedule his forays beyond the comforting tranquillity of the Oval Office. They are not a formal body. Mostly they cluster in twos or threes, but they are always linked minute by minute through the phones. It is a singular power mechanism, twisted by its own internal stress.

Regan has become the most reviled White House staff chief in modern times, utterly without support in Congress, the media and his own party. Yet the President clings to him even in the face of his wife's obvious distaste. Don Regan, so bumbling and insensitive in high profile, has reduced his visibility dramatically, a move that has at last become him in his ill-starred winter. / But it may be too late. Fair or unfair, there is a national perception that Regan has guided both the President and himself mindlessly toward humiliation. For the moment, he refuses to leave on his own, fostering the unfortunate image of two stubborn old men huddled together in ignorance and isolation.

Still, there is in the midst of this strange scene some stirring of calm competency trying to assert itself, first and foremost from Nancy Reagan. When West Wing concerns began to rise because the sequestered invalid was being judged too dotty to resume his duties, she ignored those who urged her to push him out front before he was well enough. "Too many people I know who have had this operation have tried to do too much too soon," she said. "They had to go back to the hospital. I'm not going to have that happen now." That settled it. Reagan didn't even take the usual 30 minutes to joke with the establishment at the recent Alfalfa Club dinner. He stayed home and rested.

Fitzwater has absorbed the White House press hectoring with good humor, and his obvious sincerity about trying to be right and thorough is holding most grumblers in check for now. Thomas, earlier dismissed as one of Don Regan's "mice," has nevertheless kept lines open to old friends on the Hill and in the media. Wirthlin is keeper of the polls, the closest thing to a real grass root that the President hears.

If the new facts reveal a White House deception beyond anything so far known, Reagan's leadership problems will simply grow to tragic proportions. If the new data only embellish the story of ineptitude and naivete that is already known in its essentials, then Reagan can regain some of the lost prestige by talking from the White House pulpit on other national concerns and working harder than he has ever worked to learn where his country is headed. He cannot again reach the high ground he once occupied, but he can manage his last months in power with dignity and meaning. That is enough.