With Reagan: The Inside Story

DURING Ronald Reagan's two presidential Administrations, at least until the Iran-Contra crisis broke halfway through the second, his political opponents and media critics seemed almost too afraid of him to protest vigorously. In the three and a half years since he stepped down, however, they have drawn a picture of a half-senile former actor, woozily bent on further enriching his wealthy friends while the nation endured a decade of greed and sleaze.

Mr. Reagan's associates have in general been a bit slower about publishing their own very different evaluations of the man and his times, but these are beginning to come on line. Now, at last, we have the account of the man who, on policy matters, was perhaps closer to President Reagan than anyone else. The result is, quite simply, the best and clearest account we are ever likely to get of the major policy decisions and crises of the Reagan Presidency.

Ed Meese served Ronald Reagan as chief of staff when he was governor of California. Reagan brought him to Washington in 1981 as "counselor to the President," and in 1985 named him Attorney General. In keeping with the time-honored principle that attacks on a President are first launched indirectly, against his close associates, Meese, who made no secret of his staunch conservatism, was doomed from the start to be a favorite media whipping-boy. (He genially compares accepting appointment as Attorney General to the blunder of the captain of the Olympic javelin team who "won the toss and elected to receive.") But he does not deal here with the vicious attacks on him personally. The present volume is Meese's detailed chronological account of the Reagan Presidency, as he saw it from deep inside.

Meese has the clear, cool mind of a lawyer, without the verbosity and complexity that so often afflict the legal style. Innately good-tempered, he declares at the outset that he will avoid personal criticisms wherever he can, and he is as good as his word. But when Meese considers it necessary, no reader will be left in doubt where blame is to be assigned.

Thus at the very outset he makes it clear that he believes Reagan's decision to fire John Sears as his campaign manager in February 1980 was essential to his ultimate victory. For Sears wanted to redesign Reagan as "the establishment candidate"--a role that would have required him to jettison practically every belief he held dear.

Once in the White House, the Reagan that Meese saw and served was no amiable somnambulist. On the contrary, "Reagan was, in fact, a tough and decisive leader, one of the best I have ever known or seen in action

Far from being ignorant, he was widely knowledgeable on a host of issues-often much more so than his detractors.'' Chapter by chapter, Meese credits Reagan with being the real force behind key Administration policies, from tax reduction to cold-war strategy to SDI.

Along the way, Meese acknowledges the problems presented by various individuals. His remarks about White House Chief of Staff James Baker are circumspect, but quite enough to indicate that Baker was the Prince of Leaks. As for Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver, Meese notes that he '%vas virtually the only original Reaganite from California who seemed to be totally overcome by the power and blandishments of the establishment, so that he basically aligned himself with the pragmatists."

Then there was OMB Director David Stockman, who betrayed the President by publicly attacking the Administration's tax policy. On the general subject of the "pragmatists" and taxes, Meese comments bitterly that "It all adds up to Stockman and [Treasury aide Richard] Darman becoming convinced by the late summer of 1981 that tax-rate reduction would be calamitous for the economy and setting to work surreptitiously to change the program."

It is in his detailed account of the Iran-Contra crisis, however, that Meese performs his most signal services for the historical record. He stresses, for example, that the hope of freeing our hostages in Lebanon was only one reason Reagan approved a limited arms deal with Iranian moderates. Meese lists three more:

1. To establish communication with moderate elements in Iran, in order to improve relationships with a postKhomeini government.

2. To help bring an end to the IranIraq war, preferably with neither a clearcut winner, lest the war continue and further ignite the Middle East.

3. To influence the Iranian government to discontinue or at least diminish its support of terrorism.

Meese is certain, moreover, that President Reagan (and for that matter the late Bill Casey) were totally unaware of the diversion of arms-sale proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras, and explains why. Independent of the testimony of Poindexter and North, and "equally convincing, to me at least, was the President's absolute shock and surprise when I informed him of the diversion. I think I know Ronald Reagan pretty well, and in my experience deep-dyed duplicity is not on him."