The Quality of Command

By Hugh Sidey

One young aide to Ronald Reagan sat against a wall in the Cabinet Room, beneath Calvin Coolidge's portrait, and listened to the economic debate that was engulfing the White House last week. Senators, Congressmen and outside experts hammered away. Quit slicing at the regular appropriations, some said, and go after the big entitlements like Social Security. Chop more out of defense, argued others. Pay attention to Wall Street's warnings. Wall Street is an index of greed--attack it. Try the gold standard. Don't try the gold standard.

Reagan listened patiently to it all, even to the traces of panic brought down from the Hill by political hypochondriacs who see disaster in every adversity. Then he took over. First off, Reagan told his visitors, things were not so bad as they might seem in Washington and New York. Short-term interest rates were beginning to soften. And there would be more budget cuts. He looked around the table during one meeting, and for a second the warm mood faded. "Let's get one thing straight," he told his congressional visitors. "If budget-busting bills come down, I will veto them." After gathering his Cabinet officers for some exhortation and prayer, the President ordered them to stand fast. His benediction: "We knew it would never be easy."

To the young White House aide in the Cabinet Room there was an echo from the past in that message. During his campaign and the transition, Ronald Reagan had constantly reminded his troops of the difficulty of nudging the Federal Government and its entrenched bureaucracy onto a new course. The important fact is that the President has not yet yielded in conviction or purpose, two ingredients of his early success. But now he seeks something more.

This Administration is being put to a real test for the first time. Reagan faces true adversity from events beyond the White House and from some doubts within. Bryce Harlow, who has wisely interpreted Washington for 40 years, believes that only at such times can one judge the mettle of a President. Harlow, who came to town a Democrat and turned Republican, served both Eisenhower and Nixon at the White House. Along the way, he concluded that successful leadership must harden into the quality of command if a President is going to prevail. That entails both taking political risks and abandoning the search for perfect solutions. "The White House is always filled with people with strong wills," explains Harlow. "They get along beautifully in success. But when they get into travail, these hard heads believe they are the only ones with the right answers, and that can end up in an internal struggle."

In times of trouble, it has been Harlow's observation, there are no absolutely correct answers to problems, only approximate ones. As he sees it, a President in command must hold his course, tell the dissenters to go to hell-if possible, making them like it--and inject a bit of fear into his adversaries. "World peace and economic health are the two issues before Reagan now," says Harlow. "The rest are dwarfed by them. The President is the whale and he cannot let himself be eaten by the guppies."

Harlow talks knowingly about the dynamics of crises. External threats, like Nikita Khrushchev's bullying of Ike after the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane in 1960, rally the nation and the Government round a President. In a major domestic crisis, like the Depression of the 1930s, Congress tends to quit and turn to the President to save the country, says Harlow. But in a moderate-size domestic crisis, such as the one we have now, Congress will, if allowed, obstruct and usurp the President.

All last week Ronald Reagan was reaching for command, shoving his people into line, tuning them up and marching them off against incipient doubt and fear. On Thursday, after giving each of his Cabinet members a specific assignment in his new campaign to restore economic confidence, he seemed to be talking as much to the nation as to that small cluster of officials when he said, "They still won't believe us, but we are going to balance this budget by 1984."

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