Ready to Play Power Poker

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Ronald Reagan emerges from the election with his ideas somewhat battered but his leadership oddly intact. He is entering one of those times of presidential paradox when the very traits that took him to the top threaten his command.

Reagan is in the White House because of his unyielding conviction that Government needed to be restrained and military strength increased. In 21 months on the job he has forced all parties to acknowledge the validity of these principles, an extraordinary act of leadership. The debate is on his chosen ground. The heated national arguments arose not over directions but on the timing and size of budget cuts for domestic programs and increases for weapons. Then Reagan ran smack into the oldest rule of Government: solving one problem begets another. Inflation went down, unemployment went up. The election results reflect a case of public shivers, a fear that Reagan is going to cure us if he has to kill us.

There may be no more difficult presidential task than determining when the time has come to reshape policy, to adopt new tactics and even to eat a few words. ("I have eaten a great many of mine," said Winston Churchill, "and on the whole, I have found them a most wholesome diet.") Every successful President eventually learns that flexibility is salvation. The presidential bone yard is strewn with markers of those who would not change.

Woodrow Wilson's diamond-bright belief of peace through world order reached and inspired the farthest corners of civilization. But he was frozen in the amber of his vision, and would not bend in the legislative struggle to bring the U.S. into the League of Nations.

Wilson's dream perished before a recalcitrant Senate.

One can see from this distance that Richard Nixon's conspiratorial bent helped him understand the dark maneuverings of America's adversaries around the world. But that was the very trait that snared him in Watergate. He thought he could conspire his way out of political quicksand.

Lyndon Johnson fervently believed that Big Government should be used for almost any big problem that came across the American horizon. He was unmatched as a manipulator and legislator. Fired by his own successes, he simply rejected the idea that there might be limits to himself or the nation. He spent too much for war and the Great Society. His appetite for action was finally his undoing.

A few weeks ago, the veterans of Dwight Eisenhower's Administration gathered to toast the general's 92nd birthday and the 30th anniversary of his election as President. Even some of those who had been closest to Ike were surprised to hear a former Harvard professor, William B. Ewald, report that Eisenhower had come from oblivion to ninth place on the list of great Presidents compiled by historians. "The more I think about it," said Roemer McPhee, who was a young lawyer in Ike's White House, "the more I believe that President Eisenhower's indispensable attribute was his restraint. He never used too much of his power. He never spent too much of the country's wealth. He never insisted on having his way all the time."

In the first days after the vote, Reagan was marvelously contradictory. In the Rose Garden, in front of the cameras, he confessed this might be a time for conciliation with Congress. Inside the White House with his budget experts, he thumped the table and said he was not ready to propose cuts in defense or tax increases to try to reduce the country's crushing deficits. With his presidency on the line, Ronald Reagan is going to have to play a different style of power poker the next two years. He understands that. Like any good gambler who wants to come out a winner, he will have to learn when to raise, when to bluff and, from time to time, when to cut his losses.

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