The Triumph of Arrogance

By Hugh Sidey

The Reagan Administration was simply not up to the exquisite talents of David Stockman. In five years as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, he strode through the corridors of power thwarted, in his account, by political nincompoops who never grasped what policy was all about. He has hardly met another presidential aide he did not disdain. He labored unsuccessfully to educate a dotty President in the fundamentals of economics, only to have poor Ronald Reagan ignore "the palpable, relevant facts" and wander in circles.

In the end, the self-proclaimed White House intellectual, the Harvard divine, did not grasp the nature of the drama in which he played, and somewhere along his journey he misplaced his soul.

Stockman's memoirs, The Triumph of Politics (Harper & Row; $19.50), form a singular document of arrogance. That Washington cannot meet its responsibilities on the budget certainly is true, but Stockman's own failures may have had as much to do with creating the huge federal deficits and the diminished trust in Government economic planning with which we are now burdened.

Stockman's narrative about Reagan and his aides is at times so unintelligible (the President, he writes, "had no concrete program to dislocate and traumatize the here-and-now of American society") and so stunningly self-centered (the Reagan revolution was not Reagan's, "it was mine") that it provokes a bit of perverse admiration. Surely this is a hoax. The onetime boy wonder of the OMB has to be better than he reads.

Stockman's anguished discoveries that Presidents sometimes do not understand the intricacies of Government and often don't seem to know what they are talking about are hardly original. And Stockman still does not understand that the presidency is mostly political calculation mixed with a large portion of ballyhoo.

Reagan trusted Stockman, but Stockman, by his own admission, again and again failed to return that trust. The mystery in this account is why Stockman did not lay his fears of impending financial disaster squarely on the President's desk. Or why, if others thwarted his honest intentions, he did not resign. His self-exoneration--describing how he was flitting here and there in righteous dismay, confronting all those mindless Californians around Reagan, struggling to "work from within" to avert the catastrophe he so clearly saw before him--does not go down well. He confesses to being too enamored of power. Yet he leaves no doubts that he considered his morality of a higher order, his intelligence superior.

Stockman contends that Reagan was not a revolutionary and should never have tried to change the U.S. Government dramatically. That's an odd revelation. Anyone who spent four years as a Congressman should know that Presidents do not win power by planning to discard totally the American past. Ronald Reagan never suggested he intended to dismantle two centuries of American tradition. Nevertheless, the Reagan Administration has brought enough change to Washington to be called a revolution, at least in the patois of journalists.

There is a lesson, finally, in the Stockman text: beware of what Education Secretary William Bennett calls overenchantment with "learned learning." Washington has a problem with people in its elite whose only knowledge comes from the books they have read, the statistics they have marshaled, the theories that rest on charts they have devised. Long years of leadership that hone instincts and crystallize common sense--a particular Reagan resource--are often more important than the "policy equations" Stockman found so consuming. It can be said about David Stockman that he knew a great deal but understood very little.