The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Every President sooner or later has to cut a deal with that thing we call Washington, or else he will be scorned, humiliated or simply brushed aside. Most of them hate it. The wise ones finally accept it.

The Washington Establishment, or that collection of people "inside the Beltway," is the big, raw nerve end of the U.S. And it has been so for almost 200 years. Curse it, attack it, defy it indefinitely, and a President almost always ends up diminished.

Ronald Reagan these days seems to be inviting calamity, whether through his obsessive reluctance to raise revenues to reduce the deficit or his impulse to shove Supreme Court choices down the Senate's open throat. So far he has saved himself in the eleventh hour, but his anger lurks menacingly beneath the surface.

Washington at some point has been all of the evils he describes. But Washington is something more: it is history stretching back two centuries, an accumulation of the experience of politicians, lobbyists, journalists, tycoons, labor skates, hustlers, social climbers, clergy, judges, tourists, professors, bureaucrats and any number of crooks, white collar and otherwise. In short, it has served as America come to the front office to complain. Washington is bigger, lustier and louder than ever, and it is still the final point of impact on the presidency.

No President gets anything near what he wants from Washington, nor should he, and he often risks losing those achievements on the books if he doesn't deal pragmatically with the city.

"Smart ones understand," says the venerable Clark Clifford, 80, who has seen as much of the power game as anyone. Harry Truman, for whom Clifford worked in the White House, at first fought the forces around him; he severely embarrassed himself and the country before he understood he wasn't the only authority on the avenue. Clifford thinks that insofar as Reagan is concerned, it is too late. "President Reagan has become almost irrelevant. Powerful forces are moving ahead without him. In the economic field, he will be unable to recover. Our main goal now is to try to prevent the damage from getting out of hand."

Lyndon Johnson knew how to compromise better than anyone. Clifford, L.B.J.'s Secretary of Defense, remembers March 31, 1968, when Johnson tried to cut his last and biggest deal with Washington. He went on the air to "speak to you of peace" not war. It was the end of escalation in Viet Nam. Washington, with its peace marchers, Senate harangues, angry poets, editorial cartoons and leaky colonels, had stopped him. He left for the ranch because he knew enough to know he had to yield.

The American people want their President to be God. But a President can't be. The contentious mass in Washington's center is part of Government, and even Presidents cannot reign as its supreme and unyielding ruler.

Reagan's considerable good works are in jeopardy these days because he is so reluctant to deal. True, conciliation too soon and too eagerly invites contempt, as happened with Jimmy Carter. But if it comes too late it invites oblivion. That is what threatens Ronald Reagan.

"Workable wisdom is the distillation of many different viewpoints which have clashed heatedly and directly," wrote the sagacious George Reedy some years ago in The Twilight of the Presidency. "The concept that there are policies and programs which are immutably correct has been one of the most troublesome in the history of human government."