2 EMISIONES AL AIRE DE CONTAMINANTES MONITOREADOS

Having analysed how Reagan attempted to structure his executive it is now important to look at how the president himself operated within that structure. In order to do so it is necessary to look at, Reagan as manger. What will become clear is that while there may be nearly universal agreement amongst both scholars and members of his administration on what methods Reagan used, there is a significant division as to whether his management style produced a positive or negative effect on US foreign policy making.

6.5.1 Decision-making and Delegation

Reagan was a very complicated individual who offered many contradictions. His advisers have spoken of their ability to work with him day-to-day in a professional capacity due to his warm and friendly nature. However, they found it difficult to form any sort of close personal relationship with him. It was often impossible to know what the president was thinking until

he told them.⁵⁹ He had an inner-self confidence that was cultivated during his years as an actor, and his skills as a negotiator were honed while working as a union representative in Hollywood. He was able to bargain effectively in the most heated of meetings with Soviet leaders, but he became very uncomfortable when faced with disagreements amongst his advisers.⁶⁰

As a result, Reagan brought to the Oval Office a very distinct style of management. He viewed himself as responsible for setting the political agenda of his administration. It was his role as president to establish the broad strategic framework that he wanted his presidency to pursue, and he was to use the power of his office to explain this choice of direction to both the electorate and his staff. He would then delegate authority to his staff to work out the finer details of how these objectives would be achieved. His staff would be responsible for formulating the specific policy options they believed would achieve Reagan’s chosen goal.

They would then present these options to Reagan and it would be his prerogative as Commander-in-Chief to make the final decision. In his very first NSC meeting Reagan explicitly stated how he wished foreign policy making to be conducted during his administration: “I will use the NSC structure to obtain your guidance, but I will make the decisions. Once made, I expect the Departments to implement them.”⁶¹ Reagan also wished it to be known publicly how he viewed himself as president. In an interview with Forbes magazine he explained how his system of decision-making operated:

In the Cabinet meetings…I use a system in which I want to hear what everybody wants to say honestly. I want the decisions made on what is right or wrong, what is good or bad for the people of this country. I encourage all the input that I can get... And when I've heard all that I need to make a decision, I don't take a vote. I make the decision. Then I expect every one of them, whether their views have carried the day or not, to go forward together in carrying out the policy.⁶²

59 Haig, A. (1984) Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan), p6; Cannon, L. (2000) President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs), pp141-147

60 Neustadt, R. (1990) Presidential Power And The Modern Presidents: The Politics Of Leadership From Roosevelt To Reagan. (Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International), p273

61 National Security Council (1981) Minutes of NSC Meeting, 6 February, Executive Secretariat: NSC Meeting Files, Box 1, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

62 Reagan, R. (1986) “Reagan on Decision Making, Planning, Gorbachev and More” September 15, Forbes, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1986/09/15/68051/index.htm accessed 15/07/2010

Most observers noted that Reagan appeared comfortable making decisions and that when his mind was made up he stayed true to his convictions. George Shultz has written that Reagan “is comfortable with himself. He is decisive, he steps up to things, and when he decides, he stays with it. And sometimes you wish he wouldn’t, but anyway, he does. He is very decisive, and he’s very strong.”⁶³ All presidents need to make the final decision, but not all of them have been comfortable doing so. Reagan’s ability to make decisions, and feel at ease while doing so, has to be regarded as a positive aspect of his administration. However, like so many of the other contradictions in evidence during his presidency, his ease at making decisions papered over several serious problems.

The first of these stemmed from his delegation of authority to his subordinates. Reagan adopted an infamous ‘hands-off’ approach to the running of his administration. Once he had settled on a policy, it was up to the rest of the executive to implement his decision and then evaluate the policy as and when required. Reagan might have genuinely believed this was the most effective way to ensure high quality policy making, but it is clear that it also stemmed from some personal weaknesses in Reagan. He had to delegate so much authority because he had little understanding of the complex details involved in policy making. Evidence of such lack of knowledge is well known, but perhaps the most famous example was his inability to comprehend the logic of nuclear deterrence and why this meant the Soviet Union would not agree to Reagan’s development of the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI).⁶⁴ Reagan was also very reluctant to involve himself in the search for policy alternatives. Thus, when he was presented with a decision to make, he rarely questioned how these options had been developed or what the underlying bureaucratic consensus was in relation to these options.

Neustadt has suggested Reagan “seems to have combined less intellectual curiosity, less interest in detail, than any president at least since Calvin Coolidge, with more initial and sustained commitments, more convictions independent of events or evidence, than any president since Wilson championed the League.”⁶⁵ The sheer extent of Reagan’s delegation is also worthy of note. Neustadt draws an important comparison with Franklin Roosevelt, who was well known for delegating authority to subordinates: “FDR’s delegations were time limited and shifting; what Roosevelt gave he took back on notice” whereas “Reagan, it

63 Shultz, G. (1993) Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (London: Maxwell Macmillan International), p920

64 Greenstein, F. (2004) The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press), p157

65 Neustadt, R. (1990) Presidential Power And The Modern Presidents: The Politics Of Leadership From Roosevelt To Reagan. (Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International), p270

seems, could delegate blindly year after year. The one man evidently knew what he was delegating and conducted himself accordingly; the other may have had little or no idea.”⁶⁶ The combination of a strongly held worldview, lack of knowledge and delegation of authority clearly has the potential for ineffective policy-making.

A second problem resulted from the combination of Reagan’s foreign policy making system and his management style. As discussed previously, Reagan initiated a system of foreign policy making whereby authority was centralised in a White House based NSC system. However, he had not clearly defined the roles he wished his Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to play in his administration. By delegating power to both of these individuals and asking them to formulate the specifics of policy based on his decisions it was almost inevitable that severe disagreements would arise between the two foreign policy advisers over how best to implement the president’s orders. Bureaucratic disagreements will obviously take place in any form of government. However, the impact of these disputes can be reduced by strong leadership from the chief executive. As we have discussed, Reagan was unwilling to involve himself in the day-to-day running of foreign policy so he was unlikely to resolve these disputes. The problem was confounded by a particularly debilitating trait of Reagan’s. He became very uncomfortable when faced with disagreement and conflict amongst his chief advisers. As Neustadt has argued, “Reagan hated conflict amongst his

‘fellas’. He had no wish to watch them squirm, and he was modestly aware that his lack of detail often left him without the wherewithal for resolution.”⁶⁷ Indeed, so aware was Reagan of this weakness in his character and management style that he developed a tactic to help him avoid these problems. Whether in public speeches or in private meetings Reagan would tell stories and use anecdotes in the hope of deflecting attention away from his shortcomings.

James Mann recounts: “As [Brent] Stowcroft and countless other visitors had discovered, Reagan’s almost compulsive habit of telling stories served the purposes of avoiding confrontation, overcoming bureaucratic disputes, and steering clear of the finer points of policy, in which Reagan often was not well versed.”⁶⁸ This however, could only ever serve as a delaying tactic. The underlying issues would not go away. At best this could only buy time for the disputing parties to eventually resolve the issues themselves.

In his memoirs, George Shultz recounts one particularly telling incident. He had complained bitterly to Reagan about NSDD 276, which had established the NSA as chairman

66 Ibid., p273

67 Ibid., p273

68 Mann, J. (2009) The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (London: Viking), p85-86

of the inter-agency process. Shultz felt aggrieved that a member of the White House staff had been placed in a position of authority above the statutory NSC members, including cabinet heads like himself. Shultz had raised a legitimate procedural question but even before he received a formal reply from Reagan he “could see that President Reagan was not interested in what he regarded as a bureaucratic struggle.”⁶⁹ The president eventually responded to Shultz’s concerns in a letter:

None of the arrangements put in place by NSDD 276 will be at the cost of your authority or that of any other members of my cabinet. It is important to note that the committees chaired by the National Security Adviser and his deputy are not freestanding groups, but instead feeder systems for the NSC and NSPG which I chair.⁷⁰

Reagan felt this response would clarify the situation. Unfortunately, Shultz did not understand fully what the president was ordering, “I wasn’t sure what the president’s message to me meant. I decided that he was encouraging my instinct simply to ignore the directive.”⁷¹ This is a clear example of Reagan’s failure to set forth a clearly defined policy making structure and his inability to settle disputes between his advisers. It is also important to note that to this point the analysis has focused purely on the procedural aspects of foreign policy making under Reagan. As will be discussed in the Nicaragua case study below, these underlying procedural issues would have a debilitating impact on the substance of Reagan’s foreign policy. The main problem to arise was that, without clear presidential intervention to provide guidance, the various bureaucratic players were forced to interpret Reagan’s instructions and carry out the policies that they thought Reagan wanted. If there was a general consensus as to what Reagan wanted then the system could function well, such as in the case of Reagan’s first term economic and military policies. However, if there was disagreement then disasters, such as Iran-Contra, became increasingly likely. As John Dumbrell has argued,

“At worst, what Richard Perle called Reagan’s extreme ‘intellectual delegation of authority’

invited either bureaucratic chaos, or the pushing of policy far into the regions of unaccountability.”⁷² What will be highlighted in detail in the case study is the extent to which presidential involvement influences the foreign policy making process. It is possible for a

69 Shultz, G. (1993) Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (London: Maxwell Macmillan International), p907

70 in Ibid., p907

71 Ibid, p907

72 Dumbrell, J. (1997) American Foreign Policy: Carter to Clinton (London: Macmillan), p59

president to delegate authority and produce a coherent and successful foreign policy. But this depends on the president delegating the right amount of authority to the appropriate aides. If the reverse happens then it is essential for a president to either take back the authority he has delegated or be prepared to intervene at the correct moment to bring clarity and decisiveness back to the process. It is the president alone who can bring coherence to an administration in conflict with itself. As we shall see in the next section, Reagan struggled to achieve this consistently over the course of his administration.

6.5.2 Divisions: Hardliners and Moderates

Having set out his vision for both the policies he wanted to achieve (rollback) and the structure of government he wanted to operate (allegedly a formalist cabinet system) Reagan knew it was imperative that he appointed the right people to help him achieve his goals. More so than any previous president, Reagan used his power of appointment to staff his administration with individuals who were both loyal to him, his office and his policy programme. Peter Rodman was a Reagan appointee in the State Department and has written about his involvement in Reagan’s appointment process:

A staff of one hundred in the White House screened candidates for philosophy as well as competence and integrity. The Reagan team is widely regarded as having had more success than most preceding administrations in shaping the leadership of the bureaucracy by these means.⁷³

Reagan wanted to surround himself with figures of a suitably conservative political outlook.

In particular, he expected his foreign policy team to share his worldview that the international system is characterised by a zero-sum logic, and that the Soviet Union is the primary global rival of the United States. However, as discussed previously, Reagan was not a realist. He did not view the world solely in terms of power relations. Reagan expected his subordinates to share his ideological and moralistic view of international politics. The United States was inherently a source of good in the world whilst the Soviet Union was viewed as an ‘evil empire’ which was the chief instigator of violence and disorder.

73 Rodman, P.W. (2009) Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p144

As a result of this, Reagan relied heavily on conservative veterans of the Nixon and Ford administrations, as well as members of the increasingly influential neoconservative movement.⁷⁴ He filled his foreign policy cabinet posts and the highest levels of his White House staff with fellow ideologues. National Security Advisers Richard Allen and William Clark, Secretary of Defence Casper Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and White House Counsellor Edwin Meese all shared Reagan’s view of international politics, US foreign policy and the threat posed by the Soviet Union. As discussed previously, Alexander Haig viewed the Soviet Union as the biggest threat to the United States, but this was based on a traditional realist world view, not an political ideological terms. Mark Lagon has argued that, “Members of Reagan’s inner circle consciously saw each other as allies labouring to keep the administration faithful to what they saw as its ideological agenda.”⁷⁵ It was from the combined efforts of Reagan and these aides that the Reagan Doctrine was formulated.

However, although there was agreement amongst Reagan’s policymaking team regarding the fact that the Soviet Union was the primary rival of the United States and that it posed a security threat, there were significant differences in the administration regarding the severity of the threat posed and the methods that were required to meet the threat. Over the course of Reagan’s term in office a deep ideological divide opened up within his administration, splitting his foreign policy team into two rival camps.

The group detailed above became known as the hardliners. They believed that the Soviet Union had exploited the era of détente in order to aggressively expand their influence in the developing world. The hardliners believed that this posed a serious threat to the national security interests of the United States and it was imperative that US foreign policy be directed to aggressively respond to Soviet provocations. As James Scott has argued: “Driven by a conservative ideological interpretation of international developments and opportunities, this faction viewed any retreat from this purpose or the use of diplomacy in conjunction with the Reagan Doctrine as a sell-out to communism.”⁷⁶ For the hardliners, diplomacy in this context was useless and had to be rejected in favour of direct intervention in the target Third World countries.

The second group became known as the moderates. Included in its ranks were Secretary of State Shultz, Chief-of-Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief-of-Staff Michael Deaver, as well

74 Ibid., p144

75 Lagon, M. P. (1994) The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War’s Last Chapter (London: Praeger), p105

76 Scott, J. M. (1996) The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (London: Duke University Press), p24