A View Without Hills or Valleys

Reagan remains sure, serene and startlingly detached

Ronald Reagan is a wonder. Such zest, such zip, such uncontrived bonhomie. The past three years have brought plenty of crises for the country and his Administration, but Reagan cruises along as serenely self-confident as ever. Now is usually the time in a first term when the press trots out the before-and-after photographs, palpably depicting the burdens of the Oval Office: rosy, beaming President-elect vs. haggard, wan incumbent. But Reagan, now the oldest President in history, seems to have grown more robust since his Inauguration. After three years his optimism appears undimmed, his faith in bedrock conservative notions unshaken. "His perspective is unusual," explains one White House aide of the boss's remarkable equanimity. "Someone 35 years old sees hills and valleys every day, but the President just sees dips in the road. He rides above it."

There is nothing wrong with a calm, comfy, Cadillac-smooth ride. But at times President Reagan glides along altogether too smoothly, virtually unaware of the gritty, often bumpy policymaking processes of his Administration. His lapses are more than a forgivable matter of mixing up history at a press conference or misrepresenting a trivial budget figure now and again. Reagan is remarkably disengaged from the substance of his job. His aides no longer dismiss as glib the theory that Reagan has a movie-star approach to governing. "In Reagan's mind," says a White House adviser, "somebody does the lighting, somebody else does the set, and Reagan takes care of his role, which is the public role."

White House aides, adapting to his mellow managerial style, seldom prod the President, nor he them. Instead, Reagan waits for an amiable consensus to develop among his advisers, who work within the boundaries of Reagan's ideology. Except for his unbudging devotion to a military buildup and opposition to tax increases, he often accepts uncritically his advisers' recommendations. Such openness has cured Reagan of certain ideological tics: he now understands, for instance, that the International Monetary Fund is no mere Third World boondoggle. Yet his grasp of important issues is often shaky and, even more troubling, he seems unalarmed by those knowledge gaps. Says one top adviser: "Is he out of touch occasionally? Sure he is."

Even at the most pedestrian level, Reagan can be eerily detached, oblivious. He does not know where most of his closest advisers sit, even though some are only a few paces away from the Oval Office. He is vague about which underlings do what: an aide suggests that Reagan would be hard pressed to describe with any precision how Chief of Staff James Baker's responsibilities differed from those of Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese before Meese was nominated to be Attorney General. (Baker is responsible for press and congressional relations; Meese was nominally in charge of domestic policy coordination.) After three years of almost daily contact with Reagan, one White House aide was not sure that the President knew his first name. At a January meeting with five Governors to discuss acid rain, Reagan repeatedly called EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus "Don."