A View Without Hills or Valleys

Monday, Feb. 06, 1984 By KURT ANDERSEN
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One unsurpassed perquisite of the office is its access to information: Presidents can find out practically anything they need or simply want to know. Reagan's curiosity, even after three years at the epicenter of events, seems stunted. He is something of a milltary buff, but last fall during his tour of allied fortifications along the 38th parallel, which divides North and South Korea, he did not ask a single question of his U.S. military guide. White House aides cannot remember an instance when the President has asked that they form an ad hoc group to help him thrash out a puzzling policy question.

Technical specifics seem a soporific to him. He occasionally dozes off during meetings, sometimes with outsiders present. In fact, Reagan is not very good at any sort of detail. In a meeting with a foreign leader last year, Reagan pulled out and read from the wrong 4-in. by 6-in. cue cards. The diplomats were aghast. Meeting with a group of Congressmen last fall, Reagan confessed an inexcusable misapprehension as he explained why he had shifted away from his initial, unrealistic Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) proposal. That proposal called for much deeper cuts in land-based missile forces than in air-or sea-launched arsenals. Reagan had not realized, he admitted to the unnerved Congressmen, that the Soviets were certain to reject his formula because their nuclear forces were largely land-based. "I never heard any one of our negotiators or any of our military people or anyone else bring up that particular point," Reagan told TIME last week. So far, Reagan's misstatements to foreign leaders have been manageable, but some officials privately fear that at a U.S.-Soviet summit a blunder could prove irrevocable.

Reagan is happy to let his Executive Branch run by itself. Even when he makes a substantive policy recommendation, he rarely follows through on it. At a staff meeting last year, for example, he suggested that the Administration begin informal "back channel" discussions with Soviet officials. Afterward, according to one adviser, the notion was bureaucratically killed by William P. Clark, then the hard-line National Security Adviser. Reagan simply let the idea drop. While he is not inefficient—papers never pile up on his desk—Reagan does not go looking for extra work. He usually leaves the Oval Office by 5 p.m. "His personal passivity is amazing," says an official.

"Reagan is more assertive in his own life-style stuff, like when he wants to go to Camp David," explains a former adviser. And he intercedes in White House operations aggressively, according to aides, when his public performance is at stake, rewriting staff-drafted speeches to suit his own, superb rhetorical instincts. "No one," an aide says, "can edit a Reagan speech better than Reagan." Even after countless faux pas, however, he still tends to play fast and loose with the facts. In an address to Congressional Medal of Honor winners last December, Reagan told of a World War II bomber pilot who heroically went down with his plane because his wounded gunner could not bail out; the anecdote, which he has recounted more than once, apparently is fiction, based on the 1944 movie Wing and a Prayer.