RICHARD DARMAN: Driven To Beat the Budget

Richard Darman was an anonymous White House staffer seven years ago, still struggling to make his place among Reaganauts suspicious of his moderate politics, but he knew what job would suit him next. If his ally David Stockman, then the embattled Budget Director, departed, Darman thought himself a natural for the Office of Management and Budget. Word of his ambition seeped out. A newspaper column scoffing at his qualifications got big play in Boston, and his ailing father saw it. The younger Darman seethed, and not only because of the criticism. Later he confided that he was upset partly because "I still wasn't successful in a way that really meant something to him." Or to himself, for that matter.

The incident spoke loudly of Darman, who already owned an impressive record in and out of government. He also possessed a huge appetite for more responsibility, a need to perform in the political circus' center ring and a perfectionist's burden of self-doubt. That Darman, after some detours, became George Bush's Budget Director last month shows a degree of adroit tenacity rare even among Washington's tribe of striving Type A's. He appears joyful in his new post, though his return to public service dumps him into a sticky triangular paradox. Alone among Reagan advisers, Darman lent his name to a Washington coinage: "Darmanesque" denotes the arcane stratagems he devised to promote Reagan policies. In the process of advancing Reaganomics, he sometimes swallowed his own skepticism about its wisdom. Now Darman must extricate Bush from the tar pit that is Ronald Reagan's fiscal legacy. The incongruity does not diminish his enthusiasm.

It is a challenge fittingly complex for a state-of-the-art public official who, at 45, is working for his fifth President and has served in six Cabinet departments. Darman has been a policy adviser, a crisis manager, an editor of Bush and Reagan speeches, a campaign strategist and, above all, a negotiator of intricate deals. The one he found "most exciting," he says, occurred when, as a young Justice Department official, he helped broker Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. And the most significant? He names the 1986 economic-summit communique, improving policy coordination among the industrial democracies. Years hence, he predicts, that agreement will be seen as historic.

That Darman takes such pride in a pact unfamiliar to nearly all ordinary mortals -- rather than megadeals like the 1983 Social Security rescue or the 1986 tax-reform act -- shows still another of his several facets. He is a relentless future freak. In a town obsessed with the crisis du jour, he frequently peers at the far horizon and tosses off jeremiads about his sightings. Lately he has been preaching against the rampant impulse for instant gratification. Americans "need to reinstill in ourselves a sense of the importance of the future," he argues. No one argues back in principle, but politics pushes back mercilessly. That standoff underscores a fascinating conflict between Darman's strategy and his psyche.