Just Say Goodbye, Don Regan

Squabbles between two presidential advisers are common, but they rarely reach melodramatic heights. In recent months, however, a battle between Ronald Reagan's two closest counselors has been airing regularly, like a soap-opera accompaniment to news of the Iran-contra scandal. As the sniping between First Lady Nancy Reagan and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan escalated, it only added to the image of a presidency adrift. "What is happening at the White House?" asked New Mexico Democrat William Richardson on the House floor last week. "Who is in charge? A constituent of mine asked, 'How can the President deal with the Soviets if he cannot settle a dispute between his wife and the chief of staff?' "

When the melodrama came to its inevitable conclusion at week's end, Regan's ouster was yet another reminder that Nancy exerts extraordinary influence on her husband. The President considers her a trusted adviser, especially when it comes to hiring -- and firing. While Reagan avoids unpleasant confrontations, his wife is more hardheaded about staff failures and more willing to deal with them. "It's the eternal optimist in him," Nancy said of her husband a few years ago, "that if you let something go, it will eventually work itself out. Well, it isn't always so."

Initially the First Lady considered Regan's tight management hierarchy a welcome change after the occasional disarray of the troika that ran the first- term White House. But she became annoyed when the overbearing chief of staff seemed to arrogate presidential decision-making responsibilities to himself during Reagan's convalescence from cancer surgery in 1985.

Worse, Regan failed to show Nancy the kind of attention she had grown used to from former White House Aides Michael Deaver and James Baker, to whom she spoke several times a day by telephone. Regan simply did not have the patience and was not astute enough to realize that talking to Nancy was a part of his job. Says one Reagan intimate: "We all know that she isn't the easiest person to deal with. Regan never understood how to handle her. It has a lot to do with how he interacts with women." The chief of staff became notorious in the past two years for his remarks disparaging women's interests and intelligence. In the White House he tended to dismiss the First Lady's advice or, worse, to shunt off her calls to his assistants. "I have never seen a wife who gets into her husband's affairs so much," he told an acquaintance. "It's unfortunate that she doesn't realize how damaging that is to him."

When the arms-for-hostages scandal broke in November, Nancy was quicker than the President to realize its implications. Says the Reagans' son Ron: "She more than he recognized the potential for it to be as damaging as it has become." Still, in December, the First Lady was ambivalent about the need to push Regan out.