The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

novice who makes no television appearances, gives few speeches and fewer interviews, writes no learned papers, and expresses no original foreign-policy concepts,” the New York Times wrote of Clark in August 1983. “Yet he has become the most influential foreign-policy figure in the Reagan administration. Eighteen months ago, when he assumed his job after a year’s stint as deputy secretary of state, he was reluctant to assert his conservative views. Now, he is the president’s chief instrument for guaranteeing that his administration takes a hard-line approach to Communism and Soviet influence in the world.”

Clark’s bond with Ronnie went back to Sacramento, where he had been chief of staff in the governor’s office. Though he did not have a foreign-policy background, he was smart and talented. A rancher who had passed the California bar exam on his second attempt without having graduated from college or law school, Clark had brought order to Ronnie’s operation in Sacramento during its most chaotic days. Nancy had also tried to recruit him to help out during the 1980 campaign, when she was engineering the firing of campaign manager John Sears and the shake-up that put Ronnie on the path to victory after New Hampshire. Clark initially joined the Reagan administration as deputy secretary of state, put there largely to keep an eye on the volatile Al Haig. When Clark arrived, Haig had told him: “You, Bill, are going to run the building. I’m going to run the world.”

Whatever regard Nancy had for his managerial abilities, the first lady did not believe that Clark was the person to be driving foreign policy. During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clark had been unable to come up with the names of the prime ministers of Zimbabwe or South Africa, both of which were hot spots at the time. He also admitted that he did not know the definitions of détente or third world. Afterward, Democrat John Glenn of Ohio declared in exasperation that he “had never seen anything like such ignorance of foreign affairs and lack of preparation for a confirmation hearing in my years here in the Senate.” A leading daily newspaper in Amsterdam labeled Clark “a nitwit,” and London’s Daily Mirror opined: “America’s allies in Europe—Europe, Mr. Clark—you must have heard of it—will hope he is never in charge at a time of crisis.”

Once installed in the White House as national security adviser, the deeply conservative Clark clashed with the more pragmatic James Baker and Michael Deaver, though he still had an ally in presidential counselor Ed Meese, who had been an ideological comrade in arms since their Sacramento days. More troubling to Nancy was the fact that Clark, as Deaver once put it, “saw no hope in any policy that relied on trusting the Russians, argued against any attempt to improve that relationship, and did what he could to slow it down.”

Clark’s defenders, who were legion among the other old California hands, say that Nancy’s real beef with the national security adviser was that he was too close to Ronnie, which made him a rival and a counterweight to her own influence over her husband. He and the president frequently went horseback riding together in Washington’s winding Rock Creek Park. When Clark replaced Richard Allen as the White House’s top foreign-policy adviser, he leveraged his personal ties into an arrangement under which he reported directly to Ronnie and had coveted “walk-in privileges” to the Oval Office, which meant he did not have to make an appointment to see the president. “I had never really gotten along with him,” Nancy wrote later of Clark. “He struck me as a user—especially when he traveled around the country claiming he represented Ronnie, which usually wasn’t true. I spoke to Ronnie about him, but Ronnie liked him, so he stayed around longer than I would have liked.”

The national security adviser was pushing hard for a larger US military footprint in Central America. Things boiled over when Clark appeared on the August 8, 1983, cover of Time as the face of the administration’s “Big Stick Approach.” The magazine also took some shots at Shultz in an accompanying article, which noted that there had been a “disappearing act at Foggy Bottom” as “State Department influence continues to wane.” Furious, Nancy called Shultz. She told him she did not believe the national security adviser had Ronnie’s interests at heart and that he should be fired. Shultz, though he no doubt agreed, tried to calm her down, saying Clark was simply in over his head. In fact, Clark’s star turn in the media was a portent of trouble ahead. Clark would later ruefully recall an admonition he had received from Al Haig: “Once you appear in this town on the cover of Time or Newsweek, count your days in the shop.”

Not that he was all that eager to stay. Clark was restless by nature and weary of all the internecine battles. When James Watt’s resignation in early October opened a Cabinet-level vacancy at the Interior Department, Clark jumped at the opportunity to escape the White House.

Chief of Staff Jim Baker was briefly considered as a possibility to move into the national security adviser’s post, which would have been Nancy’s preference, as well as Shultz’s. Clark, upon hearing of his planned replacement, rallied his fellow conservatives—including Pentagon Secretary Weinberger, CIA Director Casey, and Meese—to put a stop to it. The right flank considered Baker too moderate for the job and also knew he was a frequent source of leaks to his friends in the press. Their choice for the post was Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the truculent UN ambassador, whom Shultz would not have accepted. Ronnie decided not to risk inflaming the tensions of his deeply divided national security team and wrote in his diary on October 14, 1983: “Jim Baker wants to take the NSC post. I was willing but then found great division & resistance in certain quarters. I finally decided that to ignore this & go ahead anyway