Let the petty pundits call him what they will, he figures. Snitch, sleaze, turncoat, tattletale. Sticks and stones, fellas. For a change, David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, has the numbers on his side. Big, big numbers like $2.3 million. Big little numbers like No. 1.
”Mr. Stockman!” exclaims a breathless young man as the new ascendant to pop literature`s throne arrives at Chicago`s NBC studios for his tenth interview of the day. ”Mr. Stockman, your editor just called. Your book is No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.”
A more emotional, more sloppily self-managed man might let out a hoot, flash a grin, indulge in a self-congratulatory superlative or two. But not the Fastidious Accountant. His face merely flickers with sly amusement. He quietly says, ”Not bad for a week`s work,” and continues, shoulders slightly hunched, hands in his pinstriped pockets, toward the next interrogation.
The publicist traveling with Stockman, on the other hand, is flushed with astonished delight. He tosses around words like ”fantastic” and
”extraordinary” as if they were confetti. Exactly one week after its release, David Stockman`s ”The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed” has routed Dr. Seuss` ”You`re Only Old Once!” from the bestseller top spot.
”It never happens this fast,” the publicist says, dialing the New York office of Harper & Row to verify the amazing story, ”except maybe for Michener, Ludlum, those guys.”
Is the Fastidious Accountant surprised?
The author takes off his glasses and wipes the lenses. Without the big rims to shield him, he looks briefly and oddly vulnerable, like the Michigan farm boy he was way back before he began manipulating the government ledger, before Harper & Row paid him $2.3 million for 422 pages of budgetary analysis, gossip and autobiography, before he had a chauffered Lincoln that whisks him weekdays at dawn from his new $2 million Greenwich, Conn., home to his new million-dollar-a-year investment banking job with Salomon Brothers.
He replaces his glasses and cups his chin in his hand. ”Oh,” he says, and the faint, impish smile returns, ”I thought it might happen.”
He autographs a couple of his books, then takes the phone to accept his editor`s congratulations. ”Something has gotten these Washington columnists all riled up,” he says with deadpan innocence. ”I`m going to have to figure out what.”
Golly, Dave. What could it be?
Could it have been the nasty remarks about former White House aide Mike Deaver: ”For Mike Deaver and the others, reality happened once a day, on the evening news. They never read anything. They lived off the tube.”
Maybe it was that rhetorically rococco gibe at House Speaker Tip O`Neill: ”O`Neill, with his massive corpulence and scarlet, varicose nose, was a Hogarthian embodiment of the superstate he had labored for so long to maintain.”
Or the denouncement of the budgetary crusade that you masterminded and, by your own admission, hoodwinked the President into believing could succeed: ”The Reagan Revolution was radical, imprudent and arrogant.”
Washington might hate such cattiness, but the public doesn`t seem to mind. Thanks to his bald assessments of his former associates, David Stockman is suddenly everywhere, staring off the cover of Newsweek, jousting with Phil Donahue. Always the shrewd competitor–as a boy he turned crop picking on his family`s farm into a contest with his brothers, and he always won–he has managed with his pen to convert the one significant failure of his life into a success.
”I`ve failed in a lot of judgments,” he says, sitting in the Whitehall Hotel early in the morning of his whirlwind day in Chicago. He has been asked what failures he has encountered in life. ”I`ve failed in a lot of ways to comprehend the limits of what`s possible to do in a democratic political process. I acknowledge that in the book at the points where it occurred.
”But have I failed in some ambition I set for myself? Being elected to Congress? No. Becoming director of OMB? No. Writing a successful book? No.”
He pauses and his eyes glint. ”It might be controversial, but it`s successful.”
Sipping the first of the day`s many cups of coffee, Stockman radiates compact energy and intense certitude. Though he is unfailingly polite, his words often have the ring of a dare. He retains a streak of `60s contrariness, a trace of the Vietnam War protestor whose favorite rock group was the Grateful Dead. His hair, steely gray though he is only 39, laps two unconservative inches over the back of his white shirt collar. He remains an iconoclast even in rumpled pin stripes.
Stockman reels off answers to questions with the efficiency and speed of a computer printer–unless the questions are about his personal life or his psyche, in which case he is likely to say something like ”I could give you an answer, but I don`t feel like thinking that hard” or ”Two people have written whole books on me and I`m not going to add to the literature.”
He began ”The Triumph of Politics” last August, after leaving his Cabinet job. Though he left behind the largest deficit in American history, he was widely praised for his hard work and intelligence. He wrote steadily until December, at home and on legal pads, hoping, he says, to chronicle the important turning point in American political thinking that had occurred during his 4 1/2 years in the White House.
Stockman entered the Cabinet committed to a minimalist government, one in which both domestic spending and taxes would be cut. He now chastises himself and his fellow ideologues for trying, with a catastrophic combination of haste, ignorance and fervor, to impose changes that the public didn`t want.
Stockman argues that since 1981 Americans have had what amounts to a national referendum on government spending. Like their President, whom Stockman depicts as a sentimentalist who lacks the intellect to understand his own revolution, they have had to confront their profoundly ambivalent desire for government that is both generous and cheap. Given their apparent preference for a moderate social democracy, he says, the only way to avoid economic calamity is to raise taxes.
”Conservatives finally had come face to face with this big government monster that they`ve been chastising and complaining about for 30 or 40 years,” he says. ”They found out in the heat of battle, looking at it program by program, constituency by constituency, that they weren`t as much against it as they thought.”
He still believes in the theory he fought for.
”As a philosophical matter,” he says, ”I still think it`s ridiculous to pay wheat farmers $2 a bushel. As a philosophical matter, I think it`s ridiculous to give people with $50,000 a year in retirement income from private sources free Medicare benefits worth $1,500 a year. I think it`s ridiculous to give middle-class students subsidized loans and grants. But I haven`t dissuaded anybody of that and I`m no longer going to try.”
Stockman explains his changes as intellectual evolution born of experience. In his critics` view, however, the erstwhile wunderkind and enfant terrible of Ronald Reagan`s Cabinet–the youngest Cabinet member of the century–is pulling one of his favorite tricks: trading ideologies and abandoning former mentors because they`re no longer convenient.
As Stockman grew up on his family`s farm in southeastern Michigan, his first hero, his grandfather, instilled in him a belief in the twin virtues of fundamentalist Christianity and Republicanism. In moving from high school to Michigan State University, he shifted allegiance from Republican Barry Goldwater to Karl Marx. During two years at Harvard Divinity School during the Vietnam War, he began edging his way to the far right reaches of conservatism. Now he concedes victory to the middle-of-the-roaders. He no longer believes in God.
His past is littered with discarded ”gurus” and ”rabbis,” among them Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y), former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, and John Anderson, the former congressman who ran against Ronald Reagan as an independent in 1980, all of whom are targets of a dig or two in his book. In 1980, as Reagan prepared for his presidential debate against Anderson, Stockman played his former mentor in the debate rehearsal, convinced that helping Reagan prevail over Jimmy Carter was more important than hurting a friend.
”There is a pattern to his life,” says Owen Ullmann, a Washington correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers who recently wrote ”Stockman: The Man, The Myth, The Future.” ”He shows a certain amount of awe for new ideas about how the world works, provided by a mentor. He finds a flaw in that idea about how the world works and winds up rejecting the notion and the mentor.” Stockman impatiently acquits himself of charges of disloyalty, rising in his chair, declaring himself offended.
”Is loyalty blind loyalty?” he asks. ”If you think nonsense is going on, if you think great errors that will be harmful to the country and to the public are being made, does loyalty require that you whitewash it, that you ignore it, that you lock yourself in a closet and keep quiet? I don`t think so.”
He says it was out of loyalty–not treachery or cowardice, as some critics say–that he stayed in his OMB job after the 1981 Atlantic magazine article in which he exposed his early doubts about the Reagan Revolution to journalist William Greider. He stayed, under pressure from colleagues, hoping to clean up some of the mess he had made.
When he finally left, it was because he was convinced there was no more he could do. ”I was motivated by idealism,” he says. ”When I finally concluded after five years that the American public really didn`t want my grand scheme for things, what point was there in staying around? I didn`t get any great satisfaction out of simply the job in itself or walking around the White House or being a member of the Cabinet or anything like that.”
Washington author John Greenya, who with Anne Urban wrote ”The Real David Stockman,” backed by Ralph Nader`s Presidential Accountability Group, doesn`t believe Stockman is a man driven by idealism. He describes Stockman as diligent, intelligent and dangerous. ”He`s an opportunist who has ended up hurting the country,” says Greenya, who has not met Stockman.
Ullmann, who knows Stockman, is more generous, depicting him as a composite of contradictions. ”He`s an incredibly naive and ambitious, idealistic do-gooder and self-promoter.” Perhaps his greatest flaw, Ullmann says, is his ”total lack of understanding about people. That is often viewed by his critics as gross arrogance, meanness. I think it`s more benign.”
The authors of both books pieced together Stockman`s life with very little help from him, relying instead on scores of friends, relatives and associates. Though the books differ, both present a man who, in his wife`s words, is more interested in ideas than in people.
Ullmann contrasts Stockman with the sociable, good-natured President who hired him, calling the youngest Cabinet member of the century ”a serious, asocial, intense and insecure young Midwesterner.”
Stockman expresses puzzlement over the current interest in understanding the mind and soul of David Stockman. ”I`m simply not going to get into the business of dissecting myself,” he says. ”This is a story about public policy, public life.”
Stockman is convinced that after the titillation of his revelations has subsided and the critics have calmed down, his book will prove to be more than this month`s cocktail conversation. ”What the book relates is true, it`s factual, it happened. It may take more than just this book to shape a new comprehension and perception about what our economic debate is all about in this country, but I think it will help and I think in the end my viewpoint on it will be accepted as the conventional wisdom.”
He is not worried that he has hurt and angered people. ”Aw, they`ll get over it,” he says.
”Look,” he says, leaning back in his chair, ”the people who didn`t come out looking too well in the book weren`t my friends the day I left. The idea that the White House is some kind of convent where all is sweet reason is ridiculous. It`s a snake pit, a battle zone.”
Meanwhile, he claims to be happy as an investment banker with a wife, a one-year-old daughter, a house in the suburbs. The average all-American upper- middle-class guy.
”My hair has gotten a lot grayer and so has my view of the world,” he says. ”I don`t see so many sharp edges, so many clear conclusions.”
As for politics, he`s through. He says. Others say it, too, and say that it would be true whether he liked it or not. Ullmann is not so sure.
”In Washington everybody says he`s finished,” he says. ”I don`t believe it. I don`t say that he`s lying, but he is a real political animal, he loves policy, he loves being at the center of debate, of national issues. I`m convinced as much as ever that he is going to come back to the political arena.”
