David Stockman and his henchmen were on a roll. President Reagan had just succeeded Jimmy Carter, and his 34-year-old budget director was summoning fellow Cabinet officers, one at a time, to what he called the ”Cutting Room.” There Stockman and several pals would browbeat their new colleagues into accepting deep spending cuts as part of his radical plan to revive the nation`s economy.
As Stockman tells it in his book ”The Triumph of Politics,” he had this ”new budget-cutting machine oiled and rolling” within days after Reagan`s January, 1981, inauguration. And ”when we switched off the ignition eight days later,” he gloats, ”nearly every vestige of Cabinet opposition to budget cuts had been run over.”
There were a few exceptions, however. The first to stand up to Stockman was Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige, a whipcord-thin ex-industrialist who, at 58, was old enough to be Stockman`s father. Baldrige also had seen much tougher foes: He had flushed Japanese soldiers out of caves during World War II and had beaten some of the best cowboys in the West in steer-roping contests.
According to Stockman, the two men pounded on tables and snarled at each other for 2 1/2 hours over a key trade issue–low-interest federal loans to countries interested in buying United States goods. Stockman wanted to abolish the program; Baldrige didn`t.
At the time, industrial America was reeling from an onslaught of cheap imports from Japan and Europe. Layoffs were emptying steel mills on Chicago`s South Side, car factories in Michigan and textile and electronics plants across the rest of the country. ”Buy American” bumper stickers were popping up all over, and many people were counting on Reagan to set things right again. The popular feeling was that the grandfatherly president would bring back the good old days of the 1950s and the 1960s, when America was far and away the world`s dominant economic power.
Stockman`s idea was to wipe out many types of federal subsidies and free the money for more productive uses. In his mind, the low-interest export loans were simply welfare–”boodle,” he says–for the big U.S. companies that made the goods. What`s more, he charges, they made a mockery of longtime U.S. efforts to discourage such practices by other countries and to promote freer trade.
Baldrige, whose job is to champion industry`s views, says he shared Stockman`s distaste for the subsidies. But he argued that rather than pulling back, Japan and several European nations were using a barrage of unsavory tactics to capture more sales and jobs from the U.S. And he insisted that the only way to stop them–and preserve the principle of free trade–was to arm U.S. businessmen with the same weapons and send them out like frontier sheriffs to face the scoundrels down.
In the end, Stockman says, he won ”a victory of sorts” by getting Baldrige to agree to a 40-percent cut in proposed funding for the Export-Import Bank, the agency that makes the loans. But Stockman also acknowledges that his antagonist eventually won the war. ”Baldrige,” he writes, ”was to reopen the Ex-Im issue every year–and Congress raised its budget every year.”
As this anecdote suggests, Baldrige, who goes by the nickname ”Mac,”
has unflinching views on how to remedy the nation`s trade woes, and they haven`t always meshed with the thinking at the White House. In fact, Baldrige was virtually an outcast during much of Reagan`s first term, when Stockman and other top advisers urged the President to stick to a ”hands-off” trade policy despite mounting congressional pressure for retaliation against offending nations.
But Baldrige, a disarmingly frank man, and a few allies kept pushing the White House to get tougher. They finally prevailed. About a year ago Reagan abruptly changed his mind and ordered a counterassault against the countries that were making the U.S. look like an economic patsy.
Reagan`s flip-flop made Baldrige a hero to many frightened businessmen. But Baldrige admits that the move was mainly a political one aimed at quelling demands for stiff new trade laws and preventing Democrats from exploiting the issue in this fall`s elections. Moreover, he concedes that the get-tough strategy is just starting to show results and isn`t likely to produce a miraculous turn-around.
Sitting in his walnut-paneled office in Washington, surrounded by bronze cowboy sculptures, a saddle given to him as a trophy and an impressive collection of rodeo-championship belt buckles, Baldrige also bridles at a gibe by Stockman that the secretary`s hard-nosed approach puts him in league with the White House`s most extreme foes–the ”protectionists” who would practically seal the nation`s borders against low-cost imports.
”Oh, Stockman, sheez,” he says, dismissing with a wave of a hand his old rival, who left the administration two months before the trade-policy change. Then, after a long pause and a drag on a Marlboro, he says that Stockman ”has allowed his theories to get in the way of his judgment.”
Baldrige says he agrees with Stockman and most economists that erecting broad protectionist barriers would raise costs to consumers, make U.S. industry less competitive and lead to even greater job losses in the long run. But at a time when other nations increasingly are subsidizing their exports and limiting the flow of U.S. goods into their markets, he also insists that
”we should not unilaterally disarm ourselves.”
In essence, then, he and allies like U.S. Trade Representative Clayton Yeutter, the administration`s top trade official, are pushing the White House toward a new, middle-ground approach–one that would promote free trade without making the U.S. seem weak but one that also would provide for retaliation without being fully protectionist. Backed by a growing number of economists, they argue that the U.S. should step up its own use of import duties and export subsidies as leverage to force other nations to play fairer. Free-trade purists ”think you can just sit down at the table and talk good economic sense and automatically everybody will follow,” Baldrige says. ”Well, that`s been proven wrong. The practical part comes in how you get the other countries to stop. And the only practical way is to beat them at their own game long enough so that they will come to the table and negotiate to get rid of those subsidized practices.”
Still, he cautions, all that government can do is lay the groundwork for fairer trade. He says U.S. industry must redouble its efforts to cut costs and modernize its plants if it expects to make much of a comeback. Intense competition is here to stay, he warns, ”and executives and labor leaders can`t look back fondly on the way things were a decade or two ago and count on things being like that again. The world is changing too quickly.”
The steer charges out of the chute at the practice ring and, being no dummy, tears straight for the safety of the wire fence. Scowling at this affront to his sense of fair play, Baldrige digs out on his chestnut horse, Skippy, and closes off the escape route. He pauses, swinging his lasso overhead with wind-whistling force, while a friend, Ken Schiffer, ropes the animal`s head. Then Baldrige tosses his noose on the ground under the steer`s belly and yanks it back up, snaring one of the hind legs.
”Eight seconds,” yells Rep. Robert Smith (R., Ore.), looking at his wristwatch. By professional standards, a so-so time. Worse yet, if this were a rodeo, Baldrige also would be hit with a 5-second penalty for failing to snag both rear legs.
”Are you sure it wasn`t 7.9?” Baldrige asks, grinning slightly, as he guides Skippy to the side of the ring. ”The clock inside my head said 7.9.” It`s a warm Saturday morning at Schiffer`s house near Aldie, Va., about 40 minutes from Washington, and the men, all roping enthusiasts, are getting more of a workout than they had expected. ”These are kind of veteran practice steers,” Baldrige says, as he watches the next animal burrow into the fence so that Smith, who owns a ranch in Oregon, can`t get his rope around it.
”They`ve learned a few tricks.”
As he lifts his cowboy hat and wipes sweat from his balding head with a red handkerchief, Baldrige looks as if he could fit right in with a group of cowpokes on a long cattle drive. Though he is 63, his lean frame, clear blue eyes and blotchy sun-stained cheeks all still evince a youthful vigor. He also has most of the accouterments: blue jeans and a big-buckled belt, tall boots with silver spurs, even a saddle emblazoned with his initials and his nickname.
The only thing amiss is his shirt–a navy polo that sports the seal of the Vice President of the United States. It was, he says, a gift from George Bush, a longtime friend and his main political sponsor.
Baldrige seems a little sheepish about the shirt, partly because, it turns out, he fears that some snide Washingtonians might use such
incongruities to question his interest in rodeo. ”I think that sometimes people here think it`s kind of phony,” he says. Indeed, a casual glance at other aspects of his background–he majored in English at Yale University, for instance, and earned up to $350,000 a year as a business executive in Connecticut–makes such suspicions understandable.
Baldrige insists, however, that his passion for roping developed long before his interest in business or politics. And friends trace his mental toughness–and his general lack of pretentiousness–to his admiration for cowboys and his love of competition.
The son of a one-term U.S. congressman, Baldrige grew up in Omaha and says he learned roping as a $1-a-day teenage hand on nearby ranches. ”I liked the life, I liked the people,” he recalls.
Since then he has gone to great trouble to sharpen his skills, even to the point of enduring terrible back pain. Sipping a beer in Schiffer`s barn after the practice workout, he says he developed an arthritic disease in his early 20s that caused his spine to ”fuse up like a poker.” The ailment caused such excruciating pain that before his spine completely stiffened in his early 40s, he had to write and read at a stand-up desk and sleep with a 3/ 4-inch-thick board under his mattress. (He now can work at a normal desk but still must use the mattress board.)
Yet he kept roping, he says, taking as many as 16 Bufferins a day to kill the pain. ”The doctors told me to give up skiing and riding, and I went along with 50 percent of their advice,” he says in a deadpan manner. ”I didn`t care much for skiing anyway.”
Once the pain eased, he decided to try his hand part-time at the professional rodeo circuit, where over the last two decades he has performed well enough in two-man roping teams to share in several victories over full-time cowboys. He won the saddle that he keeps in his office at a rodeo in Brawley, Calif., in 1978, and he picked up the belt buckles at several other events. Nowadays he competes in official rodeos only sporadically, he says, but he still rakes in about $3,000 a year, counting winnings at informal
”jackpot” competitions with friends.
”When he`s able to work at it, he`s tough,” declares Bob Ragsdale, a longtime pro who says they met after Baldrige impersonated rodeo champion Dean Oliver on the television show ”To Tell the Truth” in the mid-1960s.
”Mac was one of three people in the lineup, including Dean, and the panel guessed Mac to be Dean Oliver,” says Ragsdale, who lives in Chowchilla, Calif. (Baldrige confirms that two of the show`s four panelists voted for him; Oliver got only one vote, and a second ”impostor” got the other.)
”The thing about Mac is that he`s so competitive,” Ragsdale adds. ”He may look like heck in practice all day, but when the money`s up, he`s a winner.”
Another veteran pro, Mark Schricker of Florence, Colo., says most of the riders on the circuit quickly took a liking to Baldrige, who was named to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City in 1984, because ”he`s so down to earth.” Even so, Schricker says, cowboys sometimes chuckle at the sight of their part-time pal because with his spine injury, ”he`s got to wear his pants so low that he looks like one of the poorest-paid hands on the ranch.” For his part, Baldrige says the exacting sport and its no-nonsense competitors help him clear his mind. ”Cowboys don`t talk,” he says approvingly, ”unless they`ve got something to say.”
And he`s not above using his love for the West to bolster his tough-guy image or break the tension in Washington, a place where, he notes, ”there`s an awful lot of talk but little being said.”
He often wears a huge belt buckle that says ”MAC” with his pinstriped suits, and he admits that he routinely lassos chairs, typists and other assistants to give foreign dignitaries and other visitors a feel for his favorite pastime.
In a similar vein, former Agriculture Secretary John Block, a country-music buff, recalls stopping for Baldrige at a Brussels hotel room before important talks with European leaders and being greeted by music ”blaring down the hall. When he opened the door,” Block says, ”I realized it was Kitty Wells singing `Honky Tonk Angel.` ”
Baldrige`s frontier spirit also appeals to the administration`s top cowboy, President Reagan. According to Baldrige`s wife, Margaret (known as Midge), her husband was out riding on their 140-acre farm in Connecticut on the day Reagan called to offer him the Commerce post. She says that when she told the President-elect where Baldrige was, Reagan replied, ”It sounds like that`s my man.”
