The Reagan Administration was simply not up to the exquisite talents of David Stockman. In five years as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, he strode through the corridors of power thwarted, in his account, by political nincompoops who never grasped what policy was all about. He has hardly met another presidential aide he did not disdain. He labored unsuccessfully to educate a dotty President in the fundamentals of economics, only to have poor Ronald Reagan ignore "the palpable, relevant facts" and wander in circles.
In the end, the self-proclaimed White House intellectual, the Harvard divine, did not grasp...