Shortly after noon on Saturday, July 20, President Ronald Reagan walked out of Bethesda Naval Hospital and into a changed world. With a golden career and a life of good health behind him, the 74-year-old President now faced the full impact of his mortality and a future marked by constant vigilance against the recurrence of his cancer. For the first time in its history, the U.S. faced the prospect of a sitting President who, no matter how dramatic his recovery, would be followed by the shadow of a major disease for the rest of his presidency. If the President’s personal prognosis seemed promising, the outlook for his presidency was somewhat more difficult to predict.
Reagan walked a bit gingerly but waved a blue Navy cap jauntily as he said goodbye to the hospital doctors and nurses. Looking surprisingly fit and fully at ease in blue slacks and an open-necked shirt, the President boarded a Marine helicopter with Nancy for the 15-minute flight to the White House lawn, where some 2,000 well-wishers awaited him. At the White House, the Marine jazz band serenaded the smiling couple as hundreds of gaily colored balloons were released. Reagan’s high spirits were also reflected in his Saturday radio broadcast, taped at the hospital, in which he joked, “I don’t have as much stomach” any more for the failure of Congress to slash federal spending. More personally, he urged those unsure of their health to see a physician and “tell them Dr. Reagan sent you.”
Still, even in a nation long buoyed by the President’s cheery optimism, his ailment could infect the almost magical aura from which he has drawn his political power. It could perhaps shift at least a portion of national stewardship to others less serenely self-assured. Reagan has always been more guiding spirit than hands-on manager, but now even the vigor of his vision will be examined more critically, unjustifiably perhaps, but inevitably.
He had seemed almost untouchable, able to slough off political barbs and even an assassin’s bullet. His luck had grown so legendary that it was tempting to believe he would again beat the odds, that the polyp in his bowel would be found benign. But last week Dr. Steven Rosenberg, the chief of surgery at the National Institute of Cancer, reminded the nation in a single chilling sentence that Ronald Reagan is a vulnerable human after all. “The President,” stated the doctor, “has cancer.”
Surgery to slice out two feet of his colon had apparently removed the malignancy from Reagan’s bowel, and Dr. Rosenberg quickly explained that the President had a better-than-50% chance to live out his normal life. But the medical experts could not rule out the possibility that cancerous cells had escaped into the bloodstream and, like a microscopic time bomb, seeded themselves in another organ. If cancer should recur, the President could face a long and debilitating course of therapy that would make the heavy burden of the presidency more onerous.
The disquieting bulletin from Bethesda comes at a time when Reagan’s most prized initiatives–tax reform, arms control, deficit reduction–are drifting if not sinking. His game recovery will undoubtedly arouse popular sympathy, but it may not do much to soften skeptical congressional leaders, much less Soviet negotiators.
The White House press office worked overtime last week to bury any suggestion that the President’s illness had loosened his grip. With the Great Communicator incommunicado, his spokesmen took to relaying, and no doubt slightly embellishing, every quip and chuckle emanating from the presidential bedside in Bethesda. Cameras caught the President beaming in his bathrobe as he met with solicitous advisers and, in an echo of 1981, waving heartily from his hospital window.
On Monday, when the doctors delivered the bad news to Reagan that his polyp was cancerous, he was said to have looked up from the book he was reading (Return to These Hills: The Vermont Years of Calvin Coolidge, by Jane W. Curtis) and calmly remarked, “I’m glad that that’s all out.” In a discussion with doctors that lasted all of five minutes, he apparently had few questions, voiced no fears and suggested not a hint of the dread that many feel hearing that they have cancer.
In fact, Vice President George Bush assured reporters, the President was doing business in his hospital suite “just as if he were sitting in the Oval Office.” Spokesman Speakes said the President had been shown a statement blaming the Soviets for failing to make any progress at the arms-control talks that ended in Geneva last week. Without reading all of it, Reagan nonetheless exclaimed, “That’s fine, that’s wonderful!” More important, the White House said the President would definitely keep his summit appointment this November with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Fresh from the hospital, Reagan will meet this week with Chinese President Li Xiannian. Though an official têteà -tête may be more taxing than the doctors would prefer so soon after major surgery, “the Chinese are expecting to see the President,” explained a State Department official.
The President has always preferred to leave the day-to-day mechanics of government to his chief aides. But if he is even less ready than usual to step in and break congressional clinches or referee bureaucratic squabbles, the onus will fall increasingly on his chief of staff, Donald Regan. A bluff, take-charge operator, the former Treasury Secretary quickly moved to assert his command last week (see following story). But his lack of finesse has already been blamed for frosty relations with Senate Republicans.
Tension between Capitol Hill leaders and the White House staff may be further exacerbated by the appointment of James C. Miller III, 43, to replace the departing David Stockman as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Miller is widely regarded as a conservative ideologue who is an outspoken foe of federal regulation. As Regan’s favorite choice, he will be seen on the Hill as the chief of staffs creature. Stockman by contrast was an independent operator who more often aligned himself with the deficit cutters in the Senate G.O.P. leadership than with the True Believer supply-siders in the White House.
Reagan’s handlers would like to recreate the atmospherics of April 1981, when the President triumphantly bounced back from a bullet wound to address a whistling, cheering Congress. The outpouring of good will helped propel both significant spending reductions and a huge tax cut through Congress over that summer. Some have suggested that the Reaganauts might once again translate public sympathy for Reagan into a congressional goad. “If he returns by the fall, now having licked the Big C, he becomes an even more formidable political figure,” says White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan. To be sure, Reagan’s stock with the public is already high and likely to go higher. His favorable rating rose from 57% in May to 66% after the Beirut hostages were released. If he recovers rapidly, his public persona will gain even more luster.
Any relapse, on the other hand, will further lead official Washington to consider him a lame duck. For that matter, so too will any indications that his already somewhat unsettling air of detachment has been heightened by his operation and cancer scare. The political dynamics have changed since Reagan was shot in 1981. Then the Hill Republicans were relatively united behind him; now they are badly split and fearful about their own political fates. Almost half the Senate Republicans are up for re-election in 1986, and most are afraid that pocketbook issues like Social Security or tax deductions for second-home mortgages will weigh more heavily with voters than Reagan’s standing in the polls.
As the President mended last week, the battered congressional budget process threatened to tear apart. Rancorous negotiations between congressional leaders to resolve differences in the House and Senate budget resolutions collapsed. “I assume that means no budget,” huffed House Budget Committee Chairman William Gray, a Pennsylvania Democrat. His Senate counterpart, Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico, was equally gloomy: “Everywhere I turn I see no way to go.” Senate Republicans were still smarting from what they regard as an act of betrayal by the White House. They had voted in May to eliminate the cost of living adjustment on Social Security for one year, a politically brave move, while the House had refused to make any cuts in old-age pensions. To the outrage of Senate Republicans, the White House two weeks ago sided with the House. Furious, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole accused the White House of “surrendering to the deficit.”
The impact of Reagan’s illness on the budget standoff is not likely to be great. Shrugs Republican Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana: “Reagan never was deeply involved in the budget process to begin with.” In what could become an explosive new reversal, however, Chief of Staff Regan hinted last week that the White House might change course and back the Senate’s call for Social Security cuts after all, should the House fail to come up with some other realistic savings in domestic spending. And even from his sickbed, the President continued to insist that he is unalterably opposed to one solution that could break the impasse: a tax increase.
In the squabbling over the budget Reagan’s favorite cause, tax reform, has been forgotten, at least for the time being. “Its vital signs are barely there,” says G.O.P. Senator William Cohen of Maine. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, who has staked as much political capital on tax reform as has the President, was philosophical. “This is the season for pessimism,” he said. The real test will come in September, when the President again revs up his lobbying campaign for tax reform.
The Reaganauts are also looking to next fall for the revival of arms-control talks, which are just as stymied as the budget. Each side left the table for a summer recess last week blaming the other for blocking progress. There are hints from the Kremlin that it might consider allowing at least research on space-based defenses (Star Wars), and Soviet officials floated the idea of a 25% across-the-board cut on all missile launchers and warheads. But no offers were formally made, and Administration officials were not predicting any breakthroughs when the talks resume in September.
There is some slight hope that the new Soviet leadership may be willing to deal at the Geneva summit in November. The Administration may at least learn then whether Gorbachev wants to pursue arms control seriously, if for no other purpose than to ease the strain of the arms race on the Soviet economy.
The world will closely scrutinize the performances of Reagan and Gorbachev when they meet face to face. During his first term Reagan implicitly blamed the lack of a superpower summit on the illness and death of Kremlin leaders. Now the tables have turned: Gorbachev comes across as youthful and energetic, while Reagan’s illness calls into question his vigor and endurance. Should Reagan have a relapse before Geneva, or seem unsure when confronting the Soviet leader, it would send tremors through U.S. allies in Europe who have relied on Reagan’s resolve to fend off local ban-the-bomb movements and keep the Soviets at bay.
Reagan’s success at home and abroad has been rooted in his ability to project the image of leadership. But even before he went into the hospital, that image was eroding. He had squandered much of the mandate he acquired in his landslide election last November by allowing his priorities to be sidetracked with snafus like his ill-advised visit to the Bitburg cemetery and his squabbles with Capitol Hill over Central America. The gap between Reagan’s rhetoric and reality, always a nagging problem, has grown more pronounced, especially as long as his tough talk against terrorism goes unaccompanied by action.
The President will at least have a few weeks this summer to recover and regroup. The timing of his operation was in some ways fortunate. Washington customarily slips into its dog-day doldrums in August; Congress is in recess and federal bureaucrats flee for cooler climes. Reagan was scheduled to begin a vacation at his ranch in Santa Barbara in mid-August.
But even in his Western sanctuary, the TV cameras will be peering down from nearby mountaintops to see if he is ranging about his 688-acre spread with anything like his usual vitality. The White House has cultivated the image of Cowboy Reagan, riding tall in the saddle or sauntering about in dusty jeans, chain saw at the ready. A vacation in the shade would not go unnoticed by a press corps fixated on a highly symbolic presidency. The White House is downplaying expectations. Reagan will be “getting plenty of fresh air and exercise,” cautions a top aide, “but you won’t see him chopping a cord of wood on his first day.”
Reagan will need to hit full stride when he returns to Washington in the fall. He will face some hard stumping if he hopes to stir grass-roots support for tax reform, and some serious arm twisting of Congressmen buffeted by political pressures and the blandishments of lobbyists. An even more formidable challenge awaits him in Geneva, in the presence of his superpower rival.
Such severe demands of politics and diplomacy might daunt the most trouble-free statesman, much less one who has had a bout with cancer, yet Reagan cannot afford to slacken or stumble. A supportive but uneasy nation and a flinty-eyed world will be watching, ready to applaud him if he bounces back from his illness, but ready, too, to label him a lame-duck President just a year into his second term if he shows signs of flagging. –By Evan Thomas. Reported by Sam Allis and Barrett Seaman/Washington
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