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Finding replacements has not been easy. After nearly six months of searching, the Administration this week was to name Manuel Johnson, a Treasury official, to succeed Roberts. Explained Treasury Secretary Donald Regan of the delay: "I would make my decision, and then the White House would ask if it could have some input. They would then come up with a qualified candidate, and everything would stop for three weeks while he approached his university dean about a leave and talked to his wife about moving to Washington. Then he'd say no, and we'd be back to Square 1."
The President's three top economic advisers remain in the jobs they have held since the beginning of the Administration: David Stockman as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Regan as Treasury Secretary, and Murray Weidenbaum as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But their relative influence in the White House has shifted. Stockman, once the most prominent member of the troika, has relinquished his role as point man on economic policy to Treasury Secretary Regan.
Regan has become a kind of cheerleader for Reaganomics. Says the former chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co.: "I have made a career on Wall Street out of being bullish. If you do not offer people a ray of hope, if you don't offer them the promise that things will get better, then you have got no chance of success."
Regan's optimism seems more muted now than earlier this year, when he confidently proclaimed that the economy would "come roaring back in the late spring." Said he last week: "Things are going to get better if we stick with this program. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, there will be a brighter tomorrow."
The least influential, and visible, of the group is CEA Chairman Weidenbaum, a former economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Says one top Washington policymaker bluntly: "He's a compromiser; he gives up too easily." Reports a leading official at the Treasury: "We like him because he generally takes our side against the tax-raising crowd at the Office of Management and Budget. But you never win or lose just because Murray is on your side."
Most of the really bitter infighting has gone on within the steadily thinning ranks of the President's second tier of advisers, where policy is not so much made as carried out. Beryl Sprinkel, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, is one key player who seems to alienate as many people as he impresses. A feisty speaker who sometimes verges on pugnaciousness, Sprinkel has repeatedly attacked Federal Reserve Board Chair man Paul Volcker for failing to manage the money supply more smoothly. Sprinkel has also angered Europeans by declaring that the U.S. would not intervene to steady the value of the dollar on international money markets.