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Under Meese's chairmanship, we began a point-by-point discussion of the document. With lawyerly meticulousness, Meese conducted a dogged critique of the paper. In the process, my earlier understandings with the President—and Weinberger's too—were disappearing in a haze of nitpicking. At length, Meese tucked the directive into his briefcase. I would like to be able to say that something in his manner warned me that the document would stay there, unsigned, for well over a year. But the truth is, I never dreamed that he would not hand it to the President at the start of the next day.
Once before, when the Cabinet-designates met in Washington on Jan. 7,1 had sensed in Meese a tendency to assume an unusual measure of authority. In a sort of primer on Cabinet relations with the White House, he explained the President's ideas, the President's procedures, the President's priorities. Reagan himself spoke very little. When he did intervene, it was usually to recall an incident from his days as Governor of California that was in some way relevant to the subject.
As a result of Meese's pocketing the draft directive, there was no description of duty, no rules, no expression of the essential authority of the President to guide his subordinates in their task. This failure arose from ignorance: Reagan's assistants saw a routine act of government as a novel attempt to pre-empt power. In fact, it was a plan to share and coordinate those duties in foreign policy that express the President's powers under the Constitution. I left the White House that day with the feeling that Ed Meese and his colleagues perceived their rank in the Administration as being superior to that of any member of the Cabinet.
Next day, the press contained gossip items suggesting that I had tried to thrust the paper into the President's hands and secure his signature only moments after he had taken the oath of office. White House sources were quoted on the shock this "grab for power" on the first day of the Administration had produced in the President.
This struck me as distinctly odd. I could not conceive that any of the seven of us who had firsthand knowledge of the circumstances would be so mischievous, so numb to the requirements of the presidency, as to plant such a story. It was damaging to the President and to me. And it wasn't true. I called Ed Meese. He told me the matter wasn't worth worrying about.
But the phenomenon had seized my attention. Few things are more stimulating than being able to hear what is being said about you behind your back. I have thought much about the press and its place in American life, but never more deeply and never more poignantly than in my time as Secretary of State. In the Washington Post I soon learned that Bill Clark had not, after all, been my choice as Deputy Secretary of State, but rather that he was "expected to function as the White House eyes and ears in the State Department, especially on behalf of those in the Reagan inner circle who are suspicious of Haig's ambitions for the presidency." From