Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988.

Jeffrey Hart 

Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus (Houghton Mifflin, 468 pp., $21.95)

THE THESIS of this book by two very bright and industrious journalists, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times and Jane Mayer of the Wan Street Journal, is that the Iran-Contra affair exposed a basic truth about the Reagan Administration and destroyed the President's credibility. Full of court gossip, and containing finely etched portraits of such people as Bill Casey, Cap Weinberger, Oliver North, Mike Deaver, and Nancy Reagan, the book is irresistible to political junkies. But are the authors' conclusions true?

They believe that the President was a sleepwalker and a sentimentalist who was so moved by the suffering of the hostages in Lebanon-and by that of the CIA man, William Buckley, in particular-that he allowed his emotions to overtake his judgment. While there may be some truth to this explanation of the Iran arms deal, Miss Mayer and Mr. McManus do not take into account the possibility of multiple motives for policy decisions. The hostages were not the only pieces on the chessboard: Iran was at war with Iraq, and the United States was about to launch a de-facto naval war against Iran in the Persian Gulf. Israel, for its own reasons, also favored Iran over Iraq, whose nuclear capability it had unilaterally destroyed. The authors omit all of this context in order to prove their inside-the-Beltway thesis that Reagan was a feckless President who did not know what he was doing. The Permanent Government of the United States, which includes the Washington press corps, chooses to believe that Reagan was a political aberration, an interloper who somehow charmed the electorate into accepting his own unrealistic view of the world. The spin that Landslide attempts to put on history is that Reagan was the Wizard of Oz, a shallow master of illusion, and that all his alleged achievements are illusions too.

This certainly must be a comforting thesis for persons of settled liberal sensibility. But is it really an illusion that Reagan changed the whole framework of debate about national policy? Is it an illusion that he presided over a lowering of tax rates and an indexing of taxes to inflation-thereby challenging an entire range of assumptions about the Federal Government's right of access to your bank account? It certainly is not an illusion that, following a policy of peace-through-strength, Ronald Reagan built up American military power, put the Pershing and cruise missiles into Europe, and forced the Soviets to take him seriously. Without Reagan's injection of U.S. naval power into the Persian Gulf, Iran might well have defeated Iraq and gone on to destabilize Saudi Arabia and terrorize the entire region. Miss Mayer and Mr. McManus-who, to judge from their line of argument, are themselves no strangers to illusion-need to re-examine their epistemology.

Landslide deals mainly with the IranContra scandal, which was certainly a political disaster: against all serious principle, the Reagan Administration was willing to swap arms for hostages. My own judgment is that National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane had dreams of glory and was haunted by the Nixon -Kissinger opening to China. But McFarlane was far out of his depth. The conditions were not ripe for a deal with the Iranians, not then; not until our Persian Gulf fleet had sunk most of their navy, and not until Iran had lost its war with Iraq.

Though fascinating for its journalistic gossip, Landslide is fundamentally wrong. Ronald Reagan is a peculiar figure who nevertheless succeeded in changing the political landscape. Recent books by Donald Regan, Michael Deaver, Helene von Damm, and others convincingly show us a man who is largely inaccessible to personal affection and not terribly loyal to those who have served him. But Reagan entered upon the political scene in 1966 with a few clear and true ideas, principally that government should be limited and that peace abroad results from strength and not from equivocation. These ideas are rooted in a valid view of history and human nature. The authors of Landslide may wish that Mr. Reagan were an illusion. But that wish is itself only an illusion.