One of my duties as a young aide in the Reagan White House was to prepare responses whenever a former appointee penned a memoir in which the Gipper was portrayed in an unflattering light.
In April 1986, former OMB director David Stockman released The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, for which he had received a $2 million advance. With two years to go in the president’s second term, Stockman wrote that Reagan tended to ignore “palpable relevant facts” and wandered in circles; Reagan’s team of “incompetent” advisers was “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight”; and the president’s obsession with waste, fraud and abuse was a joke.
The White House largely ignored the personal attacks on the president and his aides. To rebut Stockman’s ludicrous assertion there was no waste to wring out of the federal bureaucracy, my office continued for the remainder of the administration to pump out excerpts from the reports of federal inspector generals throughout the government, as ongoing evidence there was, in fact, plenty of waste to be found.
On the night of May 2, 1988, ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson revealed former chief of staff Donald T. Regan would release the next day a memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, in which he would reveal that First Lady Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer to weigh in on her husband’s schedule and on the timing of presidential announcements.
The next morning, I adjusted my schedule and went into the New Executive Office Building, whose library opened an hour before the Old Executive Office Building. I pored through microfilms of newspapers, rejecting one item after another, until I found what I needed. I hit “print” and wandered over to the West Wing office of Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan’s press secretary.
“How you doing?” I asked him.
“I’ve been better,” he replied.
“I have something for you that might help.”
I handed to Marlin a copy of Don Regan’s horoscope from February 27, 1987, the day he resigned as chief of staff: A burden will be lifted from your shoulders. Events occur which place you on more solid emotional, financial ground. Be confident.
When Fitzwater stepped to the podium in the press briefing room a few minutes later, he shared that horoscope with the White House press corps, to sustained laughter and applause.
Fitzwater called the book “unfortunate” and “a distraction.” Reagan called it “despicable fiction” and moved on.
It was, of course, a different time – 32 years ago, about the same distance between the release of Regan’s book and the broadcast of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Jack Dorsey, the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, was nine years old.
But as I watched the back-and-forth between Trump spokeswoman Sara Sanders, and Trump himself, and the former FBI director James Comey, I asked myself: How might something similar have been handled during the Reagan era? Comey’s revelations are far more incendiary than anything Stockman or Regan could have imagined, but Reagan’s instinct would most likely have been to continue doing the work the people elected him to do, and inject into the narrative some much-needed humor.
Out of this sense of nostalgia, I checked a leading newspaper’s horoscopes for May 19, 2017, the day President Trump fired his FBI director.
Donald J. Trump, Gemini: Keep your eyes on the prize. Maintain your momentum and avoid being distracted by trivial issues or the gossip traveling through the social circuits.
James Comey, Sagittarius: If you punch a time clock it won’t punch back at the end of the day.
(Joe Rodota is author of The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address)