As President Reagan lay in his hospital room Monday recovering from cancer surgery, Donald Regan, White House chief of staff, requested a Marine Corps helicopter to fly him to Bethesda Naval Hospital for his daily morning meeting with the President.
Regan was one of only a handful of people in America, including doctors, who had seen Reagan since the President`s surgery two days earlier, and he alone brought the nation`s business to the hospital for the President to review.
Vice President George Bush, even after serving for eight hours as acting president, had yet to see or even speak to Reagan and would not do so for two more days. Robert McFarlane, the national security adviser who normally gives the President his daily briefing and was at his right hand throughout the Beirut hostage crisis, had not yet spoken to him either.
But First Lady Nancy Reagan was being taken by car to the hospital that morning. She chafed when she heard about Regan`s request for a helicopter, sources said. The chief of staff wound up traveling to the hospital by car that day and every day after that. Attempts to reach Regan for comment on the subject were unsuccessful.
The incident served both to underscore the chief of staff`s visible role at the center of power in the Reagan second-term White House and to remind Reagan watchers that there is a headstrong, even eager, check on that power as the President works his way back to full speed.
With Reagan expected to leave the hospital Saturday, Mrs. Reagan has taken an active role as his protector in scheduling his activities for the weeks ahead and looking over the shoulder of the high-profile chief of staff to limit Reagan`s workload.
”Everybody shares to one degree or another (Mrs. Reagan`s) view that the President deserves time to recuperate at his pace,” said a senior White House official. ”We`re not (late football coach) Vince Lombardi or anything. We don`t want the President to go out and play hurt.”
Nonetheless, Reagan aides are looking past his planned August vacation at his California ranch to map their strategy for fall, when the President is to crisscross the country to sell his tax plan and return to a full workload.
Yet as official Washington tuned in to its latest mini-drama of who`s up and who`s down, Regan has been the focus of attention. Even more than the vice president, the former Wall Street executive was being seen as the man running the government ever since the President underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his colon.
Even Bush seemed to admit as much, saying he told Reagan that ”Don Regan is doing a darn good job of running the White House” in the President`s absence.
But White House spokesman Larry Speakes repeatedly took issue with the image of the chief of staff making decisions that properly fall to Reagan.
”I wouldn`t think the chief of staff would make any decisions that he doesn`t know the President wishes him to make,” Speakes said.
But after the relatively low-key style of James Baker, Reagan`s chief of staff during the first term and one of three more or less co-equals among the President`s aides, Regan`s virtual one-man operation has raised eyebrows and evoked comparisons with the days of Richard Nixon and his powerful chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman.
”He`s certainly at the center of power and a very dominant chief of staff,” said a senior White House staff member who also was an aide during the Nixon years. ”He`s one of the most powerful chiefs of staffs for a long time.
”In fact, to find somebody comparable, you have to go back to Sherman Adams,” the official said.
Adams, chief of staff under President Dwight Eisenhower, wielded extraordinary power during Eisenhower`s second term after Ike suffered a heart attack and other ailments that considerably diminished his capacities to govern.
Regan, whose unrestricted access to the Oval Office already makes him the dominant figure in the White House during normal times, was everywhere last week, helping shape events large and small.
Regan played the central role in coordinating the brief transfer of power to Bush while the President was unconscious under anesthesia during his surgery. When the time for the transfer came, Regan placed calls to Bush, House Speaker Thomas O`Neill (D., Mass.) and Senate President Pro Tem Strom Thurmond (R., S.C.).
Besides being the only White House staff member other than Speakes and, briefly, counsel Fred Fielding, to meet with Reagan during the crucial first three days after the surgery, Regan brought the President his daily national security briefing in written form and kept him up to date on the impasse in Congress over the budget and other matters.
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Taking up a makeshift office in a hospital room down the hall from Reagan`s presidential suite, Regan acted quickly. Last Sunday, the day after the surgery, a senior White House official told reporters that Regan and his staff ”will try to make as many decisions as we can without involving him
(Reagan) where we can get agreement.
”If there is a difference of opinion and it can`t be ironed out, we will make it crisp and succinct and take it to him to make a decision and spare him from having to listen to the debate of various people,” the senior official said.
Besides streamlining the President`s workload, Regan took time to decide such small details as which photograph of the President the White House would release each day.
White House aides noted with interest that on Wednesday, the day Bush went to the hospital for the first time, he waited outside the President`s suite for Regan to arrive before entering to see Reagan. But the President, hearing the sirens from Bush`s motorcade, walked out into the hallway himself to greet his weekend stand-in.
The White House photograph released later that day, however, clearly showed the chief of staff sitting beside the vice president, laughing along at one of Reagan`s jokes.
In Regan`s defense, some White House staff members point out that the chief of staff normally plays a leading role in shaping many options for a presidential decision.
For example, Regan interviewed the various candidates to replace David Stockman as budget director and presented James Miller, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, to Reagan as his top recommendation to be the successor, which is normal procedure for filling top White House vacancies.
But some staff members, both holdovers from Reagan`s first term and new members of the White House team, are said to be disenchanted with the chief of staff`s ”pyramid” style of firm leadership.
The criticisms come guardedly, in part because of Regan`s well-known intolerance of leaks and intra-office squabbling. But some White House aides sharply question his role in shaping a compromise budget framework that Senate Republicans have assailed as leaving them politically vulnerable during next year`s congressional elections.
”That`s a fair assessment,” said a White House official when asked whether Regan deserves credit or blame, depending on the viewpoint, for the deal. ”He deserves the credit.”
Communications Director Patrick Buchanan, an outspoken conservative columnist brought into the White House by Regan, is said by associates to be disillusioned by his relative lack of access to the President.
Buchanan denied last week that he feels put out by Regan`s management style. But other White House officials said that after earlier appearing to amass considerable power on the President`s staff, Buchanan is ”just another White House aide.”
Similarly, Edward Rollins, the valuable White House director of political affairs, is said to be disenchanted and has told associates he probably will leave Reagan`s staff by the end of the year.
It is unclear whether these reported staff grumblings can be attributed to Regan`s personal style or just represent inevitable developments in any White House. But it is certain, as one aide put it, that ”there is no doubt around here who is the boss, and that`s Donald Regan. He lets you know it.”