The Too Personal Presidency

By Roger Rosenblatt

Last Thursday night the President attempted to persuade the nation that his decision to deal arms to Iran was merely a gesture of rapprochement, but logic suggests that those arms were meant to secure the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon. What shocks Americans about this transaction is that it seems so uncharacteristic of a President who has railed against trading with terrorists, and who appears to sense that the public agrees with his position. In fact, the effort to free individuals in Lebanon at a possible extreme cost is perfectly consistent with the way Reagan has always conducted the presidency's business. In forests of complex issues, Reagan likes to point to the trees, to individuals. The suggestion is that individuals embody policies, that if one appreciates the situation or nature of a particular person, he will also understand general actions taken in that person's behalf.

Think back to all you know of Ronald Reagan, and there is almost always some other person in the picture. Originally that person was you, the individual tree he addressed with startling success when he posed the question in the 1980 presidential debates, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" In the six years since, you have remained pre-eminent in the President's view. It still is you he addresses in weekly radio broadcasts and in television appearances, establishing an intimacy by look and voice that television, for all its domestic directness, usually denies.

Britain is America's ally, but that abstract agreement is brought to life by personification, by the friendship and ideological comradeship of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Libya is America's enemy, but that enmity glowers as a private hostility between Reagan and Muammar Gaddafi. If the values of American initiative need commending, Reagan will shed his spotlight on a Mother Hale of Harlem, as he did in the 1985 State of the Union message, and elevate one woman to emblemize an entire economic and social theory. If heroism in war is to be honored, a single veteran will stand beside the President on the White House steps, creating a tableau that speaks, if imprecisely, for itself.

To see the world in terms of individuals may succeed occasionally as a political tactic, but the tactic would never be consistently effective if such a view were not part of a deep and sincerely held vision. Reagan wholeheartedly seems to believe that individuals and stories about individuals are the keys to general truths. That vision can go crazily awry; Reagan is known for responding to general questions with irrelevant, albeit funny or touching, anecdotes. But the vision itself can be valid and clarifying. When John Donne wrote, "I am a little world made cunningly," it was a comfort to believe that the overwhelming complexities of the cosmos could be reduced to the size of a man.

Whatever sense one can make of the secret dealings that led to arms transfers to Iran in exchange for the hostages' freedom may be traced to Reagan's microcosmic vision, yet Reagan's reductions seem far more emotional than rational. In the Iran transaction he apparently felt the plight of the hostages as one would feel the plight of one's family in danger, and his emotional response took precedence over his country's stated policy against trading with terrorists, its neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war, its fair-and- square relations with other countries -- over every major issue to which the hostage situation potentially was tied.

He may also have assumed that most of his countrymen would share his view. A certain reasoning was on his side. For one thing, it makes more sense to try and coax Iran back into the world than to watch it burn and smolder further out of reach. The Ayatullah, at age 86, cannot live forever, though it must be noted that his mother, at age 105, is rumored to be still with us. For another thing, individuals do count. Israel's Shimon Peres, who has spoken obliquely ; of his country's role in the arms negotiations, defended the Reagan Administration's action as an exception that proves the rule. No one can doubt the rigidity of America's normal position on trading with terrorists, Peres argued, yet a democracy's central obligation must always tilt toward its individual citizens.

So the question is of gains and losses, just as it was most recently in Reagan's handling of the Daniloff incident and the summit meeting with Gorbachev in Iceland. In each of those instances, the President once again focused on individuals. So moved was Reagan at a newsman's imprisonment, he was determined to solve that problem alone, at the possible expense of creating others. So sure was Reagan that he could charm Gorbachev in Reykjavik, he overlooked the fact that he was meeting with both a man and a system. Fortunately for Reagan, the uproar over his trading a spy for a journalist rose and vanished rapidly, and even more fortunately, he did not fly home from Iceland having agreed thoughtlessly to a total ban of nuclear weapons. In both situations his luck, not his philosophy, prevailed.

In the Iran affair, however, both his luck and his philosophy may have run dry, for there basic understandings between the public and the presidency were broken that are considerably more serious than the White House reckoned. To a point, the people will tolerate, even applaud, a President's leapfrogging of rules and restrictions, as long as the people perceive a worthwhile goal achieved. But their tolerance will go quickly if they feel that presidential self-assurance is giving way to recklessness. One feels fervently for the men imperiled by the kidnapers, and for their anxious families, but from the standpoint of national honor and practical sense, it is difficult to argue that their release is worth destroying the long-term trust of our allies or creating perpetual incentives for terror.

In a way, the American people asked for what they got in this incident by having always treated Reagan exactly as Reagan has treated the people. If Reagan has zeroed in on individual members of the Republic to score his points, the Republic has also zeroed in on, and favored, Reagan as a man. Not the office but the individual has garnered an attitude of such all-embracing faith these past six years -- an attractive individual indeed, when one considers some of the discrepancies between Reagan's promises and his deliveries. But the people never wholly lose sight of the presidential office, | even if they are dazzled by a most engaging occupant. They know the value of a principle as well as the value of a life. In the case of Iran, too many principles were seized, too many killed.