Working for President Ronald Reagan

 Murray Weidenbaum

Murray Weidenbaum holds the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professorship at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of Advising Reagan. This was an address given to Fontbonne College, St. Louis, MO, August 31, 2005.

It is a pleasure to talk about working for Ronald Reagan. He was a great boss. He set clear objectives and he appointed people dedicated to achieving those objectives. Unlike some earlier presidents, he did not second-guess your decisions on the day-to-day operations of your agency. He also backed you up when you got flack for carrying out your job.

As chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, I found myself deeply involved in making economic policy from day one. Back in January 1981, inflation was the number one problem facing the American people. Every public opinion poll showed that.

One of my initial tasks was to accompany President Reagan in his first meeting with Paul Volcker, who then was the head of the Federal Reserve System. It was clear that we all wanted to get inflation down. But the President’s vision was much broader than that.

Soon after, he assigned me the job of performing an audit of the American economy. He made my audit report public at a White House press briefing that we conducted jointly. The report made it clear: the American economy was suffering from a combination of illnesses: high inflation and low growth as well as high taxation, rising government spending, and excessive regulation.

At the press conference, I quickly learned that the questions would not be limited to the announced topic. After the President left, I was asked why he said he could not find his checkbook. I answered that, personally, I delegated that task to my wife. Amidst the laughter that followed, I started to answer another question.

Then came the awesome task of putting together the details of the President’s economic program. Cutting the budget received stage center. That suited me fine because my first job in Washington was working in President Truman’s Budget Bureau.

As a very active member of the three-member group that developed the Reagan budget cuts, I frequently quoted Harry Truman’s famous statement, “I never saw a budget that could not be cut.” To be nonpartisan, I also quoted a former Republican budget director, “Good budgeting is the uniform distribution of dissatisfaction.”

During this time, the President and his key advisers were focusing on his forthcoming address to the nation in early 1981. That was going to be the occasion for his publicly laying out what became Reaganomics. The process of writing the speech revealed much about the man.

He assembled the group in his living quarters on the top floor of the White House (he loved to say that he lived above the store). The first session was devoted to developing the major themes of his first big economic speech. When the President was satisfied, he adjourned the meeting with the understanding that the speechwriters would work up a rough draft.

The rest of the group then polished the speechwriter’s first draft. The revised draft speech was sent to the President who rewrote it in his own language. After his handwritten draft was typed, the whole group reassembled.

The President held the master copy and led us through it paragraph by paragraph to get our comments. On several occasions, I told him that a section was not accurate. He never pulled rank. After all, it was his speech. He always responded the same way, “Ok, how do I make the point accurately?” That was an example of how Ronald Reagan inspired loyalty.

During this period, there was an endless array of White House meetings to deal with a host of detailed questions facing the new administration: What economic forecast should we use in preparing the budget? How should we deal with the rapid increase in auto imports? Should the expiring quotas on shoe imports be extended? How rapidly can we increase the military budget when the civilian agencies are being cut back? Should the controls on gasoline prices be lifted? These and many, many more issues of public policy.

The pace was so hectic that my staff had to postpone the party they had planned for February 10, my birthday. It was held a day late. I still remember the birthday cake. It showed me on roller skates shuttling between the White House and my office next door.

After the Reagan economic program was put together, the President called in Dave Stockman (the budget director), Don Regan (the Treasury Secretary), and me to give us our marching orders. He said something like, “Ok, boys, now that we put the program together, our job is to go out and sell it.”

That began a non-stop round of testimony, speechifying, and other presentations to a great variety of groups, ranging from congressional committees to business, labor, farmers, and other interest groups.

Not all of my presentations were a resounding success. While I was preparing my presentation to the Consumer Federation, I recalled that President Roosevelt opened a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution with a wisecrack, “My fellow immigrants.” In that spirit, I addressed the consumer group as “My fellow consumers.” To put it bluntly, those particular consumers were not buying what I was selling.

My reception was very different when I testified before the Senate Banking Committee, who had to pass on my nomination as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Missouri’s two senators at the time, Jack Danforth and Tom Eagleton, were the first to speak. Both said all sorts of nice things about me and the Senate approved me by a vote of 95 to 0.

My typical day started with the 8:00 a.m. meeting of the White House senior staff. That was often followed by a meeting of the Cabinet or one of the Cabinet councils. Much of the actual decision-making was made at the meetings of the Cabinet councils, which were smaller and more specialized groups. I was most active in the councils dealing with Economic Policy and Commerce and Trade. Occasionally I participated in the Councils on Agriculture, Social Policy, and, a few times, National Security.

I made many formal and informal presentations to these and other interagency groups. On one occasion an anonymous colleague circulated a parody of my usual economic briefing, referring to a “slowing up of the slowdown” and an “upturn of the downturn.” I don’t think that I really sounded like that—but.

In retrospect, the Reagan economic program, warts and all, really worked. Those painful adjustments in 1981 and 1982 led to the longest peacetime expansion in American history. Escalating double-digit inflation has been consigned to the history books. For me, it was a privilege to serve President Ronald Reagan during this important period.

Yes, it was very nice for U.S. News to list me as one of the 30 most influential Americans in 1981 and again in 1982. Of course, I was quickly dropped from the list when I returned to St. Louis. On that note, I’ll give the last word to the lady who stopped me as I was getting on the elevator of a Washington hotel just two weeks after I left the White House, “Didn’t you used to be somebody?”     *

“Call it faith, call it vitality, call it the will to live, call it the religion of tomorrow morning, call it the immortality of man, call it whatever you wish; it is the thing that explains why man survives all things and why there is no such thing as a pessimist.” --G.K. Chesterton