So much of the U.S. government ran on paper. What Darman understood better than most was the flow of paper, what it said and what it left out. Darman introduced me to one of my most important channels of information: the staff secretary. “A key to understanding what goes on in any White House,” he told me, “is the staff secretary.”
The position sounded to me like a paper pusher, a mindless cog in the bureaucracy. In fact, as Darman tutored me, the staff secretary sees and controls all information that goes to the President. Darman asked to be, and was appointed, staff secretary during Reagan’s first term. In that period, he knew virtually everything important about Presidential business, behavior, and decisions. He was known as a master of policy detail and made himself the indispensable man in the Administration. His information checked out. Darman was a protégé of James Baker, who was chief of staff to Reagan. In Reagan’s second term, when Baker became Treasury Secretary, Darman became his deputy. And from 1989 to 1993, under Bush, he was the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
From critical national-security information to the colorful office tales he shared, Darman provided me with a gold mine of information. I interviewed him in at least fifty-eight meetings or phone conversations. I have boxes filled with hundreds of pages of notes on our discussions. After our most important conversations, as is my practice, I typed a memo of one to six pages, laying out in detail what he’d said.
Darman was hardly an elegant presence. He cut his own hair and clearly did not care what clothes he wore. He was pudgy until he went on one of his intensive weight-loss programs. When he lost weight, he would rarely buy new clothes; he just tightened his belt ever tighter.
Darman was one of the smartest people I have ever interviewed. He had analytical brilliance and analytical patience. He had a hawklike ability to zero in on weaknesses—in policy, in people, and in his own Administration.
Reagan delegated a lot of his authority, creating a power struggle of wannabe Presidents among his advisers. Each one struggled to secure greater power for himself by isolating others from the President, Darman said. Baker was one of the most enduring if not triumphant of those competing for power and proximity to Reagan. “Jim Baker has to stop trying to be President,” Darman said to me of his mentor.
Darman had a cool disdain for everyone. Over the years, I do not believe I ever heard him voice much respect or admiration for any of his superiors—Reagan, Bush, or Baker. In 1987, Darman told me, “For four years in the Reagan Administration, I lived in a world of delegated authority without a fully engaged President. With a team of competing Presidents trying to kill each other off in secret.” Reagan was forgetful but not necessarily cognitively impaired, Darman said.
As Baker’s protégé, Darman had participated in these internecine and often wretched White House wars. He told me that his role, which was highly secret, would have been described in earlier eras as a “hatchet man.” Baker periodically deployed Darman to discredit and even destroy Baker’s rivals for Presidential attention in the Administration. Chief among those rivals were the Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Reagan’s top aide Edwin Meese, and the C.I.A. director Bill Casey. I knew I was being used sometimes, but that did not mean that the information I gleaned was not accurate.
Darman maintained that he executed these “hits” with hard facts, rarely embellished. He was a careful man. Over the first eighteen months of the Reagan Administration, he said, Haig had been hanging himself with his ego and impulsiveness. Darman just helped speed up the process by leaking precise, detailed accounts of Haig’s behavior at meetings, privately telling selected reporters and others that the Secretary of State was a “joke,” an “ass-kisser,” a “danger to the Republic,” and even “insane.” Haig finally resigned in 1982.
The next target was Meese, Reagan’s Presidential counsellor and close confidant. Darman said that he spread stories of Meese’s ignorance and quasi-scandalous activity over ten thousand dollars in moving expenses that Meese might have improperly reported to the Internal Revenue Service as supplemental income. Nothing came of it.
