Reagan’s mea culpa is a presidential lesson in survival strategy

US president Ronald Reagan left office with a robust 63 per cent job-approval rating.

In late 1986, Ronald Reagan was overseeing a presidency in deep trouble. Because of the Iran-Contra scandal, his job-approval ratings had plunged 16 percentage points in less than two months. His administration was under investigation by an independent commission and a court-appointed independent counsel, and there was serious talk of impeachment.

Yet by the time he left office two years later, Reagan had pulled out of the ditch and overseen a historic makeover of relations with the Soviet Union. He rode out of office with a robust 63 per cent job-approval rating.

What happened? And are there any lessons in this rebound for the Trump administration as it stumbles through the inquiry into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election?

The key to Reagan’s survival came in early 1987, when he launched a significant makeover of his team, bringing in a new set of Washington pros. He adopted a disciplined approach of allowing the Iran-Contra investigations — painful though they were — to play out without interference, while focusing his own energies on achieving some modest domestic legislative victories and more significant diplomatic achievements.

Equally important, his aides and his wife convinced a reluctant president to tell the nation, not once but twice, that he accepted responsibility for the Iran-Contra problem. “We convinced Reagan — and it was worse than 10 root canals — that he had to do a mea culpa to the American people,” recalls Ken Duberstein, who was among the group brought in to revive the Reagan presidency and later became White House chief of staff.

There are, of course, significant differences between the problems facing Reagan then and President Donald Trump now. The Iran-Contra scandal erupted well into Reagan’s second term and involved a substantive policy disagreement with congress, while the questions over Russia’s election-year role turn on what happened during the campaign and shortly after he entered office.

The key lesson, though, may be one that Trump seems to be resisting. Whereas Trump appears eager to derail any inquiry into the Russian question — firing FBI director James Comey amid his investigation and regularly belittling the idea that there is anything worth examining at all — Reagan came to conclude that the air would be cleared only if he allowed both the Justice Department and subsequent congressional probes to play out to their natural conclusions.

“Iran-Contra” was shorthand for a covert effort by the Reagan national security team to sell weapons to Iran, and then funnel the proceeds to arm the Contra rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua. Both ends of this transaction — selling arms to Iran and giving military assistance to the Contras — contravened prevailing laws, so the whole operation was an elaborate effort to defy congressional intent.

Reagan, it turned out, approved the sale of arms to Iran out of a humanitarian impulse: in return for the weaponry, the Iranians helped free US hostages held in Lebanon. But he appeared to be unaware that the proceeds were being used to arm Nicaraguan rebels.

Little of that was clear as word of the operation exploded in late 1986. At the end of November, the Reagan administration publicly acknowledged that money had gone to the Contras; sacked Oliver North, the National Security Council staff member behind the operation; and appointed a special commission led by former senator John Tower to examine what had happened.

But real damage control began a couple of months later, when Reagan cleaned house. He accepted the forced resignation of his White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, and replaced him with former senator Howard Baker, a widely respected Washington veteran. Baker, in turn, brought along Duberstein as his deputy, and, eventually, Colin Powell as national security adviser and longtime national-security figure Frank Carlucci as defence secretary.

The new team sought to resolve the Iran-Contra questions while also separating Reagan from them. A special channel was set up in the White House counsel’s office to handle Iran-Contra issues, freeing the rest of the White House to focus on the other pieces of the Reagan agenda.

The new team also convinced Reagan to stop making offhand comments about Iran-Contra, which kept the controversy swirling without resolving it. Increasingly, presidential attention was focused on reshaping relations with the evolving Soviet Union, which produced a set of historic summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and a landmark 1987 agreement on intermediate-range nuclear arms.

Along the way, congressional investigations were launched alongside the independent counsel inquiry. Eventually a handful of Reagan aides were indicted and convicted of various transgressions — and later pardoned by president George HW Bush.

Reagan, though, survived, and even thrived. Whether Trump can adopt a similarly open yet disciplined approach is the question of the hour.

The Wall Street Journal