Free The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush by Judith E. Michaels Page A

law. In Ronald Reagan's eight years in office, more than one hundred officials were accused of illegal or unethical conduct. 8 As one reporter put it, in terms of sheer criminality, the Reagan administration, mainly because of Iran-Contra, took the prize for ethics violations. The guilty verdicts of John Poindexter, national security adviser, and Oliver North, White House aide, were overturned only on procedural grounds; Caspar Weinberger was indicted but spared trial in that scandal by a pardon from President Bush. 9
Other violations abounded. For example, Paul Thayer, deputy defense secretary, pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and giving false testimony in an insider-trading case. Rita Lavelle, EPA toxic waste cleanup chief, was convicted of lying to Congress, as was Michael Deaver, White House deputy chief of staff. Questionable or illegal financial dealings led to trouble for others: both of Reagan's attorneys general, William French Smith and Edwin Meese, faced ethics investigations, as did the CIA's director, William Casey, and chief spy, Max Hugel. Deborah Gore Dean, top aide to HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, and two of her assistants were convicted of corruption. The secretary himself escaped indictment but not suspicion. In a plea bargain case that eventually saw a twenty-five-count indictment reduced to a one-count misdemeanor of perjury, a sympathetic judge decided to give former Interior Secretary James Watt "a break" and sentenced him to only six months of probation, a $5,000 fine, and five hundred hours of community service for his scheme to defraud HUD by funneling millions of dollars in low-income housing funds to his friends and then lying about it to Congress and a federal grand jury. The heads of numerous agencies were involved in ethical breaches: Food and Drug Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Occupational

 

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Safety and Health Administration, Maritime Administration, Legal Services Corporation, Veterans Administration, Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and Synthetic Fuels Corporation. 10
There were personnel as well as agency casualties of Reagan's administrative strategy. For one reason or another, Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, EPA head Anne Burford Gorsuch, and John P. Horton, also of EPA, White House aides Robert McFarlane, Michael Deaver, David Stockman, and others were ousted or resigned under fire. "Ten senior officials at EPA resigned or were fired and seven at HUD quit under pressure. Nine independent counsels conducted inquiries during the Reagan years." 11 Long past Reagan's presidency, investigations continued into the various HUD and Interior scandals. Nevertheless, as countless commentators noted, the genial, aw-shucks, Teflon president escaped unsullied as many aides fell in disrepute or political controversy around him.
While there were numerous accomplishments of the Reagan administration, the final assessment of its effect on government must be more negative than positive:
Overall . . . the Reagan Administration has weakened more than strengthened the more permanent institutions of presidential management, has undermined the morale of the civil service, has taken a narrow auditing approach to improving management in the executive branch, has done little to encourage competent professionals to serve in the federal government, and has overlooked opportunities to strengthen existing partnership arrangements between the federal government and other institutions at the state and local level and in the private sector. . . . Pressure has been placed on the bureaucracy to cut costs, but far less has been done to improve program effectiveness. In fact, some of the basic information resources needed to gauge program effects have been sharply cut back. (Salamon and Lund 1985, 23)
George Bush's Administrative Strategy: A Tory at the Helm
Lacking what he called "the vision thing," i.e., an overriding ideological impetus, such as that driving Nixon and Reagan, George Bush