Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn from Their Advisors?

6. Deadlock

CHAPTER 6 Deadlock Conventional wisdom has it that Ronald Reagan was poorly informed about many of the major issues of his day. This view was not only held by his political opponents but also encouraged by a spate of critical insider-accounts published by former associates . Accordingly, Reagan seems an obvious choice for a discussion of learning failures. Unlike the Eisenhower revisionists (and administration insiders) who asserted from the beginning that the Eisenhower they knew was very different from his public image as a likable but uninvolved golfer-president, even Reagan’s supporters have recognized his tendency to distance himself from the details of policymaking. They do not regard him as particularly reflective or inclined to weigh carefully multiple perspectives on important policy problems.1 On the contrary, some attribute his successes as president precisely to his reluctance to immerse himself in policy minutia. Reagan articulated a general vision, they argue, and left its implementation to others. By remaining aloof from the details of his policies, Reagan kept both his own attention and that of Congress and many other Americans focused on the broad outlines of his objectives—such as a tax cut and a stronger military—rather than on the trade-offs they entailed. This distance from his own policies also paid dividends when the policies did not succeed. Sidney Blumenthal was not alone among journalists in grumbling that those “assigned to the White House lock Ronald Reagan in their sights, fire, and believe they’ve 125 made direct hits. Yet he walks away unscathed. He has survived the assaults of the press better than any president in decades.”2 Reagan defined his job as articulating the ideals of his presidency, not as crafting the methods of attaining them. If a policy was unsuccessful or even counterproductive, this was not the president ’s fault, but that of whichever agency had implemented it. The president himself remained unassailable. The Reagan administration thus seems both an easy case and an odd case for the study of learning failures: “easy” because it seems clear that Reagan rarely made an effort to learn a great deal about difficult policy problems, and “odd” because arguably it was not Reagan’s learning that mattered, in any event, but that of his subordinates who actually formulated specific policies. As chapter 4 sought to show, the first of these objections is mistaken. It is clear that Reagan did sometimes learn and, as a consequence, change or even reverse his administration’s policies. Perhaps another leader would have learned more, or have changed course even more rapidly, but every leader has some capacity to learn. “Did Reagan learn?” is thus a much less interesting question than “When and how did Reagan learn?” Chapter 4 argued that he did so when his supply of information was carefully supervised by his advisory staff and presented to him in manageable form. This chapter takes up the question of what happened in the Reagan administration when the usual orderly arrangements broke down, when the president was given contradictory advice and forced to confront debates even among his closest associates. Although Reagan’s customary management style may often have resembled groupthink, the alternative was far worse. The usual platitudes offered by experts on decision making—to promote devil’s advocacy and to seek as wide a range of opinions as time permits—are likely to be wrong, and sometimes even catastrophic, for closed leaders. Whether or not Reagan’s decision making was poor is irrelevant , of course, if his subordinates actually made the decisions. It would be naive to assume that the buck always stops in the Oval Office. Yet it would be equally naive to assume that Reagan could (or desired to) simply delegate his job in its entirety to others. In the first case to be discussed in the next section, the debate during Reagan’s first term over the growing budget deficit, OMB Director David Stockman and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan undoubtedly played leading roles. Between them, they formulated most of the details of the Reagan administration’s fiscal and monetary 126 Deadlock policies. Yet neither could unilaterally set administration policy. Indeed, they mistrusted each other to such an extent that, at times, only the president’s influence prevented a complete breakdown of their working relationship. Although Reagan was hardly an expert on tax policy or on the myriad intricacies of the federal budget, he was nevertheless the...