On that Friday evening, while attention was riveted on the unseemly and irresistible spectacle of Regan's graceless departure, Cannon had quietly slipped into the White House to begin his confidential mission. Baker assumed there would have to be major changes in the staff. But before he made them, he needed to understand how the old White House team had functioned - or not functioned.
At Baker's instruction, Cannon embarked on a series of exhaustive interviews with the members of the White House staff, trying to determine what had gone wrong. It was like interviewing witnesses in a political mystery. For six years, Ronald Reagan had been the most commanding presence in American politics, a president of apparently limitless popularity and success. But for the past four months, ever since the news had broken that he had secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, his presidency had seemed lifeless, a hollow shell. Reagan had been elected by a forty-nine-state landslide only twenty-seven months earlier, but the polls now showed that his popularity was plummeting. He had been praised for having restored the credibility of the office, but more than half the country thought he was not telling the whole truth about either the arms sales to Iran or the diversion of money to the Nicaraguan contras. More than any recent leader, Reagan had shown an instinctive ability to please the American public, yet he had blundered into a misbegotten set of policies that no one, no matter where they stood on the political spectrum, could support. How, Cannon wanted to know, could this have happened?
Cannon had talked with the president's aides late into Friday evening and through most of Saturday. By the time he returned home quite late on Saturday night, he had been tired, dispirited, and very worried.
Now, in Sunday's early light, he began to draft his report for Howard Baker He looked again at the notes he had taken during the two days of interviews. The picture they presented of Reagan's White House was nothing short of astounding.
Cannon later recalled his impressions: "Chaos. There was no order in the place. The staff system had just broken down. It had just evaporated.
There was no pattern of analysis, no coming together. Individual cabinet members were just doing whatever they wanted to do - the ones who were smart had realized that the White House really didn't matter. They could go around the White House, and no one would retaliate.
"I took a look at some of the staff's paperwork and was stunned at their incompetence. They were rank amateurs."
But more chilling than anything else was the portrait these aides drew of the president they served. They spoke with Cannon in confidence; one by one, he recalled, "they told stories about how inattentive and inept the president was. He was lazy; he wasn't interested in the job. They said he wouldn't read the papers they gave him - even short position papers and documents. They said he wouldn't come over to work - all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence.
They felt free to sign his initials on documents without noting that they were acting for him. When I asked a group of them, who among them thought they had authority to sign in the president's name, there was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then one answered, 'Well - everybody and nobody.' "
Sifting through his notes, Cannon couldn't shake his astonishment. He was of course an uninitiated outsider; he'd had only a brief glimpse into the inner workings of an enormously complex organization. But he had seen enough to find the situation frightening - for him, for the party, and for the country.
Cannon reopened his copy of the Constitution and found, almost at end, what he had been searching for: Section Four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
AMENDDMENT XXV SECTION FOUR. Whenever the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.
Cannon stared hard at the provision. It had never been invoked; deceptively simple, it was a straightforward procedure for removing the president from office if he were no longer competent to govern. All it would take would be the agreement of the vice president and a majority of the cabinet. After a good deal of thought, Cannon reached a conclusion that would seem extreme, maybe even bizarre, to those who only knew the Ronald Reagan they saw on television and who hadn't heard all that he had over the past two days. But Cannon wasn't concerned with public perception; his primary loyalty was to Baker, to whom he felt he owed his unvarnished judgment. So he carefully typed out his first recommendation:
"Suggested priorities, March 1, 1987:
"I. Consider the possibility that section four of the 25th amendment might be applied."
**
That evening Cannon took the finished memorandum - which included several recommendations for immediate action - to Baker's home in a posh wooded enclave of Northwest Washington for a confidential meeting. Two of Baker's other trusted aides had also been asked to attend:
A. B. Culvahouse, a bright young lawyer who had cut short his vacation to take over the next day as the White House counsel, and Thomas Griscom, another transplanted Tennessean who had been Baker's press aide and would soon become the White House's director of communications. Griscom already knew what Cannon thought. He too had been asked to interview the White House staff over the weekend, and he had been similarly appalled. By Friday night, he was so shocked by the stories he was hearing that he kidded Cannon that they should be given medals for even daring to go back to the White House the next morning. The two had exchanged notes on their findings during a late lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill on Saturday, and although they had thought they were starving, by the time they had realized the magnitude of the crisis they were facing, neither had had any appetite left.
In the privacy of Baker's home on Sunday night, Cannon warned Baker and the others that what he was about to say was extremely serious. Baker assumed his practiced poker face and waited. Sparing no details, Cannon then repeated what he had heard from the president's aides. The man they described, he told Baker, had no interest in running the country. In his estimation, and as the only one in the room who had previously worked in the White House, Cannon told Baker that his first decision should be whether to set in motion the involuntary retirement of the president on the grounds that he was no longer fit to discharge the duties of his office. Such a move could cause a constitutional crisis, Cannon realized. But, he said, if the president was as incompetent as his aides indicated, invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment could be the only way to serve the national interest.
There was a long, sober silence. During Watergate, Howard Baker had been a senior member of the Senate's investigating committee, and he understood as well as any politician in the country the implications of Cannon's words. But neither Baker nor his aides dismissed the constitutional remedy as beyond the realm of possibility. Instead, after hearing Cannon out, Baker finally said in his Tennessee drawl, "Well, it doesn't sound like the Ronald Reagan I just saw, but we'll see tomorrow"
On Monday morning, March 2, Cannon, Baker, Culvahouse, and Griscom gathered in the West Wing of the White House. They planned to watch the president closely, to determine whether he appeared mentally fit to serve. First they observed him from across the room as he chaired a formal cabinet meeting. Then they accompanied him to one of the weekly "issues luncheons," a free-flowing discussion with members of the White House staff that was also held in the Cabinet Room.
One of Donald Regan's aides guided them to seats alongside the French doors that lined the side of the room and led out to the Rose Garden. But Cannon insisted on four seats at the table; he wanted a closer look at Reagan. The four men deliberately bracketed the president: Baker on his right side, Griscom on his left, and Culvahouse and Cannon directly across from him, so that they could look into the president's eyes.
Reagan seemed relaxed and animated. He swapped a few familiar jokes with Baker. There was the one about the lady from Tennessee who was a stern teetotaler. A friend had protested, "Even Jesus drank a little wine," to which she had replied, "I would think more of him if he didn't." Everyone laughed. The tension evaporated. Then Reagan reminisced a bit about being governor of California. He seemed so alert and attentive that Cannon began to wonder about everything the White House staff members had told him.
Perhaps Donald Regan's henchmen had exaggerated the president's frailties, he thought. Perhaps they were trying to justify an internal coup, an arrangement whereby the chief of staff would make others believe he had been forced to act as a kind of regent for a disabled president. Could the president they described - the inattentive, incurious man who watched television rather than attending to affairs of state - be the same as the genial, charming man across the table?
What the hell is going on here? Cannon wondered. The old fella looks just dandy
And through it all, Ronald Reagan always did,
Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)
