The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Reagan's Road Show in Europe

[Tease]

OFFICIAL [as Mr. and Mrs. Reagan step off airplane]: Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan.

ROBERT MacNEIL [voice-over]: President Reagan is back from the longest journey of his presidency. Tonight, how did he play at home and abroad?

[Titles]

MacNEIL: Good evening. President Reagan arrived home in Washington a little while ago from his 10-day European trip to be greeted with a welcome suitable for a conquering hero. The reception at Andrews Air Force Base was orchestrated by the White House, the State Department and the Republican National Committee. Hundreds of government workers were bused to the airport, and the staffs and families from 178 foreign embassies in Washington were invited. Earlier today Mr. Reagan concluded his trip with a quick visit to the Berlin Wall and a speech in which he pledged that the United States would continue its commitment to Berlin. The President also called for new communications efforts to avert what he called "the catastrophe of nuclear war by accident." In Berlin, police clashed with thousands of demonstrators protesting the Reagan visit. This presidential trip was arranged from beginning to end with careful calculation of its public relations impact in Europe and America. Tonight, four prominent molders of public opinion on how well it succeeded. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, all foreign trips by all U.S. presidents are mounted for very specific purposes with the hope of accomplishing very specific objectives. President Reagan's 10 days in Europe was no exception. According to the advance stories from the White House, Mr. Reagan went to Europe to convince our allies the U.S. economy was about to recover, to mobilize a united sanction front against the Soviet Union, to talk the British into going easy against the Argentines in the Falklands, to diffuse the growing antinuclear, anti-American feeling among the European public, to dispel any European questions about Mr. Reagan's steadiness as a leader, and to show the American public that he could handle himself and the nation's interests in international affairs. How he did in each of those categories as well as others is what we ask now of four nationally syndicated columnists.The four are Anthony Lewis, Philip Geyelin, Emmett Tyrrell and Robert Novak. An overview question first, beginning with Robert Novak, who with Roland Evans writes the Evans and Novak column. How would you characterize the trip's success, Bob?

ROBERT NOVAK: Jim, as your introductory remarks imply, this was largely an imagebuilding operation, and from that standpoint I think it was an abysmal failure. I think that the President obviously failed to get the specifics that he wanted from Mrs. Thatcher in regard to the Argentine war.He did not get the Germans and the other Europeans to go along on his opposition to credits for the Soviet Union. But much worse than that was the fact that the -- the fact that the Israelis chose to use his trip for their invasion of southern Lebanon shows the impotence of American foreign policy, the ability to influence events, to even influence our allies. But I think the thing that bothered the aides of the President back here -- at least some of the aides that I have talked to the most -- was the fact that he seems now, the President, the prisoner of the State Department and national security bureaucracy. After a year and a half of resisting it, endorsing the flobal negotiations, the rich giving to the poor nations nonsense that the State Department has been trying to foist on him -- this largely overlooked, but in the communique from Versailles, the United States did finally succumb to that.

LEHRER: Were there no pluses from your point of view?

Mr. NOVAK: I could see almost none. The plus that this is not the cowboy -- I think that except for the extreme left-wing European press, I think that had been conceded a long time ago. The great concession that the President made, which was adopting a very forward arms control policy, one that certainly is not in any distinctive way different from Jimmy Carter's -- I think that he gave away that concession some time ago in the -- so the Europeans were very grudging in their support for it. And the press he got in Europe, I thought was very negative.

LEHRER: Yeah. Taking it as a whole, would you say that there were more negatives than there were pluses? And that the end result was a negative thing, that he should have stayed home?

Mr. NOVAK: The President -- when I interviewed the President in the 1980 campaign, I asked him when he was going to go to Europe and he said he was going to go to Europe when he got the economy in shape. And the last I had known, he has not quite gotten the economy in shape. He went to Europe anyway, and like most of the other presidents, he is the prisoner of the national security bureaucracy. I think he would have been better off to stay at home. I think the only -- you asked, is there any plus? I think he's going to get a little blip out of the public relations polls at home, but that isn't the way a President really gains popularity, and it's going to be of very short duration, I would think.

LEHRER: Wouldn't he get a blip just by the fact that the House passed his budget, or at least a budget he now supports, yesterday afternoon while he was away?

Mr. NOVAK: Yeah, that's going to be one of the -- "'Twas a famous victory" because I think that whole budget situation is a sham. I think this administration is becalmed. I think it is at dead center, and it needs something more than a public relations oriented trip to Europe to stir it into action.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Next, Anthony Lewis, who writes the syndicated New York Times column "Abroad at Home." Tony Lewis, how do you assess the trip?

ANTHONY LEWIS, Jr.: I think very much as Bob Novak does in terms of its political impact. I think what was important, underneath those particulars that Jim Lehrer mentioned as the object of the trip for the President, was to appear a man of weight, of substance, in foreign affairs who could deal with the statesmen of Europe and Asia on equal terms. And I would have to say that he did not succeed in that.He came across -- I don't want to be cruel about it -- but the episode of his being asleep and not being awakened during the flap about how we would vote on the latest Falklands resolution in the United Nations, which Herblock in The Washington Post summed up in his cartoon very well, Mrs. Kirkpatrick saying, "Oh, wait a minute. A bulletin: the President has just woken up." Well, you know, when you become the subject of cartoonists' jokes, you're not showing yourself as a man of substance.

MacNEIL: I see. What did Mr. Reagan achieve, do you believe?

Mr. LEWIS: Well, I'm not sure. Perhaps he achieved, at least with the British audience -- I'm not sure about the others, but I think with the British audience, for his speech at Westminster Palace, the sense that he was a genial, a friendly, a nice man, which perhaps some of that audience hadn't been so sure of. But I repeat, take the Falklands issue, now, coming to substance. There was an example in which you needed a president who was able to be supple and skillful in diplomacy, even though it was only a short, verbal joust. What happened is that he went there with all the news stories telling everybody he was going to persuade Mrs. Thatcher to be magnanimous. What happened before he could say a word? Mrs. Thatcher sort of came out and said, "The President is behind us 100%," and you know, she just aced him out.

MacNEIL: And "magnanimity is not a word I use regarding the Falklands"?

Mr. LEWIS: Exactly.

MacNEIL: Let's look at some of the things that would seem from the communiques -- was not NATO unity, which had been in some disrepair since Mr. Reagan's election, reinforced with yesterday's meeting and the communique?

Mr. LEWIS: Yes, I'd say that was true, but, no, that isn't a great public relations event if we're judging it in those terms. That's not going to make any impact on the American public, or, really, it is not a result of Ronald Reagan's personal impact. I want to say something that I think Bob mentioned that I really think is more important than all of this public relations or image-building stuff. It's the reality of what's happening in the Middle East. What's happened there is that for the last week a great friend of the United States, a country much liked by Americans and heavily supported by the United States, has been carrying on a fearsome attack with very heavy civilian casualties -- we don't know the scope of them yet -- and the United States President has shown himself to be utterly powerless to stop it. I ask you to think what would have happened if Dwight D. Eisenhower -- another great Republican -- had been president while that was going on. It's unthinkable that an Israeli prime minister and government would have stood up to Eisenhower because he had some weight. He would not have let it happen.

MacNEIL: Was it that or was it the fact that he was absent and in Europe and away from Washington when all this happened?

Mr. LEWIS: Well, there was a bit of this same business of being asleep and the delay in sending the letter, and so forth, but I don't think it's atmospherics. I think it's the substance. Because they knew -- at least two days ago they knew what President Reagan didn't want them to do, and they have gone right on and done it anyway because they just don't think he's relevant. They don't think they have to listen.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Next, the opinion of Phil Geyelin, who won the Pulitzer Prize as the editorial page editor for The Washington Post, and now writes a column on American foreign and diplomatic issues, which is syndicated by the Post. More negatives than positives to you as well, Phil?

PHILIP GEYELIN: Well, I wouldn't put it as strongly as Bob did, but I think it was an awfully long climb from a very short slide.I think it did do some good in Europe. I think it was useful for him to go there. It was his first trip. It isn't a question of whether he had any choice. These were two summit meetings --

LEHRER: Sure. He had to go to the meetings.

Mr. GEYELIN: -- that he had to go to. He added a few other things. I don't know whether he needed the horseback ride or the Versailles setting at home. But I think he probably made a difference in Germany. I think --

LEHRER: In what way?

Mr. GEYELIN: Well, because I think any time that you show people that you don't have horns when a lot of people think you do, and take the trouble to come over and do it and make that kind of an effort. I think the speeches were good. But my quarrel with it is simply that it was programmed down to the last TV cue card, and to a point where the hand of the handlers showed all the way through it.

LEHRER: Is that avoidable?

Mr. GEYELIN: Certainly it's avoidable. The understanding of the leaders at Versailles was that eachof the seven would have a press conference afterwards and explain what they'd done. The leader of the free world was the only one that couldn't do that, or wouldn't do it, or didn't do it. And I don't think that was lost on the leaders and the discerning people in Europe that the President of the United States did not expose himself at any time to the free play of a press conference and answer questions. The only time he did, he looked worse. I think he did more damage to himself in just one incident -- Tony Lewis mentioned the fact that he was asleep. I don't mind that he was asleep.I don't think that was a terribly important vote. What I mind was that they didn't tell him about it when he woke up.So that when he got to lunch with Mrs. Thatcher, who was sorely wounded by what we had said at the Security Council, he acted as if he -- he didn't act like a president. He didn't act like the President of the United States or as if he had any contact with either Mrs. Kirkpatrick or Al Haig or anybody down the line. I just think that that's either terribly bad staff work or a reflection of the one thing they did not want to convey, which is that this man is not involved and engaged in a serious way in the details of the conduct of foreign policy. And one of the things that almost proves it was the almost pathetic length that Al Haig went to on, I think, two occasions to describe in raving terms, in raves the way the President conducted himself inside the meeting. This has been happening before. Judge William Clark, who is a National Security Council adviser, devoted a large part of his speech to describing in almost too intimate detail the extraordinary role the President had had in working out a new war strategy. You don't have to do that with a President who is actually doing it.

LEHRER: I see. Phil, what about this issue of nuclear arms in Europe? That was another one of his purposes, obviously, was to try to diffuse some of that, as I said. Do you think that he went some ways down that road toward doing that?

Mr. GEYELIN: I think he went some ways, but I think he'd gone a long ways down in his November 18th speech last year. I talked to Ambassador Arthur Burns when I was in Bonn recently --

LEHRER: You just got -- you were in Europe, what, latter part of April? About a month ago.

Mr. GEYELIN: And Arthur Burns said at that time that a lot of the steam had gone out of that peace movement, that they already had a different perception of Reagan; he added to it in Eureka, and that I'm sure he added to it a little bit here, but I think mostly he reassured people who were already reassured, and probably didn't change very many minds.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Now to Chicago for the views of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., syndicated columnist and editor in chief of the American Spectator. Mr. Tyrrell, how did you think the President did?

R. EMMETT TYRRELL, Jr.: Well, I must say I find myself at variance with most of the people here this evening. I thought the President did a rather good job. I don't know why we have such high expectations from summit meetings. They are less and less momentous as the years go on. I'm also impressed with a though that's been on my mind quited a bit the last few years, is that news from Europe -- the news across the ocean from Europe travels about as well as Beaujolais. It doesn't travel well.Our views here in America -- our perceptions of Ronald Reagan's appearance in Europe here in America -- aren't the kind -- I wouldn't put great stock in them because my experience has so often been that the perceptions that we have been to be simplistic. Before I came on I called a couple of our writers in Europe that I have been in close contact with. My managing editor just returned from Germany just the other day. And from people that talked to me directly from Europe, they are of the opinion that the President did as good a job as one could expect over there.

MacNEIL: What particularly impressed you, specifically?

Mr. TYRRELL: Well, of course, I'd say what always impresses me about Ronald Reagan is that he's underestimated by so many people, and then he actually has a kind of a free ride because he -- after being underestimated so easy, you [unintelligible] to impress people. Of course, to be underestimated is a great -- to be continually underestimated is a great political attribute, as Richelieu pointed out and Guicciardini believed. And I think that's a strength of Ronald Reagan's. He went to Europe, he was charming, he showed his usual engaging presence. Very importantly, as I checked with Patrick Wiseman from Le Figaro, as I say, before I went on -- very importantly, he laid to rest, amongst those who are inclined to think well of him, the view that he's a cowboy. I think that is a kind of -- it is kind of important. You have to remember that anti-Americanism is the European bigotry, and the Europeans are forever susceptible to thinking poorly of the United States and of United States leaders. I think it was Bob Novak that said that this view had been dispelled months ago, but it -- not amongst everyone, not amongst those who are inclined to think ill of him. And once again he went over and he proved that he was a decent man, a sensible man, not trigger-happy. And there's one very important thing that he did over there: many of the Europeans, according to Wiseman, and I might add I was there -- I was in Europe three weeks ago -- and I understood that a lot of the Europeans were very concerned about that Foreign Affairs piece that appeared recently. They needed reassurance to know that --

MacNEIL: This was the one suggesting that the West give up the idea of a first-use of nuclear weapons, is that the report you mean?

Mr. TYRRELL: Yes, that's correct. And this wobbled a lot of our European friends, and according to Wiseman, according to Coleen Welch, the Europeans were very much reassured when the President expressed the idea, the thought, that he would stand by, that the United States will stand by Europe.

MacNEIL: So, to sum it up, you would think, Mr. Tyrrell, that the President did himself some good on this trip?

Mr. TYRRELL: Well, I think he did the country some good, and I think he did NATO some good.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you.Jim?

LEHRER: Bob Novak, what do you say to Mr. Tyrrell? He says that the cowboy image was still there, and he laid it to rest, and it was a very helpful thing for all concerned.

Mr. NOVAK: I think the cost was extraordinarily high. I think that this administration --

LEHRER: The cost in what way?

Mr. NOVAK: The cost to this administration to a degree that I think is scandalous, retreating from its principles on arms control -- giving up measurement of throw weight. This administration on most issues for the last several months has been negotiating with itself, and it's negotiating with itself continually on the bargaining position with the Soviet Union. So the posture that the President is taking, without any quid pro quo from our allies, not only to confront and to supercede the nuclear freeze movement, but to erase the cowboy image, is to essentially, as I said before, to take the position on arms control which is not only softer than Gerald Ford's, but I say in some ways is softer than Jimmy Carter's.

LEHRER: Mr. Tyrrell, what do you think about that?

Mr. TYRRELL: Well, it's hard for me to respond to that because I share Bob Novak's concern about building up America's military defense forces. I don't believe that we've given up -- I don't believe that the President gave anything up over there this past week. I believe that questions of substantive policy are not hammered out at summit meetings, but before and after summit meetings by the diplomats, and that's the important thing: what has been going on and what will be going on when the summit ends.

LEHRER: Tony Lewis?

Mr. LEWIS: Well, I agree with Mr. Tyrrell's previous statement that the President was reassuring on the nuclear issue, but I don't have the substantive view of the matter that Bob Novak does, and I think it misconceives it. I don't think that the President has given away the store on that issue or on others dealing with the Europeans. He has turned from a kind of abstract ideology, which gripped him when he was running for office, to reality, which affects presidents when they're in office. It's not the first occasion. What happened at the summit was there only a ratification of a process that had been going on almost from the day he took office, which was having to take account of the real views of our allies, which were not the same as his previous ideological statements, and he's -- you know, he's rightly, and I think wisely, taken a middle position, which is reality, and the summit did ratify that.

LEHRER: Phil Geyelin, is that the perception that you got when you were in Europe that Europe -- well, let me just ask you directly. Do the European leaders feel that they have brought Reagan around to their way of thinking?

Mr. GEYELIN: I don't think so. I think they feel that he is responding, not necessarily to their leadership, but to political pressures at home and abroad -- to the peace movements in both countries. And I think the smart ones recognize that the proof of his arms control policies will be in the negotiating terms when he actually sits down at the table. So I don't think that he has really laid any worries permanently to rest, and that's certainly the point about this trip. I don't think [sic] it's going to have a very short life in people's recollection. The Germans are having a very, very serious political crisis, which could really tear that government apart later in this month -- on June 17th, as a matter of fact -- when the Free Democrats have to decide whether they're going to continue their alliance with the Social Democrats in the Leander elections in Heasse in September. So they've got their problems. The British have got the Falklands. All three of them have terrible economic problems. The one thing that the President could not do, didn't do and can't do is demonstrate that he's going to bring interest rates down. And I think they care more about that than any other issue as far as those leaders are concerned. And that issue is not going to be resolved until the interest rates come down.

LEHRER: Tony Lewis, would your feelings about the effectiveness of this trip be different if there had not been the invasion of Lebanon while he was there? I mean, did that so overshadow everything else that there was no way for it to come out in a positive way from your perspective?

Mr. LEWIS: Well, I think we should be clear that we're talking about things on very different levels.Whether the President of the United States has a public relations triumph is not terribly important in the real world.The other matter is very important. It's important in terms of our interests in the Middle East and in the lives of a lot of thousands of people. And my answer to you is, if you keep in mind that I am not making them fungible commodities, yes. If there had not been that explosion in the Middle East, it would look very different, and we could all feel more satisfied with it, yes.

LEHRER: Your view of that, Bob Novak?

Mr. NOVAK: Well, I don't think that -- I think it made it a good deal worse, as I think we all agree, by underlining the impotence of the President, but I don't think, Jim, that the failure of -- what I consider the failure of the President's trip was predicated on the insult from the state of Israel. I think the real basic problem is that when an administration, as the Nixon administration did before it, and to a lesser extent, the Carter administration, begins to gear its hopes and successes for these public relations triumphs, I think it is a sign of ideological bankruptcy. And it's the difference between 1981 and 1982 for the Reagan administration. In 1981, it seemed committed to issues, to, if you will, ideology. And in 1982, it is interested in the strategic public relations triumphs, and I think that is a sign of -- I think it is a sign of the debility within this administration, and I think that's why there is a feeling here in Washington among people of various ideological stripes that it is an administration that is old defore its time.

LEHRER: Yeah. Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Geyelin, the action of the Republican National Committee in busing government workers out to greet the President at the airport tonight indicates that there was certainly a political content in this. The White House said before he left they hoped that the enhanced prestige of the visibility in Europe would impress the Congress in its vote on the budget. Now, before he left, the coalition he had put together last year seemed to be shattered. Suddenly last night it reassembled and he won. Did the European trip and the visibility not contribute to that?

Mr. GEYELIN: Well, I have no way of knowing without doing a lot more polling of Congress. I doubt very much if the European trip did that at all. I don't think the President came across in Europe to this country, with all the distractions that there were and are on the evening news and in the papers -- the Falklands, the Middle East and everything -- I don't think he came across as a triumphant figure. In fact, I think if the imagery was anything, it was probably not helpful. I think that Versailles setting and all the other splendid settings and all the pomp and the circumstance, with very little substance that the American public could get their teeth into, I can't believe that changed the atmosphere in Congress. But I could be wrong because I have not polled the congressmen.

MacNEIL: Do you have a view of that, Bob Novak?

Mr. NOVAK: I don't think it had a thing to do with it, Robin. In boxing you would call what happened in the House of Representatives this week a tank job. The Democrats decided that of all of the alternatives winning was a lot worse than losing. And so they really let the Republicans have this ridiculously sham victory. I don't think it had any connection whatever with the President's triumphant grand tour of Europe.

MacNEIL: Do you want to add to that, Tony Lewis?

Mr. LEWIS: No, I agree completely. It was a tactical, happy defeat.

MacNEIL: What will be, Mr. Geyelin, would you say, the political impact, looking ahead for all those congressmen and people who may want to be riding on his coattails or avoiding them, to November of this European trip?

Mr. GEYELIN: Again, I don't think it's going to have a great political effect in this country. I tend to agree with Tony Lewis. I think there is a little bit of the pitiful helpless giant in Ronald Reagan as he makes his tour around the world.He couldn't talk the Argentine junta out of invading the Falklands. He cannot apparently impress the Prime Minister of Great Britain with the need for being a little bit flexible after she mops up Port Stanley. And of course he couldn't have the slightest effect on Menachem Begin, although I wouldn't quite agree with Tony Lewis; I'm not sure why he brought the memory of Dwight Eisenhower into this. Dwight Eisenhower didn't have a great deal of luck keeping the Israelis off the Sinai Desert in 1956.

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there, Mr. Geyelin. Sorry to interrupt you. I'm sorry we couldn't go back to Chicago because we lost our connection there a few minutes ago. But we thank Mr. Tyrrell for joining us from there anyway, and Mr. Geyelin, Mr. Novak, and Mr. Lewis, thank you. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight. We will be back on Monday night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.