Yesterday, I posted in my Substack on a long talk that my colleague at the Hoover Institution the late Martin Anderson gave during his time with Nixon. In it he revealed how quickly Nixon came to Marty’s position against the military establishment in 1967, shortly after meeting Marty.
There’s a lot more fun in that interview. Marty talks a lot about Ronald Reagan, who was very different from Nixon. Here is some of Reagan’s wisdom and knowledge.
I once described him as a cruel person. He had this look of being friendly and happy and nice, never quarreled with anyone, never complained. But if you shake your head and think about it a bit, he always had his way. It was as if there was a metal inside of him and everything you touch is soft and mysterious except for the middle metal. He always did it his way. No matter how many people talked to him, no matter what happened, he always did it his way. If you’re on the road, you’re gone, fired. He didn’t take any joy out of it, he just walked away.
I think if you really want to look at Reagan, one of the things that we’re showing in this new book that we have, is something that I knew from working with him. He was incredibly intelligent. I know this doesn’t sound logical, but he was incredibly smart. I’ve dealt with professors at Columbia and professors at Stanford, but he could look at something and understand it and grasp it and change it and work with it and play with it. He was incredibly fast. I would say he had a comparable mind—and I would talk to Milton Friedman or Ed Teller and Arthur. [Burns]all those boys, he could live with them.
Now, he hid that. He just stepped back. He never quarreled with the workers. You can have ten different people telling him the same thing and he just listens. He did not say to them, Look, and the dumb rabbit, ten years ago I wrote an article about this, a long article. He can just say, That’s an interesting idea. Many of the policy issues that were proposed to Reagan over time, by different people, he listened to, That’s very interesting. And when he did it, even though it was something he had decided years before that he would do, all these people were happy. He did what they told him. That made him happy, he didn’t care.
He used to say privately, There is no limit to what one can do if you don’t care who gets the credit. And he was very smart. Second, there was this feeling that he was lazy, he took a nap. I went with him for about four years. He didn’t say to sleep a little. It was just nonsense. In fact, he was working all the time. We have found evidence about this book in terms of handwritten documents and so on, he was always writing. He studied, wrote, worked constantly, in secret. As soon as he came out, he put on a public persona, he was friendly and funny and talkative.
For some reason, I find myself thinking about Reagan today. I never voted for him. I was not able to vote until 1986, shortly after I became a US citizen.
Although I enjoyed working for Martin Feldstein for two years, when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and I was chief economist, I thought Marty. [Feldstein, not Anderson] he was one of the many intellectuals who sold Reagan short. The story here is important.
Marty and I were working on a proposal, along with people from the Office of Management and Budget, the US Treasury Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House policy shop, to make employer contributions to employee health insurance. on top of the estimated $1,500 annual taxable income. That doesn’t sound like much, but $1,500 in 1983, adjusted for inflation, would be more than $4,700 today. The idea, shared by many health economists and economists, was that employers and workers would face fair compensation so that there would be little or no bias in favor of health insurance over taxable wages and salaries. ($1,500 a year was less than the average employer’s contribution and, if the $1,500 wasn’t indexed for inflation, over time the bias would be smaller and smaller.) But Marty wanted to go further and insist that so employers could deduct from their income. taxable income for their contributions to employee health insurance, they will have to purchase insurance with a coinsurance amount of at least 10% and a minimum deductible. (I have forgotten the amount of the deductible.) I argued with him. I said that this proposal without those requirements gave the employers the right incentive and he said that somehow he knew better than them. He did not have a good argument but insisted that I represent his position accurately in interagency meetings. I did. When I was about to say something that Marty was thinking but I didn’t, I said, “The chairman believes that …”
Interestingly and ironically, health economists across the country heard what Marty was advocating and wrote to me asking me to talk to him about it. (In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Marty was arguably the world’s leading economist, before he moved on to other issues like Social Security and corporate taxation.) So I would go up to Marty and say things like, “Joe Newhouse said hello and asked me to I told you that you think calling for employer-provided health insurance is a bad idea. Marty will admit the “hi” part. About the third time I did this, in response to the third letter from the economist, Marty said, “Okay, David, I hear you. Cut.” I did so.
Anyway, back to the story. There was a Cabinet Council meeting where Marty presented this proposal. Normally he would bring me and I would be one of those people you see in the pictures sitting with my back to the wall and not to the table. He didn’t invite me, and I found out about the meeting after it was over. I found out from a co-worker at another White House store, and this co-worker had been asked for a meeting by his boss.
I think Marty had found me. I was the type of person that if I saw something I disagreed with, I would speak up. The idea that Reagan and a bunch of Cabinet secretaries were there didn’t scare me at all. So I think Marty was afraid, in a way, that I was going to talk. If I had known in advance about this meeting and known that Marty was not going to take me there, I would have said, “Okay, I understand. You can say the world is flat, I won’t say anything.” Oh well.
I keep getting distracted, so here’s the part about Marty and Reagan. I once heard, after the meeting, from one of my colleagues in another White House store, I went to Marty to ask how it went. He said, “It went well. Even the President understood.” Even then, after following Reagan’s thinking for about 6 or 7 years, I thought Marty Feldstein was underestimating Ronald Reagan.
Source link