Feelings of Hurt and Betrayal

By WALTER ISAACSON

Kirkpatrick suspects she was done in by her friends

When U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been accompanying the Kissinger Commission in Central America, flew to Washington for a speaking engagement two weeks ago, she had no indication that a major staff change was about to take place. National Security Adviser William Clark said nothing about it when they met at the White House, and it was only because she had a bad bronchial infection that she canceled her return to Latin America. She did not hear about her trusted colleague's nomination as Interior Secretary until an aide called the following day.

Thus began a process that, at least in the eyes of the proud and prickly U.N. Ambassador, TIME has learned, laid bare the backbiting and power struggles within the White House. Kirkpatrick was not upset primarily by her failure to be tapped for the National Security Council (NSC) post. But she now views what happened to her as a shabby betrayal by people she considered friends within the Administration. Whether or not the slights she perceives were in fact intended, her experience provides a glimpse of the personal rivalries that have long undermined Ronald Reagan's policymaking apparatus and of the human toll such struggles exact.

When Clark finally called her to tell of his move, Kirkpatrick urged him to reconsider. She feared there would be no one left in the Administration with clout enough to pull together American policy around the globe. Secretary of State George Shultz, she felt, was too absorbed in international economic policy, East-West issues and crisis management in the Middle East to develop strategy elsewhere. Until now, she and her hard-line allies, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director William Casey, had been able to fill the gap, but only because Clark listened to them--and Reagan listened to him.

Although he later let it be known that he had sought the Interior job, Clark told Kirkpatrick that he was simply doing what the President asked. He assured her that there would be no ill effects on policy if she were to succeed him at the NSC. It was an idea seconded by Casey, when he called the same evening.

Kirkpatrick had not at that point harbored any real hope of taking over at the NSC. A few months before, noticing that Clark seemed overburdened, she had offered to give up her U.N. post and come to Washington as his deputy. He had turned the suggestion aside, adding that she might become National Security Adviser if he ever quit. Just before she left for Central America, Clark confided that he was tired of the disagreements with Shultz. The NSC job was taxing his health, and he wanted her to succeed him. But she filed these conversations away as idle speculations.

Senior White House aides say that Clark in reality never thought Kirkpatrick was the most suitable replacement. All along, Clark's deputy Robert McFarlane was considered by most of Reagan's advisers, and even by Reagan, as the obvious choice. But as in other foreign policy personnel disputes during the past three years, Reagan allowed the uncertainty to linger and leak. What should have been a clean change of command became another running story--similar to the one that accompanied the departure of Secretary of State Alexander Haig--of struggles between Administration pragmatists and ideologues. The recriminations from the dispute are still reverberating. "Those who fought McFarlane," says one consummate White House infighter, "did not help themselves."

As the President delayed announcing his choice, the maneuvering among his aides quickened. Kirkpatrick was too ill to attend a White House foreign policy meeting, and Clark phoned her afterward to reveal that a new succession plan had been discussed. Chief of Staff James Baker and Presidential Assistant Michael Deaver seized the opportunity to propose a radical plan that would have made them the undisputed joint czars of the White House staff: Baker would take the NSC job and Deaver would become chief of staff. Clark immediately opposed the move, arguing that the President's motives would be suspect since Baker was his top political adviser and had no foreign policy experience. Weinberger and Casey strongly agreed. Moreover, Reagan's more conservative supporters considered Baker the leader of the pragmatists, and hence evil incarnate.

The strongest opposition to Kirkpatrick came from Shultz. He implied to a few associates that he would resign if she got the NSC post, and that word was passed to the White House. But the question in the minds of the White House staff soon became not whether Kirkpatrick would get the job, but how to assuage her disappointment about her loss to McFarlane and the decline of her influence now that Clark was gone.

Kirkpatrick had expressed her frustrations with the U.N. and the need to commute to New York City from her home near Washington. But in seeking to let her down gently about not getting the NSC job, White House aides gave her the impression that they wanted to oust her from the U.N. post. When Clark called to say that McFarlane would be appointed, he told Kirkpatrick that she had three alternatives: becoming the Deputy National Security Adviser, taking over the Agency for International Development, or coming into the White House as a Presidential Counsellor, a title now held only by Edwin Meese. She quickly rejected these options, feeling that without a base of power she would be easily bypassed by Shultz and McFarlane.

Meese was also uncomfortable with the idea of bringing Kirkpatrick in as a Counsellor, feeling that the new post would dilute his own power and title. So too were McFarlane and Shultz. But others tried to persuade her to take a job in Washington. Casey called and asked if he could come by for a drink. Pulling herself from her sickbed, Kirkpatrick drove to a pharmacy for a cold remedy and then received the CIA director at her Bethesda, Md., home. He urged her to take the Counsellor's job. Weinberger talked to her on the phone for an hour the next morning trying to persuade her to become McFarlane's deputy. She told them both no. As a close friend later put it, "What would she do at national security briefings? Chime in and correct McFarlane?"

Kirkpatrick was invited to meet with the President on Monday before his announcement of McFarlane's appointment. Clark, apparently wishing to keep the encounter secret, suggested that she use the diplomatic entrance, where the press was not allowed. She refused, saying that she would enter the White House publicly as she always had. In contrast to the chilly dealings she had been having with most of his staff, the hourlong meeting with Reagan was friendly. He offered her the Counsellor's title or another Washington job, and again she refused. But he seemed genuinely eager to have her stay on at the U.N. if she wanted. She promised him that she would wait until the end of the year to reassess her position.

What most upset Kirkpatrick, upon her return to her official residence in the Waldorf Towers in New York, was the implication of White House aides that she would be leaving the U.N. Although many no doubt thought they were accommodating her own expressed wishes, the feisty Kirkpatrick viewed their urgings that she "move" to Washington as an attempt to remove her from her job. "Why 'move' to Washington?" a friend quotes her as saying. "Don't they know I live there?"

She was particularly upset by a story in the Washington Times by Reporter Jeremiah O'Leary, a former aide to Clark, that said Baker might take over her U.N.

post. (If the story was indeed intentionally planted, it seemed aimed at undermining both Baker and Kirkpatrick, since such a scenario would require that she be fired and he be moved from the White House.) Baker termed the story "baloney" and Clark called to deny it, but Kirkpatrick now fears that she is being humiliated through the press like others who have been unceremoniously dumped from power. Her speculations about the motives of those spreading such stories have become quite byzantine: perhaps they want to maneuver Jim Baker out of the White House, or to signal a shift to a more moderate foreign policy prior to an election year. There was no evidence that there was in fact any serious desire in the White House to ease her out of her job; by week's end senior aides had concluded that her determination to stay at the U.N. was best for all concerned.

Feeling harassed and still popping cold pills, Kirkpatrick last week lamented that her sense of propriety had been violated --not only by her detractors but also by those she once thought were friends. She feels that she has been too "trusting," and confides to intimates that she now knows how Alexander Haig, once her archenemy, must have felt when he was forced out. To her mind, the only person above suspicion is the President, whom she considers a decent man, largely unaware of his staffs manipulative ways. Yet when an aide last week told her that the President's press conference was on television, she turned away, as if not wanting to be reminded of the pain he had unwittingly caused. She said she never watches television, and asked the aide to tell her if anything impor tant came up.

-- By Walter Isaacson.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett; Gregory H. Wierzynski This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.