The New York Times-20080126-Richard G- Darman- Policy Aide and Deal Maker for 5 Presidents- Is Dead at 64- -Obituary -Obit--
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Richard G. Darman, Policy Aide and Deal Maker for 5 Presidents, Is Dead at 64; [Obituary (Obit)]
Richard G. Darman, who marshaled a deep, prickly intelligence to guide policy and deal making in four Republican administrations, including negotiating the reversal of the first President George Bush's campaign pledge not to raise taxes, died Friday. He was 64 and lived in McLean, Va.
His death was announced by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and a friend of Mr. Darman. Mr. Darman had been fighting acute myelogenous leukemia, his son Jonathan said.
In addition to serving President George Bush in the cabinet-level post of director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Darman worked in six cabinet departments and the White House. He controlled the paper flow to President Ronald Reagan, a pivotal responsibility.
Mr. Darman called himself an idealist in the long term, saying he had followed his principles when he resigned with his boss, Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson, during the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate. In the short term, he was the realist who wheedled a bipartisan Congress to pass Reagan's agenda. As director of the Office of Management and Budget, he negotiated with Congress in 1990 to pass a budget that raised taxes. The deal angered conservatives, who said it violated the pledge that Mr. Bush had made in accepting the Republican presidential nomination: Read my lips, no new taxes.
National Review, the conservative magazine, called Mr. Darman's work the most catastrophic budget deal of all time, and Mr. Bush himself later said it was the biggest mistake of his presidency. But many economists believed that the agreement's tough pay as you go rules and a resulting infusion of revenue eased the recession of the early 1990s, and paved the way for the later budget surpluses and economic boom.
In his book Who's in Control?: Polar Politics and the Sensible Center (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Mr. Darman wrote that politics in Congress had made the tax increase an inescapable strategic necessity if we were to do what had to be done for the economy.
The bipartisan maneuvering that lay behind the budget agreement was Mr. Darman's stock in trade. He steered Reagan's major economic policies through Congress, including the 1981 tax and spending cuts, the Social Security rescue of 1983, and the tax overhaul of 1986.
Indeed, political operatives coined the term Darmanesque to describe any set of ploys and tactics designed to pry legislation out of a reluctant Congress. Like a veteran of the British civil service, Mr. Darman, rising ever higher, quietly and effectively worked the levers of power for successive administrations.
I continued to learn from him that I didn't have as many answers as I thought, that I had built an edifice of doctrine, but not a theory of governance, David A. Stockman, budget director in the Reagan administration, wrote in The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (Harper & Row, 1986).
In his own book, Mr. Darman described political work as heavy lifting.
Viewed in the small, he wrote, the job is routinely this: lugging stone after stone, day after day, fitting the pieces together.
Richard Gordon Darman was born in Charlotte, N.C., on May 10, 1943, and grew up in Wellesley Hills, Mass. His father owned textile mills and marketed oil and gasoline in New England. In 1981, The Washington Post reported that Mr. Darman still regretted getting a 790, rather than a perfect 800, on one part of his high school SATs.
He made it to Harvard anyway, and was moved when John F. Kennedy returned there, his alma mater, as president-elect. Mr. Darman said he had been struck with the sense that government could involve moral and esthetic virtue.
He graduated from Harvard in 1964 and from Harvard Business School in 1967. He joined the Nixon administration in 1970 and worked under Mr. Richardson in a succession of cabinet departments: Health, Education and Welfare, Defense and Justice. At the Justice Department, he helped arrange the plea bargain that eased Vice President Spiro T. Agnew out of office.
When Mr. Richardson, the attorney general, resigned in refusing to follow White House orders to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into Watergate, Mr. Darman also quit. He joined the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington before returning to government as an assistant secretary of commerce under Mr. Richardson, and then Mr. Richardson's successor, Mr. Baker.
At the Commerce Department, Mr. Darman worked on the law- of-the-sea negotiations and continued this work into the Carter administration -- making a total of five presidents for whom he worked. He then consulted and taught until he was appointed executive director of President-elect Reagan's transition team.
Asked to join the new administration, he wrote his own job description -- managing the flow of White House paperwork -- and got the job with the title assistant to the president. Edwin Meese III, the presidential counselor, said this made Mr. Darman the nerve center of the administration. He became principal legislative strategist and also participated in foreign policy decisions.
At the beginning of the second Reagan term, he became deputy secretary of the Treasury.
Mr. Darman's pragmatism, willingness to work with Democrats and desire to make a career of government rankled movement conservatives and even aroused their suspicions. In his book Revolution: The Reagan Legacy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), Martin Anderson, a Reagan aide, called Mr. Darman easily the most disliked man in the White House, saying he had done nothing for the campaign.
But Mr. Darman did help elect Reagan by coaching him for his debates in the 1980 and 1984 campaigns. He reprised the role for Vice President Bush in 1988, preparing him for debating Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Darman wore a tank helmet for the occasion, as Mr. Dukakis had done while posing for a much-derided photograph in a tank.
Five days after the Bush inauguration, the Senate confirmed Mr. Darman as budget director by a vote of 99 to 0. He was soon negotiating a budget, with Mr. Bush's pledge not to raise taxes a defining element.
In 1988, Mr. Darman had opposed the promise, but later wrote that he was wrong politically -- even if right economically. He said in his book, I was indulging in the fantasy of governing without attending to the imperative of winning.
Reviewers of the book remarked that he seemed to see the reversal as merely poor management. Mr. Darman admitted as much in the book, writing, The subsequent violation of trust was a problem.
After President Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. Darman joined the Carlyle Group, the private principal investing firm, as a partner and managing director. He was also a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and chairman of the AES Corporation, an electrical utility. His charitable work included being chairman of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
In addition to his son Jonathan, of Manhattan, Mr. Darman is survived by his mother, Eleanor Darman of Lincoln, Mass.; his wife, the former Kathleen Emmet; two other sons, William, of Brooklyn, and C. T. Emmet, of McLean; a granddaughter, Jane Darman; his sister, Lynn Darman, of Washington, and his brother, John, of West Bridgewater, Mass.
Mr. Darman cut his own hair; said his hobby was thinking, and was quietly celebrated for the irreverent notes he passed at White House meetings. Once, when Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger was warning of the dire consequences of even the slightest defense cut, Mr. Darman slipped a note to a colleague.
There goes Western civilization for the third time in the last hour, he wrote.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Richard G. Darman, in 1990, as the president's budget director. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB DAUGHERTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS)