Must-Read: William Grieder (1981): The Education of David Stockman
Must-Read: My late friend Susan Rasky was, in general, annoyed at William Grieder.
You see, she was covering Stockman and the budget in the New York Times in 1981. She was trying to tell as it happened the same story about David Stockman and his budget that William Grieder was going to tell in the Atlantic Monthly piece he published at the very end of the year.
But, she told me, she got substantial pushback from her New York Times editors, which hobbled her. Why? In part because the Washington Post reporters–being supervised by Grieder–were telling a very different story. And her editors said that if she were right the Post would be on board as well. Grieder, she thought, might not only have been keeping his own material from the reporters he supervised, but also may have been steering the reporters he supervised away from the real story–he certainly wasn’t dropping them any hints, and wasn’t doing them any favors as they tried to cover a complex situation–the real story that Grieder was saving for the Atlantic, and that Rasky was trying to tell as it was happening:
(1981): The Education of David Stockman:
As budget director, [Stockman] intended to proceed against many of the programs…
…that fed money to the poor blacks of Benton Harbor, morally confident because he knew from personal observation that the federal revitalization money did not deliver what such programs promised. But he would also go after the Economic Development Administration (EDA) grants for the comfortable towns and the Farmers Home Administration loans for communities that could pay for their own sewers and the subsidized credit for farmers and business–the federal guarantees for economic interests that ought to take their own risks. He was confident of his theory, because, in terms of the Michigan countryside where he grew up, he saw it as equitable and fundamentally moral:
We are interested in curtailing weak claims rather than weak clients. The fear of the liberal remnant is that we will only attack weak clients. We have to show that we are willing to attack powerful clients with weak claims. I think that’s critical to our success—both political and economic success….
No President had balanced the budget in the past twelve years. Still, Stockman thought it could be done, by 1984, if the Reagan Administration adhered to the principle of equity, cutting weak claims, not merely weak clients, and if it shocked the system sufficiently to create a new political climate. He still believed that it was not a question of numbers. “It boils down to a political question, not of budget policy or economic policy, but whether we can change the habits of the political system.”…
This process of trading, vote by vote, injured Stockman in more profound ways, beyond the care or cautions of his fellow politicians. It was undermining his original moral premise—the idea that honest free-market conservatism could unshackle the government from the costly claims of interest-group politics in a way that was fair to both the weak and the strong. To reject weak claims from powerful clients–that was the intellectual credo that allowed him to hack away so confidently at wasteful social programs, believing that he was being equally tough-minded on the wasteful business subsidies. Now, as the final balance was being struck, he was forced to concede in private that the claim of equity in shrinking the government was significantly compromised if not obliterated…