Word: darman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When he is underoccupied, his bent for introspection becomes acute. His wife describes it as ongoing "self-examination, making his peace with what he does, making his peace with himself." Darman believes specific victories or defeats give him little elation or despair because he plays out either outcome in advance. "I've thought about the hundred things that can go wrong with the deficit thing," he says of today's mission. "If something starts going wrong, I'd be disappointed in myself if I hadn't already thought of that possibility...
Fear of disappointing himself or others remains a durable chain to his childhood. His conservative, demanding father Morton followed his own sire into the New England textile industry. Morton expected the oldest of his four children to do the same. Jeff Forbes, Darman's Harvard roommate, recalls the genetic imprint: "Dick's father was extremely disciplined, with a view that life was very real and very earnest. Dick took that from...
...both in the classroom and on the playing field. While trying to secure a starter's place on the football team, he played one quarter with a fractured arm. Eventually he became the team's captain and won letters in three other sports. But although he grew up affluent, Darman also felt the influence of his mother Eleanor, a liberal involved in medical social service. Later Darman mused that he "bumbled" into government work as a means of bridging his father's and mother's impulses...
...M.B.A. at Harvard, he did research on education policy that led to a job at the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Secretary Richardson soon drew him into his personal circle. As Richardson toured the Nixon and Ford Cabinets -- serving as head of Defense, Justice and Commerce -- Darman followed. Richardson, a problem-solving progressive who wore his Republicanism lightly, even served Jimmy Carter as vice chairman of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea. With that political lineage and a wife describing herself as "alas, a good old-fashioned liberal," Darman was hardly...
That he was there at all was due to James Baker, whom he had met at Commerce. Though the new chief of staff, Baker was something of an alien. He needed loyal, experienced professionals as a bulwark against right-wing rivals. Darman filled that role eagerly. Eagerly, but not comfortably. The older Reaganauts sometimes suspected him of ideological subversion. He in turn took a grandiose view of himself as an all-purpose antidote to the amateurism of some of his elders. "Every single thing that moved," he says, "I felt responsible for." His influence rose steadily...