AP

WHEN Donald Regan became President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff in 1985 he remarked, “I'll be doing the whole thing now.” The “whole thing” that Mr Regan had in mind was to be in charge of the president's public life. It had been usual before he was appointed for the president to have a circle of close advisers, each in an important-sounding job and each competing for his ear. But Mr Regan, a former businessman, believed that the White House urgently needed one strong manager who would give the president dependable support. He said that Mr Reagan, a former film actor, “regarded his daily schedule as being something like a shooting script in which characters came and went, scenes were rehearsed and acted out, and the plot was advanced one day at a time.” The chief of staff, Mr Regan said, had to make sure that “the star had what he needed to do his best”, guided by a “crew, invisible behind the lights, watching the performance their behind-the-scenes efforts made possible”. There is a story that Mr Regan would arrive in the Oval Office each morning with a fresh joke to get the president in the mood to face the toils of stardom. Whether true or not, the story was believed.

However, just as Hollywood movie-making is bedevilled with rivalries, disloyalty and general malice, so was the White House during Mr Regan's time there. He lasted only two years, resigning before he was dumped. Newspapers indignantly portrayed him as a martinet who had made himself prime minister in all but name. Whatever the truth in that, his “crime” in the eyes of Washington politicians was that he did try to bring businesslike discipline to an institution that lived in disorder and was happy with it. Residents in the political village were upset that Mr Regan had not accorded them respect.

Viewers of a very watchable television drama called “The West Wing” are offered a picture of the White House where decisions are made swiftly by confident people working as a team who know exactly what they are doing. Perhaps they are these days: who knows? But by Mr Regan's account they certainly were not during the Reagan presidency.

Enter Nancy Reagan

Within the White House there were officials running their own private government. One group was in the basement, selling arms illegally to Iran in a bid to gain freedom for American hostages and using the profits to support anti-communist fighters in Nicaragua. After the story came out Mr Regan was blamed. He said, no doubt truthfully, that he knew nothing about it. He rarely went to the basement.

One of his continuing problems was what he called the “shadowy distaff presidency” run by Nancy Reagan. The president's wife had faith in the clairvoyant talents of a woman in San Francisco she called My Friend. From a study of Mr Reagan's horoscope the friend claimed to pick good days and bad days in the president's life. Mrs Reagan would in effect veto activities arranged by Mr Regan if they fell on bad days. Mr Regan described the vexing problem in his book “For the Record”:

The president's schedule is the single most potent tool in the White House, because it determines what the most powerful man in the world is going to do and when he is going to do it. By humoring Mrs Reagan we gave her this tool, or, more accurately, gave it to an unknown woman in San Francisco who believed that the zodiac controls events and human behavior and that she could read the secrets of the future in the movement of the planets.

The friend was particularly busy with advice when Mr Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev at summits at Geneva and Reykjavik. She prepared a horoscope of the Russian leader as well. Nothing much resulted from these meetings so perhaps, inadvertently, they were held on bad days. For Mr Regan anyway there must have been quite terrible days when he regretted taking the job. Until he had become chief of staff, his life had been one long much-praised path to good fortune.

His upbringing was modest. His father was a policeman. But the industrious young Regan won a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied law. As a marine in the second world war he came unscathed through some of the fiercest battles of the Pacific campaign. In 1946 he joined a brokerage later known as Merrill Lynch as a trainee. In 1971 he was made chief executive of the firm that he had helped transform into a large and innovative banking business. In 1981, during Ronald Reagan's first term, he entered government as treasury secretary. Again he was a success. The Economic Recovery Act that he piloted through Congress was an exercise in Reaganite supply-side economics, which is based on the belief that tax cuts get more people to work and boost production.

Mr Regan was probably closer to Ronald Reagan than any other official. When the president's popularity was dipping and a sacrificial victim was needed, Mr Regan said he would go, as long as he could do so with dignity. He was bitterly upset when it was leaked that his successor had secretly been chosen, spoiling his managed exit. Their last conversation, on the telephone, was bitter. “I deserved better treatment than this,” Mr Regan said. “I'm sorry,” said the great communicator. They never spoke to each other again.