Michael K. Deaver, at 69; adviser, image consultant to Ronald Reagan
WASHINGTON -- Michael K. Deaver, the media maestro who shaped President Ronald Reagan's public image for 20 years, only to be convicted on three counts of perjury for lying to Congress and a federal grand jury over his subsequent lobbying business, died of pancreatic cancer yesterday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 69.
As the White House deputy chief of staff during the first term of the Reagan presidency, Mr. Deaver orchestrated Reagan's every public appearance, staging announcements with an eye for television and news cameras. From a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office, Mr. Deaver did more than anyone before him to package and control the presidential image.
A close friend of both the president and his wife since their days in the California governor's mansion, Mr. Deaver introduced the "photo op," which positioned the former actor in visually irresistible locations where press questions could not intrude: atop the Great Wall of China, on the beach at Normandy for the 4oth anniversary of D-Day or in front of a construction site as he announced the latest government report on new housing starts.
"I've always said the only thing I did is light him well," Mr. Deaver said. "My job was filling up the space around the head. I didn't make Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan made me."
But it was more than that. Mr. Deaver limited access to Reagan in a way unprecedented in the modern presidency. "The more you expose yourself, the more you expose yourself to trivialization," he told The
As skilled as Mr. Deaver was at creating memorable visuals, he overlooked the impact of what can happen when a photo reinforces pointed words. Not quite a year after he left the White House to start a wildly successful lobbying business, he appeared on the March 3, 1986, cover of Time magazine. Well-dressed, telephone pressed to his ear, a smug-looking Mr. Deaver sat in the richly appointed backseat of a limousine, with the Capitol dome over his shoulder.
"Who's This Man Calling?" the headline asked, then answered: "Influence Peddling in Washington."
That was the moment when Mr. Deaver's rags-to-riches life combusted. Popular opinion demanded a crackdown on Washington's business-as-usual practices. The press and a Democratic Congress obliged, targeting a close friend of the Republican president who was seen as cashing in on his access.
Within months, stories implying that Mr. Deaver used his Oval Office connections for monetary gain abounded. One said that he had lobbied the director of the Office of Management and Budget on behalf of
Attempting to staunch the bleeding of his reputation, Mr. Deaver boldly agreed with a call for an independent counsel to investigate him. He testified for days before both Congress and a grand jury. In the end, the only criminal charges he faced stemmed from that testimony; he was convicted in 1987 on three counts of perjury for giving false testimony to a congressional investigating subcommittee and a grand jury.
Washington insiders were stunned at the conviction and blamed it on Mr. Deaver's attorney's decision not to call witnesses or mount a vigorous defense. Mr. Deaver was sentenced to three years' probation, 1,500 hours community service, plus a $100,000 fine. He lost his clients and virtually all his assets.
"Looking back, I guess one tip-off was that he really enjoyed the trappings of power," wrote former Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes in his memoir, "The Reagan Presidency From Inside the White House." "His office contained dozens of photographs, framed in silver, of Deaver with kings, queens, and prime ministers, many of whom he had prevailed on for autographs. There was a lot of the small-town kid from Bakersfield, California, in him, and I suppose he just got carried away with his own importance."
Born into a working-class family in Bakersfield, Mr. Deaver grew up there and in the desert town of Mojave, Calif. He was still in his 20s, an
"From the inside, the reviews on Nancy were not pleasant," Mr. Deaver later wrote. "Many who dealt with her said she was at best demanding, a tough-minded political wife who needed constant attention."
But Mr. Deaver and Nancy Reagan hit it off, and he was brought into Reagan's inner circle. So close did he become to the Reagans that he said, "I always imagined that when I died there would be a phone in my coffin, and at the other end of it would be Nancy Reagan."
He once even saved Ronald Reagan's life. On a campaign plane in 1976, Reagan began choking on a peanut. Mr. Deaver wrapped his arms around the candidate from behind and drove his fists inward and upward below his diaphragm. On the second try, the nut flew out.
When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, Mr. Deaver briefly considered staying behind in California. But not for long. He sold his stake in a successful Sacramento public relations firm and moved east, where he, Edwin Meese III, and James A. Baker III became the troika that ran the administration. Deaver was seen everywhere with the president. He set the calendar and schedule, as he had in California, and focused his attention on whether a particular action would be good for Reagan.
He made enemies with his hubris, he later realized, writing in a memoir that he helped prevent Meese from becoming chief of staff and had a key role in the firings and resignations of Interior Secretary James Watt, budget director David Stockman, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and national security adviser William Clark, who had originally hired him when Reagan was elected governor in California. He didn't return phone calls, and the press considered him insufferably arrogant.
He resigned in 1985, shortly after a presidential trip to Europe included a stop at the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where 49 Nazi SS soldiers were buried. The brief ceremony there drew strong opposition from Jewish groups, veterans, and others; Mr. Deaver had made the advance arrangements for the trip, and failed to foresee the uproar the Bitburg stop would cause.
But there was no sign Reagan bore a grudge.
After his conviction and sentencing, Mr. Deaver gave up his appeals, although he still asserted he was innocent.
By 1996, he was back in the GOP's good graces, meeting regularly with Newt Gingrich and becoming an official for the party's 1996 convention. In the past 10 years, his clients included British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Republic of Kazakhstan, 
