Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gary Stromberg is a successful businessman in recovery. He cofounded a music PR firm and serves on the board of Positive Directions.

Jane Merrill coauthored The Harder They Fall with Gary Stromberg.

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Second Chances

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Change proves true in the day it is finished.

—I Ching (number 49, translated by Thomas Cleary)

Not since Puss in Boots made a king of a drowning miller's son has there been a publicist like Michael Deaver. By all accounts, Deaver revolutionized the face of political image- making, by bringing election campaigning into the TV age.

As President Reagan's media adviser for more than twenty years, Deaver presided over no fewer than eight State of the Union addresses. He held the position of Deputy Chief of Staff from 1981 to 1985. Deaver along with James A. Baker III and Ed Meese were dubbed "the Troika" owing to their impact on policy and over the direction the administration took during their tenure.

He made the cover of Time (March 3, 1986) just after he quit as a White House official. That story asked, "What makes Deaver so valuable?" to which it answered, "It is hard to think of a lobbyist who has a better sense of how the Reagan Administration works or who has more clout among the Reaganauts."

Deaver's central innovations came from his belief that most Americans got all their information from television, so, as he told WNYC Radio's "On the Media," "Television was the most important part of my job.... I really felt myself more like a producer for television than anything else. Press events were cast consciously to form how the public viewed President Reagan."

As never before, the White House was setting the agenda for the networks instead of the other way around. "The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy," Deaver famously commented. "We fed them and they ate it every day."

A New York Times bestselling author, he wrote three memoirs about the Reagans—most notably in 2001, an intimate personal portrait of the president called A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan.

Deaver spent his post–White House years as vice chairman of Edelman, a public relations firm with strong ties to the political scene. He was an eminence who advised clients including Republican leaders and heads of major corporations, such as Microsoft, AT&T, Nissan, Fujifilm, Nike, and Kraft, on how to tailor their messages to the media.

His influence moved outside the United States to Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He kept tabs on foreign attitudes toward U.S. business and advised heads of state on how to deal with the Americanized media in their countries. Sadly, Michael Deaver died of pancreatic cancer on August 18, 2007, at age sixty-nine.

That the master of spin dropped the veils to speak of his personal difficulties with alcohol is, we think, remarkable and telling. Deaver embodied everything you'd expect to find from a man in recovery. He was quiet and humble and expressed the gratitude of one whose life was inalterably changed.

Michael Deaver

I'm the child of alcoholics. Both my mother and father were alcoholics who ultimately stopped drinking but never went into treatment. They stopped drinking in their late seventies and lived into their nineties.

I've always said that alcoholism is the most significant thing about me. I lived with alcoholics, I became an alcoholic—quite an active one—and I've now been in recovery for twenty years. So alcoholism has been the principal factor in all of my life.

When I went off to college, my goal was to never be like my father. I didn't want to drink like him, but by the time I graduated from college, I was a daily drinker, just like he was. It didn't seem to interfere with my life. I wouldn't drink to excess every day; I'd maybe have a couple of beers or a mixed drink, but by and large, very few days went by without me putting alcohol into my system. This went on from the time I was about twenty-one until I was around forty-six or forty-seven. And during that time I had various jobs. I was a piano player for a while, which was not a great occupation for an alcoholic. I was also in politics, which again is not a great place for an alcoholic to be.

I worked on several campaigns, both gubernatorial and presidential. On the various plane flights, when you are traveling with the media on board, there was, of course, a fair amount of drinking going on. We were on very busy schedules, hitting four and five cities a day, maybe six or seven stops in each city, getting on and off of planes. It was hectic.

In my career with Ronald Reagan, I was sort of the number two man, the deputy chief of staff, in the California governor's office and later in the White House when he was president. During the campaigns, I was the manager on the road. I had the responsibility for the candidate, the schedule, the staff, and the speech writing. All of those things came under me in the presidential campaigns of 1976 and then in 1980. In '76, of course, we lost, so I went back to my life in public relations, and Reagan remained a client of mine. It was during this time that I got married and my wife and I had two children.

Usually, I always drank in the evenings. A drink or two, a glass of wine or several. But it never seemed to affect either my career, which was moving along nicely, or my family. I'm sure it did, but I didn't realize it. Then in 1980 I went through another campaign with Reagan, and the big difference this time was that he won the presidency. So my family and I moved to Washington, D.C., and I became the deputy chief of staff of the White House, which was a very serious job.

Though I kept on drinking during this stage of my life, there were days when there just wasn't time for alcohol. I was in my office in the White House by 6:15 A.M. each day, and I didn't get done until at least 7 P.M., six days a week. Maybe on Sunday I'd get to relax a bit, but there was always the White House switchboard to worry about. I could never really escape because my role was so principal to the president and first lady. I was always on call. Even on Sunday there would be five or six calls from either the president or the first lady, or from others in the White House, so I had to keep myself reasonably sober.

But a time came, finally, when I made three or four trips to China, where I was the principal person on the plane. The stewards on Air Force One took very good care of the passengers, and taking very good care of me meant vodka. I came home from those trips and found out I needed a drink at five o'clock in the morning. I had never done that before. My father had done that, and it always bothered me. I always thought, "That was it. If you drank at five o'clock in the morning, you had a serious problem." I rationalized it that very first morning by saying, "Well, you know, it's six o'clock at night in Beijing." So, of course, my body doesn't understand this. And that became the moment when, as I've heard it described, my filter broke. It simply wasn't possible from that moment on to live without alcohol in my system.

I had tremendously high blood pressure in those days, developed from all those years in the White House. The White House doctors put me on beta-blockers. The combination of beta-blockers and alcohol is not good. Even though I was chairman of the second inauguration of the president, I had to leave one of the inaugural activities to be taken to Georgetown University Hospital. One of the doctors...