Mr. Break-It: the not very reassuring past of Ira Magaziner, the brains behind the Health Care Task Force

Washington Monthly, May, 1993 by David Segal

One of the uglier power struggles that played out after Clinton's election was between two Friends of Bill from the Oxford years, Ira Magaziner and Robert Reich. They were natural rivals. Though they had been Rhodes scholars at the same time and had coauthored a book on industrial policy, both men felt best qualified to direct Clinton's economic policy. Both seemed naturals for the top spot at either Commerce or Labor, or as head of the Council of Economic Advisers. Both had the ear of the president.

Magaziner, according to insiders, moved first. Shortly after the election, he went to Clinton and, in one of the transition's more audacious lunges for power, asked for authority over health care and labor. "It was a flat out power grab," says a person familiar with the transition. "And it was disingenuous. Representations were made to a variety of people that there would be collaboration, and when he made the grab, he did it for himself."

But Reich exploited his F.O.B. status more ruthlessly. "He went to Clinton," remembers one campaign insider, "and said 'Look, I'm a friend of Ira's and it hurts me to say this, but he's just too radical."' Reich's message dovetailed nicely with a number of reports that had been leaked into The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere tarring Magaziner as a central planner with an affinity for industrial policy. After Magaziner met with Clinton in Little Rock, he didn't hear from his soon-to-be boss for several weeks, time enough for Reich to Iago his erstwhile colleague. "Clinton and Reich were meeting a lot then," says another person familiar with the transition, "and he told the president that Ira's just a little bit far out for the center image that he's trying to create." When the dust settled, Reich was in the cabinet as secretary of Labor, and Magaziner had what sounds like a decidedly humbler tag--special assistant to the president.

For all appearances, Magaziner had been outmaneuvered in his first big-league dust-up. But he, not Reich, is the central figure on the Health Care Task Force, which is about to unveil a plan to reform one-seventh of the nation's economy. And since Magaziner is not tied to a single portfolio, once health care is safely in motion, he'll be free to apply his talents elsewhere. As the administration's reform guru-at-large, don't be surprised to see him in New York a year from now, fixing the U.N.

For anyone familiar with his career, Magaziner's unique position is enough to make you, well, concerned, and the profiles published in the drum roll preceding the Task Force's plan--with the exception of the one in Newsweek last month--have tended to gloss or ignore what is worrying. His history in the private sector and his previous forays in government reflect a passion for bold strategic thinking and public policy of New Deal-sized grandeur. But what is left in the wake of his reformist zeal? The 500-strong colloquy he's now orchestrating may be too sprawling to bear Magaziner's imprimatur distinctly, but browse the standout chapters of his life and you get the sinking sense that if health care reform is anything like his past projects, it will be hopelessly complex, or impossible to sell, or simply iii-advised. And while we're waiting in line for blood tests and barium shakes, Magaziner will be off... fixing the U.N.

GE whiz

Magaziner's mind is legendary. He can synthesize pie graphs, streamline bureaucratic waste, and parse economic indicators like a oneman mainframe. He's focused to the point of absent-mindedness: Legend has it that he once unwittingly traversed a tarpaulin stretched over a hotel pool on the way to a meeting. And he's apparently impervious to exhaustion--when he tells aides to produce something "by four," they have to ask "a.m. or p.m.?" Those who don't know him well describe him as humorless, aloof, and arrogant. His friends contend he's just extremely shy and awkward. "He's not the 'hail fellow well met' type," says an acquaintance. "But he's tremendously warm and loyal."

With a wiry shock of black and gray hair and a complexion like chalk, Magaziner made his reputation storming company compounds, rattling executives, and rustling documents until dramatic solutions emerged. He won rave reviews peddling advice and spreadsheeting for corporate bigfoots like Coming Glass and A.T. Cross. He helped rebuild the consumer electronics division at General Electric and persuaded Volvo to venture into the luxury auto market, a move which helped rescue the company from oblivion.

But some of Magaziner's solutions have been longer on drama than wisdom. When GE was a client, he convinced the company to develop a new rotary compressor (the pump that cools air in refrigerators) rather than buy the item from foreign manufacturers. The result was an expensive, defective debacle. GE ended up recalling a million of the compressors, a measure that resuited in a $450 million pretax charge on earnings. Among Magaziner's more famous clients is the now-defunct Wang Corporation, the soonto-be defunct Swedish economy, and two politically defunct candidates for president, Richard Gephardt and Michael Dukakis. A 1990 profile in Boston Business Journal opined that Magaziner's track record and phenomenal fees prove that in the consulting biz "it's not whether you win or lose but how much you pay the brain ."