TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capcon.3

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                /*<&≥            ▄;                                          ╚July 20, 1987

IRAN-CONTRA

Charging Up Capitol Hill


How Oliver North captured the imagination of America


The screen split. On one side of it, Ronald Reagan was seen
ambling sidelong and smiling across the South Lawn of the White
House. He waved to an off-camera crowd, deflected shouted
questions with a shrug, and at the steps to his helicopter,
smartly saluted the Marine guard standing at attention.

At that moment, on the left side of the television screen,
another Marine, Oliver North, leaned forward in the witness
chair in the Senate Caucus Room, listening, his eyes gone now
from disingenuous to wounded, then brightening to a righteous
glint.

Blip. The Reagan side of the picture disappeared. The
President's helicopter, Americans were told, would lift off the
White House lawn and bear him away, toward a speech in
connecticut that had nothing to do with the Iran-contra
hearings. It was strange effect, a kind of moral vanishing.
Reagan at that moment became an absence.

What remained on the screen was the astonishing drama of Ollie
North. For four days last week a remarkable American
pageant--presented on television, Reagan's natural medium--was
dominated by a 43-year-old Marine lieutenant colonel, the man
whom Reagan had fired from the National Security Council staff
last November.

Oliver North achieved a kind of evanescent coup d'etat in the
American imagination. It was a fascinating and impressive
transaction. And slightly spooky.

North charged up Capitol Hill and took the forum away from the
politicians. He played over the heads of the joint
congressional committee, aiming his passionate rhetoric and
complex charm at the 50 million people watching on television,
the real audience and jury at the proceedings. The obscure,
middle-level NSC staff member--said to be a "loose cannon," an
aberrant zealot from the White House basement--did not behave
like a guilty character caught at misdeeds, like a raccoon
startled by a flashlight in the middle of the night.

Instead, he arrived surrounded by an aura of honor and injured
virtue. The force was with him. He played brilliantly upon
the collective values of America, upon its nostalgias, its
memories of a thousand movies (James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington, John Wayne in They Were Expendable) and Norman
Rockwell Boy Scout icons. Ironically, he played precisely those
American chords of myth and dreaming with which Ronald Reagan
orchestrated his triumphal campaigns of 1980 and 1984. In the
fading seasons of Reagan's presidency, young Ollie North was
splendid at the Old Man's game.

By the end of four days of testimony, North had accumulated a
foot-high pile of telegrams of support (GOD BLESS YOU, GOOD
LUCK AGAINST THOSE ILL-BRED HYENAS). Dozens of floral bouquets
were delivered to the Norths on Capitol Hill.

A TIME poll taken Thursday night showed that 84% felt that he
was telling the truth when he said his actions were approved by
higher-ups, and more people tended to believe him than to
believe the President. North had won a certain amount of raw
popular support--an evident success with Americans that at least
for the moment bemused and intimidated the congressional
committee that had come to grill him. That popularity, however,
might not help him later in courts of law.

North's performance was a complicated masterpiece of rhetoric
and evasion, of passion and manipulation. he constantly turned
the question of what he did into a discourse on why he did it.
One does not expect Marine lieutenant colonels to be
mysterious. North displayed last week a personality capable of
contradictions, which he somehow arranged to achieve a weird
harmonic. When the dramatic and tonal effects were stripped
away, North's defense was simple. It was based on two main
themes, each impenetrable, together impregnable. The themes were
1) "I assumed I had the authority," and 2) "I don't recall."

But it was the dramatics that captured Americans. North begins
with luminous self-possession and a chestful of medals. The war
in Viet Nam was an interesting half-buried theme of North's
witness before the committee. He came home from the war a hero:
Silver Star, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts. The residue of
the war (martyrdom, loss, pride of service, loyalty to comrades)
played against North's current situation as scapegoat, martyr
and lone champion of the all-but-lost cause of the contras.

Some Marines did not think that North, who served in the White
House as a civilian, should have worn his uniform to the
hearings. But North, gifted with impeccable theatrical
instincts, knew that the costume would be necessary. It fit
well with the resplendent armor of his belief in what he was
doing and therefore in his explanations of it.

North is an interestingly modulated man. Sometimes one saw in
him a haunting and lovable pleading--dignified, controlled--that
would ignite into eloquence or jolts of fury. He was
impressively self-contained, yet funny and easy as well. He
was a boyish All-American engaged in dark, Machiavellian games,
Beaver Cleaver playing Dungeons and Dragons for keeps. He was
adorable and dangerous. The vocabulary was often breezy, almost
childish; the diversion of funds to the contras, he said, was
a "neat idea."  He impersonated a sort of G.I. Joe action figure
who might have belonged on Saturday morning kids' television.
And yet when the members of the committee, a little dazed,
ended their session at week's end, they realized that they had
been in the presence of a highly intelligent and articulate man.
A few people even thought that the work North did for the
National Security Council, sneaking around in the back alleys
of diplomacy, might have been beneath him.

North is a natural actor and a conjurer of illusion. His face
is an instrument that he plays with an almost unconscious
genius. His countenance is dominated by his eyes. Now they are
the eyes of a vulnerable child: innocence at risk in a dark
forest. Now an indignation rises in them, dark weathers of
injured virtue. And an instant later, there comes across the
landscape of North's face something chilling, a glimpse perhaps
of the capacity to kill, and the eyes constrict their apertures
a little, taking aim. The altar boy who might charm the nuns
could take on ferocities. His voice was low and passionate.
It cracked in the affecting way that Jimmy Stewart's does,
although sometimes, with a force of anger behind it, the voice
sounded like Kirk Douglas' in a manic moment.

The Boy Scout and patriot had the nation rooting for him.
Charismatic politicians, and demagogues, have always known how
to dramatize life as a struggle between black and white, between
good and evil. A committee counsel came to ask North about the
nearly $14,000 security system he had installed at his suburban
Virginia house, a setup that was paid for by Major General
Richard Secord. North delivered a magnificent aria in which he
described how the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal had targeted
him for assassination. he told how Nidal's group had brutally
murdered Natasha Simpson, 11, daughter of an American
journalist, in the Christmas 1985 massacre at the Rome airport.
"I have an eleven-year-old daughter," said North,
melodramatically. He offered a challenge. "I'll be glad to
meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, O.K.?  But
I am not willing to have my wife and my four children meet Abu
Nidal or his organization on his terms."

After that performance, the committee for the moment dared not
ask about the snow tires that North was said to have purchased
using some of the money from the Iranian arms sales.

Eventually, North had so won over the audience that when Senate
Counsel Arthur Liman came stalking after him, a curious effect
set in, even among some who thought that North was lying. One
wanted to shout at the screen, like kids at a Saturday matinee
of long ago. "Watch out, Ollie!  He's setting a trap!"

What happened in the Senate Caucus Room last week was a sort of
drama of the moral settlement of America. First there was the
frontier, the wild places where savages roamed and life was
dangerous and action was survival. The pioneer, the early
cowboy, the vigilante all kept guns loaded and shot fast. One
did not survive by regulations and laws and merely mental,
abstract things. Justice was a rougher business, and even at
that ran a distant second to coming out of it alive. "The
essential American soul," D.H.Lawrence once extravagantly wrote,
"is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

Ollie North's world is still a frontier (Latin America, the
Middle East) where savages and terrorists wander. something in
Americans sympathizes with that view of the world, with a bit
of Teddy Roosevelt roughriding and a distaste for legal
punctilio. In Texas lore there is a defense for homicide that
goes like this: "He needed killing."  Case dismissed.

It is a mind-set out of the American West, the sort of ethic
that says a horse thief needs to be hanged and hanged now, in
the interests of efficiency and emphasis. What makes such an
ethic palatable, and even attractive, is the underlying sense
that the American, divinely sponsored, is inherently fair. If
fairness is guaranteed, why get exercised about the fine print?
Ollie North believes that the overarching justice of his
projects, such as funding the Nicaraguan resistance, legitimized
his efforts to skirt the Boland amendment.

But after the pioneers and the cattlemen, of course, came the
schoolmarms and the lawyers and the congressional committees.
The untrammeled open plains need to be fenced and organized and
submitted to the rule of law. After action governed by
conscience comes behavior governed by regulation, the broader
organization of a more complicated society.

The congressional committee represents that later stage of the
nation's development. North appeals to Americans as a magnetic
character in the older style. Americans have a visceral
attraction to cowboy morality. It is part of their folklore.
When they see that it succeeds--in the capture of the Achille
Lauro hijackers, for example, or even in the invasion of
Grenada--they cheer it on. However, they are intensely wary of
that ethic when it is turned loose, unsupervised, in a world
made dangerous not just by terrorists but by nuclear weapons.

Part of Americans' sympathy with North arises, again, from the
principle of fairness. They see him as a man who was following
orders, and who is unfairly being asked to take the rap for men
higher up.

Foreigners are sometimes bemused--and appalled--by the American
habit of putting on spectacular show trials of the Watergate
kind. Is America a sort of regicide society, a nation with a
compulsion periodically to tear out the wiring of its own
Government?  One had thought Reagan would be the first President
since Eisenhower to retire happily after two terms.

Another question:  If the Constitution's system of checks and
balances demands this kind of congressional surveillance of the
presidency, why do the hearings so often lose their way in
labyrinthine detail?  Why don't Congressmen examine larger
social and moral and political issues?  The dense tangle of the
Iran-contra affair, with its elaborate deceits and boxes within
boxes, is, in the light of day, fairly simple. It involves two
issues.

One is Iran, where an incapacity to face hard decisions about
hostages led the Administration to contravene its own boycott
and sell arms to a terrorist state, thereby subverting the moral
and political authority of the President. It is curious that
the Reagan Administration, with its weakness for the cowboy
ethic, should be so unwilling to face necessary losses, so
sentimental about getting hostages home when the price of the
rescue might be the collapse of an immense structure of
policy--and would inevitably mean the taking of farm more
hostages.

The second issue is Nicaragua. The Administration for years
has failed to win popular or congressional approval for its
policies in support of the contras. So the White House has done
things of highly questionable legality in order to circumvent
the Boland amendment.

The net result of the Administration's handling of the two
issues is fiasco both ways.

Ironically, Oliver North won more support for the contras in
four days of testimony than Ronald Reagan has been able to stir
up in six years. While North was testifying last week, the
dispirited contra lobby in Washington came alive and mobilized
its mailing lists again.

The Iran-contra hearings last week may have had more to do with
theater and symbolism than with great constitutional questions.
Throughout American history, the President and Congress have
collided on the question of who runs the nation's foreign
policy. The Iran-contra affair demonstrates the danger at
either end of Pennsylvania Avenue; the problem of unexamined,
undisciplined policy by the Executive, and the problem of a
foreign policy excessively inhibited and micromanaged by the
Congress. In either case, the American system of checks and
balances sometimes makes it difficult for foreigners to deal
with the U.S. with confidence. They may fear that private deals
of the Ollie North kind will be exposed, by Congress, the press,
or both. Or they may fear, as the contras did, that a
President's policy of support may presently be rescinded on
Capitol Hill.

The results of the hearings for Ronald Reagan are
cross-grained. North's credibility does not rub off on the
President. On the contrary. The Administration had been
worried that North would be torn apart on Capitol Hill and taint
Reagan in the process. Yet it was North's boffo performance
that somehow diminished the President: North stood tall in
defense of the convert crusade on behalf of the contras, in
contrast to Reagan's feckless refrain about not being quite sure
what was happening. North's loyalties were unwavering, even
toward the President who had summarily dismissed him. Having
scrambled so hard to distance itself from North, the White House
will find it hard to bask in his temporary aura.

At the same time, North's passionate defense does tend to
validate the President's policies toward the contras and to draw
some of the poison out of the public's attitudes toward the
whole Iran-contra misadventure. North left an impression of
projects that at least were passionately well meant.

The President may achieve an arms-control agreement in the fall.
But his time left for achievement in the White House is short.
Once the 1988 primaries begin, Reagan will have virtually
departed into history.

It is difficult to predict where Oliver North's destiny will
take him. Americans may decide that he won them a little too
easily, and sobriety may set in. His moment may be fleeting.
The special prosecutor lies in wait. It may be, semper fi,
that he will grow old in the corps. Perhaps he will reverse
Ronald Reagan's trajectory and find a home in Hollywood.
Politics?  North has already proved that he is almost
dangerously gifted at the persuasive arts.

--By Lance Morrow
-------------------------------------------------------------

Assessing the Performance

Although the capital was awash with expressions of support for
Oliver North, reaction to the Marine lieutenant colonel among
the public at large was more qualified. In a poll taken for
TIME last Thursday evening by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman,* 60%
of those surveyed call themselves "sympathetic" to North, but
no more than 51% of the respondents judge North to be totally
truthful.

Which of these descriptions do you feel describe Lieut. Colonel
North?

Does not
Describes   describe  Not sure

A reckless adventurer               15%        72%       13%

A national hero                     29%        61%       10%

A true patriot                      67%        24%        9%

Someone we need in Government       37%        49%       14%

A scapegoat for higher-ups          77%        15%        8%

Someone I would want to marry
 my daughter                        26%        57%       17%

Only 22% think North's actions in diverting Iran arms profits
to the contras were legal; 58% say he acted illegally.
Nevertheless, 69% answered no when asked whether North "should
be sent to jail for his role in the Iran-contra matter."


Did the President Know?

An overwhelming 84% of those polled believe North's testimony
that all his actions were approved by higher-ups in Government.
Even more damaging to Ronald Reagan, 58% agree that the
"President knew money was being diverted from the Iranian arms
sales to fund the contras," and only 23% disagree.

But Reagan's credibility increased slightly following North's
appearance.

Do you think President Reagan has told the American people
everything he knows about the Iran-contra issue?

Last Week   May 1987  January
1987

Told everything                     21%        14%           16%

Holding back information            71%        75%           77%


Was the Policy Wrong?

By better than 2 to 1 (64% to 28%), those surveyed disapprove
of selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and also object
(by 63% to 23%) to diverting funds to the contras. Moreover,
62% think it was wrong "for the Reagan Administration to conceal
its secret operations in Iran and Nicaragua from the Congress."
But most respondents are also cynical about the congressional
hearings: 57% say the proceedings are motivated more by politics
than by the evidence.

The poll also reveals a gain in public support for the contra
cause, perhaps owing in part to North's testimony.

Do you approve of U.S. support for the contras fighting against
government troops in Nicaragua?

Last Week       January 1987

Approve                             38%               26%

Disapprove                          43%               50%


*Conducted by telephone on July 9 among 612 adult Americans by
Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. The sampling error is plus or minus
4%.