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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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042489
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04248900.049
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1990-09-17
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NATION, Page 18Ollie's Cash StashAfter a probe of his finances, North's case heads for the jury
It was a classic courtroom confrontation: defendant and
prosecutor, both decorated Marine veterans of Viet Nam, locked in
a bitter cross-examination. The Oliver North who endured four days
of acerbic questioning by prosecutor John Keker last week did not
come across as a selfless patriot used by superiors to carry out
a covert plan for assisting the Nicaraguan rebels in defiance of
a congressional ban. Instead, North emerged as an evasive witness
with a selective memory and unusual personal finances.
The most curious tale in North's testimony concerned the
"family fund": a stash of up to $15,000 in cash that North claimed
he kept in a steel box bolted to the floor of a closet in his
suburban Washington home. North's initial explanation of how he
happened to have that much cash lying around elicited muffled
laughter from the courtroom audience. "When I would come home on
Friday . . . I would take my change out of my pocket and put it in
that steel box I'd been issued as a midshipman." When Keker
expressed his disbelief, North added another explanation: proceeds
from a 1964 insurance settlement after an automobile accident in
which he suffered a serious knee injury.
North is accused of embezzling $4,300 in traveler's checks that
was intended to aid the contras. He claimed that he financed some
of his activities from the family fund, then reimbursed himself by
dipping into the contra donations. North's credibility was further
damaged by former NSC administrator Mary Dix, who testified that
several times in 1984 and 1985 North was so hard up for money to
buy lunch and gasoline that he railed at secretaries who claimed
that the agency's petty-cash fund was too low to reimburse his
out-of-pocket expenses. He stopped badgering, Dix said, in mid-1985
-- about the time his safe held thousands of dollars for the
Iran-contra "enterprise."
North's hope is that the jury will believe that most of his
secret actions were approved by President Reagan, former National
Security Advisers John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane and the late
CIA Director William Casey. After North's testimony, the defense
rested, setting the stage this week for closing arguments and jury
deliberations. They are likely to turn on a difficult question: Is
Ollie North, who admitted lying to protect the contras, now telling
the truth?