The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his097/onorth.lzh/ONORTH.TXT

Text File | 1991-07-08 | 22KB | 380 lines

GOV:The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North

    The following article originally appeared in the Conservative Digest
(September 1987). It was also reprinted in an ad for the same. This is
a great monthly magazine with a format similar to the Reader's Digest.
Subscription prices vary depending upon the length of the subscription.
I think it's worth you while to check this one out. If you want more
information write or call:

   Conservative Digest P.O. Box 2246 Fort Collins, CO 80522 (800)
847-0122

   The testimony of Colonel Oliver North before the Iran/Contra
Committees exposed the cruel lengths to which the viciously partisan
Democrat liberals were prepared to go for a mere political advantage.
Ollie North gave them all a lesson in character.

   The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North

   Colonel Oliver North's appearance before the Iran/Contra committees
will in time be regarded as a watershed in the history of American
conservatism, one comparable to the Whittaker Chambers exposure of
Alger Hiss. But Chambers, while a magnificent writer, had even less
charisma than does George Shultz. He also did not have a national
television audience.

   The only modern televised event that conservatives have reason to
compare with North's testimony is the famous 1964 speech for Barry
Goldwater that launched Ronald Reagan's political career. That speech
came too late in the campaign to do anything significant for Goldwater,
but Oliver North's efforts appear to have salvaged the final months of
President Reagan's second term, firmly putting an end to talk of
impeachment.

   If the President were a man to go for his opponent's political
jugular, he would now go on television for an address to the nation. He
would have Lt. Colonel North at his side. Colonel North would proceed
to show his famous slide presentation, with whatever classified
photographs the President, as Commander-in-Chief, chooses to authorize.
The presentation would stress the possibility that if the Nicaraguan
Communists are successful in their subversion of Honduras, El Salvador,
and Guatemala, up to ten million additional refugees will illegally
enter the United States from Latin America.

   The President would then announce the promotion of Lt. Colonel North
to full colonel, and pin the eagles on his shoulders. That done,
President Reagan would make the following statement: "Ladies and
Gentlemen, I know you are as concerned about what Colonel North has
just shown us as I am. To be sure that the Communists who have invaded
our hemisphere understand our resolve, I am today submitting to the
U.S. Senate the name of Oliver North for appointment to the rank of
brigadier general. I am asking for immediate confirmation, and intend
to place General North in charge of liaison activities with the
Nicaraguan freedom fighters. In accordance with that policy, I am
asking Congress firmly to reject the Boland Amendment by appropriating
$2 billion dollars in aid to free Nicaragua and prevent the refugee
crisis that is now looming.

   "We must send these signals immediately. I will return next Monday
evening to inform you of the response of Congress. I am asking Senator
Byrd and House Speaker Wright to expedite these matters. Please write
to your Senators and Congressmen and tell them where you stand on the
issue of American security. Thank you, and God bless you."

   Presto: instant end of congressional resistance against aid to the
freedom fighters. "All those Congressmen in favor of denying Ollie
North his star, please stand up and be counted. Smile for the folks
back home! You'll be returning there permanently in 1989!" End of the
Boland Amendment. Probable end of Daniel Ortega.

   My fantasy could happen. I doubt that it will, but it could.

   The designated sacrificial lamb has already publicly roasted and
then dined on the Joint Congressional Committee. It happened because of
Oliver North's visible decency and refusal to bend his deeply held
principles. And it came as a terrible surprise to Congress. After all,
how often does the typical Congressman come face to face with either
visible decency or deeply held principles? Certainly not when he shaves.

   Overnight Turnaround

   No one, including me, had even a hint of warning that Ollie North
was such a master of the electronic medium, part St. Bernard and part
pit bull, leaving behind a canteen of hot soup for the freedom fighters
and about half a dozen casualties among the cagiest political operators
on Capitol Hill. No one imagined that he could so brilliantly combine
an articulate defense of his actions with humor, pathos, righteous
indignation, deadly verbal responses to the Bronx cheers of a classic
Bronx lawyer, and even a verbal presentation of an invisible slide show.

   Most important, and most remarkable, he was on the offensive from
the moment he took the stand. He put Congress on trial. By the end of
the first day's hearing, it was obvious that the Committee was in very
deep trouble. A sports analogy may not fully communicate the
confrontation, but the hearings reminded me of the first fight between
Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay. Sonny looked mean at the weigh-in. He
glowered. He seemed unbeatable, talked unbeatable, and failed to come
out for the seventh round. So did the Committee.

   At the opening bell, North landed a solid right on the Committee's
glass jaw, and it staggered around in a collective daze the whole week,
oblivious to what was happening. Heads began to clear over the weekend,
except for those of Boland, Rudman, and the Honorable and Decorated
Senator from Hawaii. On Monday, most members started grabbing for a
towel to throw in. The fight was over; the Committee had split, and the
new political strategy was to praise North's courage while trying
vainly to hold on to the viewing audience.

   The Viewers

   The television ratings climbed, day by day. Network revenues fell,
hour by hour. The hottest soap opera in twenty years was not
interrupted once by a warning about static buildup in our socks. Word
of mouth took over and everyone who could get a TV set was watching.
Millions and millions of people.

   Newspapers meanwhile featured blazing headlines that called
attention to the hearings. So completely out of touch were they with
what everyone had seen on TV that Accuracy In Media should assemble a
collection of those headlines as proofs in point. (Franz Kafka, where
are you now that we need you?) The story of the headlines began with
the incomparable classic displayed on the front page of the Washington
Post on the morning of July 17th, just before Colonel North began his
testimony, a headline that deserves to be in the Headline Hall of Fame,
right alongside the Chicago Tribune's 'Dewey Defeats Truman.' Here it
is: "Lacking the Old Luster, North Returns to Testify/Disclosures of
his 'Dark Side' Weaken Credibility of Affair's Most Intriguing Figure."

   And then, all heaven broke loose. Day after day, the headline
writers did their best to make it look as though North had confessed to
everything short of worshipping Allah in a mosque with the Ayatollah,
but they created a major problem for themselves. The headlines kept
reminding more and more and more people that they could watch all the
fun for themselves. They could eliminate the middleman. "Aye, there's
the rub."

   Millions of viewers tuned in to the hearings, and the discrepancies
between what was happening in front of the cameras and what was being
announced in those six-word headlines were increasingly obvious to even
a child. The traditional tight little coalition between the
newscasters, with their two-minute segments of electronically spliced
videotape, and the newspaper reporters, with their six-word,
bold-faced, selective headlines, was no longer fooling the people. The
people were watching the whole thing, live. "Live-action news!"
actually became live-action news, and the liberal press was exposed as
it had never been before.

   The newspaper reporters could not bring themselves to describe the
bruising that North was inflicting on the Committee. It was as if they
had announced the Liston-Clay fight on the radio, round by round; "And
Liston leads with his jaw again, and again. You can almost feel the
pain in Clay's fists. Liston is standing firm, like an immovable
object, while Clay bounces desperately around the ring, hoping to avoid
Liston's steady glare. This is terrible, ladies and gentlemen. Someone
should stop this fight before Clay get killed."

   You could guess the fighter on whom the reporters had placed their
bets before the fight. This kind of reporting works only when nobody is
watching. It only works if the judges are crooked and the fight goes
the full fifteen rounds.

   But still they hoped, "Magnetic North is not the same as True
North," quipped one liberal reporter. This sounds good until you get
lost without a compass. The Committee was visibly lost, led only by
counsel Liman, who wandered in verbal circles around North's shredder.
And still they hoped. Daniel Schorr reports that Senator Inouye told
him he was undismayed, that it would all look different in print than
it looked on television. What Inouye meant was that it would all look
different when recast by liberal editors who wrote the headlines. But
nobody was paying any attention to the headlines. They were watching it
live!

   I called Dan Smoot on the Saturday following the first five days of
North's testimony. Dan Smoot was one of the important personalities in
the conservative revival on the 1950's, is an expert in constitutional
law, and authored The Invisible Government (1962), that first public
critique of the Council on Foreign Relations. Smoot had been the first
conservative to have a nationally syndicated television news program,
was driven from the air in the infamous Democratic Party machinations
to support the Reuther memorandum, and very much understands the power
of television. I asked Dan how he evaluated the hearings. "Colonel
North has done more damage to the left in the last five days," Dan
Smoot said, "than anything I can remember in the last twenty years."

   Impressions

   Television images are powerful, but they last only as recollections.
It is these strong impressions that are at the heart of the left's new
problem. What remains in the public mind are North's good looks, his
uniform and medals, his unwillingness to bend, his handling of every
challenge, and (above all) his obvious integrity. Also remembered are
the Vietnam-era flowing locks of counsel Nields, the whining voice of
the leering counsel Liman, and the scowling face of the Honorable and
Decorated Senator from Hawaii.

   Wether Colonel North will remain in the limelight is yet to be seen.
Predicting what will happen to a celebrity is tricky, and he is now a
celebrity. By the end of July, there were pages of pictures and stories
on Colonel North in the supermarket tabloids. The exploiters had his
testimony on the newsstands within two weeks (Taking The Stand, Pocket
Books), and it took only two weeks to produce, release, and market
videotapes of the hearings. Doubtless every major book company in the
country has been trying to contact him for exclusive rights to his
autobiography. Reader's Digest will no doubt run the condensed version.
Wether Tom Cruise will star in the movie, I cannot say. What I can say
for sure is that the conservative movement has been given one summer of
delirious happiness, and a million of Richard Viguerie's direct-mail
appeals with Ollie North's picture on the envelopes were dropped into
the mail within the week.

   It is not the celebrity status of Colonel North that is crucial to
the conservative movement. What is crucial is that an honorable man
stood up publicly in front of the whole nation with everything he
valued at stake and, in the name of a higher ideal than political and
personal expediency, directly confronted the congressional poltroons-
politicians who are recognized by the public as weak-willed,
opportunistic, blindly partisan, and possessed of no vision longer than
tomorrow's headlines.

   The public is well aware that hypocrisy is a way of life in
Congress, but Americans are seldom given an opportunity to see a real
man with authentic integrity, proven courage, and detailed knowledge
fight it out with the gutless frauds and intellectual pygmies and the
know- nothings who run Congress. The media monopoly of the left has
therefore failed, giving the right new life, a new face, and a new
ideal of personal style and dedication.

   Judge Gerhard Gesell

   But after all the cheering has ceased, and the television crews have
gone back to producing footage intended for careful editing, and the
network-news broadcasters return to their preferred calling of
systematically misinforming the American public and selling advertising
time- above all, selling advertising time- the nagging questions still
remain: Who was right, North or Congress? Who has control over American
foreign policy, the Executive or Congress? If Congress refuses to fund
an operation, can the President legally fund it by diverting money from
discretionary funds? If every expenditure is listed in the Budget, have
we given the Soviet Union too much information?

   The key questions today are these: If Congress is so short-sighted
as to allow the forces of international Communism to surround this
nation, and if the public allows Congress to get away with this retreat
from responsibility, isn't it the constitutional obligation of the
President to thwart the intentions of Congress? Can he do so even when
he signs legislation that hampers his decision-making ability?

   Conservatives of long standing remember similar arguments in the
late 1930's, and again in the years immediately following World War II.
There is not much debate among professional historians today concerning
President Roosevelt's determination to take the United States into the
European war, even when it meant covering up naval battles with German
submarines in the North Atlantic, lying to the public during the
election campaign of 1940, and misleading Congress at every
opportunity. Almost everyone now agrees that F.D.R. did these things,
though they were denied by professional historians until the early
1970's. The question today is: Was Roosevelt correct? Was he
constitutionally empowered to thwart the isolationist impulse of the
voters and Congress after 1936? His supporters argue that he acted
deviously but properly in a just cause.

   This legal issue still confronts us today. Sixteen Congressmen and
Senator Helms have gone into federal court to plead that the President
abdicated his constitutional responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief of
the armed forces by signing the legislation known as the Boland
Amendment, which in fact has reappeared in several incarnations over
the years.

   In perhaps the oddest of ironies in recent years, this question is
about to come before Judge Gerhard Gesell. What the plaintiffs did not
know when they submitted this case for Judge Gesell's consideration is
that, years before he was elevated to the bench, Gerhard Gesell was the
brightest young light in the law firm of Dean Acheson, before Acheson
served as Secretary of State. It was Gesell who left Acheson's firm to
become Democratic counsel for the famous Pearl Harbor investigations of
late 1945 and early 1946. The hearings investigate these questions: Who
was responsible for the debacle at Pearl Harbor in 1941? Did Roosevelt
have advance knowledge that the attack was coming and refuse to give
warning in order to assure popular support for U.S. entry into the war?
Or was knowledge withheld from the President by General Marshall? These
questions are strikingly similar to today's": Who was responsible for
setting the terms of the Iran/Contra deal? Did Reagan know that some
sort of deal was being worked out? Did he know any of the details?

   But the underlying question in the late 1930's and early 1940's was
this: Who is properly in charge of American military and foreign
policy? This is still the unanswered question.

   It is therefore an oddity of history that Gerhard Gesell will decide
wether to hear this case (the decision may already have been made by
the time your read this). If he does hear it, will he begin to sketch
out a constitutional solution? He was a defender of Roosevelt in the
hearings of 1945 and 1946. Will he be a defender of Reagan today?
Conservative Republicans denied after the war that Roosevelt had
possessed such constitutional prerogatives in 1937-1941. The Democrats
said that the President did possess such authority. Today, the
Republicans argue that Reagan does have such constitutional
prerogatives. The Democrats deny it. History plays strange tricks.

   The Boland Amendment(s)

   The original version of the Boland Amendment was signed into law as
a rider to a huge appropriations bill on December 21, 1982. It was part
of the funding of the Department of Defense. This rider specified that
no Defense Department funds or C.I.A. funds could be used to finance
the armed forces of any group seeking to overthrow the Communist
tyranny in Nicaragua. The next year, some money for the freedom
fighters was appropriated by Congress despite Boland's rider, but
another Boland rider was added to prohibit any intelligence agency from
aiding the freedom fighters. This included direct and indirect aid.

   It is important to note, however, that the President's own staff,
which is not an intelligence agency, cannot be and was not prohibited
from acting under Presidential authority to further the President's
foreign policy. In addition, remember that the various Boland riders
contain no criminal penalties or sanctions of any kind. Without
sanctions, Congressman Boland's rider is as dead a letter as the 1978
law, Public Law 95-435, which absolutely requires the government to
balance its Budget. There are no sanctions attached to that piece of
politically utopian legislation, either. Congress ignores it, the
President ignores it, and the voters ignore it. Yet a Committee filled
with character assassins tried to humiliate Colonel North in front of
the American people by accusing him of breaking the Boland law as if it
were the law of Moses instead of a toothless and goofy political whim.

   The Boland rider pretends to limit the spending of U.S. tax dollars.
It limits spending no more effectively than Public Law 95-435. In any
case, it does not affect the spending of Iranian tax dollars. The worst
they could do with Colonel North is to prosecute him on some kind of
trumped-up tax charge. Do you think they want to try that one on
national television? Current polls say Americans oppose such a move by
a ratio of four to one.

   Congress no more cares about the President's unwillingness to obey
the Boland rider than it believes in balancing the Budget. It cares far
less about the Constitution than it cares about looking good on
television. Congressmen care about television ratings. Colonel North
got them the ratings they so deeply desired, and then beat them to a
pulp in full view of millions. They resent him deeply for that, but
there is nothing they can do about it without facing the vengeance of
the voters.

   What the Committees and their legal counsels, Mr. Nields and Mr.
Liman, apparently believe is that it was the legal obligation of Oliver
North to plow through the legal precedents of all restrictive
legislation similar to Boland's famous riders, and then come to a
conclusion regarding the constitutionality of his assignment. More than
this, in their view, Colonel North was supposed to conclude that
Congress's preferred version of the legal issues is in fact correct,
that the riders are fully constitutional, that they do apply to the
National Security Council, and that the financing of the freedom
fighters by that old fighter for freedom, Mr. Khomeini, clearly
violated Boland's swarm of riders. That is laughable.

   Conclusion

   Congress is a victim of self-inflicted wounds. The daily display of
idiocy and hypocrisy that is transmitted by satellite to possibly a
thousand catatonic viewers by C-SPAN when it telecasts debates of the
U.S. House of Representatives was at long last seen firsthand by
millions of viewers on network television. Congress did itself a real
disservice: It went public, without editing or commercial
interruptions. It also created a media hero. This was not difficult,
since Colonel North, unlike most media heroes, happens to be the real
article. A real hero is easy to define: He is one who volunteers for a
righteous but dangerous job that nobody else wants, risks everything
but his highest purpose, and when he is discovered stands up to his
accusers and tells them that his goals were honorable, his methods were
legitimate, and appeals to a jury of his peers- the millions of
Americans watching on television.

   See Congress run. Run, run, run. See the commentators fume. Fume,
fume, fume. The Young Republicans sold a hundred thousand "North for
President" bumper stickers in the first week of the hearings. That
sounds like a good idea to me. A vote for North is a vote in the right
direction.

   Would he settle for the U.S. Senator from New York or Virginia?
Neither Pat Moynihan nor Paul Trible would know what hit them.