Landslide
Mayer, Jane & McManus, Doyle
46 The thrust of this readable but but he is one of the best journalists at I hyped book about Ronald Rea- America's most underrated newspaper, gan is that the Iran-contra scandal the Los Angeles...
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...As an inThis thesis won't fly, but Mayer and dependent force, he was finished...
...The Jencos browbeat Reagan, and he was shaken by the encounter...
...They sneer at the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...On the Saturday before DeFrank's item was to run, McFarlane was informed of it...
...He had few allies, except in the press corps...
...Then she covered up her husband's knees and hastily placed some papers on his lap, to make it look as if he had been working...
...Nancy got into more serious things too...
...Iran- hostages back...
...Second, there were Reagan's easily tugged heart strings...
...It has terrific portraits of the way Nancy Reagan and Bud McFarlane operated at the White House...
...It is a depressing tale...
...In truth, it produced the breakthroughs that occurred in the second term...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 World War II...
...Without a second military in Afghanistan, and the re- thought, the President jumped at the habilitation of the national psyche are idea of sending arms to Iran to get the trivial events in comparison...
...For certain, Cannon talked to some aides who thought Reagan was terminally out-of-it...
...ferent...
...The metaphor, in fact...
...She signed "O.K...
...That's liberal nonsense...
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...While McFarlane was running the secret NSC operations, the White House press corps portrayed him ascapable, wise, and steady, even as he was sliding toward emotional collapse," the authors correctly point out...
...With the artful use a failure...
...Strange...
...The downside was that it showed terrorists how important hostages were to America—and to Reagan personally...
...Regan was frustrated...
...The interviews he held with White House staffers are described as "exhaustive...
...D ut this book cannot be dismissed .1...
...They claim that Reagan's hard-line posture toward the Soviet Union during his first term failed...
...They should last for at least six months, at full run, befOre ou need to replace them...
...And Mayer had serves perfectly as a metaphor for his her moments as a reporter for the Wall presidency...
...of such techniques, Reagan moved But that wasn't true for the other big public opinion, enabling him to change ventures of his second term...
...Do not confuse this advanced device with similar loolcing, but much less sophisticated and less powerful units...
...Reagan kept up with the twists and turns in SovietFred Barnes is a senior editor of the American relations, which wound up New Republic in better shape than at any time since THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 by their go-between with Iran, the creation of a new relationship sleazebag arms merchant Manucher between the United States and Iran...
...In Iranamok, he was political realities simply by altering aloof, uninformed, wrongheaded, and public perceptions...
...In Tehran, the Iranians he The most riveting chapter in the dealt with were middle-level bureau-book is an account of McFarlane's crats...
...It emits short, high-pitched shrieks (at the threshold 91 ul*asound) in 15 sec...
...He seemed to make up his mind on the spot to go and tell Reagan he was leaving...
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...Their presence may have marked the beginning of the end of Reagan's resolve on terrorism," Mayer and McManus write...
...You may have thedpouring poison down their holes or getting rid of them with other nostrums...
...A number of officials, including press secretary Marlin Fitzwater and national security adviser Colin Powell, insist they talked to Cannon only briefly and then only as part of a larger group, not one-on-one...
...All they wanted were arms...
...It was a reporter, Thomas DeFrank of Newsweek, who forced his hand...
...lightly...
...The game of emotions proved harmful two ways, Mayer and McManus contend...
...He stormed into the Oval Office and urged Reagan to halt the Israeli assault on Beirut...
...Then, with Nancy leading the charge, the Regan crowd was unceremoniously fired...
...Nancy personally went through the thousands of pictures taken weekly by White House photographers...
...The authors refer to the "finished memorandum" in which Cannon said invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment should be considered...
...All secret trip to Iran in 1986...
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...They had reasons for thinking this and a motive for trashing the President...
...One nice bit of reporting in Landslide clears up a deceptive anecdote told by Michael Deaver in his kiss-and-tell book about Reagan, Behind the Scenes...
...This is ludicrous, not the Cannon that folks in Washington know...
...She stopped a photographer from taking a picture of her husband, knees bared, in the hospital in January 1987...
...From all evidence, McFarlane was out of his depth as national security adviser...
...He took a keen interest in schmoozing with Mikhail Gorbachev, and succeeded at it...
...It sets the tone for the book, just as the opening salvo about Nancy Reagan and astrology established the theme of Donald Regan's White House memoir, For the Record...
...He McManus make the best possible case needed either Congress or foreign for it...
...There's a final small point...
...And so on...
...They portray Reagan as prolonged economic boom, the revolu- soft-hearted and impressionable, and tionary cuts in individual tax rates, the thus easy prey for the machinations military buildup, the first arms control (tears, accusations, threats, and so on) treaty that actually reduces nuclear of the relatives of American hosweapons, the defeat of the Soviet tages in Lebanon...
...You have 30-day return and one year warranty...
...In Deaver's book, the story stopped there...
...power after the Ayatollah Khomeini—Accomplishments before the scandal seems scarcely to have crossed Reagan's broke in November 1986 were largely mind...
...It was Cannon who came to the conclusion that the Twenty-fifth Amendment should be considered on the grounds that Reagan might be incompetent to continue as President...
...I wonder...
...that nothft really works...
...I learned a lot...
...A few days later he met in Illinois with relatives of various hostages in Lebanon, including the family of Father Lawrence Jenco, a Catholic priest...
...The unit runs on four (4) D-cells cc uded...
...Though not especially known outside moderate Republican circles, Cannon had earned a reputation as a smart, tough operator," they write...
...If you prefer, mail check or card authorization and expiration...
...Time after time was already worried about Iran's sup-when this proved to be untrue, the port for Muslim rebels in neighboring Americans went ahead with another Afghanistan...
...The next day, he did, only to be disappointed when Reagan accepted his resignation without a fight...
...His handlers cleverly to the niceties of how this might be found "blue backdrops to flatter his pulled off...
...But Mayer and McManus found that the caption was mistaken...
...McFarlane just sighed," the authors write...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 47...
...Once the arms deal was ex-complexion" and produced "presider- posed and a political firestorm ensued, tial playlets, complete with scripts, to Reagan didn't see that he'd done any-send his homilies home...
...The idea that the five contra—a better handle is Iranamok— arms shipments might clear the way for involved all the main strands of the new American ties to Iran—or at least Reagan regime and exposed what the to moderate Iranians poised to take authors call a "feckless presidency...
...Ghorbanifar tration could virtually redraw the map assured McFarlane and North they'd be of the Middle East...
...First, the White House put on gala welcomes for freed hostages, beginning with those just back from the American embassy in Tehran in 1981...
...T o buttress their argument that Reagan was practically a vegetable, Mayer and McManus indulge in one egregious piece of hype...
...It was at her urging that the president called on the Senate Intelligence Committee to give North and [Admiral John] Poindexter `use immunity,' meaning their testimony wouldn't be held against them in a trial," according to Mayer and McManus...
...Too true...
...46 The thrust of this readable but but he is one of the best journalists at I hyped book about Ronald Rea- America's most underrated newspaper, gan is that the Iran-contra scandal the Los Angeles Times...
...Iranamok the entire direction of American destroyed Reagan's effectiveness as a politics...
...An Iranian-Ameridealing with senior Iranian officials can entente would be a major vexawho were willing to see that all the tion for the Soviet Union, which hostages were freed...
...We cannot ship without this...
...on those to be released and tore the corner on those "deemed unflattering...
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...They blame his tax and budget cuts for causing the 1981-82 recession...
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...But most of the time he wasn't...
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...He had the Reagan Administration got was delusions of grandeur, dreaming about shame...
...Reagan aides figured Reagan would gain popularity from these events which exploited the public's exhilaration over the release of the hostages...
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...My understanding is that Cannon had notes, but he didn't produce a memo with the Twenty-fifth Amendment business in it...
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...The hostages were his chief con-perceived rather than real...
...McFarlane's departure from the White House was an example of life imitating art...
...When he read a scared letter from the TWA 847 hostages in 1985, he immediately asked what could be done to get them freed, even if it meant complying with the demands of terrorists...
...It is totally safe, of course, around children and pets...
...Deaver recounted seeing a news photograph of a bandaged Lebanese baby whose arms, the caption said, had been blown off, presumably by the Israelis...
...Reagan's cern...
...To justify the attention given to Cannon, Mayer and McManus transform Cannon, an amiable functionary, into a major figure...
...By November 1985, he was ready to quit, but he couldn't quite pull the plug...
...The book opens with a five-page prologue that tells the story of James Cannon, an aide to Howard Baker who talked to White House officials about Reagan in the days before Baker officially took over as chief of staff in March 1987...
...This was a zany notion that nobody took seriously, even Cannon, I suspect...
...The complacent President got Menachem Begin on the phone and quickly a cease-fire was arranged...
...That's what Regan and his aides believed at the time...
...Soon arms were flowing to Iran...
...He held out for the zero-zero option and crafted an INF treaty with the Soviets that easily passed muster in the Senate...
...There are also problems with the account of how Cannon raised the question of the Twenty-fifth Amendment...
...She "determined which images the public saw, particularly when they included her...
...DeFrank had learned of McFarlane's plan to quit...
...The inescapable conclusion is that McFarlane and North were in over their heads...
...They make fun of Reagan's "fantasy" that the deficit could be reduced without boosting taxes or cutting Pentagon spending...
...So Iran-contra Manus may not be a household name, falters as a metaphor...
...Those varmints Olin *rely see, but their hearing is fine-tuned...
...Their reporting on Reagan's per- governments to go along with his sonal role in Iranamok, for instance, is policies, or he was stymied...
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...But that doesn't stop the authors from giving the episode great prominence...
...He asked about them daily, made first-term advisers elevated presidential known his ardent desire to see them stagecraft to an art form," Mayer and freed, and didn't pay much attention McManus write...
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...Engaging but unsentimental, he was cool under pressure and decisive when faced with a hard choice...
...intervals...
...Then the picture was taken...
...He'd lost...
...But that's extraordinarily detailed and almost not the same as having his entire persuasive...
...At the four summits with Gorbo, Reagan was highly engaged...
...Regan had gone through a struggle with Nancy Reagan—and her astrologer—over who'd influence Reagan...
...I expected as much...
...But reality was difshipment...
...Israeli authorities went to the trouble of finding the injured child, who had indeed been hurt, but not by Israeli bombs, and who under the bandages still had the use of both arms," they write...
...T he story of the arms deal has I been told before, but never more coherently or dramatically than in Landslide...
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...He proved the adage that you can get good coverage by being a source of information for reporters...
...She wouldn't let Reagan show his face inpublic as Iran-contra eroded his presidency...
...Mayer and McManus don't like Reagan or Reaganism...
...Still, as was so often true with Reagan, the facts didn't matter as much as the emotional impact...
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...They contend that Oliver North's "tin cup diplomacy"—raising private money to aid the Nicaraguan contras—was a "natural" outgrowth of "Reagan's privatized politics...
...You can imagine their attitude toward Reagan when Cannon chatted with them...
...The Street Journal...
...He was a zombie some of the time, especially in the four months after the scandal broke, months in which he had surgery for cancer and was under the thumb of wife Nancy...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
