Opening Arguments
Toobin, Jeffrey
BOOK REVIEWS Iishard to write a boring book about I the Iran-contra affair and, while Jeffrey Toobin hasn't fully succeeded, this is as close as anyone is likely to get. Toobin came to Washington...
...He shredded important documents before others could see them...
...Poor McFarlane broke down in the fall of 1985—long before the attempted suicide —and he never recovered...
...But kiss-and-tell books like this one have a chilling effect on candor...
...he lied...
...Toobin came to Washington with Judge Lawrence Walsh to prosecute the Reagan Administration...
...I am, thankfully, not a lawyer, so I don't know what legal ethics demand in such cases, but in civilized society you're either supposed to be able to justify an accusation or refrain from making it...
...Secretary of State Shultz testified twice to Congress, giving quite different versions of what he knew and what he had done...
...This was the case in North's lies to Hamilton (for which, deliciously, the jury refused to convict), as it had been earlier in the celebrated "apology" Bill Casey made to the Senate Intelligence Committee, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan pretended he had not been briefed about the mining of Nicaraguan harbors...
...he was never able to reconstruct fully what had happened...
...In the tradition of the worst congressional slanderers, Toobin first calls Abrams a liar, then admits that there is insufficient evidence to prove it...
...Overwhelmed by personal grief and guilt, he just couldn't be a reliable witness...
...government...
...When Walsh raised the question of revealing sensitive information, Toobin was right to laugh, if for the wrong reason—he doesn't understand intelligence at all, and actually seems to believe that there were no really secret secrets in the Iran-contra documents...
...had done to Nixon...
...But it didn't happen that way, and the great purification produced only a handful of convictions against North and Poindexter: shredding documents before Congress could read them, preparing a phony chronology of the Iran initiative for Congress, accepting a security fence without paying for it, and lying to Congress...
...He took a valuable home improvement to which he was not entitled...
...he cheated...
...it's just that the digs were pretty spiffy...
...Toobin noticed that, but ignores the broader irony: Congress accuses the Executive Branch of lying when Congress chooses to forget it had known about the affair the whole time...
...Toobin gives not a moment's thought to the effect of the OIC on its targets...
...That no one will speak openly in the presence of Jeffrey Toobin from now on is his own problem...
...Should the secretary be prosecuted...
...When he proved incoherent on the stand, they rued having made the deal, and Toobin strongly hints that they should have prosecuted McFarlane and locked him away...
...Why don't you just tell me what you want me to say, and I'll admit to it...
...Because to defend yourself in such investigations, you run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, Xerox bills, courier chits, and the like...
...There were various brilliant pieces of McFarlane, but they never again formed a coherent pattern...
...He and many of his colleagues saw themselves as avenging angels who would do to Reagan what Jaworski, Ben Veniste et al...
...Oddly, Toobin tells us quite a bit about the early days, when the OIC worked out of cramped quarters, but nothing about the super-elegant facilities it has occupied for most of its existence...
...As you would expect, Toobin invariably favors the OIC team, but that is the least of the book's problems...
...First, and fatally, it suffers from the inevitable limitations of vision and understanding of a newly minted lawyer dealing with a highly complex event involving intelMichael Ledeen is the author of Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair (Scribner's...
...22.95 Michael Ledeen 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...
...Toobin, who hadn't even taken the bar exam when Walsh hired him, is way out of his depth...
...Nor, for that matter, does he seem to know (or care) that some of the most astonishing false statements were made by some of the most important (and largely uncriticized) figures...
...he stole...
...Toobin exults in the convictions: [North] wrote a false chronology for Congress...
...But Toobin misses some of the most instructive moments in the case, as when Judge Gesell made it clear in his questioning of Iran-contra committee chairman Lee Hamilton that Gesell knew that Hamilton had been aware all along of what North was up to...
...But the donors never took a deduction, and none of the money was spent on military supplies...
...And, if the answer is yes, why should it be any different with Abrams...
...In his congressional testimony—one of the most heart-rending moments of this entire fiasco—he virtually said to his tormentors, "Look—I don't know what I did here...
...The harshest treatment is reserved forElliott Abrams and Bud McFarlane...
...Is it possible that Shultz never asked Reagan what North was doing...
...First he said he hadn't known...
...So why plead guilty...
...These convictions—subsequently overturned on appeal—provide the justification for the vast Walsh enterprise, with its unlimited resources, its pharaonic facilities in some of the most expensive digs in Washington, and its enormous staff...
...In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd swear that Toobin had somehow been dragooned by a phantasmagorical group pretending to be the OIC...
...At a certain point, you are faced with Hobson's Choice: plead guilty and save what can be salvaged of your financial assets, or fight on, guaranteed of ruin, but with a chance of saving your name and perhaps your career...
...And, to return to the former secretary of state, if you think Abrams must have known more than he let on, what about his boss...
...There are some exciting moments, largely in the interplay between John John Keker—the prosecutor in the North case—and Brendan Sullivan, North's lawyer...
...then he said he had fought it all the way...
...Richard Miller and Spitz Channell pled guilty to taking tax-deductible donations for a purpose (buying military supplies for the contras) that is not tax-deductible...
...Toobin berates Judge Walsh for trying to suppress publication of this book, and we all instinctively sympathize with an author fighting censorship...
...Moynihan was the "convenient forgetter," but it was Casey who apologized...
...Toobin denounces North as a liar, then bemoans the difficulties the OIC had in obtaining North's notebooks...
...ligence, foreign policy, and many levels of the U.S...
...The treatment of McFarlane shows Toobin and the OIC at their worst...
...It is difficult to estimate just how much has been spent by the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC), but it is reportedly well in excess of $35 million...
...Yet this is a man who, by any decent standard of justice, requires affection and support, not punishment...
...The OIC decided to call him to testify against North, and to guarantee his cooperation they gave him a plea bargain so he wouldn't have to go to jail...
...Since Toobin can't prove it, he ought to have the good manners to shut up...
...He seems not to know that much of the material in North's notebooks is false (011ie wasn't any more reliable in writing than in speaking...
...I hasten to add that I had nothing but respectful and proper treatment from the OIC...
...But is there no obligation by a lawyer to maintain confidentiality...
...OPENING ARGUMENTS: A YOUNG LAWYER'S FIRST CASE: UNITED STATES v. OLIVER NORTH Jeffrey Toobin/Viking/374 pp...
...But what government, indeed what society, can function effectively if the standards of private discussion are not sustained...
...Would Toobin call it lying to Congress...
...Indeed, it was even feebler than that, since on one count North was convicted only of "aiding and abetting" the production of the false chronology...
...One version has to be false...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
