Editorials
COHMONWEAL Im------ch Reagan? A few weeks ago a man was disqualified from the presidency for apparently failing to honor his marriage vows. Should another man continue to occupy...
...These are the grave questions Congress's investigation should be posing, not to the witnesses, but to ourselves...
...The power to conduct wars and spend monies requires congressional consent, not just an absence of airtight congressional prohibitions...
...Robert Owen's repeated praise for the "democratic resistance" stands in stark contrast to the memo he earlier sent Colonel North, describing Adolfo Calero as a U.S.-creation and a "strongman" surrounded by liars and people motivated by greed...
...Congress's lackluster performance has other sources, of course...
...Why wait until Robert C. McFarlane's testimony to Congress had blasted holes in the picture of a completely detached and unknowing president...
...Nobody is trying to play games with . . . Congress," replied Langhorne C. Motley, the president's special spokesman on Central American questions, when asked in March 1985 whether the administration was seeking "some loophole" around the congressional restriction...
...This central truth has been obscured as much as it has been elucidated by the congressional hearings...
...Should another man continue to occupy the presidency despite his circumvention of a public, solemn oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and to take care, as that Constitution charges him, that the laws be faithfully executed...
...But the committee's failure goes deeper...
...As priest and university president, Hesburgh has lived a. lifetime of leadership...
...Reagan boasts that he has always been deeply involved in decisions about contra aid...
...None of this, the White House now says, was ever prohibited by the Boland Amendment...
...One does not have to be a supporter of the Sandinistas to question these views as ignorant and simplistic...
...Two years ago, representatives of the president assured Congress that the administration understood the Boland Amendment to prohibit "soliciting and/or encouraging'' other countries to aid the contras...
...is pretty plain English...
...how little he's slept...
...how many miles he's traveled, millions of dollars he's raised, diplomas he's signed, letters per day he's received, or minutes he's spent on the campus in South Bend, Indiana...
...and official Washington is reluctant to shake one of its pillars again...
...maybe even one sincerely convinced that all this flimflam is his duty to a higher cause—but a liar and a cheat nonetheless...
...President Nixon apparently found Hesburgh's insistence on human rights more substantial than cosmetic...
...FIRST IN HIS CLASS Who has more honorary degrees than Herbert Hoover...
...This turns the Constitution upside down...
...With the encouragement of the president's defenders on the committee, witnesses regularly voice paeans to the policy of backing Nicaragua's "democratic resistance...
...General Secord may be well informed on managing Swiss bank accounts and air drops...
...Reagan's apologists maintain, in effect, that the president can do whatever he wants internationally unless Congress explicitly prohibits it—with the burden on Congress to contrive legislation that a clever White House lawyer can't circumvent...
...To be sure, the pressure of events has worked to shift foreign policy-making into the executive's hands from the very start of the Republic, culminating in the president's power to initiate nuclear war...
...A few weeks ago a man was disqualified from the presidency for apparently failing to honor his marriage vows...
...The fine print arose from Congress's susceptibility to compromise and its attempt to exert merely some minimal control over policies that were on the border of legality to begin with...
...Even a cursory reading of this document reveals how untenable are assertions that foreign policy is a presidential preserve which Congress has no business entering...
...how many daily Masses he's said or hasn't said (The answer to the latter is one...
...His personal record of public service has almost everything to do with his conviction that educated Catholics bear particular responsibilities to serve the greater society...
...The president is appointed commander in chief of the armed forces, and his specific enumerated powers include making treaties (with the advice and consent and two-thirds approval of the Senate), the nomination and appointment of ambassadors (again with the advice and consent of the Senate), and the reception of ambassadors and public ministers from other lands...
...It is apparently better to rewrite the Constitution than to admit that Mr...
...Even that minimum was too much for this administration...
...It is unmitigated gall for presidential apologists to complain today about these limitations or variations...
...And we are going to comply with that...
...The president remains popular (although scarcely one in four adults now believes he is telling the truth about the diversion of funds to the contras...
...President Reagan's sudden recovery of memory is only the latest twist in a plot that remains, nonetheless, rather simple: Congress passed a law that the administration didn't like, so the administration set out to disobey it...
...Writing in the New York Times, David E. Rosenbaum noted 339 the congressional committee members' failure to follow through on their questioning...
...It is to his credit, for example, that he was not only appointed to the Civil Rights Commission (under President Eisenhower), but that he was asked to resign from it while he was chairman...
...By most accounts, Hesburgh's "vital statistics" would appear to include how many other who's whos he's hobnobbed with during his thirty-five years under the Golden Dome...
...we add our hearty congratulations, admiration, and best wishes...
...In The Federalist Papers, Hamilton emphatically contrasts the unshared power of the British sovereign in foreign affairs with the president's need to obtain the legislature's concurrence...
...Now Mr...
...Is the president above the law...
...So no one dares breathe the "I" word...
...Despite Robert C. McFarlane's acknowledgment of "dozens" of discussions with the president about contra aid, the committee never really pursued the details of those conversations...
...But accommodations to necessity should not be erected into matters of principle...
...Those who know better have let these flag-waving defenses of administration policy go unchallenged while they concentrate on the mundane details of dates and grocery lists...
...Perhaps more than any other single individual today, he has clarified the role of the "Catholic university" — demonstrating that the two words are not the oxymoron some have claimed and recent Vatican strictures on higher education seem bent on proving...
...The shared responsibilities of president and legislature for foreign policy are the constitutional norm, not some congressional encroachment...
...The public is reportedly treating Congress's hearings with a yawn, and under these circumstances, it may be just as well...
...So much for "original intent...
...The Constitution makes the executive branch the sole agent of foreign policy but not its sole formulator...
...That resolution stands, and it...
...Yet a tally of such statistics does not begin to sum up the man...
...But even educated Catholics deserve a little R & R, every thirty-five years or so...
...To Father Hesburgh, on his commencement of life in the slow lane (ever drive a moped...
...An amiable liar and cheat, perhaps...
...Should the Constitution be de facto revised so that in the life-and-death arena of international politics we elect an absolute monarch once every four years...
...Reagan, not to put too fine a point on it, is a liar and a cheat...
...Nor, for that matter, should such questions turn upon the possibility that General Secord was overcharging for grenades or Oliver North bought snow tires out of government funds...
...Responsibility stretched back to the Oval Office, to the worldview the president favored and the mode of operation he had approved...
...Indeed, while the Constitution is being bicentennialized in Philadelphia, it is being trounced in Washington...
...his term in office is running 340: out...
...a perpetually bemused one...
...As usual...
...Reagan has given himself a little margin of vagueness to play with, but the obvious question is why, if the president was well informed about contra aid all along, if it was even, as he says,"my idea to begin with," if he saw nothing wrong in his conversations with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia or in clearcut instances of soliciting funds by other administration officials, then why didn't he mention any of this before...
...presidents...
...how many committees and commissions he's been appointed to by successive U.S...
...It was obvious from the start that responsibility for this did not begin and end with a few "cowboys" in the White House basement...
...As this rhetorical sediment builds up —and what else can one call Mr...
...Surely, the devotees of trivial pursuits have tucked away this tidbit by now...
...The answer, listed in nearly every recent tribute, is Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame, who is retiring this month...
...It is becoming clearer and clearer to the American people that Mr...
...He claims never to have personally solicited aid from other countries, but the evidence is overwhelming that he at least encouraged it—and knew of soliciting done by others in the administration...
...Now it simply becomes clearer that the effort to evade the law also involved a good deal of direct knowledge and participation by Mr...
...Hesburgh has shaped a university where Catholic faith, values, and commitment are cultivated as well as academic competence, and where freedom of inquiry is insured for both students and faculty...
...Whether the U.S...
...he shows no knowledge of Central America...
...should support the contras or, even more important, whether the president should hold himself above the law are not questions to be resolved by anti-Communist buzz words...
...If the Boland Amendment went through different versions, that was in response to a series of lies that the administration told about its commitments in Nicaragua...
...The enumeration of Congress's powers specifically includes providing for the common defense, regulating foreign commerce, defining and punishing piracies on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations, declaring war, raising, supporting, and regulating armed forces—in addition to the general power of the purse...
...If the Boland Amendment was limited to agencies "involved in intelligence activities," that was because of the assumption that other agencies would not be conducting covert wars without Congress's authorization...
...342...
...Owen's closing apostrophe to "Ollie," the "legend" confronted by "treacherous" enemies but supported by "the greatest leader the free world has known"?—the chances diminish for any rational examination of the issues at hand...
...Quite the contrary...
...Yet insofar as these hearings touch on the substance of the administration's Nicaraguan policy rather than its evasion of the Boland Amendment, the discussion has been conducted entirely on the administration's terms...
...Reagan and his administration have transgressed it...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 11
