Contragate: the Swill of Empire
Bromwich, David
JANUARY 31, 1987 Er the past twenty-two months, almost since the day of President Reagan's second inauguration, the foreign policy of the United States has been controlled by a handful of...
...When, in the mid-1940s, Americans said that they loved Roosevelt, they had in view an impression of selfless activity that they could read in the lines of his face...
...All this it did at a moment when such payment appears to have been prohibited by the ever more freely interpretable laws of the Congress of the United States...
...Now George Will, possibly our highest-paid conservative, celebrates the Fifth and urges Congress to confer immunity upon North and Poindexter...
...The president is not, exactly, part of this company, though nobody has ever been better at toasting them, with a wink and a nod...
...It would seem that he is a man who lives for, and is kept healthy by, war...
...Colonel North received a medal for heroic service on the occasion of his successful wheedling in Congress to cry up votes for selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia...
...At the same time, it was chiseling a few extra dollars (thirty million, if we can trust Edwin Meese with a fact) from the first set of terrorists, for the sake of conveying them to a second set...
...and their cronies from the world of munitions and lobbying: in short, facilitators of terrorists-in-need, along with the usual foot soldiers, who turn up as drug peddlers on the return trip...
...He had to lie about it, or dissimulate, or redefine the truth, in order to keep it alive through its days of adversity...
...His calling is simply to make it come true...
...So why not Iran...
...Serving military officers do right to take the Fifth Amendment...
...Let us turn from these lofty considerations to the patchwork of rumor and innuendo that confronts a reader of the daily papers...
...Still, in all the administration's doings and in the shuffling quasi-legal apologetics that followed their discovery, nobody could have guessed the final turn of the story that the president's artists-in-uniform had contrived...
...And that money went—not straight to the mob...
...that Iran today remains a terrorist power...
...No taking of sides was involved...
...Let Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel (a.k.a...
...But what if one chose to credit the picture of Colonel North that his admirers have tried to make current: that he is an ingenuous fellow, an enthusiast of freedom, with a big streak of decency...
...From day to day, it was Colonel North's business to sell out all these truths, in order to keep afloat the one cause that he did care something about...
...Israel's motive was more canny, from one point of view...
...though, in fact, Iran may now be winning the war, thanks to the same negligible supplies...
...He is no stranger to dishonor...
...But in another sense the Iranians were not buying: the chance to wreck one more American presidency was too perfect to resist...
...May each day bring new helpings of malfeasance and misfeasance...
...This awakening is unprecedented in our history—never, before, was there such a sleep—and it will be painful...
...DEMOCRATIC LEFT, Jan.-Feb., 1987 134 The White House was thus paying a hefty bribe to retrieve hostages from terrorists, who could then recapture them, or others, at will...
...But in offering to help the United States, the leadership of Israel was at any rate conducting policy, however wrong the help and however imprudent the policy...
...Robert Lekachman Glee David Broder, the Washington Post's political sage, has reproved New Republic editor Michael Kinsley for openly proclaiming his glee at Iragua...
...Our society is nastier now than it was in 1980...
...Gunrunners...
...In such a mood, a "wild idea" that would "sock it to the president's opponents" was already halfway to being realized...
...Domestically, Reaganomics has redistributed income to the already obscenely rich, broken unions, starved social programs, and tolerated persistently high unemployment...
...But it was his office, the common knowledge of his opinions, and his ignorance that provided the necessary cover for them to join together...
...or, if they did come to light, they had to be placed on an infinitely adjustable schedule of reformation...
...Get back the American hostages in Lebanon by arranging a payoff to Iran...
...ex-CIA agents (but what is an ex-CIA agent...
...But all of it (we were told at first) "could easily fit into a single cargo plane...
...for these were supply-side men...
...By contrast, everything that our president did, at the bidding of the Colonel, the Admiral, and their friends, merely followed from an impulse of lawless glory by which all policy was answerable to the demands of fantasy and spectacle...
...Who are these men...
...But again, who were they...
...As for the distributor of medals, he remains a less enigmatic, but finally a more mysterious, phenomenon...
...of sly executants and solid henchmen, whose loyalty to the Constitution was nothing beside their faith in the great man they served...
...While Iran was paying good money for the weapons we sent, it was paying bad money too, over the market value of the items purchased, to show its appreciation for the mob of geniuses at the White House...
...Some foreign observers have supposed him to be an American type...
...We were proterrorist when it suited our aims of the moment: as witness our support for the contras...
...that there is not, and never yet has been, anything resembling a majority popular sentiment against the Sandinistas—these were outside his province...
...Yet we are told he performed none of these acts for private gain...
...and the distributor of medals who was the first to acclaim him Americans easily confound truthfulness and generosity by supposing that together they form a compound virtue called "good nature...
...Only yesterday, Joe McCarthy was lacerating Fifth Amendment Commies and universities were firing members of their faculties who took advantage of constitutional protection...
...But the deals they cooked up were elaborate—the packages they assembled heavy to load and unload...
...Whatever emerges from the scandal of Iran and Nicaragua, it will be recorded of Ronald Reagan that he was a spellbinder, who enchanted his countrymen when they could least afford that luxury, but whose charm may have ended in time to repair some of the things he almost destroyed...
...What...
...He has bequeathed to us a confusing legacy of debts and corruption, with a vacant air of good feeling...
...there was also perhaps the impression that he was one of the rich, who had not sold the country to the rich, but helped to widen its promise in a time of crisis...
...This was another Iran, one we had almost forgotten...
...The home of the Ayatollah Khomeini's freedom fighters bought our weapons, all the way down the line...
...It was a life of soldiers playing at government...
...He was, and is, the ultimate front man...
...The idea, for this second Iran, was to send a few shipments of weapons—not enough to win the war, our president believed or might have believed...
...He seems well versed in the arts of skulduggery and manipulation, and his management of the press, at the invasion of Grenada, was itself enough to establish his character...
...It had occurred to a few people all along— people, like the current secretary of state, who do not consistently aspire to the status of outlaws— that these military deals and geopolitical rationalizations would cast a suspicious light on our anti-terrorist "line...
...Everything we seem to stand for, every commitment our leaders seem to affirm, is puzzling, questionable, recondite...
...Everybody has known direct, plain-spoken, even compulsively truth-telling persons without a particle of generous feeling...
...For him now to say what actually happened, after the initial profession of bafflement, the shredding of documents, and the sudden siege of prudence and the Fifth Amendment, would be to begin an unfamiliar conversation...
...Nothing like these impressions can explain the dream of Reagan from which we are only beginning to awake...
...But to the view of every person of sense, dishonor was written over everything he did: dishonor for the word of his country, and for the cause of constitutional democracy itself, which he was busy dismembering at home, in the dubious hope of forging a counterfeit of it some day south of the border...
...He presided over the slaughter of our marines in Lebanon, and then withdrew without a whisper...
...Likewise it is possible for an altruist—someone who is "generous to a fault"—to have only the vaguest familiarity with a great many ordinary habits of truth-telling...
...We have heard all this before...
...Meanwhile, it was occurring to some even less trustful Americans that there never had been a line...
...If initiative shifts from the president and his reactionary helpers to a Democratic Congress, each of us should stand and cheer the alleged crisis of the presidency...
...It came to betting on a nation of evangelical Moslems, which is committed to the destruction of Israel, against a nation of the Arab League, which has held the same commitment for a longer time...
...Get the Hasenfus story...
...Iran, whose every success we have deplored, and instructed all Europe (in terms of no uncertain moral advantage) to help us stop...
...It was the finding of still more arms, for still another war, which, if fought, the United States would observe from the sidelines, with its customary geopolitical acumen...
...Iran, the stronghold of Moslem fanaticism...
...His fellow pundits, joined by sober-faced politicians and newspaper editorialists, fear damage to the presidency...
...Its illegal contra war, deliberate escalation of the arms race, refusal to match the Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing, violation of the Salt II treaty, and Star Wars follies have all made the world a more dangerous place, confused our allies, and damaged our own economy...
...of fledgling citizens, barely acquainted with the rules of a democracy...
...the spare parts that we added 133 give them enough to equip their air force once again...
...And if he is aided by self-deception, there is no telling where he will stop...
...We pitched in with two thousand missilelaunchers, which the president thought were handheld until, at a press conference, a reporter informed him that they were mounted...
...We have only begun to glimpse, in the half light of their hints and hesitations, the curious underground life that the Reagan administration fostered for the Norths, Poindexters, and Secords, whom it had silently raised to power...
...The ugly past of its leaders, the scrappiness of its political program, the grinding inhumanity of its guerrilla tactics: these facts had to be kept in obscurity...
...It is difficult to conceive how this gamble could prove to be other than disastrously wrong...
...special prosecutor), assemble his staff with all deliberate speed...
...JANUARY 31, 1987 Er the past twenty-two months, almost since the day of President Reagan's second inauguration, the foreign policy of the United States has been controlled by a handful of military officers and their pals: freelance spies, itinerant jobbers from think tanks, adepts of "sailing close to the wind" in the illegal export of arms...
...They are the swill of empire...
...This administration has presided over calamitous foreign policies...
...But truth is a maverick, too...
...Ditto for the House and Senate select committees...
...It's enough to make the proverbial horse laugh...
...How many faraway deaths it takes to feed the hearty decency of this president's helper...
...Since he first came to prominence on William Buckley's Firing Line, with a defense of the army after the massacre at My Lai, Colonel North has been called a "maverick," a "cowboy," a "rogue elephant...
...In imagining, and then bringing into being, a cause or a set of persons worthy of his self-sacrifice, the altruist has to be a ready believer from the first in one kind of fiction...
...BACK IN EARLY 1985, some of Ronald Reagan's friends came up with an idea to win a mid-term election...
...Nobody pretends that Admiral Poindexter is an inveterately honest man...
...But they were his whole economy of truth...
...The president himself is a personified double entendre...
...By christening their head organizer "a national hero," he has lately endorsed the very acts he claims to have known too little to ratify at the time...
...and he does not wait for an answer...
...the sponsors, or concocters of aliases, for armies of mercenaries...
...With these, the Iranians can fire missiles that burn through the lead plating of tanks...
...These memories belong to his life without having joined his reputation...
...Sell Reagan's teflon at auction...
...He made up the cause he served, that of the contras, before it had a proper existence outside his mind...
...Besides, this time they could have their revenge on Israel into the bargain...
...By all means encourage the White House to issue more conflicting statements...
...Doubtless to the contras themselves, North has been a straight dealer, within the limits of his competence...
...Other truths —that civil wars are to be avoided, particularly when they are not one's own...
...He was secure in his knowledge that the president loved him for what he did...
...The president's motive appears to have been a pathetic mix of sentimentality and opportunism...
...Truthfulness and generosity, honesty and altruism, are in fact widely different traits...
...Why should we therefore expect him to tell the truth...
...And, in particular, to the two interesting personalities at the heart of the case: our new national hero, Colonel North...
...In every picture you see, these days, he is waving goodbye...
...Bunglers and criminals in high office patriotically endeavor to put Watergate or lragua behind them in order to govern effectively and prevent the Soviets from taking advantage of the leader of the Free World's disarray...
...For my part, I not only share Kinsley's glee, but I look forward with keen anticipation to the paralysis of this administration in its expiring months...
...One thing is certain...
...It went, instead, to our second set of terrorist friends, the contras...
...the Iran of geopolitical renown, the "bulwark against Soviet penetration" in the Persian Gulf...
...A ruling passion like war can sometimes be its own reward, and in any case a large share of his reversion took the form of personal (not public) vanity...
...It is not to be supposed that they did their secret work without many well-placed accomplices up and down the halls of State and Defense...
...Has there ever before 135 been a public figure to whom people felt so kindly disposed, whose record of public kindness was such an absolute zero as his...
...The hero, Pyle, of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, was modeled on this sort of person...
...Interview the mysterious General Secord...
...Americans have lived these last many months by the whims of a state within the state...
...It will not be hired out by anyone who pleases...
...James Watt and Michael Deaver sat at the places he set for them...
...Let's hear it for glee...
...May their inquiries stretch into 1988...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
