Reagangate: the Farce and the Shame
Howe, Irving
You need—said Oscar Wilde about the death of Dickens's Little Nell—a heart of stone not to laugh. So too about Irangate, contragate, Reagangate. A cake decorated with a key delivered by hand to...
...Given Stalin's terror and the way his intraparty opponents had been broken, the charge was a cruel mockery...
...Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, that silky charmer, hustling ten million bucks from the Sultan of Brunei for the contras and then blithely chirping that he doesn't know what happened to the dough...
...What a sorry mess—from breaking the air controllers' union to the preposterous Grenada invasion, from James Watt at Interior to McFarlane in Teheran, from supply-side economics to the biggest budget deficit in American history, from steadily falling standards of living for the working class to repeated tax breaks for the rich, from utter indifference to the plight of the blacks to—but why go on...
...it's happening in the administration of the most powerful capital of the world, one of the two that can—by decision or, as it now appears, lack of decision—blow up the world...
...Ellie: (hesitantly) I'm not sure, maybe I could call Norman...
...Every crisis brings its cant, and the reigning cant of this moment—spread by writers like David Broder and Charles Krauthammer—is that we ought not to rejoice at the collapse of the Reaganite deception, since after all this administration has almost two years to go and we can't afford to have it paralyzed...
...I apologize to the Three Stooges who, in the last Dissent, I ineptly compared to 011ie, Ellie, and Donnie...
...IT'S FINALLY FALLING APART, the whole Reaganite deception, the great scam, the reactionary politics...
...CIA men, free-lance adventurers, and thugs...
...011ie: (patiently) Mr...
...A One-Act Play SCENE FROM A ONE-ACT PLAY: Donnie, 011ie, Ellie, and Ronnie, the main characters...
...Ronnie: Sultan...
...Ronnie: (interrupting, in his Commander-inChief voice) Don't say another word, Colonel...
...At a more exalted level Charles Krauthammer opines in the New Republic that there may well be, heavy sigh, a conflict between democracy and the needs of an American empire, and all this fuss about a few little blunders by 011ie and His Merry Boys could well undermine the presidency...
...Who has either consciously disgraced it or allowed his subordinates to violate the law while he slumbered peacefully, if not the president...
...But why...
...A comparison: In the Moscow Trials engineered during the 1930s by Stalin against fallen Bolsheviks, one charge was that the defendants had set up a "parallel center," a sort of shadow to the government...
...a Bible with a verse inscribed by Ron...
...they don't realize we're in a deadly war with communism and that you can't play by the rules because the communists don't either...
...Mr...
...droppings of cant from Washington about never negotiating with terrorists...
...But now, in our democratic United States, something quite like that—a "parallel center"— was set up by North, Poindexter, and various parties still to be named, some surely in high places...
...President, my Commander in Chief (Ronnie's face reddens with pleasure), those congressmen are a bunch of yellow-bellied pacifists, liberals, pinkos...
...two international finaglers named Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi accepted as diplomatic authorities...
...There is, we know, a sequence of presidents, some better, some worse...
...And then, there's something else: the simple truth...
...Given all its done, might not a touch of paralysis constitute a measure of health...
...What can they possibly mean by that...
...One may wonder whether in fact there is any such thing as the presidency—isn't that a fiction of political scientists, authors of textbooks, and journalists who would like someday to be political scientists...
...Farce, yes, but also a deeply serious matter, far more so than Watergate...
...But would the Three Stooges have lost the Sultan's ten million dollars...
...President, I address you as my Commander in Chief (face reddens again, etc., etc...
...President, there's a crisis: the freedom fighters are short of money...
...At least if the Three Stooges had taken a cake to Iran, they'd have thrown it in Khomeini's face...
...And now...
...A touch of decency and human concern...
...What sort of epistemological maze do they want to lead us into...
...First, let that come out and then we'll take a look at the presidency...
...Ellie: I think I can raise some from the Sultan of Brunei...
...and have to say that we may find it necessary to take some unusual steps, maybe cutting a corner or two...
...Donnie: (aside) Why doesn't he shut up, who let him in anyway...
...For what Iran/contragate signified was a sustained effort, largely successful and perhaps still in place, to set up an illegal shadow government— what Theodore Draper has called a junta—staffed by influential people within the White House and by a ring of retired army officers, ex-(or still...
...To compare Watergate with contragate is like comparing a crew of housebreakers with a network of international gunrunners...
...PEOPLE ASK: DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW...
...011ie: Mr...
...You know, I'm a Big Idea man myself and don't need to get involved in all those details...
...The presidency needs to be protected, hence go easy on the president...
...George Shultz saying he doesn't know what happened...
...It's falling apart, the Teflon falseness and greed and mindlessness...
...CIA operators trying to blame NSC operators, while Robert McFarlane blames the Israelis (they gave him bad intelligence and he, poor innocent, believed them...
...Only Sultan I know is the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth, remember him...
...Whatever the original purpose of the Iran feeler— if it even had a clear purpose—it soon became a strategem for circumventing the decision of Congress and the will of the American people...
...The "parallel center" or junta, taking as its historic mission to wipe out communism in very weak countries, found illegal ways to chan136 nel money to the contras...
...A little liberalism, maybe...
...Well, perhaps it's unfair just to dismiss the 137 question...
...Ronnie swings like a home-run hitter, loud appreciative laughter) Where in hell is Brunei...
...This bumbling, lawless, arrogant, stupid, vicious sequence of inanities and pratfalls isn't happening in Lower Slobovia...
...Yet what was unique about this right-wing "parallel center" in Washington was not that it set itself up in opposition to the government...
...So Dissent is assembling a panel of experts— Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein—to investigate the problem: Do we know what we mean when we ask, did Reagan know...
...The government remade itself as an anti-government...
...Who has been the main enemy of the presidency...
...011ie and Ellie may be hard to tell apart but remember that 011ie is the National Hero...
...A cake decorated with a key delivered by hand to the Iranians...
...No, it was set up by the government and could not have survived a day without the tacit connivance of high government officials...
...I expect you to do your duty...
...Don Regan saying he too—all this is the stuff of farce...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
