How Not to Govern

...President anda handful of his most zealous aides willingly did the absurd in pursuit of the nonexistent...

...But at a much deeper level it maps the fault lines of an American political culture that cannot easily come to terms with the conflict between its protection of democracy at home and its exercise of power abroad...

...Kennedy and Nixon helped to develop the National Security apparatus that Reagan relied on almost exclusively...

...Draper maintains it was largely a coincidence that Reagan's determination to support the Nicaraguan guerrillas got mixed up with his wanderings in the bazaar of Iranian fundamentalist politics and amid the warring sects of Lebanon that held, and still hold, American hostages...

...Draper builds a strong case showing that while overly diligent aides carried out often ill-considered actions, Reagan fully approved the decision to send his men to Teheran and further encouraged a climate of visceral conviction that made reasoned dissent difficult...

...The consistent Presidential push for ever more autonomous power in confronting highly sensitive foreign policy issues, continued by George Bush, has strained the American system...

...But, they said, they felt he would agree...

...On the Middle East side, a politically parochial U.S...

...It was already beginning to help contra rebels in Honduras...

...This was the Washington Ronald Reagan peopled and inhabited during the bulk of his Presidency...

...But he worked with a small group of chosen true believers...

...Although Draper has written a carefully measured book, it does suffer from some errors...

...The chief culprit, Draper says, is Ronald Reagan...

...It might have been noted, too, that the minority report of Congress' Iran-contra Committee makes a case for Reagan's use of the National Security Council...

...Few members of the Reagan Administration come off well under Draper's keen inspection, however...

...In fact, there was greater continuity between the policies of the Carter and Reagan Administrations than Draper suggests...

...They testified that they did not inform the President of their scheme so as not to incriminate him...

...Draper concludes it with a warning: "The best in our history is based on the premise that the dangers of arbitrary power are vastly greater than the disadvantagesof shared power...

...Rarely, if ever, have we been given such an opportunity to learn just how our government really works," Draper writes in his Introduction...

...aid to Nicaragua—not President Reagan, as Draper has it...

...The tendency toward Presidential power had grown steadily in the Cold War...

...Thus went the disturbing story of a Presidency so far off base on these key foreign policy matters that only enormous luck saved it from self-destruction...

...Perhaps this is inevitable, and there is no denying that on a number of occasions it has proved to be beneficial...

...now completing a book on Central America Even now that the storm has passed, the Iran-contra scandal seems too incredible to believe...

...The language North and his cohorts used reveals the depths not only of the zealotry but of the obsessions driving the vein of American conservatism that Reagan represented...

...Draper speaks of "the junta-like sense which North and those closest to him had of themselves...

...Finally, Draper is wrong when he says that Nicaraguan rebel leader Augusto César Sandino was "tracked down" by Somoza's National Guard and killed...

...For a fantasized "opening" to "moderates" in Teheran and an ephemeral possibility of having American hostages in Lebanon released, Ronald Reagan sold U.S...

...And congressional committees fully approved the CIA's covert project to aid the antiSandinista opposition inside Nicaragua...

...His loyalists, the majority of whom were former or active-duty military officers, did as they were ordered...

...They played by their own rules and were not accountable to everyone else's government...

...But one positive consequence of the Iran-contra scandal may be that Congressional committees on intelligence will exercise greater oversight than in the past...

...The CIA simply added Pastora to its quiver when he made himself available...

...It was in this crucible of reassertion and insecurity that Reagan described the Nicaraguan rebels as "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers...

...North himself, deep in his own epic quest, constantly offered his all in gestures of ritual self-sacrifice—ever promising to fall on his spear, Semper Fide/is...

...officials lied to Congress—then went to third countries like Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Brunei to get cash for the Nicaraguan guerrillas...

...missiles to Iran even though his Administration had officially designated it a terrorist state...

...The tale Draper recounts traces the Une between the legal and the illegal...

...Many seasoned U.S...

...When former National Security Council head Robert C. McFarlane was asked to explain why he had not opposed policies that he later claimed to find wrong, he replied: "To tell you the truth, probably the reason I didn't is because if I had done that, Bill Casey [Director of the CIA], Jeane Kirkpatrick [Ambassador to the UN] and Cap Weinberger [Secretary of Defense] would have said I was some kind of Commie...

...Complete with their poison pills (in the event of capture) and their fake Irish passports, this band of Reaganauts incarnated what one Administration official termed "perilous statecraft...

...Like the Wise Men in a more uplifting desert epic, Washington's emissaries came bearing gifts— two pistols and a chocolate cake baked in Tel Aviv...

...If they are to be believed, North and the NSC chief, Admiral John M. Poindexter, had the "neat idea" all by themselves to use profits from missile sales to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan rebels...

...Congress has been unable, or unwilling, to act as an effective check and balance at critical moments...

...After Congress sought to end all U.S...

...As Theodore Draper observes in his encyclopedic account of the affairs that nearly sank Reagan, "American gullibility seemed endless...

...What angered Congress was the news that the CIA itself was doing the mining and had lied about it...

...CIA boss William J. Casey, much blamed for the scandal after his death, was less a director of the Iran-contra affairs than has been thought, in Draper's view...

...Vice President George Bush, who was present at several key meetings on Iran, apparently never peeped a demurral...

...At times at an almost too methodical pace, Draper has written what is likely to be one of the most complete accounts we will ever get of a major government scandal...

...Rather than listen to them, the President turned to his closest admirers and cut his senior Cabinet members out of the game...

...From the evidence presented here, Reagan was a man little experienced with the ways of the world, but seized with near-theocratic obsessions about America's place in it...

...Senior U.S...

...It is a sobering lesson in civics...

...The logic of this is both absurd and deadly: Presidential aides pursued policies so secret and so explosive that they felt the need to conceal their actions even from the President...

...It appears that only Secretary of State George ? Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger had the common sense to oppose selling missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages...

...In other words, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel and a Navy Admiral, detached to the National Security Council, on their own authority made high-risk and illegal decisions in defiance of Congress...

...But the ambiguity of the positions it took went further...

...How did the sunny President from southern California, who will perhaps be more remembered for helping to end the Cold War, go so awry in Nicaragua and Iran...

...Following his full telling of the tale, Draper concludes with a carefully researched, deeply felt brief —arguing that Reagan's actions threatened the constitutional order of the United States...

...Instead of working to rebuild the department and take advantage of its resources, Presidents have given up on it...

...North was able to manipulate the American government because the bureaucrats knew he was Reagan's ideological point man...

...Draper correctly notes that Congress failed to exercise its responsibility to oversee the Executive...

...Among the possible futures of the American republic, that one seems worth avoiding...

...A majority of Congressmen were not troubled when told that contra rebels were mining Nicaragua's harbors...

...That fight led to the cut-off of funding to the rebels— but even then, Congress later restored $100 million, explicitly for the rebels to make war on the Sandinistas...

...support for the war in Nicaraguain 1984, the President told his most trusted aides to "keep the contras together body and soul...

...Along the way a completely separate secret operation began, to seek an "opening" to "moderates" in Iran...

...The President also had several of his most senior aides accompany the missiles to the Ayatollahs...

...Robert Owen, a young man who helped manage the Nicaraguan rebels for North, called him "Blood and Guts" and "Steel Hammer...

...Those quibbles aside, A Very Thin Line is a powerfully argued, deeply convincing, book...

...The extent of available documentation in this instance is overwhelming...

...It is an ironic judgment on a White House that prided itself for being "hardheaded" and derided its Congressional critics as "soft" and untrustworthy...

...A by-product of their efforts, on the Central American side, was the use of part of the profits from the Iran missile sales to fund anti-government guerrillas in Nicaragua when Congress had forbidden such support...

...officials thought North was a loose cannon and a congenital liar...

...When North telephoned, they assumed he was expressing the desires of a President determined to get his way...

...Still, the increasing White House control of foreign relations has resulted in the atrophying of the rest of the American foreign policy bureaucracy, especially the State Department...

...A mentality of fevered adolescence, in other words, directed some of the more sensitive policies of the most powerful nation on earth during Ronald Reagan's stewardship...

...If we give up this premise, we must become a very different country, with a very different constitutional foundation...

...He states, for example, that U.S...

...In essence, its adherents were romantic American nationalists, raised in an ethosof simple values and American dominance of the war against international communism...

...policy toward Nicaragua "made a full turn" under Reagan...

...He also reportedly declared Oliver North "an American hero" when the young Lieutenant Colonel resigned and faced indictment...

...It was President Carter who first became infuriated with Sandinista support for rebels in El Salvador, and who first suspendedU.S...

...Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon conducted foreign policy virtually as they saw fit...

...Having been "seared" by the debacle in Vietnam, they now felt threatened by the change and challenge that Nicaragua and Iran embodied...

...Sandino voluntarily came to negotiate with Somoza, then was double-crossed and murdered...

...As for rebel leader Eden Pastora, the CIA did not support him "for lack of any alternative...

...Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, the NSC "action officer," set up a "private" network to supply the rebels...