Oliver North’s diminished popularity - 2 October 1987

A couple of young people I know up in Boston – well, young, they’re in their 30s – they’ve just got married.

Of course they’ve been living together for several years, but they found the uncertainty of an alliance that might be broken next week or next year too much to bear. They have settled for the comparative serenity of committing themselves to a contract and they are so dizzy with relief that they talk as if marriage had just been invented

Since I won’t get to see them for a month or more to hand over in person their wedding present, whatever it’s going to be, I mooched around my neighbourhood looking for some little token gift to send off to them now. I found it in a toy and novelty shop, the sort of place that crams into the window fuzzy bears and clockwork dogs, masks of Dracula – Halloween is only a month away – and is stacked with greeting cards wishing you a happy birthday, quick recovery, a bouncing baby.

I found just the thing tucked in among the cards. It was a little plastic packet of shredded newsprint, strips of torn news reports clipped to a card which had at the top the legend “From the desk of Lieutenant Colonel Olly”. Below it was a small photograph of Colonel North and stamped in scarlet the words “Top Secret” and across the card was the big title “Contrafetti”. Get it?

The girl behind the counter said, “I thought nobody would ever come and buy it.” She’d ordered a dozen two months ago, sold 11 at once but this relic of the order had sat there in the window unbought, unclaimed.

Now it strikes me that there might possibly be some listeners who don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, it’s hard to believe now but it’s been barely three months since an unknown, handsome, firm-jawed, bemedalled marine colonel, bright as a puppy, sat at a table facing 26 members of the Senate and the House, a joint select committee formed to investigate the Iran-Contra shenanigans and he began, “I came here to tell you the truth, the good, the bad, and the ugly”, a hypnotic beginning, never mind that it struck an echo in some of us and took us a day or two to recall that it came from a Clint Eastwood movie.

We’ve grown accustomed to that sort of inspired, stolen one-liner. A dozen or more of President Reagan’s best exit lines have been traced – but only after they enchanted his audience – to his favourite movies, of which he has on tap an impressive mental file. The President can recall good movie punchlines the way Churchill could recall single lines from Shakespeare or Macaulay.

Well you will surely recall that not long after Colonel North started to testify, the country – and that was meant to be his audience as much as the committee – the country discovered a marine colonel with an astonishing gift of the gab, culminating every now and then in ringing vows to obey any order his commander in chief ever gave him – the president, that is.

The chronic contradiction in his eloquent testimony which a handful of senators and congressmen got across to him very sharply but without much obvious effect was that any oath of office he’d take, either as a civilian or as a member of the armed forces, was not, is never, to the president but to the Constitution which the president himself – every president swears in the moment of his inauguration – to uphold and defend.

Most of you will now recall the popular storm of idolatry or revulsion that swirled around Colonel North. The idolatry movement was never more than a small whirlwind around him that turned his head. Even while he was still on the stand there were some many funny and savage cartoons done by the present young and greatly gifted generation of American cartoonists, by MacNelly, Oliphant, Conrad, Borgman.

Two of these young men, MacNelly and Oliphant, are syndicated in Europe and I was pleased to see that an English newspaper I greatly respect carried one or two of them so that the English anyway would not be fooled into thinking that Olly North’s small army of disciples constituted the voting population of the United States.

So imagine my distaste, to put it mildly, when I read in that greatly-respected paper, practically bang up against a pungent cartoon, a wailing lamentation from its Washington correspondent about the gullibility, the waywardness, the incurable sentimentality of quote “the American people” unquote.

This man began by making his own judgement of Colonel North, a very widespread judgement, quite early on though the man delivered it as if he were a lonely hero, like Churchill defying the House of Commons before and after Munich. Colonel North, he wrote, was a dangerous zealot, an ostentatious patriot who had lied to Congress, broken loose through the chain of command and was conducting his own foreign policy in Iran and Nicaragua on the brash assumption that the president would surely have approved.

All right, nothing spectacular or original about that view, but the correspondent ended on a note of pity and alarm for the American people. “Nowhere in America,” he wrote “is there a sign of these misgivings”. This foolish conclusion was drawn from the fact that Colonel North, during the days of his testimony had received – how many was it? 50? 100? – say a hundred thousand letters of praise and prayer. That left, by the way, only 240 million Americans who didn’t write to him.

That dispatch from Washington which annoyed me greatly at the time prompted me to do a talk in which I traced the swift upward and downward trajectory across the graph of American hero worship of another soldier who got above himself, General Douglas MacArthur, who after being fired by President Truman in 1951 for going beyond his orders as the United Nations Commander in Korea swept around the country making soaring speeches that also mobilised millions this time of disciples. He would run for president. He did. At the Republican convention I reported he got four votes against Senator Taft’s 280 and Eisenhower’s 845 and the moral I drew was that a year is an age in the lifetime of an overnight hero.

Still, I fully expected then, way back there in July, that Colonel North would have a wobbly but scary run. "North for President" headquarters would sprout around the country. There would be rallies and, as the year petered out, so perhaps would Olly Mania. I was wrong. Within two months exactly of the colonel’s first appearance on the stand he was dead, not only as a political prospect and as a popular hero but worse, as a marketable commodity, a cruelly swift collapse not anticipated by various entrepreneurs who rushed, in July, to cash in on this ripple of popularity which my Washington correspondent saw as a tidal wave sweeping the entire United States and hurling young Olly maybe into the White House.

In no time there were Oliver North T-shirts on display, buttons, bumper stickers, a book reprinting his entire Congressional testimony, most ambitiously a 90-minute video cassette actually showing him at it, defying the Committee. Over 100,000 of these cassettes were manufactured. The manufacturer reported last month very disappointing sales in New York, Washington, the south and he groaned, “It is bombing royally in the midwest”.

I hasten to remind you that when Britons picked up the verb “to bomb” from this country – for decades it’s been a regular headline in the show business magazine Variety – they got it the wrong way round. In America it means to flop in a deafening fashion, to bomb.

Well, the book of North’s testimony, three quarters of a million printed, has sold less than 300,000. Of the 100,000 video cassettes, the maker hopes in time to sell a half of them. A San Francisco businessman got busy in July manufacturing over half a million 12-inch Olly dolls. He’s a shrewd business consultant and he anticipated selling 450,000 of them. He has had orders for 200. Not 200,000 – 200.

Other smart entrepreneurs are also looking at much red ink and one at least is consulting the bankruptcy laws, but there is one publication which has sold way beyond its publishers' expectations. The man who thought of it crowed the other day, “We’ve sold ten times what we expected to sell”. It’s a colouring book for children or for adults facetiously inclined. It’s a satire on the hearings, a joke book, whose joker hero is none other than Colonel North.

The publisher was a little nervous at first but he has sold 200,000 and expects to reap a fat profit from sales of about half a million. Some people, he admitted had written, early on, angry letters. They didn’t like us poking fun at Olly, but he says, “I guess you can’t please all the people all the time”.

Well, to jump from much ado about Olly to alas poor Pat, I knew her well. I’m sorry indeed to have to add a postscript and a sort of obituary on the career of one presidential prospect who had stirred a good many of us, Mrs Pat Schroeder, whom I talked about a month ago.

This gutsy, funny, no-nonsense Congresswoman who sounded as if she were going to knock all the stuffiness and pomposity out of the running candidates, she withdrew the other day for reasons both sad and honourable.

She had the problem from the start of being seen as the women’s candidate for president instead of as a woman running for president. Also, she felt frustrated by the system which has you going before cheering crowds of voters but then learning that in that district some other candidate has already locked up the delegates to the convention.

But in the main what decided her was the public exposure, the publicity that as she said turned every human contact into a photo-opportunity and there was the insoluble problem of security, of being shadowed everywhere by secret service agents.

“I could not bear” she said “to be separated from the people I serve by people who are well-meaning but are trying to protect me. I would shrivel.”

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