Teflon President on sticky ground

Whatever else it would be nice to talk about, there really is this week a topic which has seized the country, a blunder, a secret – some say an illegality – which has come out and been pinned on Mr Reagan and which, for once, will not come unstuck from the Teflon President, which is why, on Thursday evening and against the advice of some of his close advisers, he felt compelled to go on the air and present his case to the nation.

It has been a marvel through the Reagan presidency, and one never satisfactorily explained, that more than any president, indeed, more than all the presidents we've known put together, Ronald Reagan has managed to stand aside from policies, errors of judgement, howling misstatements of fact, bold moves taken without congressional consent, for which no one but he was responsible. It's as if a crowd gathered regularly at a courthouse waiting to see a man put on trial saw the defendant arrive and then watched him take his place, not in the dock, but as chief counsel for the defence, and win.

Well, we're talking this time, of course, about the situation that arose out of the release of David Jacobsen, the American hospital administrator in Beirut who'd been held hostage in Lebanon for 17 months by fundamentalists who are described as having close ties with Iran. I'd like to tell you the story as it came to us, stage by stage, as a background to Mr Reagan's astonishingly confident appearance on Thursday night.

When Mr Jacobsen was released, there was, as always, immense rejoicing in the United States and understandable enthusiasm at the White House since Mr Jacobsen was set free two days before the congressional elections. Several shrewd pundits saw in this happening another example of President Reagan's happy relationship with Lady Luck.

The release of the American hostages from Iran nearly six years ago, for which President Carter had fretted and laboured for most of the last year of his presidency, their release came a few minutes after noon of the January day on which Mr Reagan took his oath of office, so that the first announcement he was able to make as president was the rousing one that the long ordeal of the Iranian hostages was over. The luck of the timing made Mr Reagan look like a Daniel come to judgement.

However, this time the pundits had to retract their sudden guess that Mr Jacobsen's release would so stir the country in the president's favour that it, alone, might help him win control of the Senate for his party. It didn't happen and no doubt we should have had a whole raft of eloquent sermons on why it hadn't happened, but these sermons were brushed into the waste basket by a story in a Beirut magazine revealing, or asserting, that five American government officials – one of them, it dared to say, had once been head of the president's National Security Council – had been in Tehran months ago and had flown there recently carrying gifts from President Reagan.

I don't think this story would have provoked much more than puzzled denials from Republican leaders and jabs of sarcasm from liberals if the story had stopped short at identifying only two of the president's presents – a cake baked in the shape of a key to open the closed door of American-Iranian relations. Right? And a Bible.

However, the story went on to say that the Americans had offered a shipment of American military spare parts. The speaker of the Iranian parliament said he had spurned them all. It took only a day or two for American reporters, from two newspapers, a news magazine and the television networks, to start in like ferrets burrowing below the surface for a deeper truth and they came up with the charge that Mr Reagan's peace offerings, the cake and the Bible, on the seventh anniversary of the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, were mere symbolic tokens of a year or more of secret negotiations and an actual shipment of arms to Iran. Impossible!

Why should it, at the start, have been so impossible to believe? Because President Reagan, more passionately than any other Western leader, has urged an arms embargo of Iran and has sworn over and over again that the United States would never negotiate with terrorists. Mr Reagan was in the joyful act of welcoming Mr Jacobsen, the freed hostage, to the White House when reporters dogged him to say if the story of arms shipment was true.

Very rarely, almost never, has Mr Reagan made use of what was once a routine presidential prerogative, to reply to questions on matters involving delicate diplomacy, 'No comment!' This time, he said, 'No comment!' in an anguished tone. He begged the reporters to back away from speculation and Mr Jacobsen was on hand to give an imploring echo to the plea not to tease a situation in which other American lives were at stake.

Only a day or two later, the press went after the old National Security adviser that the Lebanese magazine had mentioned, Mr Robert McFarlane. They found that Israel, too, had been involved in shipping arms to Iran and that McFarlane had said it had become essential to forge links with Iran. Secretary of State George Shultz was not in on the negotiations, but as long ago as last May had strongly opposed them. So had the Secretary of Defense Mr Weinberger. Both of them have been the president's most resounding mouthpiece for proclaiming that the United States would make no deals with terrorists or terrorist nations.

Well, it came out after 18 months of these secret dealings that Mr Shultz and Mr Weinberger had been bypassed, which you might say is a novel way to run a foreign policy. It had all been cooked up in secret sessions of the National Security Council which means, can only mean it was the president's own idea.

On Wednesday Mr Reagan called in the key congressional leaders of both parties. It was a secret meeting. It took only an hour or two for its agenda and proceedings to get out and into print. The president had broken down and admitted the truth. No, he actually proclaimed it. The shipment of arms, he said, was very small but proof in good faith of a vital policy designed to establish a firm connection to moderates in Iran against the day of the Ayatollah's demise or overthrow. The release of two hostages was simply a coincidence.

Well, it seems to me that between the president's insistent and fervent pledges that he will never negotiate with terrorists and his secret dealings to get hostages released there is a peculiar distressing American connection. It's the public exposure of the families of the men who are still held hostage. In no other country, I believe, do the people see on television, week in week out, the bitter complaints of the mothers, fathers, sisters, wives, brothers, of the hostages that were not released. Here they are seen to vent their grief and resentment of the president always at the moment that the families of the freed man are rejoicing in their home-towns and tying yellow ribbons around trees.

What the embittered families are saying in effect is, 'We are absolutely against negotiating with terrorists but why doesn't the president get my man out?'

I can't think of any other act of the Reagan presidency that has so shaken, in the Congress and the press, the moral authority of the White House. Not Grenada, not the spy newspaperman trade, not the secret mining of the Nicaraguan harbours, and for the first time, conservative Republicans are shaken, too.

One of the most ardent conservative columnists in the country, Mr William Safire, wrote on the morning after Mr Reagan's admission of the truth, 'Remember how we brought moral suasion to bear on our allies, urging them to follow our example in denying arms to terrorist states, how we righteously indicted Israeli arms dealers for illegally trans-shipping weaponry to Iran? In turning soft, in failing to stick to his bravely announced Operation Staunch which supposedly denied arms to Iran, Mr Reagan insures the capture of future American hostages by terrorists who thereby learn that their crime pays.'

And on Wednesday night, one of the president's most loyal conservative supporters, the veteran Senator Barry Goldwater, was on television calling the supplying of military equipment to Iran 'a dreadful mistake, probably one of the major mistakes the United States has ever made in foreign policy'. So Mr Reagan took to the air.

Mr Reagan has more gifted speechwriters than any president before him – more gifted, that is, in knowing and expressing the emotional tone he can convey most persuasively in performance. It's a tone of honest, almost good-natured, outrage at what he calls, and on Thursday did call, false rumours and erroneous reports and distortions in the press.

And yet, at the end of his address, the long and careful reports of the New York Times and their distillation by the TV networks stood up to careful scrutiny and the president's attack. He did not mention the shocked criticism from both parties, nor the shipping of arms by Israel, nor of course the inside opposition of Mr Shultz and Mr Weinberger. Obviously, he did not face the fact that shipping arms to Iran is, by law of Congress, a criminal act or that there's an Iranian immigrant here already serving three years in prison for doing it.

The president simply insisted, in the teeth of the facts, that it was right to negotiate with Iran and that these talks and the arms shipments had nothing to do with the fortunate release of hostages.

If the reaction of Congress and the press and people who followed the story is shocked disbelief, not so the people. The first poll gave a 72 per cent majority in the president's favour. The people seemed to be saying, along with the families of hostages still held, 'Well, it is a brave thing to announce eternal opposition to terrorist nations, but anything you do that gets our men out is fine with us'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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