Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal

Before he sat before the microphone on Wednesday, Ronald Reagan was, everybody agreed, at the low point of his presidency.

The polls taken after the grave strictures of the Tower Commission showed only something over 40% of the country believing him now to be an effective president or, indeed, a president in charge. But the polls can only measure the answer to a simple question, "Do you approve or disapprove the way in which Ronald Reagan is handling the presidency?" They do not mention various moods in which the answer is given, or the misgivings of many people who were still with him, at any time during the six years.

Between last November and his election in 1980 it would have been, I think, impossible to believe that some of his most conspicuous champions would so bitterly lose faith in him. Of all his champions in the media, three men have stood out as the most gifted, most literate, journalists and at the same time as the most dedicated conservative Reaganites. They are William F Buckley, George Will, and to a lesser extent William Safire.

As early as last December, Mr Buckley, who has been in print and on the air the most brilliant of the president's advocates, looked over all the considerable evidence available even then of the secret foreign policy being carried out by Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter and their agents. Mr Buckley admitted that the transfer of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras from the sale of arms to Iran was a defiance of Congress, and the act that forbids such aid and then Mr Buckley added, "I am certain that he did not know this, because he said so. I am not yet ready to say that the President of the United States is lying to the American people. If he is, he should resign his office tonight." That was in December.

That's the question: the president's knowledge of the diversion of funds, to which the Tower Commission could not get a positive answer apart from the denial of the president himself. For the Tower Commission had no power to subpoena witnesses, to seize bank accounts, to call foreigners as witnesses. It concluded with its belief in the president's ignorance but had no notion what had happened to all those missing millions of dollars.

That's something which will be gone into – is being gone into – by the staffs of the two select committees, one in the Senate, the other in the house, which will begin their hearings next month. It has to be added that before the president’s speech on Wednesday, 51% of the American people believed he was lying in that matter.

Last weekend, Washington was agog over an extraordinarily harsh column written by George Will. Since the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s first term Mr Will has been the columnist on whom the president could best depend to give his policies and his conduct of them, the most telling intellectual defence.

It’s no secret that Mr Will, throughout those years, has taken the risk – which is always considerable for any journalist, any reporter – of becoming a close friend of a politician he has to report on, none other than the President of the United States. Mr Will is even closer to Mrs Reagan. Sooner or later, a journalist's intimacy with any politician threatens his own integrity as an onlooker and a critic. Last weekend Mr Will was forced to meet that disagreeable test.

In the knowledge that his commentary might very well mark the end of a beautiful friendship, Mr Will began in this remarkable column by saying that the president ought to feel deep gratitude to the Tower Commission for describing the Iran-Contra affair as an aberration, and the president's handling of it as his management style. Both characterisations, wrote Mr Will, are too kind.

The Iran-Contra affair was not, he wrote, an aberration – it was a policy of the same pattern as the Daniloff debacle, and the Iceland summit, of selling arms to Iran and then bartering them for hostages, and it was, "self indulgent folly that could neither be defended nor kept secret".

As for the phrase "management style", Mr Will saw it as a euphemism for a character trait and that trait is a grave flaw. In sterner ages which spoke of sin, the flaw was considered one of the seven deadly sins. It is sloth, nowadays known as laziness. Mr Will recalled the president's bumbling performance in his first debate, in 1984, with Walter Mondale. Then the intellectually dishonest pretence that swapping the journalist Daniloff for a Russian spy was not a swap at all. Then what Mr Will called the slovenly preparation for the summit in Iceland. In the present, the Iran-Contra, affair quote, "there were many important things Reagan was not told and that he was content not to be told, furthermore there were things he was told but did not absorb". Those failures reflect the low level of energy Reagan was investing in governance.

What is being tested, Will insisted, in these next difficult days is his character, not his capacities, by his actions and inactions. Since November, Reagan has put upon himself a heavy burden of proof – he must prove he is still interested in being president, as he contracted with the American people to be, until 1989.

The third member of the conservative defence is the New York Times's William Safire who must, however, be looked on as an unreliable loyalist because he is an inquisitive journalist first, and a conservative second. He is an enormously energetic and probing reporter who never lets his ideology blind him to wrongdoing in his own camp. At the very beginning of Reagan’s first term he questioned the integrity of an administration that could keep, as a close friend, a crooner who had had close links with the Mafia, and Safire late wrote, "the most obscene act of this administration was the award of the Medal of Freedom to Frank Sinatra, on the same platform with Mother Teresa".

Mr Safire has attacked the head of the United States information office, a very close friend of the president, for secretly taping telephone conversations and then lying that he had done that. Mr Safire is not, you can see, the most dependable publicist for Reagan conservatism and by now the administration must have given up on him. As a friend, more threatening than many an enemy.

Well, last weekend Mr Safire too sent Washington into a tizzy with a column he wrote attacking Mrs Reagan. At a time, Sapphire wrote, when he most needs to appear strong president, Reagan is being weakened, and made to appear wimpish and helpless by the political interference of his wife. He was referring, in the main, to Mrs Reagan’s well-publicised campaign to oust Mr Donald Regan from his job as the president’s chief of staff.

As we all know, Mrs Reagan succeeded in a spectacular way, and was influential in having Regan succeeded by the experienced, the likeable, the honourable former senator Howard Baker. He was the one, ironically enough, who put the fateful, the ultimately damning question, to President Nixon’s aides who appeared before the Watergate committee, "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

It’s a question which still remains to be objectively and positively answered in the Iran-Contra affair. And the burden of this scandal will not be lifted once for all from the president's shoulders until all the evidence is in before the Senate and the house select committees. Mr Safire went on about Mrs Reagan in his rollicking, blistering fashion, accusing her of being a power-house of patronage, controlling jobs, trips and honours at the United States information agency, and expensive lead-ballooning of the White House staff with costly volunteers. She is, he finally declared, an incipient Edith Wilson, unelected and unaccountable, presumably, to control the actions and appointments of the executive branch.

Edith Wilson was the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson and when he was paralysed by a stroke, he sat helpless behind drawn shades in the White House while Mrs Wilson, in all daily practical matters, took over his administration. George Will threatened us with the same point, writing that unless the president proves a revived interest in the presidency, quote, "there will soon be corrosive comparisons with the last months of Woodrow Wilson's presidency".

I have gone into the lapsed loyalties of the president's most devoted champions in the media to suggest the wider misgivings in the people at large in such a town, which was surveyed on Wednesday night, as Peoria, Illinois, which gave Mr Reagan a thundering endorsement indictment in '84 and which, on Wednesday evening, were split down the middle of its continuing belief in him.

Well, that was the situation before the president performed his 40-minute speech on, appropriately, Ash Wednesday. And what happened? He did not fall on his knees and beg forgiveness, he admitted – because Mr Nixon admitted – mistakes, not sins, not wrongdoing. He took full responsibility, he offered no excuses, he admitted the affair had deteriorated into an arms for hostages deal, he repeated that "activities were undertaken without my knowledge" – he was implying that the transfer of funds to the Contras, and he was angry about them, he dropped one of those simple, artful sentences that people will remember, "as the navy would say, this happened on my watch".

Inevitably, the Republicans rejoiced that he put the scandal behind him, inevitably the Democrats said, actions will speak louder than words. The fact is that whereas Mr Reagan was once a mediocre actor, he is now a fine one, a fine performer of his speechwriters' scripts, and what he did on Wednesday was to do superbly what he does best, which is to put the best possible face on an awkward situation, and do it with evident sincerity.

I should guess that his popularity will rise again, never to the old peak, but will rise healthily for the time being. It could plummet down deeper still only if the mistakes of the Iran-Contra affair turn out to have been enormities about which he knew more than he at present admits.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.