Iran-Contra reports - 20 November 1987

When, thirteen years ago, an exhausted Richard Nixon conjured up one last desperate grin, performed his final spread-eagle wave on the steps of an airplane and abdicated in disgrace, there was a wave of admiration in the other democracies for the process that had sent him packing.

For the care and seriousness with which the government body that sifts the evidence for an indictment, the House Judiciary Committee, the way it had done its business and voted articles of impeachment; the process then called for the president's trial by the Senate sitting as a final court of law.

As we all know, it never came to that, because four of Mr Nixon's most stalwart conservative supporters in the Senate, up to that point, went to him and reported that a head count of the 100 senators showed only a handful who would not vote for his impeachment. So, he resigned, saying, not that he'd made grievous mistakes of judgement, not that he'd done, to use an old-fashioned word, wrong, or been guilty as the indictment charged of obstruction of justice and other crimes and misdemeanours, but that there was no point in going on, since, he explained, he had lost his political base. So, he went home to California and exile.

Among the countries that held their admiration for the impeachment process, there were two that had particularly interesting reactions. One was the Soviet Union and the other was France. The Soviet reaction was an official one. Pravda and Izvestiya instructed their obedient millions that the real reason Nixon had been forced out was that he'd bravely advocated détente in Soviet- American relations and so had been crushed by the warmongering imperialist ruling circles of the United States.

The French reaction was never official. It was a response widespread in the press and reported as the private opinion of people in government. And it was, as you might expect, an amused, sophisticated response, "Ah, mon Dieu! How naive are these Americans!" Of course politicians use undercover ways of defeating their opponents in an election. Perhaps the laundering of millions of dollars in campaign contributions went a little far but, really, to make a constitutional crisis out of a raid on the campaign headquarters of the oppositionpParty, what a fuss! What a simple-minded exercise in government!

However, one consequence, one product of Watergate which none of us I think could have predicted at the time was the spawning in Europe, as well as in this country, of a new breed of journalists whose parents were the two Washington Post reporters who had done the original digging. And who came up with pay dirt and, in the end, traced the smell of it to the White House – Woodward and Bernstein.

The two heroes of Watergate, played in the Watergate movie, All the President's Men, by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, inspiring a new generation to go out and do likewise. As once Fred MacMurray and Joel McCrea, in a raincoat, had inspired a previous generation – they inspired me – to become fearless foreign correspondents.

Of course, as we've all seen to our dismay, bordering on nausea, the urge to be investigative reporters was also felt by slick young journalists who were simply mischief-makers from birth. What used to be called contemptuously in this country keyhole reporters. Who, today, deface the pages of Italian and German magazines and the British tabloids, most recently with a farrago of innuendoes, knowing hints, malicious guesses about the British Royal family.

But enough serious and able journalists of this investigating type have sprouted here and abroad to give the collywobbles to politicians in power. And now, where do you think they've surfaced, to the furious embarrassment of the government? In France.

Evidently, there are French journalists who do not share the sophistication of their fathers who mocked the exposure of Watergate. Now they have a gate of their own. Nothing less than their own Iran arms scandal, first revealed or confirmed when two conservative newspapers leaked parts of a confidential defence ministry report and later saw it published in full by the rRightist Le Figaro.

President Mitterrand's response has been to say that he knew about the illegal sales in 1984. France had an embargo against all such sales. That he was shocked, even as Secretary Shultz and Weinberger were shocked here. That he told the defence minister to stop it, but it went on into 1986, to which Monsieur Mitterrand said, "If the monitoring authorities don't tell me anything, then I'm allowed to think that there is no wrongdoing".

The monitoring authorities in this country, most famously or infamously, Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter, also didn't tell the president. Admiral Poindexter had the gall to say, before the Iran-Contra joint investigating committee, that he "assumed" the president knew all the time. President Reagan has admitted that he ought to have been told but he stopped short of such a barefaced escape hatch as Monsieur Mitterrand found. "If they don't tell me anything, then I'm allowed to think that there's no wrongdoing".

It's not too much to say that Mr Reagan has not been allowed to think there was no wrongdoing. In fact a majority of that joint Senate-House committee that investigated the Iran arms sales and the subsequent transfer of funds to the Contras in Nicaragua, a majority has now only just stopped short of saying positively that the president must have known. And this comes out in the report of the majority of that committee which was published on Wednesday.

We've waited so long for it that many people and many otherwise well-informed foreigners assumed the Iran-Contra affair was over and done with. No wonder!

In the first place, there were too many people on the joint committee: 26, divided between the house and the Senate. The famous Senate committee that investigated Watergate had seven Senators, that was all. But we have to recognise by now politicians are the first to appreciate the flattering rewards that televised hearings have brought to them.

The rewards of exposure, of public recognition, so the House wanted to get into the act and the result is that the hearings went on for weeks. Everybody had to say his piece over and over so as to implant on the visual consciousness of the public a familiarity with a face and a voice, only his most ardent, local constituents could claim. And the result of going through all these millions of words from the witnesses and the Senators and the Congressmen, the result is a majority report of 450 pages. The minority report is shorter but not less verbose and repetitive.

I should explain that after all Congressional hearings, a report is published. I've never heard of one that was unanimous so the majority, which almost always means the majority Party, in this case the Democrats, plus some renegade Republicans, the majority signs one report. And the minority, in this case the Republicans, but with no dissenting Democrats, signed another.

The conclusion of the majority report is that the president probably knew more than he admitted, about both the arms sales and the diversion of the profits to the Contras. It blames him for letting the National Security Council staff, most conspicuously Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter, get out of control and privatise foreign policy.

It rejects the president's contention that his original aim with the arms sales was to open up relations with Iranian moderates. From the start, it says, it was an arms for hostage trade. The report, one Republican Senator put it, deals with the responsibilities of the presidency. And its unqualified conclusion is that he failed in his Constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The minority report insisted on by the six Republican Congressmen and two Republican Senators is 150 pages long. And will bring relief and comfort to the White House and its principal tenant. It says that there is absolutely no evidence that the president knew about the illegal diversion of funds to the Contras, often referred to as the Freedom Fighters.

The minority report is practically a Reagan campaign puff. There was, it said, no Constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for the rule of law, no administration dishonesty or cover-up. It goes so far as to declare that, "Yes, the president made mistakes, but proceeded legally in pursuing both the Contra policy and the Iran arms initiative." It emits a final snort at the report of the majority by accusing it of reaching hysterical conclusions. Where does this leave us?

Well, the whole point of a Congressional hearing, especially into a debatable breaking of the law, is to see if the law can be more sharply defined or replaced by a new and better law. That will come later. But this is not the end of the Iran Contra affair.

Remember the special prosecutor appointed, reluctantly we may be sure, by Mr Reagan's own justice department, by his attorney general, has just about come to the end of his interminable investigation which has been going on all spring and summer, the presentation of the testimony of hundreds of witnesses before a Grand Jury.

Sooner than later that jury will rise. And every indication is that it will vote indictments against, let's just say for now so as not to squeeze the last drop of suspense from a juicy, if mouldy, grapefruit, indictments against three or four of the principal players.

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