A surfeit of scandal

'Bated breath' is hardly the phrase you'd use to describe the way the American people have been following the hearings of that joint Senate House committee into the Iran-Contra mess and if most people by now are bored with it, it's not because the testimony has been boring.

On the contrary, the committees have piled up an enormous record of deceit and financial finagling and a dense mesh of details about the running of a private army that make you think you're seeing one of the more preposterous James Bond movies in which James Bond is played by Lawrence of Arabia, with a supporting cast of exiled Iranians, Swiss bankers, beautiful loyal secretaries, not to mention American ambassadors and other appointed members of the administration, pretending they are not members of the administration.

I think there's a danger here. It's the danger of being bored by having been fed a surfeit of scandal. Just as a drug addict increases the dosage in the hope of increasing the pleasure, he finds that he needs more and more in order to feel the initial kick and, in the miserable end, he can be taking huge doses and feeling nothing at all. His senses are numbed to anything less violent than the kick of a mule.

Now, compare this with the public response to other scandals. When 60 years ago the first news came out about the scandals that had gone on under President Harding, the shock was felt from coast to coast. The old soldier's pension fund had been defrauded by its chief. He went to jail. The attorney general had torn up – today he would have shredded – his bank records before he came to trial. The secretary of the interior, the home secretary, had secretly leased government oil reserves to a crony on down payment of a $100,000 bribe. He, too, went to jail.

President Harding, himself, was in the clear. He really was a simple man, he'd been too busy hunting the Reds to notice what was going on under his nose. Anyway, the hearings, the trials, were swiftly conducted. The public was shocked and the criminals were behind bars.

Nothing as bad as the Harding scandals happened until the early 1970s and Watergate. The Senate hearings took their time too, but it had been so long since anyone had heard of such crookery in the White House that again the people were roused and shocked. And when it came out a year later that President Nixon had been privy to the original break-in and had supervised some of the subsequent shenanigans like laundered money and the secret bombing of Cambodia, and then, when the decisive committee, the House Judiciary Committee, heard a tape of Mr Nixon actually ordering the CIA to stop the FBI investigating the whole mess, that was it.

Articles of impeachment were filed. Mr Nixon was told by his own men in the Senate that in the following trial he would certainly be found guilty, so he resigned. And the quiet, decent, uninvolved Vice President Ford succeeded and, as Mr Carter said, 'he healed the wounds'. Anyway, he helped the country get the foul taste out of its mouth.

And now Iran-Contra. When I talk about the danger of being bored with it, I'm thinking that we've been fed such increasingly strong doses of trickery and deceit that we're becoming numb, morally numb. I have good friends I like to think of as being reasonably honest people who, whenever they comment on the affair, say, 'Well... well, from what we've learned from all the books about the intelligence services in this country and in Israel and Britain, maybe the same thing is going on everywhere.'

I think this kind of neutralism is only a step away from saying, 'Well, these people are running a private army because they thought the United States was blind to the peril of Marxist governments taking over all of Central America. Maybe these soldiers of fortune were not so much crooked as brave. Maybe, after, Colonel Oliver North should be thought of as, as the president says, a national hero.'

Well, we shall soon see whether the Congress looks on him as a crooked adventurer or as Lawrence of Arabia. Colonel North was, admittedly, the absolutely top man in setting up and running this private army, this underground foreign policy. Before the first investigating committee he refused to testify, claiming his constitutional right not to incriminate himself out of his own mouth. He threatened a week or more ago not to testify in private before the joint select committees. Their method has been to get the witnesses to tell their story in private session, confront them with documents and so on, so that when they came into public session, they would not feel they'd been tricked with surprise evidence.

If Colonel North had so refused, he could have been cited for contempt of Congress. No citizen subpoenaed to appear before a congressional committee can refuse, without being cited for contempt. Maybe, it occurred to the committee members, that's what Colonel North wanted. He'd get a simple, short prison sentence instead of – if all the evidence they've collected proved illegality or criminality – instead of a long prison sentence.

The last thing the committees wanted was to let Colonel North off the hook with a contempt citation. They bargained with him and he agreed to deposit with the committee a whole sheaf of his personal records, which he did last Tuesday, appearing in his marine uniform, with six rows of ribbons and medals, just as a reminder of how he sees himself.

On Wednesday, he settled down to testify in private. And when he goes public next week, he has the comforting knowledge that nothing he says, nothing brought out against him in these committee hearings can lead to his prosecution because he agreed to testify only if he were granted what's called limited immunity. As a reward for testifying at all, he will not be prosecuted whatever he says. Whatever he says, that is, before the joint committees.

But remember, there's also in the case a special prosecutor working independently and working, we may be sure, at full tilt, night and day. If he produces independent, damaging evidence against the colonel, he could then be prosecuted on that score, but it won't do if the special prosecutor confirms damaging evidence already given to the committees by the colonel, himself. So you see, it is a race.

Anyway, this coming week, at long last, the leading actor, the star, the protagonist, will take the witness chair.

It's not possible that we will hear any more juicy details. The committees have already been swamped with the juice of Colonel North's beliefs and adventures and memos and secret safaris. We know pretty well the whole chain of command of this extraordinary army and its exploits, the whole chain of command down from Colonel North. But how about up?

That was the crucial question from the beginning and it remains the crucial question at the end. Who authorised his remarkable enterprise, as he calls it. There's only one man in the United States who has the authority to give and, of course, that man is the President of the United States in his role as the constitutional commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Many of the underlings,the powerful underlings in Colonel North's private army, or improvised foreign office, have testified that they assumed all along Colonel North was acting if not on the president's orders, at least with his approval. The key question inside the questions is, how much did the president know about the diversion of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Contras?

All the Democrats on the committees, by the way, call them Contras. The witnesses involved in the plot and most Republicans on the committees call them freedom fighters. It's not a small point if you stop to reflect how, in the end, the Congress and the people will come to look on the enterprise.

So, the central issue at the end is the same as the one at the beginning. The whole bundle of evidence can be tied up in a massive volume entitled, 'What Did the President Know?'

Some of you may recall that a fortnight ago, I talked about the welcome, to some of us, the welcome decline in flag-waving television commercials in pinning the adjective 'American' on the virtues of things to eat, to wear, to drive, to buy. This decline was not due to any twinge of conscience on the part of the advertising agencies, but to their discovery that chauvinist advertising wasn't selling, doing the job and they concede, or say frankly in private, that the airing of the Iran-Contra affair has had a lot to do with it.

Another vanishing act, which has not been commented on, is the first gradual and then swift, disappearance of those posters and motorcar stickers and decals saying, in facetious variations, 'I love New York'. Mayor Koch talks less and less about the glories of the Big Apple. His administration, too, is depleted of its old hearty strength by officials who have committed suicide or gone to jail, or are facing jail.

And on Tuesday, a very chastened Mayor Koch appeared to hear the public report of a commission he appointed on the future of the city. If by the year 2000, the report said, something is not done about poverty and housing and public education, New York could collapse as a world capital for business, finance, the media, technology and the arts.

At last, the city has officially recognised what anybody with eyes to see has seen for decades cluttering the skyline, more and more and more high-rise, luxury apartment and office buildings and vast areas of the city with rotting or abandoned blocks of once middle-class or working-class houses.

It's a long and complicated report touching on every ill of the big city – of big cities – today and we'll go into it at another time. But the city has recognised, for the first time, that its survival as a peaceful metropolis depends on a wholesale clean-up.

A melancholy touch of humour was given to this report by an item I spotted of a local clean-up that is not appreciated by the citizens. Downtown, in a mainly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, there has appeared the strange novelty in the delicatessens of pasteurised salami.

One old man summarised the general outrage. 'Pasteurised salami, yet? It's embarrassing. It's like a high-school girl – beautiful complexion and no character.'

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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