John Tower And Colonel North - 5 March 1989

If you’d just arrived in America, anywhere in America, not simply in Washington, you’d think that there was only one topic that was absorbing and obsessing the population.

It’s the private life and character of former Senator John Tower of Texas which is being debated, has been debated gravely, earnestly, jokingly and inexhaustibly, for the past six weeks by, in the first place, the 100 United States senators and in the second, third, fourth and uncountable places by newsmen and women, media commentators, talk-show comics, politicians everywhere, Americans of every stripe and age, wherever two or three are gathered together. It’s a spectacle unlike any I can recall in my experience of American politics.

Now the public examination of the private life of a public man is of course nothing new in any country. It is, indeed, something that people everywhere in all countries find more tasty than any other morsel of public affairs, but in this place and this particular context it’s very rare indeed.

A new president arrives in the White House. The first thing he does there is begin to put together his administration by naming his Cabinet and a new team of ambassadors. He has the power to do this, it says in the Constitution, with the advice and consent of the Senate.

So the moment the president names a man or woman to one of these offices, the appropriate committee of the Senate – foreign relations, for a secretary of state, armed services for defence, so on – they hold public hearings and call witnesses to testify about the man’s or woman’s fitness for the job, which invariably does not go beyond a discussion of the professional background and the ideas that the nominee could bring to the new post.

And again, invariably it’s the custom for that committee to approve – with perhaps one or two dissenters – the president’s choice, then to pass on the recommendation to the whole Senate which nine times in ten consents to the nomination by an overwhelming majority, very often by a unanimous voice vote.

In other words it’s a well-recognised tradition for a Senate committee in the first place to let the president have his Cabinet choices with very little quibbling. President Bush has had no trouble with appointing a whole raft of new ambassadors. Since the invention of the jet airplane and the presidential hotline “Quick, get Mrs Thatcher or Gorbie”, ambassadors have lost most of their power as diplomatic go-betweens and today I doubt that one American in a thousand can tell you offhand who is the American Ambassador in London or, on the other hand, how many of my listeners can at once name the British Ambassador to Washington.

There’s been no trouble, no delay there, but if there’s one concession, one favour, the Senate can be counted on to grant an incoming president it is his choice of his Cabinet. The ones already in place went whistling through the committee hearings and the required vote on the Senate floor but not Mr Bush’s choice for the secretary of defence, Mr John Tower.

I touched on this lamentable story a week ago and thought by now it would be all over but then for the first time in 44 years a Senate committee voted against a new president’s choice of a Cabinet officer – they are so called, not ministers – and then, contrary to what everybody expected, Mr Tower did not do the usual thing.

He did not ask to have his name withdrawn so as to save his president, be it possible, the ultimate humiliation of being turned down by a majority vote of the whole Senate. Mr Tower held on and Mr Bush insisted that he do so.

So now we’ve gone to the ordeal I hinted at, an unholy debate in the Senate, which really does have other things of global importance to do and we are told that into the coming week they will be hammering away and deploring and snarling about the question of whether Mr Tower drank too much for his own good in the 1970s and whether he stopped or didn’t stop in the 1980s.

The question that should have been the main concern of the Senate foreign relations committee was does Mr Tower’s couple of years' experience as a consultant to weapons manufacturers, from which he earned more than three-quarters of a million dollars, does it make it impossible for him, as the head of the Pentagon, to be fair and impartial in awarding contracts for the armed forces, especially for defence aircraft and weapons, about which he has secret information?

Now nobody at all doubts Mr Tower’s expertise in defence matters. There’s probably only one other man in the country who can match it. He is Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat however, and – behold! – he is the chairman of the armed services committee that turned down Mr Tower.

Moreover he, Senator Nunn, is the one who has led the opposition to Mr Tower’s appointment and he’s done it too, puzzlingly, by stressing from the beginning the burning question of Mr Tower’s drinking habits, even though Mr Towers has sworn that for the past dozen years he has – except on very rare occasions – abandoned spirits, hard liquor, and kept to wine and beer.

And then, only last Sunday on national television, Mr Tower read out a pledge not to touch even wine or beer, or any other form of alcohol if he’s confirmed. Mr Nunn’s response to this self-denying gesture was to switch his complaint and say, “All very well but there’s the question of those three-quarter million dollars and your time as an arms consultant.”

Other Democrats had an unexpected response. If, as Mr Tower swore, he’s had no problem with alcohol in the 1980s why should he now make a drastic offer to cure it?

Well I suppose a week from now we shall know the answer. Mr Tower will either survive and repair to the Pentagon to tend his bruises and try and recover his battered self-esteem or he will be out and on his way back to his native Texas which does not require from its citizens a pledge of total abstinence, although until about 20 years ago Texas was under the very powerful influence of the Methodists, one of the last dry states where alcohol could not be bought or sold in public.

When it is all over there will be something to say about this extraordinary performance in the United States Senate. It’s not a freakish incident. It came about, I believe, because of a radical change in the behaviour of the press, media, under the growing influence of religious fundamentalists and to go into that will take us well beyond this particular episode in the Senate to changes in American politics and the tradition of reporting them, which have been stirring for some time.

Well there have been other things happening. A listener in India writes in with the delightful, innocent question, “Whatever happened to the trial of Colonel North?”.

A wild, if obvious, free association makes me think that this inquisitive man, if he’d been living in say 1790, might well have written to a journalist in London wondering whatever happened to the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings. The answer in both cases might well come to be the same, "Oh it’s going on and on and may continue ‘til the furthest reach of time".

Imagine if you’d been a Londoner in 1788 much interested in what would happen to the former Governor General of India and you bustled off to Westminster Hall to watch the trial. You would have had to be a man of considerable wealth and patience to follow it through. It lasted for several years.

Well, when Colonel North finally came to trial it took two years for the government prosecutor and the defence to agree on what charges could be brought. The expert guess was that the trial might last six months.

If it does I think that Mr North’s lawyer, Mr Brendan Sullivan, will regard it as a defeat whatever the verdict. It was deducible in the Iran-Contra hearings, and has been made crystal-clear in the trial, that Mr Sullivan’s main purpose is to stall, stymie and – as soon as possible – stultify the trial and have it abandoned.

It took time, as it always does here, to get a jury of impartial jurors of Mr North’s peers duly representative of society at large. So they wound up with an all-black jury (Washington is more than 70% black), that swore it had never read about Mr North in relation to Iran-Contra or anything else, never watched television, knew next to nothing about him. They must be the only dozen people in the United States so qualified.

However, the trial has been going on for nearly three weeks and so far they’ve finished with two witnesses. I don’t know how many score remain to be called. Three times the judge has sent the jury home for days on end 'til the government prosecutor and Mr Sullivan can wrangle and fight over the introduction of particular documents.

There are literally thousands of documents and the prosecutor has to check with the department of justice each time to see if they contain classified information that concerns national security. Time and again the government says no, you can’t have that. Time and again Mr Sullivan, Mr North’s lawyer, says he must have it to show that Mr North was only obeying his superiors. So in a comical way, the government – the prosecution, is unwittingly or unavoidably on Mr Sullivan’s side. If he doesn’t get the documents to prove his case there can be no trial.

Mr Sullivan is a brilliant, meticulous, inflammatory but very patient man. He’s quite willing to scan and argue over every paragraph in several million words. He got the main criminal charges thrown out because they could only be supported by documents the government daren’t release. He’s expecting to have all the other charges thrown out on the same grounds and have the trial abandoned.

I called an old Irish friend of mine in San Francisco the other night. “How about the North trial?” I asked him. He said, “Boy, I’ll tell you. If I ever get into deep trouble, I want that Sullivan.”

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.