He`s decisive but confused, detached but involved, tough but
compassionate, secretive but open, aging but aggressive.
He leaves details to others, but he is very good with details if he has the information.
He has sound judgment, but is willing to gamble his whole administration on high-risk foreign policy adventures in Iran and Nicaragua, relying on arms profiteers and shady characters to make it work.
In the Iran-contra hearings, Ronald Reagan was at one time or another all of these things, depending on who was talking.
This mysterious, contradictory image of Reagan haunted the 26-member committee throughout its deliberations. With each new witness, the complexity deepened. Who was this chameleon?
The committee, like the country, found it difficult to see Reagan`s true colors.
Did detachment lead to the scandal, or was it his own flawed judgment?
To hear the story of former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, it was Reagan`s detachment. Poindexter said that he decided on his own authority to divert profits from U.S. arms sales to Iran to the U.S.-backed rebels fighting in Nicaragua, but knew in his heart that Reagan would have condoned it.
To hear Secretary of State George Shultz tell it, it was a rare lapse in Reagan`s usually good judgment that caused the President to continue selling arms for hostages. As Shultz saw it, Reagan thought the arms sales were but a small token in the initiative to open relations with more reasonable members of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini`s regime.
The Tower Commission that Reagan appointed to investigate the Iran-contra affair came back with the devastating conclusion that the foreign-policy misadventure occurred because the President was a remote, confused, careless and indifferent figure who let his emotions and a group of swashbuckling aides rule and misuse him.
As the hearings progressed, however, this sharp profile became fuzzier and fuzzier. The President`s clear desire to gain the release of the hostages held in Lebanon led him to approve the arms shipments to Iran, and though his secretaries of state and defense protested, he gave his approval even as the hope that the policy would succeed faded.
He signed presidential findings that enabled the sales to go ahead without notifying Congress. At the Geneva summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane briefed the President on the complex arms shipments to Iran via Portugal and Israel. He had daily briefings on the Iranian initiative and listened to his advisers debate it.
Once, when Chief of Staff Donald Regan couldn`t remember whether he had opposed continuing with the Iran initiative in late 1985, the President pulled out his notes and told Regan that he had, indeed, opposed the continuation of sales.
This did not sound like a detached president at all.
In the beginning, Reagan was cautious about the Iran initiative. McFarlane first raised it with him in the summer of 1985. The President, according to Regan, wanted to go slow, especially when Israel wanted the U.S. to replenish the arms it had shipped to Iran in September.
But after that, the initiative seemed to take on a life of its own, as the prospects for getting the hostages released and assuring an anti-Soviet Iran proved more and more appealing to a president willing to take a gamble.
Though Reagan continued to deny it was arms for hostages, Regan had no doubt. As he put it, in the Middle East, the U.S. currency was arms, and Iran`s currency was terrorism and hostages.
Shultz painted a different picture of Reagan than the image evoked by the Tower Commission.
”I have come to have a profound respect for his capacity to make good decisions and to be decisive,” the secretary said. ”He`s not a trimmer; he looks at something and he decides, takes a position. And, at least as I have observed it, his positions have been good positions, and they`ve worked.”
But how could such a decisive man let his national security staff misuse and mislead him, as Regan, Shultz and Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese indicated in their testimony? Why would Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver North, a National Security aide, think they had the leeway to run an independent foreign policy and get by with it without the President knowing eventually?
North`s story is that he didn`t think he was an independent agent. He said he acted with the knowledge and authority of his superiors.
Poindexter said he briefed Reagan daily on many details of his operations, but he kept from him the crucial fact of the profits diversion to protect Reagan from political embarrassment and to give him ”deniability.”
Yet, as the committee heard, if Reagan didn`t know all the details of the Iran initiative and the contra-support operations, he certainly knew many of them. When McFarlane sent him a note saying that Saudi Arabia had agreed to donate $1 million a month to a contra bank account, Reagan returned the note expressing ”satisfaction and pleasure.”
Regan said when the administration was trying to obtain approval of contra aid from Congress, Reagan was kept informed daily on how many weapons and supplies the Nicaraguan rebels had.
In addition, Reagan would often speak to private groups that helped finance or support the contras in meetings arranged generally by the security council staff, usually North.
The whole issue of detachment and remoteness came up when the story of the diversion of arms sales profits to the contras emerged from Meese`s
”fact-finding inquiry” last November.
There seems to be little doubt that Reagan`s management style was to set the general policy guidelines and let aides carry them out. He felt extremely comfortable with Regan`s tight-fisted, highly controlled style of management and the way his chief of staff controlled access to the President.
Regan, an ex-Marine officer, was the gatekeeper and the czar of information in the White House, with one big exception, he contends: the whole national security area. The chief of staff sat in on briefings by McFarlane and then by Poindexter, but he didn`t see all the papers they presented to Reagan, he says, though he tried.
The evidence indicates that Reagan wanted it this way. If he did not, why was it that Regan, known as ”the prime minister” inside the White House, could not get it changed?
Despite this direct chain of command and communication, Poindexter swore he kept the fact of the diversion away from the President. Testimony by the President`s top aides was consistent: Reagan seemed shocked and surprised when Meese revealed the diversion to him last November.
If he was acting, Regan said, Reagan deserved the Academy Award that eluded him in his previous career.
But the troublesome questions kept coming back. Why would Poindexter, who was not known for independent actions in the past, suddenly take it upon himself to make monumental decisions on behalf of the President?
Why would Reagan call up North and call him an American hero if he found the diversion to be repugnant and eventually destructive to his
administration?
How could a president be so alternately detached yet so involved and passionate about his foreign-policy moves and his desire to get the American hostages home?
The Reagan-is-remote theory is appealing because the alternative that cynics like to speculate about seems too troubling.
Troubling, yes. But illogical?
It goes like this: A strongly ideological president who still regards the Soviet Union as the evil empire seeks every opportunity, however slim, to fight communism, whether it is in the Middle East or in Central America.
He grasps at any chance to open a line of communication with Iranian rulers, or to find money for the contras even in the face of congressional opposition or outright bans.
The fear that Iran could one day be brought into the Soviet sphere, and that the Persian Gulf would be turned into a Soviet lake (the motivation that prompted him to accept reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers), drove his actions. In Central America, it was his fear that Nicaragua would spread its Soviet influence throughout the hemisphere.
The hostages being held by pro-Iranian fundamentalists in Lebanon provided a kind of cover. He could use the lives of the hostages as a pretense for keeping the operation secret from a meddling Congress as he pursued a broader geopolitical objective, for which great presidents are remembered.
In an operation such as this, it makes sense to maintain an attitude of detachment. Poindexter said ”plausible deniability is required” to maintain cover. And the President was comfortable with Poindexter as his security council assistant. Regan testified to that.
This troubling scenario shows Reagan as a strategic, geopolitical player willing to make bold moves on the international chessboard, using the hostages as pawns. It fits the mold of a president who ordered troops to Grenada and who bombed Libya. It fits the script for a second-term President eager to ride off into the sunset, his place in history secure.
These thoughts occurred to some skeptical members of the Iran-contra panel, if their questioning is an indication of their feelings, but Poindexter`s testimony dashed any documentation of that unspoken theory. Yet it remains an intriguing theory consistent with the activist, gambling, cool- headed Reagan, not the old, out-of-it, detached image with which he is now saddled.
The mystery still hangs over the hearings, and the real Ronald Reagan may never emerge.
