“The good, the bad and the ugly… I never carried out a single act, not one, in which I did not have authority from my superiors… I lied every time I met the Iranians… Congress is to blame because of the fickle, vacillating, on-again-off-again policy towards the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance… I do honestly believe they expected that Ollie would go quietly, and Ollie intended to so right up to the day that somebody decided to start a criminal prosecution…take the hit… I never took a penny that didn’t belong to me…the ultimate covert operation…off the shelf…assumed the President knew…erroneous, misleading, evasive and wrong statements to Congress…a neat idea…we all had to weigh the balance between lies and lives…they were sitting in my office, reading, and I’d find a document and go out and shred it; they were working on their project, I was working on mine…lying does not come easily to me…probably the grossest misjudgement that I’ve made in my life – I then tried to paper over that whole thing with two phony documents…my brain is shredded…”
As pundits of every conceivable political stripe praised the testimony of the Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North before the Iran/Contras investigating committee, I had a hard time staying awake through it. Each vaguely interesting statement was accompanied by an hour of paper shuffling, legal wrangling and obscure, uninformative detail.
As I watched, Congressmen stopped being Congressmen, but blurred and became…wolves? But, North, on whose career they were expected to feast, was also a wolf! Some time in the third day of testimony, 50,000 telegrammes started spinning in the air, forming a halo of public approval above North’s head. In response, the Congressmen donned ill-fitting sheep’s costumes and spent most of the rest of the week bleating mildly.
In fact, the most emotional debate of the proceedings took place when Republican Bill Mcollum of California, momentarily throwing off his sheep’s costume, accused Senate Counsel Arthur Liman of being too aggressive in questioning North. Too aggressive! When had the investigation become a mutual admiration exercise?
Meanwhile, in the back of the room, Anastasio Somoza and Daniel Ortega stood and watched the proceedings. Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator overthrown by the Sandinistas, shook his head, confused. “Freedom fighters?” he asked. “Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance? Is he talking about the Contras?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sandinista leader Ortega replied.
“Maybe he’s talking about a different Nicaragua…”
“Like, in some alternate universe?”
“You mean to tell me that the Contras are…heroes?”
“Well, I don’t think so. They rape women, kill innocent civilians, including children, and steal from the aid the Americans send them. They also run drugs into the United States to make some extra money. And, they aren’t even an effective fighting force!”
Somoza smiled broadly. “Yes,” he remarked. “Those are my boys!”
Meanwhile, in another part of the room, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was also shaking his head in disbelief. “They were looking for a moderate in the Iranian government?” he said to nobody in particular. “That’s like trying to find a vegetarian in a school full of piranha.”
Still meanwhile, Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was holed up in an office in Washington, muttering, “Is it over, yet? I haven’t seen anybody in weeks. Who’s dumb idea was this limited immunity thing, anyway?”
Finally meanwhile, back in the hearing room, the elected officials tried to regain public opinion by staging everybody’s favourite game show, Spot the Patriot! Twenty-eight Senators and Representatives climbed up on soap boxes and tried to look and sound more patriotic than a Marine Lieutenant Colonel.
George Mitchell, a Democrat from the great Maine, said: “It is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the Contras and still love god and still love this country as much as you do. Although he is regularly asked to do so, god does not take sides in American politics, and, in America, disagreement with the policies of the government is not witness to lack of patriotism.”
Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, said: “I don’t want you prosecuted. I don’t think many people in America do, and I think there will be a lot of hell raised if you are.”
Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, said: I cannot agree that the end justifies the means, that the threat in Central America was so great that we had to do something, even if it disregarded constitutional processes, deceiving Congress and the American people. The means employed were a profound threat to the democratic process.”
Spot the Patriot!
I realized that television had driven out reasonable debate about the issues at hand, abetted by opinion poll journalism that reflected this lack of substance back at viewers. My own opinion poll taken at the time would have looked like this:
| Yes | No | Don’t Know/No Opinion | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do you know where Nicaragua is? | 32 | 36 | 32 |
| Do you know who leads the Sandinistas? | 18 | 30 | 52 |
| Do you know who leads the Contras at the moment? | 12 | 42 | 12 |
| Do you like Colonel Oliver North? | 70 | 18 | 12 |
After it was all over, Betsy North, the obligatory dutiful wife in this publicity-driven morality play, tucks the baby-faced Lieutenant Colonel into bed. Quietly, he asks, “I did good, didn’t I?”
“You did good,” she answers.
And the moral of the story is: you can’t promote democracy abroad by subverting it at home. Unless you look good on television.