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$Pretitle{131}
$Title{The Iran-Contra Affair:  Supplemental and Additional Views
Chapter 10   Views of Hyde}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Hamilton, Lee H. and Inouye, Daniel K.}
$Affiliation{US Congress}
$Subject{world
policy
congress
america
hearings
democracy
threat
administration
american
foreign}
$Volume{}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Book:        The Iran-Contra Affair:  Supplemental and Additional Views
Author:      Hamilton, Lee H. and Inouye, Daniel K.
Affiliation: US Congress
Date:        1987

Chapter 10   Views of Hyde

     One unanticipated benefit of the Iran-Contra hearings was the surprising
emergence of so many strict constructionists among members of the Joint
Investigating Committee.  It is heartening to see the ranks of those devoted
to law and order increasing, notwithstanding the selectivity of their
devotion.

     In earlier days, we were conditioned to favor appeals to "the higher law"
over mere statutory expressions, depending on who made the appeal and the
degree of leftward tilt to their cause.

     We have seen high-minded demonstrators trespass on military
installations, splash animal blood on draft records, illegally picket within
500 feet of the South African Embassy, conduct sit-ins to obstruct C.I.A.
university recruitment, and deliberately violate our immigration laws to
provide sanctuary to a chosen few.

     These acts of civil and criminal disobedience are routinely applauded by
many who turn a cold shoulder, a blind eye and a deaf ear towards such appeals
when made by, for example, Fawn Hall on behalf of her former boss, Lt. Col.
Oliver North.

     Ms. Hall's testimony that "sometimes you have to go above the written law
. . ." has been much remarked in the press, but we are less often reminded
that she was echoing Thomas Jefferson, who on September 20, 1810 wrote to John
Colvin:

A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of
a good citizen, but it is not the highest.  The laws of necessity, of
self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher
obligation.  To lose our country, by a scrupulous adherence to written law,
would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty and property and all those
who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.
[Writings of Thomas Jefferson, n. 28 at p. 279.]

     The selective availability of "the higher law" is but one of the
anomalies underscored by these hearings, and has particular relevance to any
study of the scope and applicability of the various Boland Amendments.

     A dominant theme of these hearings has been vigorous condemnation of
those who allegedly violated the letter or the spirit of the Boland
Amendments, or who lied to Congress or were not forthcoming in their testimony
about Central American policy.  The rationale for these transgressions - the
need for secrecy to protect lives, the sensitivity of negotiations with Iran
about hostages, combined with the notorious inability of Congress to keep a
secret - were summarily rejected by most of the committee's members.  We were
regularly reminded of some bedrock propositions, including the President's
duty under the Constitution to see that the laws are faithfully executed, that
we are a government of laws and not of men (most especially in this
bicentennial year) and that the end cannot justify the means.

     These propositions - true enough - deserve a less facile application to
the complex events involved in these hearings.  All of us at some time
confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil
and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral imagination by labeling every
untruth and every deception an outrage.

     In assessing how helpful the axiom is that "the end doesn't justify the
means," I suggest consideration of the dilemma facing President Harry S.
Truman on August 6, 1945.

     Four months earlier, the invasion of Okinawa cost 151,000 American and
Japanese lives.  The resistance was suicidal, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
believed if this World War was to end, Japan itself would have to be invaded.
The best military estimates anticipated a loss of one million American lives
and no one could guess how many more million Japanese lives. The President had
no options that could be called good, but the stark choices before him
required a decision: to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and, indeed,
Nagasaki) and thus end the war or to invade the Japanese homeland at a cost of
untold millions of lives.

     We all know Truman's decision, and for myself I believe it was the right
one.  But to those who think it was morally wrong and seek to indict Mr.
Truman, I suggest, rather, they blame those in the Japanese government who
forced this decision on him.

     What has this to do with the Iran Contra affair?  The circumstances and
the actors are different but the moral dilemma is the same - or, as Lt. Col.
North put it, "Lies or Lives."

     Former Virginia Governor Charles Robb correctly summarized Congress'
vacillating Nicaraguan Contra policy when he called it "playing with people's
lives."  New York Times correspondent James Le Moyne echoed that sentiment
when he wrote recently that ". . . it is difficult not to conclude that it has
been hypocritical, immoral and deeply damaging to the United States to send
men to kill and to die for six years on half promises and sporadic
assistance."  Le Moyne concluded his October 4, 1987 article in the New York
Times magazine with these observations by Donald Castillo, an ex-Sandinista
who Le Moyne believes is "one of the Contras' most able political analysts:
'You North Americans have great values, but you need to learn to define and
apply them . . . . you have been generous to us - and you have also utilized
and manipulated us as part of your domestic political agenda . . .  But have
you been aware that you're playing with the life and blood of a people and a
country?'"

     To those many who grew impatient with we few who insisted on discussing
policy, I suggest that a fundamental reason for our differing perspectives on
the purpose of these hearings may be the differing view we take towards the
seriousness of the threat that Marxism-Leninism poses to peace, freedom,
security and prosperity in the world.  Those of us who not only take this
threat seriously but also try to do something about it are often considered to
exercise a "cold war mentality."  This is a grave sin indeed in the liberal
catechism.  But our view of the urgency of the situation was well stated by
Professor George McKenna of the City College of New York who wrote in the New
York Times of June 5, 1987:

"While Congress fiddles, the world burns.  In the 1960's there were four
openly proclaimed Marxist-Leninist regimes in the third world; today there are
16.  Two Soviet client states are right at our doorstep, and they are working
relentlessly to add another four to the Soviet fold: El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras and Costa Rica.  The Reagan Administration's 'crime' is that it tried
to stop this process, just as the Roosevelt Administration tried to stop the
expansion of another evil empire in the summer of 1940."

     There are other contentious issues these hearings have emphasized - none
more important than the proper constitutional roles of the President and the
Congress in the formulation and execution of foreign policy. Senator George J.
Mitchell of Maine and I have exchanged a series of letters on this subject,
which I characterize as the struggle between the Congressional supremacists
and the Presidential monarchists.  Actually neither characterization is
accurate, as each has a vital role which cannot exclude the other. But
defining these boundaries is (to use Simon Bolivar's phrase) like plowing in
the sea.  Nonetheless a better understanding of the President's constitutional
authority and that of Congress is essential if we are to ever develop and
manage a successful foreign policy, regain the confidence of our allies and
deserve the respect of our adversaries.  The renewed focus on this "invitation
to struggle" is one of the positive things to emerge from these hearings.

     I will not burden these views with the arguments and citations I have
made in my correspondence with Senator Mitchell, except to assert my general
conclusion that the Founding Fathers intended to vest the general control of
foreign affairs in the President - subject of course to the specific checks
set forth in the Constitution.  Citing United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export
Corp. 299 U.S. 304, 319 (1936), the Tower Commission's report correctly
asserted:  "Whereas the ultimate power to formulate domestic policy resides in
the Congress, the primary responsibility for the formulation and
implementation of national security policy falls on the President." (PV-1)

     There have been many elements of unreality about these hearings.  But the
most serious breach of reality has had to do with why we held them in the
first place.  What was it, really, that brought us to create these select
committees?  Some will argue that it was a concern for Constitutional process;
and well we should have been concerned.  But to leave the matter there
obscures what seems to me a crucial substantive issue, a real and deep
division that has led to this exercise.

     That division, to be simple, accurate and blunt, can be stated thus:
there are Members of the House and Senate who do not believe that communism in
Central America is a grave threat to peace and freedom that requires an active
and vigorous response from the United States; there are Members who concede
the threat in the abstract, but wish to do little about it beyond talking; and
there are Members who acknowledge the threat and wish to challenge it,
forthrightly, through the variety of instruments proposed by the National
Bipartisan Commission on Central America.

     In real political life, the first two categories of Members - those who
see little or no threat, and those who see the threat but cannot gather
themselves to challenge it - work together.  Their alliance, as curious as it
may seem in the abstract, is what accounts for the baroque dance of the Boland
Amendments.  This strange alliance between the unbelieving and the
believing-but-unwilling has made a mockery of our foreign policy:  we have had
one policy one year, and another policy the next.

     This has reinforced the tendency of insecure Latin American leaders to
say one thing in private and another in public.  This strange alliance of
political convenience and/or confusion has further strengthened
anti-anticommunism here at home.  One shudders to think of what it has taught
the Soviets.

     Whether one traces this triple division to that all-purpose whipping boy,
"Vietnam," or whether one finds longer historical lines feeding it, it remains
a desperately debilitating fact of our national life.  When Members of the
Congress of the United States look at the same situation and see radically
different things - or, seeing the same thing, differ utterly on what, if
anything, is to be done about it - we are in far deeper trouble than the issue
of Constitutional propriety.

     My side of the argument - those who both see the communist threat in
Central America and wish to address it through economic, humanitarian, and
security assistance to that region's democrats - carries its share of the
blame for the impasse we have reached.  We have somehow failed to convince
those who see the threat we see that there are ways to address that threat
which serve the ends of peace, freedom, and justice.  Our failure to make this
argument successfully - a failure, I say in all candor, that has plagued the
White House as well - has created circumstances in which those who neither see
nor wish to act have coopted some of their more prescient colleagues.  The
result has been the kind of schizophrenic Congressional policy that we have
been enduring these past months.

     Meanwhile, whatever its own failures of persuasion, the Executive has had
to act.  At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, there is precious little of
the luxury of ambiguity.  One must act (always, one hopes and prays, wisely),
for not to act, in this world, is itself an action.  Sins of omission,
according to classic moral theory, can be as grave as sins of commission.  The
Executive has not sinned, largely, on the omission side of the ledger (save in
its unwillingness to make its case to the country in and out of season).
Conversely, we have seen ample evidence of the ways in which the Executive has
acted that can be legitimately criticized.  But there is a luxury we indulge
here.  For the sake of Constitutional propriety, we must, on occasion, indulge
it - this luxury of retrospective wisdom.  But it should be a rare indulgence.
It can lead to policy confusion and indeed paralysis.  Indulge the luxury of
retrospective wisdom too promiscuously, and we inevitably fall into sins of
omission - which can be as bad, indeed, worse, than the sins of commission.
Neville Chamberlain was a good and decent man, and an ambiguist.  The
Czechoslovaks paid the price for his sins of omission in 1938.  His countrymen
paid for the next six years, as did most of the free world.

     Moreover, we have had a disconcerting and distasteful whiff of moralism
and institutional self-righteousness in these hearings.  Too little have these
committees acknowledged that the Executive may well have had a clearer vision
of what was at stake in Central America.  Too little have we acknowledged that
our own convolutions have made the task of the Executive even more difficult.
Too little have we confessed that there is real reason to be concerned about
the Sieve on Jenkins Hill - the unending leaks which everyone on these
committees know exist, and few are willing to take steps to address
effectively.  That the Executive is a major source of leaked information is a
sad truth, but in no way diminishes our own responsibility.  No one doubts
that the Executive has done some very stupid things in this affair.  But one
would have liked to have seen some modest acknowledgment of Congressional
responsibility for our present policy impasse.

     In nearly thirteen years of service in the House, it has seemed to me
that the Congress is usually more eager to assert authority than to accept
responsibility; more ready to criticize rather than to constructively propose;
more comfortable in the public relations limelight than in the murkier
greyness of the real world, where choices must often be made, not between
relative goods, but between bad and worse.  These are not the characteristics
that give one confidence in the Congress as a policy - making instrument for
America's inescapable encounter with an often hostile world.

     These unsavory character defects are not endemic to this institution. One
cannot walk into the old Senate chamber, and travel back, in the mind's eye,
to the days when that chamber was filled with the likes of Webster, Calhoun,
Clay, Davis, Benton, Houston, Cass, Seward, Chase, and Douglas, and think that
the United States Congress cannot do better than it has done in matters of
foreign policy over the past ten years.  The question is not institutional; it
is, in the deepest sense, personal.  It has to do with the quality of mind and
spirit we bring to our deliberations.  It has to do with whether we are
playing to the galleries, or to conscience and duty.

     We ought to acknowledge that questions of Constitutional propriety have
been engaged by these hearings.  But we must also acknowledge that there is a
deep division in our national legislature over a basic question in world
politics.  We have, in these hearings, obscured rather than illuminated that
division.  I bring it to the surface here, not to bait anyone, but in the
conviction that only an honest delineation of our differences can lead us
beyond posturing to genuine debate.  Without that kind of debate, we will
continue to flounder in the world, at precisely the historical moment when the
tide seems to be shifting in favor of the forces of democracy.

     History will not look kindly on us if we miss the opportunities to
advance the twin causes of peace and freedom that are before us: in Central
America, and throughout the world.

     So, as we debate ends and means, let's not obfuscate the deepest
ideological and moral issue of our time, which is the contest between freedom
and tyranny in the world.  To dismiss that contest as the fantasy of an
overheated Cold War mentality is not the act of a morally or politically
serious person.  Those who see the scalps of General Secord, Robert McFarlane,
Admiral Poindexter, and Lt. Col. North as the sure and quick path back to
post-Vietnam neo-isolationism are going to reap the whirlwind before this
century is out.  By all means, let's get our house in order and use means to
conduct the great contest in the world that don't corrupt our own democratic
processes.  But let's not make the argument over means a Trojan Horse by which
neo-isolationism and anti-anticommunism resume dominant positions in our
policy debates.

     The resurgence of isolationism in our contemporary culture is easily
traced.

     In the 1970's, several key ideas, developed during Vietnam, came forward
in American public life and got lodged in the teaching centers of our culture
- the religious leadership, the universities, the prestige press, the popular
entertainment industry.

     A new form of isolationism arose.  It did not teach, as traditional
isolationists did, that America should avoid the world because we would be
corrupted by it.  No, the neo-isolationism of the post-Vietnam era taught that
America should stay out of the contest for power in the world because we
corrupted the world.  What happened when America acted in world affairs?
"Vietnam," was the sole answer.  No reference to the war against Hitler; no
reference to the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan; no reference
to NATO or the Alliance for Progress.  No, what happened when America
"intervened" in the world was "Vietnam."

     And so, paradoxically, the very same people who taught us that the world
was "interdependent," also teach us that "intervention" is a very bad thing.
This neo-isolationism, as many political commentators have noted over the past
decade, has become deeply ingrained in the Democratic Party.

     We were also taught, in the post-Vietnam period, that anti-communism was
culturally passe, historically fallacious, and an inappropriate criterion for
guiding U.S. policy.  Anti-communism, too, had gotten us "Vietnam."  Those who
taught this theme were not, in the main, pro-Leninist (as the Old Left was in
the 1930's).  Rather, they were anti-anticommunists. As such, they were
willing to give an extraordinary benefit of the doubt to a whole host of Third
World communists, each of whom was, in turn, going to get right what Lenin and
Stalin had fouled up: Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Salvador Allende, Maurice
Bishop, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Angolan Eduardo Dos Santos and, finally,
Daniel Ortega and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

     The miserable record of these tyrants speaks for itself, and there is no
need to belabor it here.  But what we ought to note is how this
anti-anticommunism was challenged by the people of the Third World.  Wherever,
in the past decade, people have been given the choice among traditional
authoritarianism, a Leninist "new order" and democracy, they have, without
exception, chosen democracy.  They chose democracy in El Salvador, Honduras
and Guatemala.  They have chosen democracy in Portugal and Spain.  They chose
democracy in Argentina and Brazil.  They chose democracy in the Philippines.
They are trying to build democracy, under great pressure, in the northern
provinces of Mexico today. I have no doubt that the great mass of the people
of Chile, given the choice, would opt for democracy.

     And some people, many of whose leaders had been in the forefront of the
revolution against Anastasio Somoza, still wish to choose democracy for
Nicaragua.  That is what, tragically, our anti-anticommunists cannot see.

     A third idea let loose by the Vietnam debacle was the notion that
military force can never serve the ends of peace, security and freedom.  Now
those who live in a society of laws should, to be sure, be very careful about
the circumstances in which they take up the sword.  But in a world
persistently hostile to democratic values - a world in which men will starve
their opponents to death for political power (as in Ethiopia), or torture them
in ways that would defy the imagination of Dante (as in Cuba), or stupefy
their minds with drugs (as in the USSR) - it seems odd, at the very least, to
assert that the world's principal democratic power should unilaterally reject
the use of armed force on all occasions short of the invasion of Long Island.

     This teaching was challenged, in a fundamental way, by the successful
U.S. action in Grenada - a military intervention for which the people of
Grenada expressed overwhelming gratitude.  This teaching was being challenged
by our support for the Afghan resistance.  And this teaching was being
challenged by the policy we adopted in the 99th Congress of direct military
support for the Nicaraguan democratic resistance.  Considerably more was, and
is, at stake, then, than the fate of Daniel Ortega and Adolfo Calero.  What
was at stake in the Nicaragua debate - and what remains at stake today - is
this key teaching in the creed of those who had become accustomed to the high
moral ground in the U.S. foreign policy debate since Vietnam - that American
military force cannot serve the ends of peace in the world.

     Of course, there remain specific questions of legality that have to be
clarified.  The Courts will wrestle with these questions for years to come, as
the Independent Counsel proceeds with his indictments and prosecutions. But,
there also are questions of the way in which our foreign policy-making
apparatus works - or doesn't work.

     Beneath these questions of legality and structure, however, there is an
even more fundamental argument being engaged here.  It is the question of
America's role in the world, and indeed whether we shall have any.

     As we argue over "intervention" and "interdependence," neo-isolationism
is being challenged - sometimes skillfully, sometimes clumsily - by the Reagan
Administration.  That is an important part of what we are arguing about in
this affair.  The Administration has forthrightly told the leadership of the
communist world that the United States proposes to emerge from the paralysis
and self doubt of the Carter era of "malaise" and to re-enter, vigorously, the
war of ideas: the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of men and women
all over the world.  We have tried to be, again, the party of liberty in the
world.  This has been disconcerting, to say the least, to those who have been
taught for almost a generation that America was not on the side of history.
However, adequately or inadequately, the Administration has challenged this
genteel form of surrender, and has reasserted the idea that history is of our
making, if we have the wisdom, will and strength for the task.  And that is
part of what we're arguing about in this affair.

     There is an argument over the appropriate use of military force being
engaged here.  The Administration has made plain - in Grenada, in Libya, in
Angola, in Cambodia, in Lebanon, with the Afghan resistance and the Nicaraguan
democratic resistance - that it believes that in certain situations armed
force can serve the ends of freedom, justice, security and ultimately, peace.
Its exercise of that power has been both skillful and, to be candid, less than
skillful.  But beneath the specific cases to be argued there is the more
fundamental point of whether we as a nation are going to eschew the
discriminate and proportionate use of armed force for anything other than
direct self-defense.

     We ought to admit, frankly, that we are, as a nation, deeply divided at
these basic choice points.  It is one of the great failures of the Reagan
Administration that it has not forced these questions out into the open of our
public life so that they could be debated civilly and frankly, rather than
surreptitiously.  Perhaps the providential paradox of our present situation is
that these absolutely fundamental questions have been brought to the surface
anyway, chiefly through the testimony of Lt. Col. Oliver North.

     And so, beneath the legal and structural arguments; beneath the policy
debate; even beneath the challenge to the post-Vietnam orthodoxy that I have
so briefly sketched here - there is an absolutely basic question being engaged
in the debate over this affair.  And that is the question of America.  This is
not an argument over anyone's patriotism.  But survey research has clearly
demonstrated that many of America's most influential opinion-shapers and
values-teachers respond negatively to the question, "On balance and
considering the alternatives, do you consider American power a force for good
in the world?"  Note the modesty of the question.  And yet many of our most
prestigious commentators and analysts, many of our most influential scholars,
bishops, and rabbis, answer in the negative.

     Their teaching has had a profound, and I think debilitating, effect on
our public life and our foreign policy for almost a generation.  That teaching
has gotten itself lodged, to a degree difficult to imagine, in the Congress of
the United States and among members of both parties.  It is a teaching of
despair: perhaps humane despair, perhaps a despair tinged with a sense of the
ironic and the contingent in human affairs, but despair nonetheless.

     Others of us reject that counsel of despair.  We do not claim to have all
the answers when the complexities of policy are engaged.  We know full well
that mistakes have been made by this Administration, and some acting in the
name of this Administration.

     But we also know that these were mistakes made because of a judgment
that, on balance and considering the alternatives, American power can be a
force for good in the world, and that in the hierarchy of values freedom
towers above all others.

Henry J. Hyde