TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/87/87capcon.3

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                Ñöef»░ô                                            «««Charging Up Capitol Hill

July 20, 1987

How Oliver North captured the imagination of America

The screen split.  On one side of it, Ronald Reagan was seen ambling
sidelong and smiling across the South Lawn of the White House.  He
waved to an off-camera crowd, deflected shouted questions with a
shrug, and at the steps to his helicopter, smartly saluted the Marine
guard standing at attention.

At that moment, on the left side of the television screen, another
Marine, Oliver North, leaned forward in the witness chair in the
Senate Caucus Room, listening, his eyes gone now from disingenuous to
wounded, then brightening to a righteous glint.

Blip.  The Reagan side of the picture disappeared.  The President's
helicopter, Americans were told, would lift off the White House lawn
and bear him away, toward a speech in connecticut that had nothing to
do with the Iran-contra hearings.  It was strange effect, a kind of
moral vanishing.  Reagan at that moment became an absence.

What remained on the screen was the astonishing drama of Ollie North.
For four days last week a remarkable American pageant--presented on
television, Reagan's natural medium--was dominated by a 43-year-old
Marine lieutenant colonel, the man whom Reagan had fired from the
National Security Council staff last November.

Oliver North achieved a kind of evanescent coup d'etat in the American
imagination.  It was a fascinating and impressive transaction.  And
slightly spooky.

North charged up Capitol Hill and took the forum away from the
politicians.  He played over the heads of the joint congressional
committee, aiming his passionate rhetoric and complex charm at the 50
million people watching on television, the real audience and jury at
the proceedings.  The obscure, middle-level NSC staff member--said to
be a "loose cannon," an aberrant zealot from the White House
basement--did not behave like a guilty character caught at misdeeds,
like a raccoon startled by a flashlight in the middle of the night.

Instead, he arrived surrounded by an aura of honor and injured
virtue.  The force was with him.  He played brilliantly upon the
collective values of America, upon its nostalgias, its memories of a
thousand movies (James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, John
Wayne in They Were Expendable) and Norman Rockwell Boy Scout icons.
Ironically, he played precisely those American chords of myth and
dreaming with which Ronald Reagan orchestrated his triumphal
campaigns of 1980 and 1984.  In the fading seasons of Reagan's
presidency, young Ollie North was splendid at the Old Man's game.

By the end of four days of testimony, North had accumulated a foot-
high pile of telegrams of support (GOD BLESS YOU, GOOD LUCK AGAINST
THOSE ILL-BRED HYENAS).  Dozens of floral bouquets were delivered to
the Norths on Capitol Hill.

A TIME poll taken Thursday night showed that 84% felt that he was
telling the truth when he said his actions were approved by higher-
ups, and more people tended to believe him than to believe the
President.  North had won a certain amount of raw popular support--an
evident success with Americans that at least for the moment bemused
and intimidated the congressional committee that had come to grill
him.  That popularity, however, might not help him later in courts of
law.

North's performance was a complicated masterpiece of rhetoric and
evasion, of passion and manipulation.  he constantly turned the
question of what he did into a discourse on why he did it.  One does
not expect Marine lieutenant colonels to be mysterious.  North
displayed last week a personality capable of contradictions, which he
somehow arranged to achieve a weird harmonic.  When the dramatic and
tonal effects were stripped away, North's defense was simple.  It was
based on two main themes, each impenetrable, together impregnable.
The themes were 1) "I assumed I had the authority," and 2) "I don't
recall."

But it was the dramatics that captured Americans.  North begins with
luminous self-possession and a chestful of medals.  The war in Viet
Nam was an interesting half-buried theme of North's witness before
the committee.  He came home from the war a hero:  Silver Star,
Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts.  The residue of the war (martyrdom,
loss, pride of service, loyalty to comrades) played against North's
current situation as scapegoat, martyr and lone champion of the all-
but-lost cause of the contras.

Some Marines did not think that North, who served in the White House
as a civilian, should have worn his uniform to the hearings.  But
North, gifted with impeccable theatrical instincts, knew that the
costume would be necessary.  It fit well with the resplendent armor
of his belief in what he was doing and therefore in his explanations
of it.

North is an interestingly modulated man.  Sometimes one saw in him a
haunting and lovable pleading--dignified, controlled--that would
ignite into eloquence or jolts of fury.  He was impressively self-
contained, yet funny and easy as well.  He was a boyish All-American
engaged in dark, Machiavellian games, Beaver Cleaver playing Dungeons
and Dragons for keeps.  He was adorable and dangerous.  The
vocabulary was often breezy, almost childish; the diversion of funds
to the contras, he said, was a "neat idea."  He impersonated a sort
of G.I. Joe action figure who might have belonged on Saturday morning
kids' television.  And yet when the members of the committee, a
little dazed, ended their session at week's end, they realized that
they had been in the presence of a highly intelligent and articulate
man.  A few people even thought that the work North did for the
National Security Council, sneaking around in the back alleys of
diplomacy, might have been beneath him.

North is a natural actor and a conjurer of illusion.  His face is an
instrument that he plays with an almost unconscious genius.  His
countenance is dominated by his eyes.  Now they are the eyes of a
vulnerable child:  innocence at risk in a dark forest.  Now an
indignation rises in them, dark weathers of injured virtue.  And an
instant later, there comes across the landscape of North's face
something chilling, a glimpse perhaps of the capacity to kill, and
the eyes constrict their apertures a little, taking aim.  The altar
boy who might charm the nuns could take on ferocities.  His voice was
low and passionate.  It cracked in the affecting way that Jimmy
Stewart's does, although sometimes, with a force of anger behind it,
the voice sounded like Kirk Douglas' in a manic moment.

The Boy Scout and patriot had the nation rooting for him.
Charismatic politicians, and demagogues, have always known how to
dramatize life as a struggle between black and white, between good
and evil.  A committee counsel came to ask North about the nearly
$14,000 security system he had installed at his suburban Virginia
house, a setup that was paid for by Major General Richard Secord.
North delivered a magnificent aria in which he described how the
Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal had targeted him for assassination.
he told how Nidal's group had brutally murdered Natasha Simpson, 11,
daughter of an American journalist, in the Christmas 1985 massacre at
the Rome airport.  "I have an eleven-year-old daughter," said North,
melodramatically.  He offered a challenge.  "I'll be glad to meet Abu
Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, O.K.?  But I am not
willing to have my wife and my four children meet Abu Nidal or his
organization on his terms."

After that performance, the committee for the moment dared not ask
about the snow tires that North was said to have purchased using some
of the money from the Iranian arms sales.

Eventually, North had so won over the audience that when Senate
Counsel Arthur Liman came stalking after him, a curious effect set
in, even among some who thought that North was lying.  One wanted to
shout at the screen, like kids at a Saturday matinee of long ago.
"Watch out, Ollie!  He's setting a trap!"

What happened in the Senate Caucus Room last week was a sort of drama
of the moral settlement of America.  First there was the frontier,
the wild places where savages roamed and life was dangerous and
action was survival.  The pioneer, the early cowboy, the vigilante
all kept guns loaded and shot fast.  One did not survive by
regulations and laws and merely mental, abstract things.  Justice was
a rougher business, and even at that ran a distant second to coming
out of it alive.  "The essential American soul," D.H.Lawrence once
extravagantly wrote, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

Ollie North's world is still a frontier (Latin America, the Middle
East) where savages and terrorists wander.  something in Americans
sympathizes with that view of the world, with a bit of Teddy
Roosevelt roughriding and a distaste for legal punctilio.  In Texas
lore there is a defense for homicide that goes like this:  "He needed
killing."  Case dismissed.

It is a mind-set out of the American West, the sort of ethic that
says a horse thief needs to be hanged and hanged now, in the
interests of efficiency and emphasis.  What makes such an ethic
palatable, and even attractive, is the underlying sense that the
American, divinely sponsored, is inherently fair.  If fairness is
guaranteed, why get exercised about the fine print?  Ollie North
believes that the overarching justice of his projects, such as
funding the Nicaraguan resistance, legitimized his efforts to skirt
the Boland amendment.

But after the pioneers and the cattlemen, of course, came the
schoolmarms and the lawyers and the congressional committees.  The
untrammeled open plains need to be fenced and organized and submitted
to the rule of law.  After action governed by conscience comes
behavior governed by regulation, the broader organization of a more
complicated society.

The congressional committee represents that later stage of the
nation's development.  North appeals to Americans as a magnetic
character in the older style.  Americans have a visceral attraction
to cowboy morality.  It is part of their folklore.  When they see
that it succeeds--in the capture of the Achille Lauro hijackers, for
example, or even in the invasion of Grenada--they cheer it on.
However, they are intensely wary of that ethic when it is turned
loose, unsupervised, in a world made dangerous not just by terrorists
but by nuclear weapons.

Part of Americans' sympathy with North arises, again, from the
principle of fairness.  They see him as a man who was following
orders, and who is unfairly being asked to take the rap for men
higher up.

Foreigners are sometimes bemused--and appalled--by the American habit
of putting on spectacular show trials of the Watergate kind.  Is
America a sort of regicide society, a nation with a compulsion
periodically to tear out the wiring of its own Government?  One had
thought Reagan would be the first President since Eisenhower to
retire happily after two terms.

Another question:  If the Constitution's system of checks and
balances demands this kind of congressional surveillance of the
presidency, why do the hearings so often lose their way in
labyrinthine detail?  Why don't Congressmen examine larger social and
moral and political issues?  The dense tangle of the Iran-contra
affair, with its elaborate deceits and boxes within boxes, is, in
the light of day, fairly simple.  It involves two issues.

One is Iran, where an incapacity to face hard decisions about
hostages led the Administration to contravene its own boycott and
sell arms to a terrorist state, thereby subverting the moral and
political authority of the President.  It is curious that the Reagan
Administration, with its weakness for the cowboy ethic, should be so
unwilling to face necessary losses, so sentimental about getting
hostages home when the price of the rescue might be the collapse of
an immense structure of policy--and would inevitably mean the taking
of farm more hostages.

The second issue is Nicaragua.  The Administration for years has
failed to win popular or congressional approval for its policies in
support of the contras.  So the White House has done things of highly
questionable legality in order to circumvent the Boland amendment.

The net result of the Administration's handling of the two issues is
fiasco both ways.

Ironically, Oliver North won more support for the contras in four
days of testimony than Ronald Reagan has been able to stir up in six
years.  While North was testifying last week, the dispirited contra
lobby in Washington came alive and mobilized its mailing lists again.

The Iran-contra hearings last week may have had more to do with
theater and symbolism than with great constitutional questions.
Throughout American history, the President and Congress have collided
on the question of who runs the nation's foreign policy.  The Iran-
contra affair demonstrates the danger at either end of Pennsylvania
Avenue; the problem of unexamined, undisciplined policy by the
Executive, and the problem of a foreign policy excessively inhibited
and micromanaged by the Congress.  In either case, the American
system of checks and balances sometimes makes it difficult for
foreigners to deal with the U.S. with confidence.  They may fear that
private deals of the Ollie North kind will be exposed, by Congress,
the press, or both.  Or they may fear, as the contras did, that a
President's policy of support may presently be rescinded on Capitol
Hill.

The results of the hearings for Ronald Reagan are cross-grained.
North's credibility does not rub off on the President.  On the
contrary.  The Administration had been worried that North would be
torn apart on Capitol Hill and taint Reagan in the process.  Yet it
was North's boffo performance that somehow diminished the President:
North stood tall in defense of the convert crusade on behalf of the
contras, in contrast to Reagan's feckless refrain about not being
quite sure what was happening.  North's loyalties were unwavering,
even toward the President who had summarily dismissed him.  Having
scrambled so hard to distance itself from North, the White House will
find it hard to bask in his temporary aura.

At the same time, North's passionate defense does tend to validate
the President's policies toward the contras and to draw some of the
poison out of the public's attitudes toward the whole Iran-contra
misadventure.  North left an impression of projects that at least
were passionately well meant.

The President may achieve an arms-control agreement in the fall.  But
his time left for achievement in the White House is short.  Once the
1988 primaries begin, Reagan will have virtually departed into
history.

It is difficult to predict where Oliver North's destiny will take
him.  Americans may decide that he won them a little too easily, and
sobriety may set in.  His moment may be fleeting.  The special
prosecutor lies in wait.  It may be, semper fi, that he will grow old
in the corps.  Perhaps he will reverse Ronald Reagan's trajectory and
find a home in Hollywood.  Politics?  North has already proved that
he is almost dangerously gifted at the persuasive arts.

--By Lance Morrow
-------------------------------------------------------------

Assessing the Performance

Although the capital was awash with expressions of support for Oliver
North, reaction to the Marine lieutenant colonel among the public at
large was more qualified.  In a poll taken for TIME last Thursday
evening by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman,* 60% of those surveyed call
themselves "sympathetic" to North, but no more than 51% of the
respondents judge North to be totally truthful.

Which of these descriptions do you feel describe Lieut. Colonel
North?

                                            Does not
                                Describes   describe  Not sure

A reckless adventurer               15%        72%       13%

A national hero                     29%        61%       10%

A true patriot                      67%        24%        9%

Someone we need in
Government                          37%        49%       14%

A scapegoat for higher-ups          77%        15%        8%

Someone I would want to
marry my daughter                   26%        57%       17%

Only 22% think North's actions in diverting Iran arms profits to the
contras were legal; 58% say he acted illegally.  Nevertheless, 69%
answered no when asked whether North "should be sent to jail for his
role in the Iran-contra matter."


Did the President Know?

An overwhelming 84% of those polled believe North's testimony that
all his actions were approved by higher-ups in Government.  Even more
damaging to Ronald Reagan, 58% agree that the "President knew money
was being diverted from the Iranian arms sales to fund the contras,"
and only 23% disagree.

But Reagan's credibility increased slightly following North's
appearance.

Do you think President Reagan has told the American people everything
he knows about the Iran-contra issue?

                                Last Week   May 1987  January 1987

Told everything                     21%        14%           16%

Holding back information            71%        75%           77%


Was the Policy Wrong?

By better than 2 to 1 (64% to 28%), those surveyed disapprove of
selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and also object (by 63%
to 23%) to diverting funds to the contras.  Moreover, 62% think it
was wrong "for the Reagan Administration to conceal its secret
operations in Iran and Nicaragua from the Congress."  But most
respondents are also cynical about the congressional hearings: 57%
say the proceedings are motivated more by politics than by the
evidence.

The poll also reveals a gain in public support for the contra cause,
perhaps owing in part to North's testimony.

Do you approve of U.S. support for the contras fighting against
government troops in Nicaragua?

                                Last Week       January 1987

Approve                             38%               26%

Disapprove                          43%               50%


*Conducted by telephone on July 9 among 612 adult Americans by
Yankelovich Clancy Shulman.  The sampling error is plus or minus 4%.