In My Time (25 page)

National Security Advisor John Poindexter briefed us, revealing the story of a secret administration initiative that would soon result in a firestorm. In hopes of improving our relationship with supposedly moderate elements in Iran, the United States had begun to sell arms—at first indirectly, then later directly—to these factions. The United States also wanted help from the Iranians in securing the release of American hostages whom Hezbollah was holding in Lebanon, and after the arms sales commenced three Americans were freed. Less than a week before our Situation Room briefing, President Reagan had appeared in the Rose Garden with David Jacobsen, who had been released after seventeen months in captivity in Beirut.

The freeing of hostages was undeniably a good thing, but it was clear to me that the initiative was ill-conceived. It violated the arms embargo that we had imposed on Iran and that we were insisting other nations observe, and it undermined our strict policy against negotiating with terrorists. Congress had not been told about the operation, as we should have been.

The situation grew exponentially worse in late November when Attorney
General Ed Meese disclosed in a press conference that profits from Iranian arm sales had been diverted to insurgents known as the Contras, who were fighting against the pro-communist government in Nicaragua. The Congress had passed the Boland Amendments, measures aimed at constraining the president from pursuing his policy of aiding the Contras. After President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua made a much-publicized trip to Moscow, the fierce resistance on the part of the Democrats to aiding the Contras had abated somewhat, but the Boland Amendments were still on the books, so the stage was set for a confrontation.

On December 2 I made my way through a downpour to an 11:00 a.m. meeting the president had called with the Republican leadership in the Cabinet Room. He assured us he’d had no knowledge of the diversion of funds to the Contras, and after we departed he made the same point in a four-minute televised speech. He also said he would welcome the appointment of a special prosecutor and endorsed congressional inquiries into the matter.

The next day the president called another meeting with the Republican leadership, this time in the Oval Office. The president sat in a chair on one side of the fireplace and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole in the chair on the other side. I was on a cream-colored sofa between House Republican Whip Trent Lott and Vice President George Bush. Across from us were House Minority Leader Bob Michel, president pro tem of the Senate Strom Thurmond, and my friend Alan Simpson, the Senate whip. The president was emphatic that the administration had not traded arms for hostages. The terrorists who had done the kidnapping had gotten nothing, he said. He went on to explain that the arms had been sold to moderate Iranians who in turn helped convince the terrorists to release the hostages. Reagan leaned forward in his chair and asked, “Now, what exactly is wrong with that?”

He emphasized again that he had not known about the diversion of funds to the Contras, which was better than if he had known, but troubling nonetheless. Iran-Contra wasn’t Watergate, though plenty of Democrats were trying to make it seem that way, but as I noted on
NBC’s
Meet the Press
in late December, “Clearly something went haywire at the White House,” and the president’s “lack of involvement in some of those details is at the root of the problem.”

President Reagan did not have to wait long for the congressional inquiry he said he would welcome. In the first week of January 1987, both the Senate and the House formally appointed investigative committees. Bob Michel named me the ranking Republican on the House side, passing over more senior members. I suspect he chose me in part because I was already involved, having been his representative at the initial meetings when everyone else was out of town. But he also knew of my deep interest in national security issues, and I suspect he trusted me to do what needed to be done without any grandstanding.

In preparation for the hearings, I hired some top-notch people, including Tom Smeeton, who was minority counsel for the Intelligence Committee, to be minority staff director, and George Van Cleve, a lawyer who had worked in my congressional office, to be minority counsel. For the minority editor and writer, I chose Michael Malbin, who had a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell University and had also worked for several years as a reporter at the
National Journal.
He had recently been studying conflicts between the executive and legislative branches of the government, giving him particularly valuable expertise.

The most dramatic moments of the hearing began on July 7, when Oliver North, who had been on Reagan’s National Security Council staff from 1981 to 1986, was sworn in. He rose to take the oath in the hearing room wearing the beribboned and bemedaled uniform of a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel. The majority had planned to use his testimony to tie the president to illegal activities. Suddenly it was confronted with the possibility that Lieutenant Colonel North, with his earnest manner and unabashed patriotism, might coalesce national support behind the efforts to free hostages in Iran and fight communists in Nicaragua.

Colonel North had a slide show he had presented many times to mobilize support for the Contras, but the Democrats, seeing how persuasive he could be, prevented him from making the presentation. As
the ranking minority member, I chose to question him last, and I used the opportunity to ask him to talk through his slide show, which he did in a twenty-minute tour de force. Of course I had serious concerns with North’s conduct. He had shredded documents and operated without proper authority. It was later judged he had acted illegally, though in the end his conviction was reversed on the grounds that his immunized testimony had affected his trial. If the majority was determined to present him as a man who had purposely broken the law and subverted the Constitution, I felt that he had the right to defend himself as a man who was trying to save lives and protect democracy in the face of congressional vacillation.

In my closing statement at the hearings, I made the point that Iran-Contra represented serious errors on the administration’s part, but that there were mitigating factors—“which, while they don’t justify administration mistakes, go a long way to helping explain and make them understandable.” Among them were “congressional vacillation and uncertainty about our policies in Central America” and “the vital importance of keeping the Nicaraguan democratic resistance alive until Congress could reverse itself and repeal the Boland Amendment.” I also noted that the administration’s failure to notify Congress, while inexcusable, needed to be set against “a Congressional track record of leaks of sensitive information sufficient to worry even the most apologetic advocate of an expansive role for the Congress in foreign policy-making.”

The majority report on the Iran-Contra affair was a sensational story of rogue operatives within the administration willing to skirt the law and subvert the Constitution in their determination to carry out their own foreign policy. In the minority report we tried to present a more balanced view, one that took the long history of struggle between the executive and the legislative branches over foreign-policy making into consideration. As the report noted:

The boundless view of Congressional power began to take hold in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War. The 1972 Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s report recommending the War Powers Act,
and the 1974 report of the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee), both tried to support an all but unlimited Congressional power.

The tendentious majority report was part of the same pattern, resting as it did “upon an aggrandizing theory of Congress’ foreign policy powers that is itself part of the problem.”

The minority report continued:

The country’s future security depends upon a modus vivendi in which each branch recognizes the other’s legitimate and constitutionally sanctioned sphere of activity. Congress must recognize that an effective foreign policy requires, and the Constitution mandates, the President to be the country’s foreign policy leader. At the same time, the President must recognize that his preeminence rests upon personal leadership, public education, political support, and inter-branch comity. . . . No president can ignore Congress and be successful over the long term. Congress must realize, however, that the power of the purse does not make it supreme. Limits must be recognized by both branches, to protect the balance that was intended by the Framers. . . . This mutual recognition has been sorely lacking in recent years.

Iran-Contra was part of what the report called “an ongoing state of political guerrilla warfare over foreign policy between the legislative and executive branches,” and while the Democrats had tried to turn the scandal into another Watergate, no evidence emerged that the president was guilty of anything except inattention or absentmindedness. Those of us in the committee’s minority noted many times that we were critical of the administration’s conduct, but we nonetheless worked vigorously to defend the president against the extreme charges made by his critics. I thought it was also crucial to defend the presidency itself against congressional attempts to encroach on its power.

Shortly after the hearings and investigation were completed, I received a phone call at home on a Saturday from First Lady Nancy Reagan, who was at Camp David with the president. They both got on the phone and thanked me for the role I had played in the investigation.

DURING MY CONGRESSIONAL YEARS, I frequently took either Liz or Mary with me on trips back to Wyoming. These one-on-one excursions were a good chance to talk, an opportunity for me to find out what was going on in their lives. It was on one of these trips—in the Denver airport, to be precise—that Mary told me she was gay. I told her that I loved her dearly and that what was important to me was that she be happy.

Both Liz and Mary became interested in and knowledgeable about politics, which did not mean that they always responded the same to political events. Liz was a page at the 1984 Republican convention in Dallas and was thrilled to march into Reunion Arena for opening ceremonies each evening, carrying a flag and wearing a cream-colored robe covered with red, white, and blue elephants. Mary, who was a page at the 1988 convention in New Orleans, took one look at that year’s page uniform—khaki pants or skirt, white shirt, and red kerchief around the neck—and resigned, declaring that she had no intention of dressing up in something that Soviet youth in the Young Pioneers might wear.

Lynne, meanwhile, was teaching English courses at George Washington University and Northern Virginia Community College. She had established herself as a writer and journalist, published a couple of novels, and contributed frequent freelance articles to different newspapers and magazines. She became a contributing editor at
Wash-ingtonian
magazine, where she wrote a monthly column about D.C. history. In 1985, President Reagan appointed her to the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution. In 1986 he chose her to succeed Bill Bennett as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A few years after I’d been elected to Congress, Lynne and I both read
The Proud Tower
, Barbara Tuchman’s book about the period before
World War I, and we had been particularly struck by Tuchman’s profile of the acerbic and autocratic House Speaker Tom Reed. We knew there must be more stories like that and decided to write a book about Speakers of the House, who have been generally underappreciated. Our subjects were Henry Clay, James Blaine, Thomas Reed, Joseph Cannon, Nicholas Longworth, Sam Rayburn, and James K. Polk, the only Speaker to become president. We also included Thaddeus Stevens, who led the charge for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.

One afternoon after the book came out, I was standing at the rail at the back of the House chamber when a page came over and told me that Speaker O’Neill would like a word with me. It turned out that he wanted to talk about
Kings of the Hill.
I had sent him a copy as a courtesy, but I was frankly surprised that he had not only read it but had some strong and detailed opinions about it.

For the next half hour—while he effortlessly presided over the business of the House—we discussed the book. He was interested in the reasons for our choice of subjects and the way we had divided the writing chores. His only criticism involved our chapter on Sam Rayburn. He did not think that we had sufficiently praised “Mr. Sam,” whom he had known and loved.

I WAS IN THE basement of our house in Virginia watching TV when the first reports of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut were broadcast on October 23, 1983. Early that morning, two separate trucks carrying bombs broke through the security perimeter and crashed into the American and French barracks. More than two hundred marines and a number of sailors and soldiers were killed.

The Marines, first dispatched to Lebanon in August 1982 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, were part of an attempt to settle the Lebanese civil war. I was one of many in Congress who had questioned the wisdom of what appeared to be America’s ad hoc involvement in Lebanon. After the bombing there would also be questions about a decision-making process that had bunched all our marines into one building in the middle of a violent city only months after the American
Embassy had been bombed. The tragedy raised a number of questions about interservice rivalries in the American military and a convoluted chain of command.

The invasion of Grenada, two days after the bombing of the Marine barracks, was a successful effort, but also underscored disorganization. When I visited the Caribbean island as a member of Congress a few days after we’d gone in, I was told about an army officer who had needed artillery support. He could look out to sea and see naval vessels on the horizon, but he had no way to talk to them. So he used his personal credit card in a pay phone, placed a call to Fort Bragg, asked Bragg to contact the Pentagon, had the Pentagon contact the navy, who in turn told the commander off the coast to get this poor guy some artillery support. Clearly a new system was needed.