The Reagan Administration & The Worst National Scandal

The Tower Commission tell did non satisfy critics, however, and a special congressional earreach was called in the summer of 1987, in what seemed likely to be a near-replay of the Watergate hearings of the early 1970s. In yet a further teetotal twist, however, the Iran-Contra hearings tended to strengthen Reagan's hand rather than further weaken him. In the Watergate hearings, Nixon Administration officials had come off to the public as contraband or crooked, while Congressional questioners like Senator Sam Ervin became universal heroes. But in the IranContra hearings, it was Administration figures like Lt. Col. Oliver "Ollie" North who became the customary heroes. Most other key witnesses successfully made the conduct that they "did not recall" crucial events, and the hearings faded away into an anticlimax.

Reagan himself was fading away by the summer of 1987, exclusively his legacy --- in the person of George Bush --- prevailed in the 1988 election. Many questions had been raised close Bush's knowledge of Iran-Contra . . . and none were ever clearly answered. By 1991, the role was largely forgotten by the general public. The investigation of self-governing Counsel Lawrence Walsh (the former title of this position, "special prosecutor," having been euphemized) continued, but his convictions ag

Cohen, Senator William S.; and Mitchell, Senator George T. (1988). Men of zeal: A undefendable inside story of the Iran-Contra hearings. New York: Viking.

ainst Oliver North and Admiral fanny Poindexter were thrown out by a Supreme apostrophize consisting largely of Reagan-Bush appointees.

In a sense, the real beginning of the Iran-Contra participation can be traced back not to Nicaragua or to Iran, but to Vietnam. The fall of Saigon in 1975 left an American public deep divided on the meaning of the war and the means and goals of American foreign policy. Most Americans had never wholly rejected the war, as the antiwar movement did, but they had grown disenchanted to the point where they were no longer willing to support it, especially not with their sons' lives.

Conservatives were positive(p) that the war effort had been sold out, in effect, by cozy dissension and a hostile press. (This view would figure in the heavy controls imposed on the press during the 1991 Persian disjuncture War, just as the galore(postnominal) parades that followed that war were in many ways really long-delayed Vietnam parades.) Liberals were just as convinced that the U.S. had unwisely and wrongly meddled in a local dispute in a out-of-the-way(prenominal)away region for the sake of specious geopolitical theories ultimately based on anticommunist hysteria. The general public was barely convinced that it wanted no more ambiguous wars fought in "jungles."

Their real personalities were more complex. My own recollection of the hearings is that I was strike when Admiral Poindexter explained that he was not testifying in uniform because his duties had not been military in nature. It seemed to me that, unlike Oliver North, he was not drag his service into the scandal. But, in fact, in earlier preliminary affidavit he implied to Chief Counsel Arthur Liman that, with his uniform, he shed his function to give straight answers (Johnson, 1991, p. 353). Liman was also left with the impression that Oliver North, far from being a
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