by Bob Spitz
Rather than belaboring the pros and cons, it was suggested that McFarlane join Oliver North in London to discuss all the options with Manucher Ghorbanifar and the Israelis and report back to the president. McFarlane, who was already regretting his resignation, was only too happy to get back into the game. And he had never met Ghorbanifar, who seemed to be holding the crucial cards. The president opted to think it over.
He concluded the meeting by saying, “It’s a risky operation. But I couldn’t forgive myself if we don’t keep trying. If it should ever become public, I think I can defend it, but it will be like trying to describe how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”
It was a rare occasion when Ronald Reagan rejected the advice of his most trusted advisers—especially the secretaries of State and Defense—but this was an instance when his heart led him to make a murky choice. Those who knew him well chalked it up to his eternal optimism and unwillingness to retreat. Aides knew he tended to deal in sweeping principles. He didn’t have a great grasp of the technical aspects of policy. As an official pointed out, “He didn’t know the difference between a ballistic and a cruise missile.” But he knew what he felt: the safety of the hostages trumped legal niceties. Still, no final decision was rendered that day. The plan called for some due diligence, and Shultz, Weinberger, and Regan left the residence feeling that the operation would effectively be shut down. Caspar Weinberger recalled telling his deputy, “The baby has been strangled in its cradle.”
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Others heard the baby crying for its bottle. At a meeting in London, on December 9, McFarlane witnessed a fired-up Oliver North actively pursuing a third arms deal with Ghorbanifar, Dick Secord, and the Israelis. The encounter, at a posh safe house in the West End, revealed a troupe of players eager to engage. McFarlane was stunned at their collegial complicity, especially at the appearance of Manucher Ghorbanifar, who wasn’t at all the kind of diplomat he’d expected. “If you had to cast somebody as a shrewd, rather brutal, husky child of criminals, this was Ghorbanifar,” McFarlane recalls. “He was nothing but a self-interested arms merchant.” McFarlane’s antennae were already twitching. A few months earlier he’d been approached by Michael Ledeen, the Middle East consultant, who told him Ghorbanifar was asking for Phoenix heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, the United States’ most technologically sophisticated weaponry in the naval inventory. “Mike, you cannot be serious!” McFarlane bristled. “This is a system we don’t even sell to our allies.” McFarlane sensed they were being taken to the cleaners, but it wasn’t until meeting Ghorbanifar that he realized the extent of the full scrub. The guy was never going to deliver what he’d promised.
It was time to cut bait. “The President has decided this is not developing in the direction we had anticipated,” McFarlane told Ghorbanifar. “The opportunity for nurturing a successor to the Ayatollah is not evident, so the President has approved closing down the operation.” Ghorbanifar flew into a predictable rage. He hurled a volley of accusations at the Americans, accused them of cheating Iran, not dealing in good faith. “The hell with the hostages! Let the Hezbollah kill them!”
McFarlane had heard enough. “Go pound sand!” he told him, and strode out of the room.
The next morning, Ronald Reagan got a full report from his former national security adviser. The deal wouldn’t bear fruit, McFarlane warned the president, explaining that there was no real definable opposition cell in Iran worthy of support to either push out or succeed the ayatollah. As far as he could tell, all real dissent had been effectively eradicated by the Revolutionary Guard. Every decent family in Iran had lost a father, a brother, a husband. And then there was Ghorbanifar, “a borderline moron, one of the most despicable characters [McFarlane] had ever met.” Despite all this, McFarlane could tell his message wasn’t getting through. “The president’s gut sentiment on this was totally different,” he says. “He would have liked to have seen the government of Iran overthrown, but it was the hostages that still moved him, not the geopolitics of it.” Nevertheless, McFarlane advised the president that he had shut down the operation. Reagan was visibly chagrined. “I wish we could have found a way to keep it going,” he said.
That wish would lead the president further into trouble.
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Oliver North was already cooking up a plan. He began working the weapons angle with John Poindexter, who was disposed to keep the operation going. They decided to simplify the process by eliminating Israel from the picture and dealing directly with the Iranians. Without a middleman, they could show a tidy profit—which could be used to underwrite Project Democracy, North’s covert Contra operation. The overall plan was baldly illegal, putting the United States in a direct deal with Iran, but if they worked it using freelancers instead of the CIA or the Defense Department, it would eliminate, so they thought, a good deal of the risk.
A parallel scenario was unfolding that interfaced with the North-Poindexter scheme. On January 2, 1986, Amiram Nir, Israel’s expert on terrorism, explained to North and Poindexter that Israel’s government was prepared to release Shiite prisoners with the understanding it would encourage Hezbollah to free the American hostages. He had already discussed the plan in London with Ghorbanifar, who suggested that shipping four thousand TOWs to Iran would certainly grease the wheels and go a long way toward aiding “Ollie’s boys in Central America.” Nir, knowing North and Poindexter were keen to divert money to the Contras, mentioned the use of profits from the TOWs for “other cooperative activities.” Israel, for that matter, also stood to profit. By shipping its arsenal of outdated TOWs to Iran, Israel would get theirs replenished with the U.S.’s latest, more technologically advanced version of the missiles. It was a win-win-win-win situation, if they all ignored the law. America got its hostages, Iran got its missiles, Israel got a weapons upgrade, and the Contras got financial support.
The president bought it. On January 6, after idly perusing a draft of the proposal, he signed a new finding that permitted the sale of weapons to Iran without notifying Congress. He wasn’t particularly troubled by the legal consequences—Ed Meese assured him he had “inherent powers as commander in chief” and that if he signed a finding it was legal. Nor was the president troubled by Ghorbanifar’s involvement, despite the thumbs-down review Bud McFarlane had given him. As John Poindexter later pointed out, “Sometimes you have to deal with pretty rotten characters.” Bill Casey assured the president that Ghorbanifar was essential to freeing the hostages.
It was Casey, more than anyone, who persuaded Ronald Reagan to pursue the initiative. At a National Security Council meeting in the Oval Office the following day, the ailing CIA director led the charge, explaining that the hostages would be released in late February if all went according to plan. Shultz and Weinberger continued to rail against the sale of arms to Iran, unaware that the president had already signed the finding authorizing it. In fact, they’d been purposely kept in the dark. “Casey believes that Cap will continue to create roadblocks until he is told by you that the President wants this to move NOW and that Cap will have to make it work,” North wrote to Poindexter on January 15. Two days later, Casey reported that Weinberger had called him to say that “his people have looked it over and signed off on the project,” but this would have been news to Weinberger, who never made such a statement, much less signed off on it. In any case, once the president was told that Cap was on board, he signed another new finding along with a memorandum prepared by Oliver North that set the arms-for-hostages deal in motion. Though the president never bothered to read the memorandum,* there was no question he knew what he was doing. The finding ordered Cap Weinberger to release 3,504 TOW missiles to the CIA on January 17. In his diary entry later that night, Ronald Reagan wrote: “Involves selling TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran. I gave the go ahead.” About the hostages, he’d written earlier: “We sit quietly by & never reveal how we got them back.”
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The president was an ardent believer in coincidence and had noted as serendipitous the two events planned for January 28, 1986. His sixth State of the Union address was scheduled for eight o’clock that evening, during which he planned to talk up his tax reform program and to congratulate the nation on its overall good health. And because of two previous weather-related postponements of NASA’s latest shuttle launch, the Challenger was set to lift off sometime just after 11:30 that morning. At last word it was all-systems-go.
Two major events, two presidential priorities.
Ronald Reagan was particularly interested in the shuttle’s mission inasmuch as it marked the flight of the first private citizen into space—Christa McAuliffe, a thirty-seven-year-old high school teacher from New Hampshire. It was the kind of heroic story he could relate to. He’d juggled his schedule to fit in a visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral to coincide with the liftoff. However, he’d caved in to aides who oversaw a last-minute rewrite of his speech that required rehearsal, and the trip was scratched.
The State of the Union address was roiled in dispute. At the congressional leadership meeting that morning, Tip O’Neill took Reagan to task for painting a misleadingly rosy picture of the unemployment rate that he intended to promote later that evening. O’Neill was especially peeved at the president’s claim that Americans on the unemployment rolls were content with their circumstances. “Those people out there can get jobs if they really want to,” Reagan argued. He cited a situation he believed to be endemic, in which “the fellow on welfare” looking for work makes a series of job-seeking calls, but when he is finally offered work “he hangs up.”
“Don’t give me that crap!” the Speaker bellowed. O’Neill, a passionate advocate for the poor, was beside himself. This was the same kind of fictitious anecdote the president used when talking about the black woman in Chicago living high on the hog from welfare checks she collected under various names. “The guy in Youngstown, Ohio, who’s been laid off at the steel mill and has to make his mortgage payments—don’t tell me he doesn’t want to work. Those stories may work on your rich friends, but they don’t work on the rest of us. I’m sick and tired of your attitude, Mr. President.”
Alan Simpson, the senator from Wyoming, tried intervening to calm things down, but O’Neill was unbowed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I just can’t sit here and listen to him talk like that.”
Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan came at the issue from radically different perspectives. O’Neill was sympathetic to people who struggled as a group. While Reagan was sympathetic to struggling people as individuals, it didn’t extend to seeing the wisdom in providing practical assistance. From his childhood, he knew well what it was to be poor, but his own up-from-the-bootstraps story had left him with disdain for those who couldn’t manage the same feat. His attitude was: “This is America, land of plenty!” A handsome, charming, white, and educated but self-made man, he didn’t see the impediments that others viewed as being insurmountable. As far as he was concerned, America provided boundless opportunity and people were responsible for their own fates. That perspective infused all of his views about domestic policy.
The you’ll-do-fine-on-your-own attitude also colored the growing AIDS crisis, which the Reagan administration regarded with apparent indifference. The president’s staff wanted him to say something in the State of the Union about the sexually transmitted virus that was decimating the nation’s gay community. As many as 12,500 deaths had been credited to AIDS in 1985, with projections ranging into the hundreds of thousands over the next few years, but so far the administration’s response to the epidemic was nonexistent. According to the White House physician John Hutton, Reagan thought of AIDS as though “it was measles and would go away.” Rock Hudson’s death in October had jolted him awake, but the White House still avoided the crisis as if it were, well, the plague. The president’s speechwriters thought he needed to acknowledge the disease, and to do it in a forum like the State of the Union address, where it would have the greatest impact.
Would he say the word “AIDS”?—that was the question being debated right up until the deadline. It was a delicate topic in 1986, when a large part of America refused to legitimize homosexuality. In the end, Reagan decided he would direct the country’s surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop, to launch a national study of the disease, but there were provisos. The Republican base had to be satisfied. No mention would be made of prevention through sex education or the use of condoms.
Just before noon, the president was briefing Larry Speakes on the details of the speech when Pat Buchanan burst through the Oval Office door.
“Sir,” he cried, “the Challenger just blew up!”
The news stunned Ronald Reagan. “Oh, no!” he sighed, covering his face with a hand.
Jim Kuhn, his assistant, ushered the president, Don Regan, and Pat Buchanan into the small study adjoining the Oval Office, where a television was already tuned to a news report. “We watched that footage play over and over without anyone saying a word,” Kuhn recalls. There it was, in living color: the Challenger lifting off flawlessly and rising with grace for a minute before erupting in a ball of flame. “Reagan seemed unable to make sense of it in his head, as if it were a movie he couldn’t follow.” The death of Christa McAuliffe touched him personally. Months earlier, he’d made the announcement that she had won the coveted seat on the flight, and her involvement in the disaster, he said, “added proximity to the tragedy—made it seem even closer and sadder to me.”
Once the immediate shock wore off, the staff underwent plans to postpone the evening’s State of the Union address. Instead, the president went on TV to offer some consoling words to the country, which had witnessed the catastrophe and was traumatized with collective grief. Relying on a script hastily cobbled together by a then relatively unknown speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, he appeared grim-faced, even a bit lost.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began haltingly, “I had planned to speak to you tonight on the State of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans.” He explained his own shock and regret before singling out the entire flight crew by name. “We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years, the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.”
He paused to collect himself, overcome by emotion. “I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff,” he said. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”
He ended with a dramatic flourish.
“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.’”
The quote was from the poem “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, a nineteen-year-old Canadian Air Force pilot who died in an inflight collision and had written those words on the back of an envelope that eventually reached his parents. The president was already familiar with the verse. In some recollections, he said it was emblazoned on a plaque outside the grade school of his daughter Patti. Other times, he insisted it was carried through World War II by a pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps—his old Hollywood buddy, Tyrone Power. Either way, the speech touched the TV audience as few had in American history. Appreciative phone c
alls and mail poured into the White House, exceeding any such outpouring in the past.
One viewer watching at home recounted being overcome by the president’s words. “As I listened to him, I had a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat,” Tip O’Neill later admitted. He considered Ronald Reagan “the best public speaker I’ve ever seen,” and that included Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Still, O’Neill refused to credit the president for anything much more than a magnetic stage presence. “He lacked most of the management skills that a president needs,” the Speaker reflected. “But let me give him his due: he would have made a hell of a king.”
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Magisterial” is a word that could have been applied to Ronald Reagan’s popularity with the general public. People identified with him as they might an understanding, big-hearted uncle. They focused not so much on what he said about policy and more on his reassuring demeanor. During the Challenger speech, he used all his actorly skills: the way he cocked his head ever so slightly to the side while maintaining perfect eye contact with the camera; the brief catch in his delivery as he appeared to be collecting his thoughts; his voice, soft but resolute; his comfort with the camera and, therefore, with the audience on the other side of it. He conjured everyone’s ideal memory of being read to as a child.
