by Bob Spitz
If only it had gone that smoothly.
The three men convened in the residence after the Sunday football games, in front of the same fan-shaped Palladian window where the top brass had met months earlier to debate the Iran initiative. Wallison hoped the president’s memory would provide a clear picture of events, but his expectations were dashed from the outset. Reagan had no recollection of approving the Israeli shipment of TOWs to Iran in August 1985. He could not remember meeting with Shultz, Weinberger, Casey, and Regan about it, nor could he recall saying he did not want to ship weapons if the United States didn’t know who it was dealing with. His memory of McFarlane’s briefing about the HAWK missile shipment at the Geneva summit was similarly vague. Regan, who was at that briefing, recounted it in detail for the president’s benefit, right down to a vivid description of the room, but it did nothing to jog his memory. When Wallison asked about the decision not to inform Congress about the shipment of weapons, there was no recollection of it.
“Do you remember Bud or John Poindexter ever telling you anything about the Contras?” Regan wondered.
“No,” the president responded.
“Well, that’s the story you’ve got to tell.”
Reagan’s lack of memory was alarming—and encouraging. Could the mind of the President of the United States be that cloudy, that confused? What did that say about his ability to govern? Then again, if he couldn’t remember issuing orders to sell the weapons, as he claimed, then perhaps that was evidence that he wasn’t directly involved, that others had run the various operations behind his back and the responsibility lay with them, not the president. It was a precarious strategy to base one’s testimony on, but it was a strategy nonetheless.
As evidenced by his wispy diary entry, the president wasn’t getting all worked up about it. He was more concerned about an upcoming surgery on January 5 to remove an obstruction from his prostate and the wear and tear it would have on his seventy-six-year-old body. He grew more unsettled after a spinal prep that left him with “total numbness from the waist to [his] toes”—a sensation that must have dredged up his postoperative shock in Kings Row. Nancy Reagan intended to see he got plenty of downtime to heal after returning to the White House, and she issued orders that nothing be scheduled for her husband for a period of six weeks, to prevent any setbacks. At the very least, she wanted him to avoid any public activity for the remainder of the month, based on the advice of astrologer Joan Quigley, who “told her that January was a bad month for the President.” That meant no appearances, no speeches, no press conferences, no travel, no unnecessary meetings—no exceptions.
This ran counter to the agenda Don Regan had set for the president. In an effort to show the country that Ronald Reagan was still able-bodied, still in charge, not “an old man hiding behind his desk in the White House . . . for fear of what this Iran-Contra thing would show,” Regan had set up an active schedule of appearances in order for the president to highlight forthcoming policy initiatives—the line-item veto, Star Wars, a possible INF treaty with the Soviets.
“Absolutely nothing doing,” the First Lady told the chief of staff. “He isn’t going to move.”
That edict was, more or less, a declaration of war. Nancy Reagan made it clear that she ran the show; Don Regan wasn’t about to let her usurp his duties and dictate the Oval Office schedule. In the meantime, she continued to badger him about replacing Bill Casey. The ailing CIA director was partially paralyzed, was incapable of coherent speech, and trembled uncontrollably. The president was waiting for the proper time to ask Casey to step aside, but the First Lady wanted Regan to expedite the process. She called his office repeatedly throughout January—about Casey, but also about a multitude of other things that irked her about the administration. “She had CNN on all day long in the residence,” says Jim Kuhn, “and when she heard something or saw footage she didn’t like, she’d call. ‘Why is Ronnie saying this? Why isn’t Ronnie saying that?’ All the time—she called all the time.” Eventually, the subject of her calls turned to policy in the upcoming State of the Union address, things she wanted to be taken out of the speech—references to abortion and Iran. That’s where the chief of staff drew the line. He took it up with the president.
“Look, this is wrong,” Regan told him. “Your wife’s interfering in the schedule. And I don’t think you should be sitting still, Mr. President.”
Ronald Reagan assured his chief of staff that he’d rein in his wife to the extent that he could, but it was no easy matter.
And she had new targets now, Pat Buchanan and Larry Speakes. Buchanan was too much of a hard-liner for her taste, dragging her husband too far to the right with his inflammatory positions on the Contras, the Tower Board, South Africa policy, and abortion. If he intended to launch a bid for the presidency in 1988, as insiders were hinting, she was not about to let him do it from the Oval Office. Buchanan asked to be named ambassador to NATO, but that was a nonstarter—he was too provocative, too much of an agitator. With his power at the White House sluicing away, Buchanan announced he would be leaving as communications director in February.
Larry Speakes would follow him out the door. His job had been in jeopardy since July 1986, when an incident on board Marine One, the presidential helicopter, sealed his fate. The president and First Lady had been staying at the Rockefeller estate in Sleepy Hollow, along the Hudson River in New York, in preparation for an appearance at the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. On the fifteen-minute flight to New York City, the Reagans were engrossed in the morning newspapers. Nancy read one of the president’s quotes aloud from an article in the New York Times. Refolding the paper, she said, “I don’t remember you talking to the press last night.” Her husband squinched up his face. “Hell, I never said that.” While this scene was unfolding, Jim Kuhn leaned back to where Speakes was sitting and whispered, “You’ve got to knock this stuff off.”
Speakes and his deputy, Mark Weinberg, were known to “polish up”—that is, enhance, revise, or even make up quotes to showcase the president in a more distinctive light. They’d ginned up a humdinger after the Geneva summit in an effort to brighten an otherwise lackluster result. “We were in the back of the car,” Weinberg recalls, “and came up with: ‘The world breathes easier because we have met.’” Before the ink was even dry, Speakes was at a lectern, saying, “The President told Gorbachev . . .” Until the incident in the helicopter, the practice went pretty much undetected. Now it was clear that Speakes would have to find another job.
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Everyone was tense about the president’s appearance before the Tower Commission. So much was riding on what he remembered about his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. According to George Shultz, “The President had completely buffaloed himself, truly believing that he had not traded arms for hostages.” What would Reagan say when he was under oath? He’d refrained from speaking publicly about it, in part so as not to accidentally contradict or incriminate himself, but also to place himself above the fray. But on January 26 he was called to account. In a secret session, he stumbled over details and was inconsistent in his answers to the panel’s questions. Eventually, he admitted that he’d authorized the arms shipments from Israel to Iran in August 1985, as Bud McFarlane had already testified, and that he’d agreed to restore Israel’s stock of weapons.
Little did anyone know that Reagan had gotten his hands on a copy of McFarlane’s testimony and had used it to refresh his memory. Afterward, his stupefied advisers reconnoitered to walk the president through a reconstruction of events, in effect coaching him to say he was “surprised to learn that the Israelis had shipped the arms,” and that once he was informed, his only recourse was to relent: “Well, what’s done is done.” If he relied on McFarlane’s testimony, it would shake out that he hadn’t authorized the arms shipment in advance, necessitating a second appearance before the Tower Commission so he could set the record straigh
t.
In the meantime, on January 29 the Senate Select Committee issued its official report on the investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. It reached a damning verdict, calling the operation an irrefutable arms-for-hostages deal and concluding that President Reagan had approved all aspects of it. What’s more, it revealed that the NSC had provided top-secret military intelligence to the Iranian government and that CIA operatives controlled secret bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands for the purpose of supporting the Contras. The report traced a tangled web of deceit that Reagan administration officials had woven: how McFarlane had lied to a Senate committee about the role of Manucher Ghorbanifar; how North told CIA officials that the president had signed a finding that never existed; that Poindexter and Casey lied to Shultz about ending the Iran operation; that Casey masked the CIA’s involvement to avoid having to report to Congress; and that U.S. officials lied about the cargoes the various planes were carrying.
The Senate report threw more suspicion on Bud McFarlane’s part in the affair. As a result, the Tower Commission summoned him to testify for an unprecedented third time. It was daunting to McFarlane, a proud, honor-bound Marine, that he should now have to confess he’d taken part in a cover-up and had lied under oath. He’d given the board his word that the NSC hadn’t solicited foreign contributions for the Contras, but he could no longer stand by that account. He felt alone, abandoned. The president could have exonerated him during his State of the Union address, in an ideal world could have admitted his own role and taken responsibility. But Reagan had ducked the issue, saying only that it was time for the country to put the unpleasantness behind it. That hurt McFarlane in a deep and personal way.
McFarlane grew despondent. He didn’t know how he could bring himself to recant his testimony, especially in front of John Tower and Brent Scowcroft, both of whom he considered mentors. The night before he was scheduled to appear, he drifted into a dark place, brooding about the mess he was in. He was exhausted, empty; he had nothing left in him. Letters were written—to his lawyer and members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, confessing to concealing the foreign contributions. The contents of a third letter, to his wife, Jonny, have never been revealed. But after he wrote it, McFarlane propped it against his briefcase, where she was sure to find it, then gulped down more than twenty Valium pills, washing them down with wine. Then he crawled into bed, expecting to die.
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The next day, February 10, while McFarlane lay recuperating in the hospital, the Tower Commission disclosed that there were additional matters it intended to discuss with the president. The board’s investigators had come across documents that revealed meetings Oliver North had had in Germany with Iranian officials in October 1986, at which time he shared top-secret U.S. intelligence concerning the position of Iraqi forces. The board also had data that tied the NSC to Contra aid. Furthermore, there were transcripts of conversations North had with the Iranians in which he claimed “he had walked in the woods with the President of the United States at Camp David, and they had talked about how admirable the Iranian Revolution was.” Even more fantastic, North boasted that Reagan expressed great admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ronald Reagan was furious when North’s comments were shared with him. “That’s just bullshit,” he said, spitting out a word that aides had never before heard come out of his mouth. “Never happened.”
No one believed for a moment that it had. North had never been at Camp David, nor was he ever alone with the president, as White House records confirmed. He’d most likely uttered this nonsense in an attempt to butter up the Iranians, hoping to get the hostages released. Nevertheless, wild statements such as these, which North had made as a representative of the United States, had the potential to backfire later. The more Reagan learned, the angrier he got. It finally dawned on the president that North wasn’t the American hero he thought he was.
But by the time of Reagan’s second go-round with the Tower Commission in the Oval Office, on February 11, the focus was on whether he’d authorized the August arms shipment in advance. This time he was more prepared—too prepared, in fact. He opened his desk drawer and slipped out an aide-mémoire that Don Regan and Peter Wallison had drafted and began reading from the portion that described his surprise at learning of the shipment. Unintentionally, he also read aloud their instructions to him—“You might want to go back over the question for the Tower Board”—raising the panel’s suspicion that the president’s testimony was canned.
The confusion was making Ronald Reagan look incompetent—and worse. Was he out of touch with what was going on under his nose? Was he losing his faculties? Not only did he seem at sea when it came to details and events, but the conflicting accounts, the constant flip-flopping, were destroying his credibility. His distressing behavior during the testimony had been leaked to the press and was inflicting real damage on his image.
Don Regan heard “a chorus building up—‘he’s a do-nothing president’—and it was feeding on itself.” For the first time Washington scuttlebutt raised the prospect of impeachment. “Whether Mr. Reagan leaves the White House,” the New York Times speculated, “may hinge on whether the President accepts the advice of those urging him to become more aggressive once the [Tower] report is released.”
Regan was pushing harder than ever to put the president back into circulation. It had been weeks since he’d been seen in public, and three months since he’d held a press conference. There was a desperate need to accommodate the press and to restore the public’s confidence. This was the moment, Regan explained to Nancy in a phone call on February 8. She continued to waver: Ronnie still wasn’t well enough. “We can’t have him talking to himself in the West Wing,” Regan persisted. “It looks like we’re shielding him.”
“Okay,” she said, “have your damn press conference.”
“You bet I will,” he said, and slammed down the receiver.
A few minutes later, after he had collected himself, Regan appeared in the door frame of Jim Kuhn’s office across the hall. “I’ve done a very bad thing,” he muttered to the president’s assistant. “I just hung up on Nancy Reagan.” Kuhn could tell from Regan’s hangdog appearance that he knew his days as chief of staff were numbered. Hanging up on the First Lady was an unpardonable offense. (In case anyone doubted that, her office leaked the details of the phone slamming to the Washington Post and NBC News.) So was the ongoing clamor that he had engineered the president’s embarrassing performance in front of the Tower Commission. But there was a greater wave of disapprobation amassing against him.
A draft of the Commission’s conclusions was delivered personally to the president on February 25. It left no doubt about what had transpired: Reagan had traded guns for hostages. But it credited his “obsession with the release of the hostages [as] the driving force behind the continuation of the Iran arms sales.” It also found, as John Tower emphasized in a follow-up press conference, that “the President clearly did not understand the nature of this operation, who was involved and what was happening.” Blame was placed on his “detached style, in which considerable authority was delegated to subordinates” and allowed the Iran-Contra business to “move forward without adequate scrutiny or supervision.” But its harshest criticism fell on Don Regan. “He especially should have ensured that plans were made for handling any public disclosure of the initiative. He must bear primary responsibility for the chaos that descended upon the White House when such disclosure did occur.”
He must bear primary responsibility. Those words were enough for the president to finally accept the inevitable fate of his chief of staff.
Nancy Reagan had already been reviewing possible candidates to replace Don Regan. A number of names had been bandied about: Labor Secretary William Brock; Charles Price, ambassador to Great Britain; Drew Lewis, now chairman of the Union Pacific Corp.; and longtime stalwart Paul Laxalt, the First Lady�
��s top choice. Laxalt wanted nothing to do with it. He was all too familiar with the president’s managerial style from their days as governors of neighboring states. “I’m a delegator,” Reagan had told Laxalt at the time. In the interim, Laxalt had come to understand that “he delegated everything out and didn’t know what the hell was going on in the basement.” No, the new chief had to be someone who could stand up to that kind of disengagement and bring some order to the Oval Office—a Washington insider who had stature on the Hill. There was one obvious person who fit that description, a consensus candidate: Howard Baker.
Senate majority leader until 1985 and now in private practice, Baker was respected in Washington on both sides of the aisle. He asked tough questions—none more famous than the one he’d asked during the Watergate hearings: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” And he cast tough votes—none tougher than his support of the Panama Canal Treaty, which had effectively eliminated him as Ronald Reagan’s vice presidential running mate in 1980.
Baker’s initial instinct was to decline the chief’s job. He enjoyed his current work and was making real money for a change, “over a million dollars” last year, he told an aide. If in 1988 he decided to run for president, a job he’d always coveted, it would be unwise to have the detritus of Iran-Contra soiling his résumé. Still, on February 28, as a courtesy to the Reagans, he agreed to fly from his vacation home in Florida to discuss the position. During the flight, he grew certain that he’d decline it, but as he arrived at the diplomatic entrance on the south grounds of the White House, a gate that the press did not monitor, the power of the presidency washed over him.
