Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  “What am I doing here?” he facetiously asked Jim Kuhn, who met him at the entrance.

  “Senator, he needs you,” Kuhn answered. Baker just grinned in response. Upstairs, in the residence, when he saw the president standing by himself in front of the Palladian window, all his defenses slipped away.

  “Howard,” the president said, shaking Baker’s hand, “we’ve got a bad situation on our hands here, and I need you to be my Chief of Staff.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Baker said, “All right.”

  Paul Laxalt, who was also there, suggested that the president invite Don Regan to join them so that a peaceful transfer of power could be arranged.

  “No, George has got that in place,” Reagan said.

  He dreaded any confrontation of the sort, especially with Regan. To head off the possibility, he’d delegated George Bush to deliver the bad news the next day so he wouldn’t have to face his chief of staff.

  Laxalt knew it would leak before then and said, “There’s no way you’re going to hold this [until then]. If you don’t tell Don, you’re going to have a hell of a problem.”

  He was right. CNN had the story within the hour. Frank Carlucci, the new national security adviser, listened to the report and headed straight into Regan’s office. Regan was stunned—and furious. Two days earlier, on February 26, George Bush had assured him he would have until March 2 to prepare for a gradual, face-saving exit.* Anything less would impugn his years of service. “I deserve better treatment than that,” he’d told the president himself. But, this—this was a slap in the face. He sat down at his desk and scratched out a one-sentence letter of resignation, then grabbed his hat and coat and left in a huff. He never returned.

  * * *

  —

  By every account, the Tower Commission report left the president “badly shaken.” But at least he felt a corner had been turned. One thing was certain: the culture of the White House needed an overhaul, starting at the top. Paul Laxalt warned that Reagan “can’t delegate freely” anymore. “For the first time in his political career he has to develop a hands-on approach.” Howard Baker’s debut as the new chief of staff brought a measure of confidence, a boost to morale. He had assured Reagan on his first day in office “that you are the President and I am not.” That was a step in the right direction. So was Baker’s announcement that there would be no wholesale housecleaning. The only change at the outset was to discharge Regan’s Mice, who had complained to Baker’s aides that the president was “inattentive and inept. . . . He was lazy; he wasn’t interested in the job.” In their place, Baker installed Ken Duberstein as his deputy chief of staff (primarily to deal with Nancy Reagan) and a young Tennessee protégé, Arthur Boggess Culvahouse, whom everyone called A.B., charging him to “find out everything there is to know” about Iran-Contra, but to give “special emphasis to the diversion of funds,” because that held the potential to create enormous problems. “You don’t want to be the only White House counsel to have your client convicted in an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.”

  Culvahouse briefly talked to the president. From what he could tell, many details revealed in the Tower Commission report clashed with what Reagan thought he knew. “He was still resisting the notion that he had traded arms for hostages,” Culvahouse says, “and we had to disabuse him of that.” Baker, who was standing by, said, “You told me you did not know about the diversion of funds. I want you to repeat it for A.B.” A bit awkwardly, the president said, “There wasn’t supposed to be any extra money.” All three men exchanged satisfied nods.

  “We need a communications strategy, Mr. President,” Baker said, “to start to deal with the loss of trust.”

  A speech. He had to address the nation, make a full confession, admit to the American people he traded arms for hostages. But even while such a speech was being drafted, the president was reluctant to take the rap. “He kept arguing that the arms went to people who had influence over the hostage takers,” says A. B. Culvahouse, “not to the hostage takers themselves. I assured him the facts revealed otherwise, but he still had a tough time admitting it.” Stu Spencer was recruited to sort this out with Reagan, but found him foggier than ever on the facts of the case. Spencer needed help to make the president understand his role in the mess, to accept the reality of what had been done and his obligation to be held accountable for it. It was the only way he could put the controversy behind him.

  On February 27, 1987, Spencer summoned John Tower to the White House, which was a dicey proposition. Assisting the president on his response to the Tower Report only a day after it had been issued could be considered, at the very least, a conflict of interest. To avoid notice, Spencer says, “We snuck Tower in through Treasury, underneath the Oval Office, and directly up to the residence, where the Reagans were waiting.”

  It was anything but a pleasure-filled reunion of old friends. “Poor Tower got so emotional when he arrived,” Spencer recalls. “He’d always been a big Reagan supporter, and now this.” He laid it on the line to the president in no uncertain terms about the board’s findings. “What you’re saying is not consistent with what the public believes. Just buckle down, take the heat. It’s not going to destroy your presidency.” It was pretty brutal. Afterward, Reagan stood and thanked Tower for his service to the country. “It was too much for John,” Spencer says. “He fell apart, he started crying.”

  The president was convinced by Tower to speak honestly to the public, to accept his complicity in Iran-Contra, and to acknowledge that it had been wrongheaded from the start. On March 4, he made good on his decision. In a twelve-minute televised address, he said, “A few months ago, I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.” He danced around an apology, but never quite delivered it. Activities were undertaken without my knowledge. There were secret bank accounts and diverted funds. The fault lay with some who served me. It happened on my watch, but I am still the one who must answer. “I asked so many questions about the hostages’ welfare that I didn’t ask enough about the specifics of the Iran plan.”

  To many watching, it sounded as though the president hadn’t paid attention to what was going on right under his nose. Part of the lingering problem was his reluctance to condemn the operation. “I think he privately still holds to his initial conviction—that the policy was well worth it,” Paul Laxalt summarized. Still, the reviews of Reagan’s speech were mostly favorable. Overnight polls showed a slight boost in his overall approval rating, which had suffered a serious downturn since the scandal erupted. And the press, for the most part, gave him a passing grade. “The President did what he had to,” the Washington Post allowed; “he admitted plenty, and he pledged to redeem the damage in his final two years in office.” Newsweek, however, reported that one-third of its poll respondents “say Reagan should consider resigning.”

  But even as he determined to move on, to refocus the nation’s attention on long-delayed policy such as an arms treaty with the Soviet Union and the veto of an $88 billion highway construction bill—the drumbeat of Iran-Contra continued.

  * * *

  —

  For the next six months, the drama played to rapt audiences on television and the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Congressional hearings and the ongoing investigation by the special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, provided a bounty of startling revelations that kept Americans glued to the saga in a way that competed with their infatuation with Dallas. The president had told Oliver North that his story would make a good movie someday, and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw seemed to agree. “The most popular soap opera on television this week is the Iran-Contra inquiry,” he said, “starring Lt. Co. Oliver North.” Oliver North’s secretary, Fawn Hall, described how she stuffed incriminating intelligence documents in the back of her blouse and into her boots before walking undetect
ed past White House security. It was revealed that, on a day the president was at Camp David, North and Richard Secord chaperoned three Iranians, one of whom was Rafsanjani’s nephew, through a midnight tour of the White House. And that Elliot Abrams, an assistant secretary of state, had accidentally transposed two digits of a bank account deposit so that a $10 million donation from the Sultan of Brunei intended for the Contras wound up in the personal account of a shipping company owner, who promptly withdrew it.

  John Poindexter and Oliver North were given immunity to testify, and when they did, all sorts of secret dealings came pouring out. Poindexter, defiant and proud, admitted destroying the original finding that the president had signed on November 21, 1986, which had confirmed the arms-for-hostages deal.* And North . . . North stole the show. Turning up in full battle dress, dripping medals that included the Purple Heart, he kept the audience transfixed with his bravado-filled tales of secret flights and payoffs, all in the name of patriotism and advancing the president’s agenda. In between the mythmaking, he admitted providing false statements to Congress about the NSC’s role in aiding the Contras, shredding classified documents, and misusing government funds.

  A cavalcade of rogues was implicated in the aftermath—CIA station chiefs, intelligence analysts, a Texas dowager heiress, a beer magnate, gunrunners, Arab princes and potentates. Witnesses began pointing fingers at one another, and after Bill Casey died of a brain tumor on May 6, 1987, their fingers were redirected at him with impunity. The paper trail detailing the diversion of funds had been scrubbed clean, so facts and lies were mixed liberally. The exaggerations and outright fabrications got so ridiculous that two files on A. B. Culvahouse’s desk were labeled “Oliver North Is a Liar” and “John Poindexter Is a Liar.” Wyoming congressman Dick Cheney lobbied Culvahouse for pardons for both men. “He said it was a witch hunt, that these guys thought they were doing the right thing, the Boland Amendment was unconstitutional—a usurpation of the president’s powers—and that political activity was being criminalized.”

  The only pardon being considered was for Bud McFarlane. The president was very sympathetic. McFarlane was a favorite of his—in the words of one aide, “very much beloved.” He had a conscience; he’d tried to kill himself. Ronald Reagan thought he deserved to be let off the hook. But aides convinced him that pardoning McFarlane would be akin to throwing Poindexter and North under the bus. And despite all the trouble they’d caused for the president, he still had great affection for them as well. While he was struggling with how to work out a solution, McFarlane sent word that pardoning him would be a mistake. He didn’t want a pardon and wouldn’t accept it if one was granted.

  In fact, the first person from the Reagan administration to be indicted for wrongdoing had nothing to do with Iran-Contra. On March 18, 1987, the day of the president’s first press conference in almost half a year, that distinction went to Mike Deaver, the former deputy chief of staff. Deaver had left his $72,000 White House job to start his own company and parlayed it into a multimillion-dollar lobbying concern. Along the way he’d allegedly sidestepped federal laws on influence peddling—time limits on when former top government officials were allowed to trade on their access and to cultivate business with agencies that once employed them. To make matters worse, the indictment charged that in appearances before a congressional subcommittee and the grand jury, Deaver had lied five times about his lobbying work.

  The First Lady sensed that Deaver “went off track” and was heading toward real trouble. Like everyone else in Washington, she had seen Deaver’s picture on the March 3, 1986 cover of Time, perched ostentatiously in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, talking on a cell phone, an unheard of futuristic toy, with the Capitol Dome in the background. The subtitle of the story was “Influence Peddling in Washington,” which did not bode well from Nancy Reagan’s point of view. She and Deaver still spoke regularly, and she warned him in no uncertain terms, “Mike, you’ve made a big mistake and I think you’re going to regret it.” But the warning came too late.

  It galled Deaver that he was only accused of lying but portrayed as a miscreant, while Oliver North admitted he’d lied and earned rock-star status. A pardon from the president might have put the matter to rest, but Deaver never expected one. The most that Reagan was prepared to offer came in a statement to the press: “Mike Deaver has been our friend for twenty years. We wish him well.”*

  Ed Meese was also in hot water for ongoing alleged ethical violations. The Office of Government Ethics had already concluded in 1985 that Meese had violated conflict-of-interest rules in helping his friend E. Robert Wallach obtain a noncompetitive government contract for the Wedtech Corporation. Now, in 1987, an independent prosecutor was investigating Meese’s effort to help Wallach secure government backing for an oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan.

  Morale in the Justice Department had hit rock bottom, the lowest it had been, a Justice appointee facetiously noted, “probably since the founding of the republic.” High-placed officials threatened to quit over Meese’s conduct. Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns and Assistant Attorney General William Weld actually met with the president and vice president to complain that the attorney general had created an atmosphere that made it impossible for them to continue. Reagan listened (although he nodded off during Weld’s presentation), but was unmoved. Meese had insisted he had done nothing wrong, and the president took him at his word. “I still have confidence in Ed Meese,” he told the two men. “I hope you won’t leave, but if you do there will be no hard feelings.” (In March 1988, Burns and Weld resigned from Justice. Wallach would later be convicted in a scandal involving defense contracts. Meese was charged with complicity in an influence-peddling scheme, prompting his resignation, but the independent prosecutor decided against prosecuting him.)

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1987, these embarrassments, especially the Iran-Contra investigation, drew attention away from the president’s initiatives. Progress on an INF treaty that would eliminate all intermediate- and short-range missiles in Europe generated little public excitement. Reagan’s long-overdue acknowledgment that “AIDS affects all of us,” in a major AIDS speech on May 31, drew boos from the audience, which had expected much more from him at this late date. Reagan even had a hard time focusing the nation on good news about the economy. Individual income taxes were considerably lower, the stock market had experienced a record run-up, and interest rates and unemployment were down. The view was hardly bleak. But most front pages across the country kept their focus on the nonstop scandals and what they said about the president’s disengagement as head of state.

  It was time for him to reclaim the spotlight, and he set out to do so on a nine-day European tour in early June. He zeroed in on an address he’d agreed to give in Berlin to celebrate the city’s 750th birthday. Jack Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and Reagan intended to use that as a benchmark, but significantly raise the stakes. On June 11, 1987, a crowd estimated at twenty thousand assembled in front of the Brandenburg Gate, just a hundred yards from the Berlin Wall. From where the president stood he could peer into the East, where an armed sentry stood at a brick security post. Two panes of bulletproof glass shielded Reagan in case the guard or anyone else got any ideas. There had been hope that his words would carry into the Communist sector, but East German police prohibited people from being within earshot of the loudspeakers.

  “I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do,” Reagan began, “Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin.” This line from a popular old German song translates as “I still have a suitcase in Berlin.” Endearing, though no match for JFK’s barnburner. But Reagan still had an ace up his sleeve. Later in the speech, following the introduction of an initiative to make Berlin the aviation hub of Central Europe, the president launched into a broadside questioning the sincerity of the Soviet Union’s desire for peace. “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmist
akable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,” Reagan said, his face flushed, his conviction palpable. Raising his voice a few decibels, he proclaimed, “Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace—if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—if you seek liberalization: come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

  The crowd went nuts. It was the line they’d been waiting to hear, a line that gave voice to the captivity of their city from the mouth of the President of the United States. So simple, and so effective. So Reaganesque. The line played repeatedly on television sets around the globe.

  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

  Ronald Reagan drew strength and satisfaction from the worldwide reaction to his words. But back in Washington, D.C., the mood quickly dimmed again. Throughout the rest of June and most of July, the Iran-Contra hearings continued to dominate attention in the nation’s capital, and its glare cast a collateral pall over the White House and its occupants. The testimony implicating Oliver North and his accomplices was piling up; witnesses accused him outright of being both a thief and a compulsive liar. And it was reflecting on Ronald Reagan. The president tried to make light of it, quipping, “I think the spotlight has been growing so dim in recent days that when you get a mile and a half from the Potomac River, there are an awful lot of people who have gone back to their favorite television shows.”

  If they had, however, it was out of disgust. Polls showed that only 42 percent of the public approved of his handling of the job, the lowest rating of his entire presidency. More than 50 percent thought he was lying to them. The New York Times reported that the hearings were taking a personal toll on the president. “More than ever he is showing signs of his 76 years, so much so that his memory lapses and rambling discourse are no longer a source of friendly jokes, but one of concern, friends say.” He’d always had trouble with putting names to faces. But “at a recent news conference, for instance, the President was unable to remember the name of the United Nations Security Council.” And he’d referred to his secretary of state as “General Secretary Shultz.” It didn’t help that his new defense for avoiding reporters’ questions at an event was cupping a hand to his ear and shaking his head, pretending he couldn’t hear.