I respected George Shultz as a man of the highest integrity. He made me wonder if there were things about the Iranian initiative I didn’t know about. So, early the next day, I asked Attorney General Ed Meese to come to the White House and I told him about George’s remarks.
Ed said some of his people in the Justice Department had already found inconsistencies in some of the things we had been saying, based on Poindexter’s remarks, about the weapon shipments to Iran. I asked him to conduct an immediate and thorough review of the events to find out exactly what had happened. It was Friday; I asked him to spend the weekend looking into the matter, and to report to me on Monday.
Nancy and I spent the weekend at Camp David, where the weather was crisp and very cold. I spent a good part of Saturday and Sunday watching myself being pilloried on television because of the Iran initiative.
On Monday morning, the Iran affair was the subject of a two-hour meeting in the Situation Room. Afterward, I wrote in my diary: “George Shultz is still stubborn that we shouldn’t have sold the arms to Iran. I gave him an argument. All in all, we got everything out on the table.”
Then, at four thirty that afternoon, Ed Meese and Don Regan brought me a bombshell: Over the weekend, one of Ed’s assistants had discovered a memorandum indicating that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, while working with the Iranians to arrange the release of the hostages, had diverted part of the money the Iranians paid for the weapons to support the freedom fighters in Nicaragua—and John Poindexter had known about it.
My first reaction was that Poindexter and North wouldn’t do anything like that without telling me—that there had to be a mistake. But Ed said he was sure, there hadn’t been a mistake, the memorandum made it clear what had happened.
In recounting this meeting in my diary that night, I used these words to discuss the revelation: “After the meeting in the Situation Room, Ed M. and Don R. told me of a smoking gun. On one of the arms shipments the Iranians had paid Israel a higher purchase price than we were getting. The Israelis put the difference in a secret bank account. Then our Col. North (N.S.C.) gave the money to the ‘Contras.’ . . . North didn’t tell me about this. Worst of all, John P. found out about it and didn’t tell me. This may call for resignations.”
After an initial reaction of surprise, shock, and disbelief to what Ed Meese had found, I told the cabinet and the White House staff that we were going to do everything we could to get to the bottom of the matter, immediately make public the discovery, and hide nothing. The worst thing we could do was try to cover it up. Early the next morning, I met with the leadership of the Congress—both houses, both parties, in one meeting—to tell them what Ed had found. Then I announced it to the press. Ed took their questions for an hour and we leveled with them, the whole truth. John Poindexter submitted his resignation as national security advisor and Oliver North was relieved of his duties on the NSC staff. Then I went on television to inform the American people what we had discovered. I asked ex-Senator John Tower, former Secretary of State (and former Senator) Edmund Muskie, and former White House National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to make a full and independent investigation to determine exactly what had happened. I also asked for the appointment of an independent prosecutor to look into the matter and determine if any laws had been violated.
69
THOSE FIRST MONTHS after the Iran-Contra affair hit the front pages were frustrating for me. For the first time in my life, people didn’t believe me. I had told the truth, but they still didn’t believe me. While I was unhappy, I never felt depressed about the situation: There wasn’t a gloom or “malaise” hanging over the Oval Office, as some writers have suggested. I just went on with my job.
Nancy says I never get depressed, and it’s true that I tend to see the positive things in life. In this case, I didn’t feel that I had done anything to feel depressed about. There’s a difference between having done something wrong and feeling bad about it, on the one hand, and, on the other, having an inner feeling that says you haven’t done anything wrong—and that’s how I felt. I knew everything I had done was within the law and within the president’s powers. But if I wasn’t depressed about what was going on, I sure felt frustrated that I couldn’t get my message across.
Every autumn, just before Thanksgiving, the president is presented with a huge turkey in celebration of Turkey Day; in 1986, it weighed fifty-eight pounds. What many people don’t know is that the president and his family don’t sit down and eat this behemoth bird: It’s a ceremonial gobbler brought for picture-taking. Then it returns home, possibly to make a return appearance the following year. It’s never put in an oven. But that Thanksgiving, which we spent at Rancho del Cielo, I felt I was the one being roasted.
The pundits claimed that the administration was “paralyzed” and “dead in the water.” That wasn’t true. We were still proceeding with our domestic and foreign policy programs. We had all kinds of things we were battling for every day. Still, the Iran-Contra hoopla caused a lot of distractions for the administration and, until all the answers were in, I knew there would be a cloud over the White House. Every day there was another “revelation” about the affair. Congressmen were demanding answers, and some were calling for the first special session of Congress since 1948.
I wanted answers, too. I told congressional leaders, who formed two committees to investigate the affair, that I was willing to go along with any effort they felt was necessary to get to the bottom of the problem. I asked them to schedule the hearings as soon as possible, and offered to waive the White House’s executive privilege so that Poindexter and North could testify openly and we could all learn the truth. In response to my request, an independent counsel was named to investigate possible criminal violations in the Iran-Contra affair. I brought home our NATO ambassador, David Ab-shire, to handle the White House’s response to the investigations, and directed him to make sure no one in the administration kept any secrets from Congress or the Tower Board. And we sent word to the lawyers representing Oliver North and John Poindexter, who knew what had happened, that I wanted them to tell the entire truth and do nothing to protect me.
As the furor continued, I came under pressure to make personnel changes. Some of this advice came from people who were very close to me, including Nancy, my children, and former political advisors like Mike Deaver and Stu Spencer.
George Shultz had to go, some said, because he’d said publicly that he opposed the Iran initiative. That was something I couldn’t conceive of: George was a patriot who had done nothing except express an opinion and stick to his principles. Along with Cap Weinberger, he’d been correct: His prediction about what would happen if the Iran initiative ever became public knowledge had been right on the mark.
A lot of people also wanted me to replace Don Regan. They said he had supported the Iran operation and hadn’t been on top of things when it started to get into trouble. But I felt that, whatever blame there might be in the Iran-Contra affair, it wasn’t his. Besides, I hadn’t needed anyone to push me to accept a proposal to meet with responsible Iranians about the possibility of establishing a relationship with the people who might someday be running the government of Iran.
There was also criticism heaped on Bill Casey, and I was urged to replace him, too. That was something I couldn’t do to a man who was fighting for his life against brain cancer.
Mike Deaver urged me to hire a criminal lawyer. He said it was likely I’d have to defend myself against criminal charges, because North or Poindexter might try to blame me for what had happened. I told him I had nothing to hide: I didn’t care what anybody said, I hadn’t done anything wrong, and didn’t want to do anything that could be construed as throwing a roadblock in the way of getting at the truth.
Christmas in Washington that year was a difficult time for all of us. As we waited for the Tower Board to complete its investigation, Nancy, as always, gave me support when I needed it, even though it was an extremely tough period on her and the children.
Nancy thought that people had served me badly and wanted me to do something quickly to restore the American people’s faith in my honesty. She wanted me to be more critical of North and Poindexter for hiding things from me—but I said that I was the one responsible for the Iran initiative, that we still didn’t know all the answers, and that it wouldn’t be fair to do that.
On Christmas Day, after spending the previous evening at the home of our friends Charles and Mary Jane Wick, we opened our gifts at the White House. There were phone calls from everyone in the family except Patti and her husband Paul, and my brother and his wife. When I spoke to Ron, I could tell something was troubling him. Two days later, when we were in Los Angeles, I found out what it was. He and Maureen told me they wanted to talk with me alone. Once again, the subject was Iran-Contra. Simply put, they said they were worried about their old man—concerned about the licking I was taking in the press—and urged me to show more anger at the people involved in the affair and fire some of them.
Maureen and Ron were trying to help me. I realized that. But I told them that I thought I was handling things the right way, and that I couldn’t fire people just to save my own neck.
• • •
A few days into the new year, after we’d returned to Washington, I had to go again to Bethesda Naval Hospital, this time for minor prostate surgery. After I was released, my doctors told me to take it easy. I went to work on a light schedule and told the cabinet and staff that the administration had been preoccupied too long with the Iran-Contra crisis and it was time to go forward.
We were still trying to free the hostages in Lebanon, but having little success at it. The situation had grown even worse since our efforts went up in smoke during November: Early in the new year, terrorists seized three American college professors in Beirut. We sent our Delta Force commando team to Cyprus with orders to prepare a rescue effort, but British officials urged us not to proceed with the operation. They said that it would be impossible to maintain secrecy over the raid and even rumors of it might cause the death of the hostages or of British emissary Terry Waite, who was in Beirut trying to free them.
Later, after we had scrubbed the rescue attempt, Waite himself was taken hostage; then still more hostages were seized. “It’s a frustrating business,” I wrote in my diary January 26, 1987. “You feel like lowering the boom on someone, but how do you do it without getting some hostages killed? We need more intelligence on who and where . . .” The next day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began making a list of targets in Iran for possible retaliation because of the hostage-taking; but we knew that any application of military force could bring harm to the hostages.
I appointed Frank Carlucci, a former CIA official, to succeed John Poindexter as national security advisor, and he appointed as his deputy a brilliant army officer, Lieutenant General Colin Powell. Together, they began tightening the lines of authority inside the NSC, while the State Department took over the portfolio for exploiting any opportunities to reestablish relations with Iran.
Bill Casey’s continuing absence from the CIA was causing problems there. Although his doctors said it was unlikely that he could ever return to his job, they said that if we told him that, it would probably set back whatever chances he had for a recovery. That left us with a dilemma. We decided to wait a few weeks; if, as the doctors predicted, he still did not recover enough to go back to the CIA, I would offer him a job in the cabinet (eventually I offered him the post of counselor to the president, Ed Meese’s old job, and he was delighted by it) while we began a quiet search for a successor. I initially favored former Senator Howard Baker, who had a reputation for high integrity and had been an outstanding majority leader in the Senate, or Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington lawyer. Williams wanted the job—but before we could offer it to him, he discovered that he, like Casey, was dying from cancer. Ultimately, we persuaded FBI director William Webster to take the job at CIA, and we found another job for Howard Baker.
It has been reported that I replaced Don Regan as White House chief of staff because I thought he did not do a good job of “protecting” me from political damage during the Iran-Contra problem—but in fact I never felt that way, and Iran-Contra had nothing to do with his replacement. I had appointed Don secretary of the treasury on the advice of some of the members of my old Kitchen Cabinet in California; they’d called him a wizard on economic matters. He had gone on to do an outstanding job at the Treasury Department, especially by helping get tax reform off the ground and in winning Wall Street’s support of the economic recovery program; he was one of the strongest advocates in the cabinet for sticking with the economic recovery program after David Stockman and others began urging me to abandon it. But I was to learn that I had created some problems when I appointed him to succeed Jim Baker as White House chief of staff.
As I’ve mentioned, being president sometimes isolates you from events going on right around you: Many people are reluctant to tell you things that they think might cause you worries; some believe you only want to hear “good” news. Many in the administration were less reluctant to speak up to Nancy about troublesome matters—I guess they knew she had my ear—and I’d discovered long before I got to the White House that she was gifted with a special instinct that helped her understand the motives of some people better than I did. In a way, she gave me an extra set of eyes and ears.
I learned from Nancy and then from others that many people—staff members, cabinet members, and congressional leaders—felt that Don had an oversized ego that made him difficult to deal with. Because of the way he treated people, I was told, morale was bad among the staff. According to some, Don thought of himself as a kind of “deputy president” empowered to make important decisions involving the administration. Although I only found out about it later, he resisted having others see me alone and wouldn’t forward letters or documents to me unless he saw them first. In short, he wanted to be the only conduit to the Oval Office, in effect making that presidential isolation I just complained about even more complete. Nancy, ever protective of me, had been among the first to urge me to let Don go after the Iran-Contra affair began—although, as I’ve said, I didn’t believe he had done anything to warrant it. But the morale issue was another matter, and I decided to look into it, especially after new problems came up following my surgery in January.
My doctors told me to take it easy for up to six weeks after the operation. Nancy, always a doctor’s daughter, wanted me to follow their orders. After I left the hospital, she said she thought Don was pushing me too hard in scheduling public appearances, and at one point she called him about it. He ended the conversation by hanging up on her. That night, in early February, when I came up to the family quarters after work, she was very upset and told me how he had hung up on her. I was troubled by this kind of temperamental outburst, especially toward Nancy, who has always had only my best interests at heart.
By then, many other people in the administration were confirming what Nancy had told me about the morale problem and about Don’s efforts to shield me from virtually all opinions other than his own. Once it started, I heard the same thing over and over again: Don required everything to go through him. Just down the hall from the Oval Office, he was in a position to do that. I had always liked Don and enjoyed his Irish humor, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to run the store.
Several times during the previous year, Don had told me he wanted to return to private life, and in November he had submitted a letter of resignation. But after the Iran-Contra affair started to heat up, he said he didn’t want to leave until it was resolved, because if he did it might appear that he was admitting blame for it. I respected that and asked him to stay. At the same time, aware that he was anxious to leave, I started thinking about a replacement, so I’d be ready whenever he gave the word.
By the middle of February, when the release of the Tower report was only a few days off, the complaints about Don had become a chorus. There were reports that he had claimed Nancy was behin
d my appointment of Jack Koehler as White House director of communications. (Koehler subsequently withdrew his name from consideration after reports surfaced that he had belonged briefly to the Hitler Youth organization as a ten-year-old boy.) I wrote in my diary February 22: “That does it. Nancy had never met Koehler and had had nothing to do with his appointment.” The next day, after the usual morning staff and NSC meetings, Don came alone into the Oval Office. I let him know I thought it was time for him to leave. We agreed that he would depart after I chose a successor and the Tower Board made its report public.
On February 25, the day before I was to receive the report prior to its public release, I got a surprise: Through an intermediary, I learned that Don had changed his mind. He wanted to remain chief of staff through April, then be appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to succeed Paul Volcker, whose term was scheduled to expire that summer. Don never brought this proposal up to me personally, so I can’t confirm whether or not it was true. But I sent word to him that it couldn’t be.
The next day, George Bush and Don had lunch. Afterward, I noted in my diary that George said he’d observed “for the first time a side of him [Don] he hadn’t seen—an outburst of temper. Finally, [Don] snarled he’d be out of here Monday or Tuesday.”
That evening, I asked Paul Laxalt to come to the White House and told him I’d like him to take on the White House job. But he said he might make a run for the presidency and didn’t want to take himself out of the running by taking the job. “His candidate,” I wrote, “is former Senator Howard Baker. It’s not a bad idea. He thinks Howard is looking for a graceful way of getting out of running for president. I’d probably take some lumps from our right wingers, but I can handle that. . .”
The entry for February 26 continued: “VP just came up—another meeting with Don. This time totally different. He says he’ll hand in his resignation first thing Monday morning. My prayers have really been answered.”
An American Life Page 56
