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The following article originally appeard in the Conservative Digest (September
1987). It was also reprinted in an ad for the same. This is a great monthly
magazine with a format similar to the Reader's Digest. Subscription prices
vary depending upon the length of the subscription. I think it's worth you
while to check this one out. If you want more information write or call:
Conservative Digest
P.O. Box 2246
Fort Collins, CO 80522
(800) 847-0122
The testimony of Colonel Oliver North before the Iran/Contra Committees exposed
the cruel lengths to which the viciously partisan Democrat liberals were
prepared to go for a mere political advantage. Ollie North gave them all a
lesson in character.
The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North
Colonel Oliver North's appearance before the Iran/Contra committees will in
time be regarded as a watershed in the history of American conservatism, one
comparable to the Whittaker Chambers exposure of Alger Hiss. But Chambers,
while a magnificent writer, had even less charisma than does George Shultz. He
also did not have a national television audience.
The only modern televised event that conservatives have reason to compare with
North's testimony is the famous 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater that launched
Ronald Reagan's political career. That speech came too late in the campaign to
do anything significant for Goldwater, but Oliver North's efforts appear to
have salvaged the final months of President Reagan's second term, firmly
putting an end to talk of impeachment.
If the President were a man to go for his opponent's political jugular, he
would now go on television for an address to the nation. He would have Lt.
Colonel North at his side. Colonel North would proceed to show his famous
slide presentation, with whatever classified photographs the President, as
Commander-in-Chief, chooses to authorize. The presentation would stress the
possibility that if the Nicaraguan Communists are successful in their
subversion of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, up to ten million
additional refugees will illegally enter the United States from Latin America.
The President would then announce the promotion of Lt. Colonel North to full
colonel, and pin the eagles on his shoulders. That done, President Reagan
would make the following statement: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I know you are as
concerned about what Colonel North has just shown us as I am. To be sure that
the Communists who have invaded our hemisphere understand our resolve, I am
today submitting to the U.S. Senate the name of Oliver North for appointment
to the rank of brigadier general. I am asking for immediate confirmation, and
intend to place General North in charge of liaison activities with the
Nicaraguan freedom fighters. In accordance with that policy, I am asking
Congress firmly to reject the Boland Amendment by approporiating $2 billion
dollars in aid to free Nicaragua and prevent the refugee crisis that is now
looming.
"We must send these signals immediately. I will return next Monday evening to
inform you of the response of Congress. I am asking Senator Byrd and House
Speaker Wright to expedite these matters. Please write to your Senators and
Congressmen and tell them where you stand on the issue of American security.
Thank you, and God bless you."
Presto: instant end of congressional resistance against aid to the freeedom
fighters. "All those Congressmen in favor of denying Ollie North his star,
please stand up and be counted. Smile for the folks back home! You'll be
returning there permanently in 1989!" End of the Boland Amendment. Probable
end of Daniel Ortega.
My fantasy could happen. I doubt that it will, but it could.
The designated sacrificial lamb has already publicly roasted and then dined on
the Joint Congressional Committee. It happened because of Oliver North's
visible decency and refusal to bend his deeply held principles. And it came as
a terrible surprise to Congress. After all, how often does the typical
Congressman come face to face with either visible decency or deeply held
principles? Certainly not when he shaves.
Overnight Turnaround
No one, including me, had even a hint of warning that Ollie North was such a
master of the electronic medium, part St. Bernard and part pit bull, leaving
behind a canteen of hot soup for the freedom fighters and about half a dozen
casualties among the cagiest political operators on Capitol Hill. No one
imagined that he could so brilliantly combine an articulate defense of his
actions with humour, pathos, righteous indignation, deadly verbal resopnses to
the Bronx cheers of a classic Bronx lawyer, and even a verbal presentation of
an invisible slide show.
Most important, and most remarkable, he was on the offensive from the moment he
took the stand. He put Congress on trial. By the end of the first day's
hearing, it was obvious that the Committee was in very deep trouble. A sports
analogy may not fully communicate the confrontation, but the hearings reminded
me of the first fight between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay. Sonny looked mean
at the weigh-in. He glowered. He seemed unbeatable, talked unbeatable, and
failed to come out for the seventh round. So did the Committee.
At the opening bell, North landed a solid right on the Committee's glass jaw,
and it staggered around in a collective daze the whole week, oblivious to what
was happening. Heads began to clear over the weekend, except for those of
Boland, Rudman, and the Honorable and Decorated Senator from Hawaii. On
Monday, most members started grabbing for a towel to throw in. The fight was
over; the Committee had split, and the new political strategy was to praise
North's courage while trying vainly to hold on to the viewing audience.
The Viewers
The television ratings climbed, day by day. Network revenues fell, hour by
hour. The hottest soap opera in twenty years was not interrupted once by a
warning about static buildup in our socks. Word of mouth took over and
everyone who could get a TV set was watching. Millions and millions of people.
Newspapers meanwhile featured blazing headlines that called attention to the
hearings. So completely out of touch were they with what everyone had seen on
TV that Accuracy In Media should assemble a collection of those headlines as
proofs in point. (Franz Kafka, where are you now that we need you?) The story
of the headlines began with the incomparable classic displayed on the front
page of the Washington Post on the morning of July 17th, just before Colonel
North began his testimony, a headline that deserves to be in the Headline Hall
of Fame, right alongside the Chicago Tribune's 'Dewey Defeats Truman.' Here it
is: "Lacking the Old Luster, North Returns to Testify/Disclosures of his 'Dark
Side' Weaken Credibility of Affair's Most Intriguing Figure."
And then, all heaven broke loose. Day after day, the headline writers did
their best to make it look as though North had confessed to everthing short of
worshipping Allah in a mosque with the Ayatollah, but they created a major
problem for themselves. The headlines kept reminding more and more and more
people that they could watch all the fun for themselves. They could eliminate
the middleman. "Aye, there's the rub."
Millions of viewers tuned in to the hearings, and the discrepancies between
what was hapening in front of the cameras and what was being announced in those
six-word headlines were increasingly obvious to even a child. The traditional
tight little coalition between the newscasters, with their two-minute segments
of electronically spliced videotape, and the newspaper reporters, with their
six-word, bold-faced, selective headlines, was no longer fooling the people.
The people were watching the whole thing, live. "Live-action news!" actually
became live-action news, and the liberal press was exposed as it had never been
before.
The newspaper reporters could not bring themselves to describe the bruising
that North was inflicting on the Committee. It was as if they had announced
the Liston-Clay fight on the radio, round by round; "And Liston leads with his
jaw again, and again. You can almost feel the pain in Clay's fists. Liston is
standing firm, like an immovable object, while Clay bounces desperately around
the ring, hoping to avoid Liston's steady glare. This is terrible, ladies and
gentlemen. Someone should stop this fight before Clay get killed."
You could guess the fighter on whom the reporters had placed their bets before
the fight. This kind of reporting works only when nobody is watching. It only
works if the judges are crooked and the fight goes the full fifteen rounds.
But still they hoped, "Magnetic North is not the same as True North," quipped
one liberal reporter. This sounds good until you get lost without a compass.
The Committee was visibly lost, led only by counsel Liman, who wandered in
verbal circles around North's shredder. And still they hoped. Daniel Schorr
reports that Senator Inouye told him he was undismayed, that it would all look
different in print than it looked on television. What Inouye meant was that it
would all look different when recast by liberal editors who wrote the
headlines. But nobody was paying any attention to the headlines. They were
watching it live!
I called Dan Smoot on the Saturday following the first five days of North's
testimony. Dan Smoot was one of the important personalities in the
conservative revival on the 1950's, is an expert in constitutional law, and
authored The Invisible Government (1962), that first public critique of the
Council on Foreign Relations. Smoot had been the first conservative to have a
nationally syndicated television news program, was driven from the air in the
infamous Democratic Party machinations to support the Reuther memorandum, and
very much understands the power of television. I asked Dan how he evaluated
the hearings. "Colonel North has done more damage to the left in the last five
days," Dan Smoot said, "than anything I can remember in the last twenty years."
Impressions
Television images are powerful, but they last only as recollections. It is
these strong impressions that are at the heart of the left's new problem. What
remains in the public mind are North's good looks, his uniform and medals, his
unwillingness to bend, his handling of every challenge, and (above all) his
obvious integrity. Also remembered are the Vietnam-era flowing locks of
counsel Nields, the whinning voice of the leering counsel Liman, and the
scowling face of the Honorable and Decorated Senator from Hawaii.
Wether Colonel North will remain in the limelight is yet to be seen.
Predicting what will happen to a celebrity is tricky, and he is now a
celebrity. By the end of July, there were pages of pictures and stories on
Colonel North in the supermarket tabloids. The exploiters had his testimony on
the newsstands within two weeks (Taking The Stand, Pocket Books), and it took
only two weeks to produce, release, and market videotapes of the hearings.
Doubtless every major book company in the country has been trying to contact
him for exclusive rights to his autobiography. Reader's Digest will no doubt
run the condensed version. Wether Tom Cruise will star in the movie, I cannot
say. What I can say for sure is that the conservative movement has been given
one summer of delirioius happiness, and a million of Richard Viguerie's
direct-mail appeals with Ollie North's picture on the envelopes were dropped
into the mail within the week.
It is not the celebrity status of Colonel North that is crucial to the
conservative movement. What is crucial is that an honorable man stood up
publicly in front of the whole nation with everything he valued at stake and,
in the name of a higher ideal than political and personal expediency, directly
confronted the congressional poltroons- politicians who are recognized by the
public as weak-willed, opportunistic, blindly partisan, and possessed of no
vision longer than tomorrow's headlines.
The public is well aware that hypocrisy is a way of life in Congress, but
Americans are seldom given an opportunity to see a real man with authentic
integrity, proven courage, and detailed knowledge fight it out with the gutless
frauds and intellectual pygmies and the know- nothings who run Congress. The
media monopoly of the left has therefore failed, giving the right new life, a
new face, and a new ideal of personal style and dedication.
Judge Gerhard Gesell
But after all the cheering has ceased, and the television crews have gone back
to producing footage intended for careful editing, and the network-news
broadcasters return to their preferred calling of systematically misinforming
the American public and selling advertising time- above all, selling
advertising time- the nagging questions still remain: Who was right, North or
Congress? Who has control over American foreign policy, the Executive or
Congress? If Congress refuses to fund an operation, can the President legally
fund it by diverting money from discretionary funds? If every expenditure is
listed in the Budget, have we given the Soviet Union too much information?
The key questions today are these: If Congress is so short-sighted as to allow
the forces of international Communism to surround this nation, and if the
public allows Congress to get away with this retreat from responsibility, isn't
it the constitutional obligation of the President to thwart the intentions of
Congress? Can he do so even when he signs legislation that hampers his
decision-making ability?
Conservatives of long standing remember similar arguments in the late 1930's,
and again in the years immediately following World War II. There is not much
debate among professional historians today concerning President Roosevelt's
determination to take the United States into the European war, even when it
meant covering up naval battles with German submarines in the North Atlantic,
lying to the public during the election campaign of 1940, and misleading
Congress at every opportunity. Almost everyone now agrees that F.D.R. did
these things, though they were denied by professional historians until the
early 1970's. The question today is: Was Roosevelt correct? Was he
constitutionally empowered to thwrart the isolationist impulse of the voters
and Congress after 1936? His supporters argue that he acted deviously but
properly in a just cause.
This legal issue still confronts us today. Sixteen Congressmen and Senator
Helms have gone into federal court to plead that the President abdicated his
constitutional responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces by
signing the legislation known as the Boland Amendment, which in fact has
reappeared in several incarnations over the years.
In perhaps the oddest of ironies in recent years, this question is about to
come before Judge Gerhard Gesell. What the plaintiffs did not know when they
submitted this case for Judge Gesell's consideration is that, years before he
was elevated to the bench, Gerhard Gesell was the birghtest young light in the
law firm of Dean Acheson, before Acheson served as Secretary of State. It was
Gesell who left Acheson's firm to become Democratic counsel for the famous
Pearl Harbor investigations of late 1945 and early 1946. The hearings
investigate these questions: Who was responsible for the debacle at Pearl
Harbor in 1941? Did Roosevelt have advance knowledge that the attack was
coming and refuse to give warning inorder to assure popular support for U.S.
entry into the war? Or was knowledge witheld from the President by General
Marshall? These questions are stirkingly similar to today's": Who was
responsible for setting the terms of the Iran/Contra deal? Did Reagan know
that some sort of deal was being worked out? Did he know any of the details?
But the underlying question in the late 1930's and early 1940's was this: Who
is properly in charge of American military and foreign policy? This is still
the unanswered question.
It is therefore an oddity of history that Gerhard Gesell will decide wether to
hear this case (the decision may already have been made by the time your read
this). If he does hear it, will he begin to sketch out a constitutional
solution? He was a defender of Roosevelt in the hearings of 1945 and 1946.
Will he be a defender of Reagan today? Conservative Republicans denied after
the war that Roosevelt had possessed such constitutional perogatives in
1937-1941. The Democrats said that the President did possess such authority.
Today, the Republicans argue that Reagan does have such constitutional
perogatives. The Democrats deny it. History plays strange tricks.
The Boland Amendment(s)
The original version of the Boland Amendment was signed into law as a rider to
a huge appropriations bill on December 21, 1982. It was part of the funding of
the Department of Defense. This rider specified that no Defense Department
funds or C.I.A. funds could be used to finance the armed forces of any group
seeking to overthrow the Communist tyranny in Nicaragua. The next year, some
money for the freedom fighters was appropriated by Congress despite Boland's
rider, but another Boland rider was added to prohibit any intellignece agency
from aiding the freedom fighters. This included direct and indirect aid.
It is important to note, however, that the President's own staff, which is not
an intelligence agency, cannot be and was not prohibited from acting under
Presidential authority to further the President's foreign policy. In addition,
remember that the various Boland riders contain no criminal penalties or
sanctions of any kind. Without sanctions, Congressman Boland's rider is as
dead a letter as the 1978 law, Public Law 95-435, which absolutely requires the
government to balance its Budget. There are no sanctions attached to that
piece of politically utopian legislation, either. Congress ignores it, the
President ignores it, and the voters ignore it. Yet a Committee filled with
character assassins tried to humiliate Colonel North in front of the American
people by accusing him of breaking the Boland law as if it were the law of
Moses instead of a toothless and goofy political whim.
The Boland rider pretends to limit the spending of U.S. tax dollars. It
limits spending no more effectively than Public Law 95-435. In any case, it
does not affect the spending of Iranian tax dollars. The worst they could do
with Colonel North is to prosecute him on some kind of trumped-up tax charge.
Do you think they want to try that one on national television? Current polls
say Americans oppose such a move by a ratio of four to one.
Congress no more cares about the President's unwillingness to obey the Boland
rider than it believes in balancing the Budget. It cares far less about the
Constitution than it cares about looking good on television. Congressmen care
about television ratings. Colonel North got them the ratings they so deeply
desired, and then beat them to a pulp in full view of millions. They resent
him deeply for that, but there is nothing they can do about it without facing
the vengance of the voters.
What the Committees and their legal counsels, Mr. Nields and Mr. Liman,
apparently believe is that it was the legal obligation of Oliver North to plow
through the legal precedents of all restrictive legislation similar to Boland's
famous riders, and then come to a conclusion regarding the constitutionality of
his assignment. More than this, in their view, Colonel North was supposed to
conclude that Congress's preferred version of the legal issues is in fact
correct, that the riders are fully constitutional, that they do apply to the
National Security Council, and that the financing of the freedom fighters by
that old fighter for freedom, Mr. Khomeini, clearly violated Boland's swarm of
riders. That is laughable.
Conclusion
Congress is a victim of self-inflicted wounds. The daily display of idiocy and
hypocrisy that is transmitted by satellite to possibly a thousand catatonic
viewers by C-SPAN when it telecasts debates of the U.S. House of
Representatives was at long last seen firsthand by millions of viewers on
network television. Congress did itself a real disservice: It went public,
without editing or commercial interruptions. It also created a media hero.
This was not difficult, since Colonel North, unlike most media heroes, happens
to be the real article. A real hero is easy to define: He is one who
volunteers for a righteous but dangerous job that nobody else wants, risks
everything but his highest purpose, and when he is discovered stands up to his
accusers and tells them that his goals were honorable, his methods were
legitimate, and appeals to a jury of his peers- the millions of Americans
watching on television.
See Congress run. Run, run, run. See the commentators fume. Fume, fume,
fume. The Young Republicans sold a hundred thousand "North for President"
bumper stickers in the first week of the hearings. That sounds like a good
idea to me. A vote for North is a vote in the right direction.
Would he settle for the U.S. Senator from New York or Virginia? Neither Pat
Moynihan nor Paul Trible would know what hit them.
Electronic reprint courtesy of Genesis 1.28 (206) 361-0751