It was the political scandal of the 1980s: secret missions to Iran, a Bible autographed by the president, millions of dollars diverted through Switzerland, Israeli middlemen, a network of retired spies and, lest anyone forget, the ultimate goal was to buy guns for Nicaraguan rebels.
The final chapter came Tuesday when special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh declared after a seven-year investigation that former President Ronald Reagan “created the conditions” that allowed others to break the law and prompted senior aides to cover up their actions.
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In a 566-page report, Walsh was even harsher on George Bush. He accused the former president of misleading the public during his 1988 election campaign, and he blamed Bush for “the most unjustifiable act” of pardoning six of the main participants in late 1992 shortly before he left office.
Yet Walsh’s obvious frustration suggested an ultimate lesson of what became known as the Iran-contra affair: How difficult it is to hold presidents accountable even if they flout Congress and pursue foreign policies at odds with their own public rhetoric.
As derisive as he came to be toward Reagan and Bush, Walsh conceded he did not have enough evidence to seek criminal charges against them. Both former presidents issued statements Tuesday disagreeing with the report.
The facts of the scandal were enough to challenge the imagination of a novelist such as John LeCarre, with characters such as former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North scheming in the basement of the White House to trade missiles to Iran for American hostages in Beirut and divert profits to rebels seeking to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
At the outset, many thought the scandal would rival Watergate and bring down another president. But Iran-contra never took on the immense constitutional gravity that surrounded the investigation of Richard Nixon and forced his resignation in 1974. It ended much as it began, in a stew of intense partisan bickering.
Walsh’s report comes just as a special counsel is to be named to look into President Clinton’s investment in an Arkansas land deal that has come to be known as Whitewater, for the name of the venture. The Iran-contra experience has prompted a heated debate over whether a special prosecutor is needed to conduct a non-partisan investigation or if Walsh proves that such appointments tend to become obsessive, expensive searches for wrongdoing.
In the end, Walsh’s investigation resulted in fewer than a dozen convictions of former government officials and private go-betweens, and some of them, notably of North, were overturned on appeal.
But the release of the prosecutor’s three-volume report Tuesday will undoubtedly form a foundation for history’s judgment of the entire affair and, in the process, raise questions about the candor and personal accountability of both Reagan and Bush during their combined 12 years in office.
Walsh, 82, a lifelong Republican, said Reagan “thought he was serving the country in what he did, and the fact that he disregarded certain laws and statutes in the course of it was not because of any possibly self-centered purpose.”
At the same time, the retired federal judge said that Reagan “knowingly participated or at least acquiesed in the efforts” of former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and other officials to conceal Reagan’s role when the arms-for-hostages deal became public in 1986.
And while Bush, who was Reagan’s vice president, said publicly during the 1988 presidential campaign he had been “out of the loop” on the Iran dealings, he was telling investigators privately that he had been “regularly informed of events” related to them, the report said.
Both Reagan and Bush issued denials and said Walsh’s report was unfair and drew, as Reagan put it, “unwarranted conclusions.” Meese attacked the report as being “patterned after the old Soviet model of justice: You’re guilty because I say you’re guilty, and damn the truth.”
For both supporters and opponents of independent counsels, the Iran-contra inquiry, which cost some $36 million, brought out numerous lessons.
While it can take much longer and cost more than a congressional investigation, Walsh showed that a special prosecutor may be able to delve more thoroughly into the labyrinthine record trails and testimony of government officials than congressional investigators.
It was in the summer of 1987 that the congressional inquiry inadvertently became the backdrop for Oliver North to become a national figure and a hero to those who supported Reagan and his policy of aiding the anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua at the very time Congress forbade such military assistance.
The hastily convened congressional investigation collapsed without developing any detailed evidence of the actions of Reagan and Bush after former National Security Adviser John Poindexter accepted blame and testified that he approved the diversion of money to the contras without the president’s knowledge.
Walsh said his investigators were skeptical of Poindexter’s assertions, but they could not prove that Reagan personally knew about the diversion. He does insist, however, that Iran-contra was never a “rogue operation”of aides operating independently of the president, as the White House claimed.
The final report says little new about North who, in one of several twists in the case, has embarked on a political career. North is now seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from Virginia. He has become wealthy and a popular speaker on national issues before conservative audiences.
Walsh, who has been criticized by many conservatives for spending so much taxpayer money, defended his relentless approach to the investigation. He claimed that one reason it dragged on for so long was that Bush, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, former Secretary of State George Shultz and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan all withheld personal diaries and notes from investigators until late in the inquiry.
Walsh said once he received those notes, he discovered a whole new picture behind the White House’s public statements. While Reagan publicly insisted that the U.S. would not negotiate with hostage-takers, it became clear that Reagan had known about the sale of Hawk missiles to Iran.
Walsh said Meese, too, became aware of Reagan’s knowledge and then “appeared to have spearheaded an effort among top officials to falsely deny presidential awareness of the Hawk transaction.”
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The attorney general’s investigation was “more a damage-control exercise than an effort to find the facts,” said Walsh, who added that he seriously considered prosecuting Meese for making false statements to investigators.
Meese dismissed the report as “infirm musings.”