Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 15, 1993 TAG: 9301150439
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THOMAS F. EAGLETON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WALSH'S PROBE
IN VARIOUS facets of public endeavor, there is a time to come and a time to go; there is a time to make your case and a time to make your closing argument. Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, has reached the time-to-go point.Six years ago, when Walsh, an Eisenhower Republican and former judge, was appointed independent counsel by a federal appellate panel, he faced a systematic pattern of obstruction and cover-up. Beneath all the blaming rhetoric, the laws were clear: (1) It was illegal to sell military equipment to terrorist nations, and (2) it was illegal to provide governmental aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration repeatedly voiced its enthusiastic support of (1), and begrudgingly stated it was in compliance with (2). But it was violating both laws. Arms were being sold to Iran, our most despised terrorist adversary, and the profits of the sales were being siphoned off to the Contras.
At the outset, no one seemed to know much about anything. Iran-Contra was a policy that had no parentage. President Ronald Reagan forgot all that he supposedly never knew and Vice President George Bush was "out of the loop" - so they claimed. Documents were shredded; disavowals and vague memories were the order of the day.
The earliest hearings in 1986 were before the Senate Intelligence Committee. They didn't produce anything close to a final picture of what happened in Iran-Contra, but those hearings did convince the senators in attendance that administration witnesses were not telling the whole truth.
In 1987, the congressional Iran-Contra committee awkwardly did its work in shedding more light on the affair, but at a price: messing up the independent counsel's cases against Col. Oliver North and Adm. John Poindexter. The independent counsel labored to obtain guilty pleas and convictions from other Iran-Contra players who willfully deceived Congress in their testimony - "perjury," it is often called.
Iran-Contra was more than a philosophical policy disagreement between Congress and the president. Iran-Contra was the willful violation of existing laws, and the attempted cover-up of the illegal activities through the destruction and withholding of documents and the submission of perjured testimony. The Iran-Contra participants all have been motivated by patriotism as they understood it, but when they lied under oath, they crossed over the red-white-and-blue line into the darkness of willful criminality.
It all came to an end with the pardon of Caspar Weinberger and the others. No one, including Judge Walsh, wanted the aging Weinberger to do time in Leavenworth. The purpose of the prosecution was to hold Weinberger fully accountable, like any other witness under oath, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. President Bush, in the final cover-up, robbed both Walsh and Weinberger of their respective days in court.
For Walsh to proceed further would damage the work that he has done and jeopardize the prospects for re-enactment of a new independent-counsel law. Walsh has the opportunity to write a definitive final report that will come closer than any other document to piecing the Iran-Contra puzzle together.
Walsh's ultimate accomplishment will be in summarizing what is known and the pinpointing of the obstructions he faced in finding even more. In historical terms, Iran-Contra will have to rest in pieces.
Thomas F. Eagleton, a Democratic senator from Missouri from 1968-1987, is University Professor of Public Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis.