
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 1, 1994                   TAG: 9402030284
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MATTHEW J. FRANCK
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

WHY CONSERVATIVES SHOULD OPPOSE NORTH

Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others. ... [L]let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty.

- Abraham Lincoln, 1838

WITH RELEASE of the final report on the Iran-Contra affair by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, the events that first brought Oliver North to the nation's attention were briefly back in the news.

Conservatives who have made up their minds to support the retired Marine lieutenant colonel, now running for the GOP Senate nomination in Virginia, will consider the Walsh report little reason to reassess North's record and character. With considerable justice, conservatives regard Walsh as an unaccountable, out-of-control prosecutor who squandered scores of millions of taxpayers' dollars to little effect.

But while the Walsh report contains numerous speculations and dubious opinions, it is also a timely reminder of certain indisputable facts, as difficult as it may be at times to sift them out.

It is useful to be reminded, during this political season, that the only reason North escaped criminal punishment, following his conviction for lying to Congress and profiting personally from his Iran-Contra activities, is that he had confessed to those same offenses before Congress under a grant of limited immunity, and that Walsh was unable to prove that his prosecution was completely insulated from the use of that immunized testimony.

North may have told Congress "I don't believe I ever did anything that was criminal," and he has since maintained that his successful appeal was a "vindication." But his factual guilt has never been in doubt.

Even so, conservative Virginia Republicans who support North will no doubt reply: Consider the source - the corrupt and vindictive Mr. Walsh. And even if they cannot deny the facts about North mentioned above, is it not the case that, in his deception of a Democrat-controlled Congress, this patriotic and decorated combat veteran served his president well, helping to further Ronald Reagan's policy aims in the Middle East and Central America?

To answer that, we should consider one or two other sources, starting with Reagan himself.

In his autobiography, "An American Life," the former president revealed doubts about North's character serious enough to cause him to mention not once but twice that he was disturbed at allegations (later denied by North in sworn congressional testimony) that the Marine officer had claimed to have frequent private contacts with him.In truth, the president "knew little about about him personally ... never saw very much of him at the White House ... never met with him privately and never had a one-on-one conversation with him" until the day he fired him.

More importantly, Reagan was incensed at not having been told by North and his superior, John Poindexter, about the diversion of profits from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels. He learned late in the day "the full magnitude of how [he] had been misled," and tells us in the autobiography that before the revelations of November 1986, "I had not heard a whisper about funds being channeled from the Iranian arms shipments to the Contras - and I would not have approved it if anyone had suggested it to me."

Reagan is even careful to mention that when he called North a national hero, "I was thinking about his service in Vietnam" - not his career as a national-security aide.

A still harsher judgment was made of North by another source that conservatives ought to take seriously. Then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, in his book with Reagan, argues for the legality of both the Iranian venture and the Contra resupply. But he blames North and Poindexter for "fundamental errors" in intelligence doctrine: "crossing or combining two different covert operations," with the increased risks of failure at both ends, was the naive and dangerous idea of military men with little idea of what they were doing. And if, while deceiving the president, they thought they were serving his interests, "the effect of the diversion in terms of political support and general credibility for Reagan policies was just the opposite."

Meese also discusses one of the most disturbing episodes in North's checkered career. He reports in his book that at the time he, as attorney general, first confronted North with evidence of the funds diversion, North told him that only Poindexter and Robert McFarlane (Poindexter's predecessor as national-security adviser) were privy to the entirety of the operation along with himself. Yet the following year, in testimony before Congress, North painted a portrait of CIA chief William Casey as the real mastermind. As Meese points out, North's oral testimony is the only "evidence" of Casey's involvement, and Meese spends two or three pages making a compelling case that the whole story is bunk.

Why, then, did North pin so much of Iran-Contra on Casey, after initially failing to tell the attorney general in November 1986 of the CIA chief's involvement? Between the time Meese interviewed North and congressional investigators did so, Casey died. It seems North was seeking as much after-the-fact authority as possible from high-level officials for what he had done, and Casey's death made convenient cover.

If Ed Meese is a more credible character for Reaganite conservatives than Ollie North - and he should be - then in entwining the late Bill Casey in Iran-Contra, North very probably committed perjury before the joint congressional committee.

The leading candidate for the GOP Senate nomination, therefore, stands before us as a man who lied to Congress, a political privateer who profiteered, a deceiver who ill-served the president whom he professed to admire so much, a ham-handed and muddle-headed intelligence operative. And, it seems, a coward who would malign a dead man to cover his own backside.

It's time Virginia's Republicans took another look at the conservative candidate with both brains and ethics - Ronald Reagan's second-term budget director, Jim Miller.

\ Matthew J. Franck, an assistant professor of political science at Radford University, is a 1993-95 Salvatori Fellow with the Heritage Foundation.

Keywords:
POLITICS

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