Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 5, 1994 TAG: 9404050018
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARRY FLYNN NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG LENGTH: Long
After North speaks at a luncheon of the Heritage Republican Women's Club, Finger joins a small group waiting for the crowd at the Ramada Inn to thin out so she can exchange a few words with him and get a couple of autographs.
"When you testified, I was glued to the television," she tells him admiringly. North gained fame in 1987 when, as a boyishly good-looking Marine lieutenant colonel, he appeared before a televised hearing of a joint House-Senate committee inquiring into the Iran-Contra affair.
Now, Finger is one of North's adherents seeking to win him the nomination for U.S. Senate at the state Republican convention in June and to elect him in November. Some of the North loyalists are grass-roots party activists. But others, like Finger, have come out for party events for the first time, drawn in by North's considerable personal appeal.
While most share a common patriotic conservatism, often rooted in deep Christian faith, they could manifest those sentiments elsewhere, even with his opponent for the nomination, Jim Miller. The real thread that runs through all of them is even more basic than that: They believe Oliver North, and they believe in him.
Many of his most ardent supporters have met North in recent years as he has traveled the state for Republican causes. They've been locked in his iron-grip gaze. "He looks you straight in the eye," they'll often say. They've heard his speeches, peppered with patriotic references to duty, honor, country.
They believed what he told the congressional committee investigating Reagan administration support for anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua. More than that, they rooted for him against what they saw as bullying or wrongheaded legislators interfering with an anti-communist policy that was good for the world and right for America.
His supporters admire North for standing up to Congress. The image of him - a parade field-erect officer in uniform - sitting opposite a panel of legislators is burned into the national memory.
"When I saw him in his uniform, raising his hand" to be sworn in before testifying, "I said, `You give it to them,' " Finger recalled.
During the testimony, "He gave as good as he got," she said. "I admired him for it. He wasn't intimidated. And he served his country - valiantly. When they listed all his military honors, I just shook my head." Finger is married to a former Air Force fighter pilot.
"To me, he's the salt of the earth, a dying breed," Finger added. "That's the kind of man that we had during World War II."
Now 51, North has begun to show the years since his debut on the national stage. His hair, longer than when he was a gung-ho Marine, is still short but thinning now and almost all gray. The crow's feet at the sides of his eyes are deep. But if his youth has faded somewhat, the memory still stands tall. As he campaigns around the state, North taps into that vivid image of a lone soldier taking on the powers that be.
At the Virginia Beach Republican mass meeting recently, North won enthusiastic applause with a swat at the big shots of Washington: "They all know Oliver North always keeps his word, no matter how much trouble he gets into."
North admits lying to congressmen in meetings before the hearings. But he says that when he was under oath, he took the necessary heat.
"First of all, I watched him stand up to the Senate, look 'em in the eye, tell 'em exactly what he thought, exactly what he did," said Cynthia Marks, a Newport News doctor and wife of city Republican Chairman Teddy Marks.
"He took all their punches," Marks said. "Everything they wanted to throw at him, he took. And I appreciated that."
Another North enthusiast, Vernon Brown, a long-time Republican activist from Poquoson, puts it this way: "I was convinced then he was taking the rap for other people. And I still feel the same way."
Richard Rice, a systems analyst at Newport News Shipbuilding, who is going to be a convention delegate from York County, also remembers North's testimony.
"Once again, it was Oliver North unfiltered," Rice said. "And Oliver North unfiltered is a very persuasive man. Rightly or wrongly, when you listen to the man speak without the filtering system that is the media, he is an extremely persuasive man."
Despite North's declarations of fierce loyalty to Reagan, a recent letter written by the former president appeared to undercut North's credibility with some Republicans.
Reagan said he was "getting pretty steamed by the statements coming from Oliver North" and said North's claims that he met privately with Reagan were false. Even this, however, has been insufficient to sway many North loyalists.
"I take second place to no one in my admiration for Ronald Reagan," said Harold Williams, a retired Newport News surgeon.
Williams said he piled his wife and four of his five children into the family station wagon back in the summer of 1976 to drive to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, just so he could help in Reagan's unsuccessful bid that year for the party's presidential nomination.
"I admire both of them," Williams said of North and the former president. "And I think they're both trying to tell the truth."
Rice, the shipyard systems analyst, follows North's lead in blaming the Reagan letter on people misleading the former president, including possibly even Reagan's old friend, former Sen. Paul Laxalt.
"I think some political shenanigans are going on between Senator Laxalt and the Miller camp," Rice said. "And I think Mr. Reagan doesn't have the full perspective he should have.
"I just believe he has been fed largely what the media has put out about North."
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB