In My Time - Dick Cheney [77]
He emphasized again that he had not known about the diversion of funds to the Contras, which was better than if he had known, but troubling nonetheless. Iran-Contra wasn’t Watergate, though plenty of Democrats were trying to make it seem that way, but as I noted on NBC’s Meet the Press in late December, “Clearly something went haywire at the White House,” and the president’s “lack of involvement in some of those details is at the root of the problem.”
President Reagan did not have to wait long for the congressional inquiry he said he would welcome. In the first week of January 1987, both the Senate and the House formally appointed investigative committees. Bob Michel named me the ranking Republican on the House side, passing over more senior members. I suspect he chose me in part because I was already involved, having been his representative at the initial meetings when everyone else was out of town. But he also knew of my deep interest in national security issues, and I suspect he trusted me to do what needed to be done without any grandstanding.
In preparation for the hearings, I hired some top-notch people, including Tom Smeeton, who was minority counsel for the Intelligence Committee, to be minority staff director, and George Van Cleve, a lawyer who had worked in my congressional office, to be minority counsel. For the minority editor and writer, I chose Michael Malbin, who had a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell University and had also worked for several years as a reporter at the National Journal. He had recently been studying conflicts between the executive and legislative branches of the government, giving him particularly valuable expertise.
The most dramatic moments of the hearing began on July 7, when Oliver North, who had been on Reagan’s National Security Council staff from 1981 to 1986, was sworn in. He rose to take the oath in the hearing room wearing the beribboned and bemedaled uniform of a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel. The majority had planned to use his testimony to tie the president to illegal activities. Suddenly it was confronted with the possibility that Lieutenant Colonel North, with his earnest manner and unabashed patriotism, might coalesce national support behind the efforts to free hostages in Iran and fight communists in Nicaragua.
Colonel North had a slide show he had presented many times to mobilize support for the Contras, but the Democrats, seeing how persuasive he could be, prevented him from making the presentation. As the ranking minority member, I chose to question him last, and I used the opportunity to ask him to talk through his slide show, which he did in a twenty-minute tour de force. Of course I had serious concerns with North’s conduct. He had shredded documents and operated without proper authority. It was later judged he had acted illegally, though in the end his conviction was reversed on the grounds that his immunized testimony had affected his trial. If the majority was determined to present him as a man who had purposely broken the law and subverted the Constitution, I felt that he had the right to defend himself as a man who was trying to save lives and protect democracy in the face of congressional vacillation.
In my closing statement at the hearings, I made the point that Iran-Contra represented serious errors on the administration’s part, but that there were mitigating factors—“which, while they don’t justify