In My Time - Dick Cheney [78]
The majority report on the Iran-Contra affair was a sensational story of rogue operatives within the administration willing to skirt the law and subvert the Constitution in their determination to carry out their own foreign policy. In the minority report we tried to present a more balanced view, one that took the long history of struggle between the executive and the legislative branches over foreign-policy making into consideration. As the report noted:
The boundless view of Congressional power began to take hold in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War. The 1972 Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s report recommending the War Powers Act, and the 1974 report of the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee), both tried to support an all but unlimited Congressional power.
The tendentious majority report was part of the same pattern, resting as it did “upon an aggrandizing theory of Congress’ foreign policy powers that is itself part of the problem.”
The minority report continued:
The country’s future security depends upon a modus vivendi in which each branch recognizes the other’s legitimate and constitutionally sanctioned sphere of activity. Congress must recognize that an effective foreign policy requires, and the Constitution mandates, the President to be the country’s foreign policy leader. At the same time, the President must recognize that his preeminence rests upon personal leadership, public education, political support, and inter-branch comity. . . . No president can ignore Congress and be successful over the long term. Congress must realize, however, that the power of the purse does not make it supreme. Limits must be recognized by both branches, to protect the balance that was intended by the Framers. . . . This mutual recognition has been sorely lacking in recent years.
Iran-Contra was part of what the report called “an ongoing state of political guerrilla warfare over foreign policy between the legislative and executive branches,” and while the Democrats had tried to turn the scandal into another Watergate, no evidence emerged that the president was guilty of anything except inattention or absentmindedness. Those of us in the committee’s minority noted many times that we were critical of the administration’s conduct, but we nonetheless worked vigorously to defend the president against the extreme charges made by his critics. I thought it was also crucial to defend the presidency itself against congressional attempts to encroach on its power.
Shortly after the hearings and investigation were completed, I received a phone call at home on a Saturday from First Lady Nancy Reagan, who was at Camp David with the president. They both got on the phone and thanked me for the role I had played in the investigation.
DURING MY CONGRESSIONAL YEARS, I frequently took either Liz or Mary with me on trips back to Wyoming. These one-on-one excursions were a good chance to talk, an opportunity for me to find out what was going on in their lives. It was on one of these trips—in the Denver airport, to be precise—that Mary told me she was gay. I told her that I loved her dearly and that what was important to me was that she be happy.
Both Liz and Mary became interested in and knowledgeable about politics, which did not mean that they always responded the same to political events. Liz was a page at the 1984 Republican convention in