Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (44 page)

Tip blamed Daniel Ortega’s blatant play for Moscow’s patronage
for the House’s change of mind.
“When that happened it was only a matter of time before the House would rally behind President Reagan and vote with him to fund the Contras,” he would write. But what he saw was the United States on a slippery slope to another Vietnam.
“He is not going to be happy until he has our Marines and our Rangers down there for a complete victory. He can see himself heading a contingent down Broadway with paper flying out of the windows and a big smile on his face, kind of a grade-B motion picture actor, coming home the conquering hero.”

The national debate over Nicaragua was heating up. The media had begun reporting stories of Contra acts of violence clearly at odds with the White House version of their patriotic activities. Earlier in the year, Reagan had paid tribute to the Nicaraguan rebels as national heroes who might well be deemed “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.”

The final struggle in the Reagan-O’Neill battle over Nicaragua came in 1986. It was ignited when the president asked Congress for $100 million in
largely military aid
to the Contras.
“We send money and material now so we’ll never have to send our own American boys,” he told a group of Jewish leaders invited to the White House.
“If we don’t want to see the map of Central America covered in a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders, we must act now.” In equally inflammatory language, up on Capitol Hill, Tip O’Neill made the case against this escalation in U.S. military involvement. “Tomorrow, we face another Tonkin Gulf vote,” he said, referring to the 1964 resolution in which Congress had approved greater American expansion into Vietnam. “I don’t want our kids dragged in.”

O’Neill’s concern was based on fact. The week before that vote,
Time
described how U.S. troops had been conducting maneuvers in Nicaragua’s neighbor Honduras. “A $30 million network of air
bases, intelligence posts, radar stations and other installations has been built.” The story went on to say that engineers from Fort Bragg had parachuted into the country to construct a 4,700-foot landing field less than twenty-five miles from the Nicaraguan border.

After closing the floor debate on Contra aid with a powerful rebuttal, O’Neill broke with tradition—the Speaker of the House ordinarily doesn’t vote—and cast a dramatic “Nay.” So did the House majority.
“You can appreciate how hard I’m working against the President’s program,” he wrote to a friend well before the White House proposal for military aid to Nicaragua was defeated. “I believe his policies are absolutely immoral. It appears he won’t be happy until American troops are in Central America fighting for what he believes is the ultimate testing ground between the Soviets and our government.”

The statement released by President Reagan described the loss as a
“dark day for freedom.” He continued to argue that his fellow citizens must regard the Contras as noble “freedom fighters” committed to beating back the evil communists. “The American people have begun to awaken to the danger emerging on their doorstep. And one day, in the not-too-distant future, that awareness will come home to the House of Representatives. We are gaining ground. We are winning converts. The next battle will bring us the victory this just and good cause rightly deserves.”

But Tip O’Neill, too, had his motives for the Nicaragua fight. He had an aunt, his mother’s sister Ann, to whom he was especially devoted and who’d been, all her adult life, a nun. Her religious name was Sister Eunice and, as an early member of the Maryknoll order, she was part of a tradition that had sent women overseas for decades, to places ranging from Korea to Bangladesh, from Manchuria to the Sudan. Since the 1950s, the Maryknoll Sisters had
established missions in a new region, having become aware of the needs of the Central American poor. Sister Eunice herself had died in 1983, at the age of ninety-one.

Because of his aunt’s community and because of the testimonies he heard—often privately, as a result of his openness to her world—Tip O’Neill was attuned to a Nicaraguan reality distinctly at odds with the one Ronald Reagan insisted upon. “Over and above the briefings I get,” Tip had explained to his regular press contingent in 1984, “I have nuns and humanitarians who tell us that the people in the villages of Nicaragua do not know what communism is. But they know they are living a better life—with food and health care—for the first time.” He could not forget what he’d heard.

Having lost the March vote on military aid to the Contras, Reagan was far from giving up. “You have my solemn determination,” he had sworn after his defeat at the hands of the Tip-led Congress, I will “come back, again and again, until this battle is won.” His second opportunity arrived in June, and, with an eye to swaying votes with the president’s rhetorical fervor, the White House team decided to ask Speaker O’Neill if Reagan could address the House on the Tuesday before the vote.

Chief of Staff Don Regan was the one who made the request, reaching O’Neill at a charity golf match. Tip, enjoying himself after his big Boston College send-off and seeing no reason to hop to, took his time getting back to him. When he finally did, an hour and a half later, the Speaker refused to agree. To have Reagan simply come to the House on the eve of a vote, he said, would be unprecedented and “constitutionally wrong.” However, he offered alternative suggestions. If President Reagan wished to meet with the House, he told the importunate Regan, then he’d have
“to participate in open dialogue with members of the body.” And if he wished to make a
formal address, then protocol called for any such presidential speech to be made before a joint session, with the Senate in attendance as well.

O’Neill believed Regan was trying to embarrass him, making and then advertising a proposal he knew in advance the Speaker would have to reject.
“There’s no question about it,” he told reporters. “It’s a cheap political trick and I don’t think the president of the United States would do it.”

White House officials were “stunned” at the rebuff, a staffer who refused to be named told the
Los Angeles Times
. Reagan became as enraged by O’Neill’s straight-arm as Tip himself had been by the dark suspicion Regan and others at the White House had been trying to set him up.
“Tip refused to let me speak to the House. I’m going to rub his nose in this one,” he announced to his diary. In the end, he settled for going on TV and making his case in a
noontime broadcast. He realized that O’Neill’s denying him the personal appearance before the House had degraded his address dramatically.

But when the House voted in June on the $100 million in Contra aid, Ronald Reagan wound up prevailing. For him, the victory was made doubly sweet by the fact that he’d won it after coming from behind.

• • •

Ronald Reagan knew only too well that he’d originally gained the presidency with a strong assist from Jimmy Carter’s failure to win release of the American hostages in Tehran. Starting in 1984, with no surer remedy than his predecessor had, President Reagan found himself with an interminable hostage situation of his own. Over a period of months, seven American citizens would be taken as hostages by Hezbollah, a terrorist group based in Lebanon. As time passed, Reagan increasingly took personally the United States’
inability to free these captives. He was particularly upset by the knowledge that one of the men, the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, had undergone severe torture at the hands of his captors.

National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane now went to work selling Reagan on a plan he believed offered the possibility of a deal by which the hostages might be released. Claiming the existence of “moderate” elements in Iran who might be willing to try to influence the hostage-takers in Lebanon was the first part of his pitch. McFarlane’s idea was for the United States to sell our superior weapons to those so-called moderates for use in their ongoing war with Iraq. In return for this support, there was the strong possibility, he’d said, they’d be willing to approach Hezbollah.

McFarlane then offered an added inducement for the old Cold Warrior. Those “moderates” could well assume power upon the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. They might make all the difference when it came to thwarting Soviet intentions in Iran.

“Some strange soundings are coming from the Iranians,” Reagan wrote in his diary on July 17, 1985. “Bud M. will be here tomorrow to talk about it. It could be a breakthrough on getting our 7 kidnap victims back. Evidently the Iranian economy is disintegrating fast under the strain of war.” The next day, he met with McFarlane. There are, indeed, Iranians “with reasonably good connections,” McFarlane told Reagan, who could help get the hostages freed. “Yes, go ahead,” Reagan told him. “Open it up.”

Yet Reagan recognized the need for the deepest secrecy, as the conspiracy began to wind its way into history. Here’s what he confided in his diary, five months later, on December 5, 1985:

NSC Briefing—probably Bud’s last. Subject was our undercover effort to free our 5 hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. It is a
complex undertaking with only a few of us in on it. I won’t even write in the diary what we’re up to.

The plot very definitely was thickening. Having been initially described as an arrangement involving the United States and Iranian “moderates” in the Iranian ruling circle but outside the official Iranian government—by January 1986 it had morphed into a deal between the United States and elements in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Reagan’s backing of a deal nevertheless remained constant. What this meant was the United States was now shipping arms to the Iranian leadership itself.

What had begun as a deal to establish a back channel with Iranians possibly able to open discussions with the hostage-takers no longer looked like that. Now what we were entering into had become precisely the sort of quid pro quo Ronald Reagan had said he’d never ever stoop to, in this case, an arms-for-hostages arrangement with Iranian generals, who’d repay our support with a command to release the Americans being held in Lebanon.

The American press ran with the story on November 5, with its original news source for the details the Lebanese weekly
Al Shiraa.
The instant the revelations broke, they hit the White House as an all-out scandal.

Having dumped one president—Jimmy Carter—perceived as weak in confronting Iranian hostage-takers, the American public was in no mood to buy this updated version. An ABC poll showed four out of five Americans surveyed opposed delivering arms to Iran to win freedom for the hostages. Nearly as many citizens questioned indicated opposition to providing Iran with weapons as a way to improve relations with Iranian moderates. A majority of those polled believed Reagan had broken not just with American policies but with his own principles, that he’d been caught “negotiating with
terrorists.” Suddenly Reagan found himself a man mired in Middle Eastern intrigue, far from his Cold War comfort zone.

On November 25, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that his investigation of the Iranian arms deal had shown that “monies” from the transaction had then been diverted to the Contras in a ploy overseen by Oliver North. (In fact, I’d known North around this time, though only slightly, encountering him at meetings. Initially, I viewed North as a figure involved with Central America. Later, I’d noticed his name connected to the Middle East. Even back then, in real time, he’d struck me as spreading himself around far too thin for his own good.)

The Iranians had paid $30 million for the missiles, Meese learned, more than double what they cost. Most of the profits, according to an April memorandum from North to Admiral John Poindexter, who’d replaced McFarlane the year before as national security advisor, went to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance Forces, that is, the Contras, for “critically needed supplies.” It was to “bridge the period between now and when Congressionally-approved lethal assistance can be delivered.” After the House had, in March, defeated the $100 million in military aid, the enterprising North simply had decided to make up for the loss.

Though he vigorously denied all knowledge of North and Poindexter’s action, Reagan nonetheless made clear in his diary where his sympathies in the matter lay. The diversion of the money, he wrote, was “their way of helping the Contras at a time when Congress was refusing aid to the Contras.”

Poindexter, who resigned the day Meese delivered the news, had headed the NSC less than a year. Still, it was long enough for him to reflect on what had gone down on his watch. Here’s the epitaph he left to Oliver North’s disastrous scheme to divert the profits from the arms-for-hostages deal to the rebels in Nicaragua.
“I had a
feeling,” he later admitted to Don Regan, “that something bad was going on, but I didn’t investigate it and I didn’t do a thing about it. I really didn’t want to know. I felt sorry for the Contras. I was so damned mad at Tip O’Neill for the way he was dragging the Contras around that I didn’t want to know what, if anything, was going on. I should have, but I didn’t.”