On this day in 1986, President Ronald Reagan announced that rogues in the White House had secretly diverted money from arms-for-hostages trades with Iran to the CIA’s rebel army in Nicaragua.
Investigators for Attorney General Ed Meese found the so-called “diversion memo” in the offices of National Security staff member Lt. Col. Oliver North. North had tried to destroy all evidence of the diversion, but his shredder had jammed. When he came back the next day, he found investigators in his office. After they left with the memo, he returned to shred some more.
As all devotees of the Iran-contra affair know, North had been running two secret operations out of the Reagan White House. He had sold arms to the government of Iran as part of a scheme to win the freedom of American hostages in Lebanon; and he had taken this money, along with other funds, and given it to the contras fighting the communist government in Nicaragua. Both operations broke American law, and the diversion of funds raised the specter of an executive branch violating – shredding? — the Constitution.
As details of the two operations surfaced in the press, Meese started an “investigation” of the charges. He was severely criticized for failing to secure North’s office at the outset.
The diversion of funds was considered the worst part of the Iran-contra affair. Republican lawmakers like Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire said they would vote to impeach and remove the president from office if it could be proved that he knew specifically of the diversion. No documentary evidence ever surfaced showing that he did. Of course, few documents had survived North’s shredding party.
As the details of the scandal came to light, Reagan’s approval rating went into free fall and Americans’ faith in their government dipped to Watergate-era levels. Skeptics found it difficult to decide which part of Iran-contra scared them the most: the government-within-a-government, the contempt for democracy, or the bald-faced hypocrisy of a tough-talking administration willing to sell arms to the ayatollah and his terrorists. For many Americans, though, the scandal had one clear message: government officials routinely lied and broke the law.
The Edge of the American West 
46 comments
November 25, 2008 at 5:34 pm
joel hanes
the scandal had one clear message: government officials routinely lied and broke the law.
Close.
REPUBLICAN government officials routinely lied and broke the law.
November 25, 2008 at 5:51 pm
urbino
I was in college at the time of Iran-Contra, and yet somehow completely missed it (aside from the bare fact of its existence and an awareness that some guy named Ollie North was in the news a lot), and I’ve never really been clear on what happened or how seriously it was taken at the time. Thanks for the post.
A few years later, I was given a ticket to a speech North was giving at a local fundamentalist college. I don’t remember much about it, except that the question that kept coming up during the Q&A was: how soon can/will you run for president?
I guess they had forgotten about the “bald-faced hypocrisy of a tough-talking administration willing to sell arms to the ayatollah.”
November 25, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Buster
Along with urbino, I remember a different legacy for North and company. At the time of the scandal, I was in sixth grade in a smallish town near an air force base in southern California. North was usually talked about, by the adults around me, as a hero, a stand-up guy willing to take a hit for the cause of fighting Communism. I remember this distinctly because I was in charge of my best friend Jeff’s run at sixth-grade president (in retrospect, I really have to wonder what responsibilities came with this position and how it came about that he needed a campaign manager). I designed his election posters which included a fake endorsement from Ollie North.
For the record, Jeff won. But I think it had more to do with the fact that he made out with Heather at the end of lunch the day before the election (by the backstop on the baseball field). This really energized his base.
I’m glad I moved the next year.
November 25, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Vance
Joel, you’re a hopeless idealist. I think only confirmed lefties came to that conclusion. The mechanisms are mystifying, but indeed as Buster and Urbino said, it seems a wide swath of us learned that government is inherently corrupt, but rightwing Teflon can repel the moral stain.
November 25, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Mark Boggs
“””””Skeptics found it difficult to decide which part of Iran-contra scared them the most””””””
In retrospect, mine would be how much Alzheimers had actually started to affect Reagan and how much of that hampered his ability to recall anything and how much of it enabled those around him to “steer” him in those directions. And, if the disease had started to cause serious problems with Reagan’s ability to think clearly, how many other decisions were made under that cloud.
Sadly, Ollie North still has a thriving career over on FOX and many Americans actually see him as the epitome of an American patriot.
November 25, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Linkmeister
I was back and forth during the hearings, but I remember Secord as much as I do North. Unlike North, Secord seems to have dropped into obscurity.
November 25, 2008 at 7:37 pm
urbino
Teflon, indeed. The real question is: will Ollie get recycled into a future GOP administration, like Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte.
November 25, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Ahistoricality
My only quibble with this post is the idea that Iran-Contra was just a foreshadowing of Bush-Cheney-Yoo-ad-nauseum. It was a sequel to Watergate; it was an escalation from political dirty tricks to illegal policy for sure (or, for the Reagan administration, perhaps it wasn’t: their collusion with the Iranians over the hostage crisis certainly has to count for something) but the essence of the narrative has to be continuity with a longer arc.
November 25, 2008 at 8:40 pm
eric
the essence of the narrative has to be continuity with a longer arc.
Ahistoricality, if anyone knows this, it’s Kathy.
November 25, 2008 at 9:27 pm
jacob
Iran-Contra (and the Challenger explosion–same year) are my first public memories. I remember coming home every day (in first grade, I think) to watch the hearings on PBS. I was a strange kid. Alas, I don’t remember much of the details from then, and my real understanding of Iran-Contra comes from reading Sleepwalking Through History in 8th grade, which gave rise to one of my longstanding arguments with my mother, in which I claim that Iran-Contra was worse than Watergate, and she says that nothing was worse than Watergate. Come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve had that argument in the last few years. Funny that.
November 25, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Ahistoricality
It’s a quibble, not a condemnation; it’s with this post, not with the body of Kathy’s work (about which I know only a very little bit).
November 25, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Daniel De Groot
Moyers did such an awesome job detailing how frightening the whole thing was. Including North defining the very core of the authoritarian mind with his proud admissions to congress that he had lied to them in service of his President.
That testimony is why right wingers worship him so much.
November 25, 2008 at 10:05 pm
J Thomas
“the scandal had one clear message: government officials routinely lied and broke the law.”
REPUBLICAN government officials routinely lied and broke the law.
Republican government officials sometimes get caught.
November 25, 2008 at 10:33 pm
jay boilswater
You may want to take a look at “Firewall”.
November 25, 2008 at 11:29 pm
joel hanes
I was in my mid-30’s when Iran-Contra broke.
A private military for the executive branch, with its own extra-Constitutional funding, not controlled by Congress. Worse, that funding came from selling US Govt armaments to Iranian terrorists and diverting the proceeds out of the budget. Command outside the aegis of the Pentagon. Cowboy CIA operatives and cocaine dollars and a fleet of cargo planes with obscure ownership.
I thought then, and still think, that Reagan deserved impeachment and North a court-martial.
We lost even the pretence of the rule of law when the press declined to press the story, and Congress chickened out, and Casey died without telling what he knew, and the voters just shrugged.
And it seemed clear to me that Poppy Bush, Reagan’s VP, former head of the CIA, was in it up to his nostrils (he always claimed he had been left “out of the loop”).
November 25, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Michael Turner
I claim that Iran-Contra was worse than Watergate . . .
You’re right. Because Iran-Contra caused Watergate.
(Oh, sorry, wrong thread. Let’s not do the time warp again.)
I’ll never forget Pat Buchanan’s defense of Ollie Boy:
See, it was OK that Ollie broke an arms embargo against Iran, because he got a good price. I guess I’ll use some such excuse when they catch me selling nuclear weapons test data to Iran: “But I was going to donate the money in support of Ethiopa’s invasion of Somalia!”
November 26, 2008 at 2:12 am
albiondia
I don’t know so much about the Iran-Contra affair (other than that it (a) was a Bad Thing; and (b) is an event obscured by a high degree of collective amnesia. This is all prelude to asking — are you being flippant about the shredder jamming and him going home? Or is that seriously what happened? He was shredding hugely incriminating documents, the shredder jammed and instead of finding another shredder he thought, ‘fuck this for a game of soldiers, Dallas is on the box, I’m going home’…
November 26, 2008 at 4:22 am
J Thomas
He was shredding hugely incriminating documents, the shredder jammed and instead of finding another shredder he thought, ‘fuck this for a game of soldiers, Dallas is on the box, I’m going home’…
Yes, and then they came in and found some damning documents and took them and *they* went home to let him go back to shredding later.
It’s so unbelievable it just might be true.
Who would make a cover story so lame?
November 26, 2008 at 5:29 am
jacob
[Me] I claim that Iran-Contra was worse than Watergate . . .
[Michael Turner] You’re right. Because Iran-Contra caused Watergate.
So by your logic, what comes first is always worse than that it leads to? There’s no contradiction in saying (whether or not it’s true) that Watergate caused the worse constitutional crisis of Iran-Contra.
November 26, 2008 at 5:46 am
Mark Boggs
Jacob,
Was “Sleepwalking through History” written by Haynes Johnson (I think?). If that’s the one I’m thinking of, I read that in a college history class. It absolutely destroyed the Reagan mythology and, as a bonus, was an outstanding book.
Now you’ve got me wondering just what I did with that book.
November 26, 2008 at 6:44 am
[links] Link salad looks forward to some turkey | jlake.com
[…] The Edge of the American West reminds us of the Iran-Contra scandal — Look! Over there! Whitewater! […]
November 26, 2008 at 7:14 am
Levi Stahl
I was in seventh grade when Iran-Contra broke, and reading about it in Newsweek is one of my first political memories.* I followed the whole thing, and I’m regularly surprised when I realize how it has mostly disappeared from the Reagan narrative, given how hugely it looms in my political memory. Like some of the folks above, I, too, lived in an area (rural southern Illinois) where a lot of people praised North as a hero.
*My first real political memory being the 1984 mock-presidential election at my grade school, which Mondale lost like 125-6, with me among the 6. My friend Kim told me she voted for Reagan because if Mondale were elected he’d outlaw believing in god.
November 26, 2008 at 7:18 am
Michael Turner
So by your logic, what comes first is always worse than that it leads to?
No, what comes after is always worse, whenever it caused something that happened before it. Didn’t you ever see Terminator? This all becomes intuitively obvious after you see that movie.
[Someone else] It’s so unbelievable it just might be true
That’s precisely how to approach that whole sorry spectacle. By the way, Fawn Hall’s later crack cocaine addiction caused Ollie North to be idiotic about shredding the evidence years before. Just in case you want to do the time warp again. Wee.
November 26, 2008 at 8:48 am
jacob
Mark: yes and yes.
November 26, 2008 at 8:49 am
Jay C
For many Americans, though, the scandal had one clear message: government officials routinely lied and broke the law.
Actually, I think the “clear message” that most Americans “got” ( a debatable proposition) – was that government officials routinely lied, broke the law, and wouldn’t be called to account for it as long as political considerations could be brought into the mix.
Oh, and that It Was All OK if the “cause” – “fighting Communism” then, “fighting terrorism” nowadays – was “good” enough.
November 26, 2008 at 9:17 am
Urk
I grew up in a medium sized southern college town with a pretty large and mostly hippiefied activist community, so by the time Iran-contra broke nationally I had already gotten a big dose of “US out of Central America” from folks who pronounced “Nicaragua” with an overworked imitation of Hispanic authenticity, but still said “Mexico” with an “X” sound. As a punk rock kid I was…culturally skeptical of these folks as much as I agreed with their politics. As the details to Iran-contra came out it seemed to confirm all of our worst fears about the government and especially about the Reagan regime. Given the details, I’m still surprised at how little impact it had on the wider culture (relative to the crazy unconstitutionality), how quickly it went away, and how thoroughly it has disappeared down the memory hole. As an aged grad student and a TA in the 00’s I’ve brought it up in discussion sections and gotten noting but blank stares from my students, even the tiny minority of politically engaged ones.
there are probably any number of factors responsible for it’s disappearance form cultural memory, one being the size and reach of the Reagan mythology, another being right wing media muscle (which means that it only comes up in highly distorted forma s part of Ollie North’s bio) and the last being the relative complexity fo the scandal itself. I still have a pack of Iran-contra Scandal trading cards which I think are actually a pretty good way to keep track fo the large number of key players and locations.
November 26, 2008 at 10:23 am
heydave
And they wonder why I get my slappin’ hand ready when some clown tells me again how goddam great Reagan was…
November 26, 2008 at 10:23 am
Charlieford
Brings back memories, this, of that “neat idea.” And who was it who said that he wasn’t a “potted plant”? Aren’t you already in some kinda trouble when, you know, you have to point that out? Also, Iran-Contra coda: North’s conviction was overturned with help of the ACLU.
November 26, 2008 at 10:39 am
Nathan Williams
Ah, yes. My father set the VCR to record all of the hearings that were broadcast on Iran-Contra, and the first time I voted in a federal election I got to vote against North for Senate.
November 26, 2008 at 11:39 am
nick
I just want to make sure of this – I think I am on the same page as you, but if I am not, whoo-boy.
You are bringing up, sarcastically, the predeliction of those so inclined to point out some scandal of Clinton’s so as to change the subject from anything bad that ever happened under the watch of Reagan or either Bush?
I hope that is what you are doing. Because if you are conflating directly undermining the express will of Congress by selling arms to authoritian theocracies in order to fund the morally questionable activities of Central American revolutionary thugs with, at worst, a financially questionable real estate deal, then there is absolutely no hope for common ground on which to have a discussion.
November 26, 2008 at 11:48 am
nick
Also, I always wondered why it was never pointed out that North’s activities were not only against the express wishes of Congress, but in direct contradiction to the rest of the administration’s policies in regards to Iran. Those famous pictures of Rummy glad handing Saddam are from that same period – when we were supporting Iraq in its conflict with Iran. But then I guess arming both sides of that conflict worked out well for some middle management at Hughes, McDonnell-Douglas, and other weapons manufacturers, if not for the rest of us.
November 26, 2008 at 12:04 pm
ari
nick, I can’t speak for jake. But we get quite a few links from him, and I’m pretty sure he’s referring to Republican sleight-of-hand around scandals.
November 26, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Urk
if you follow the “link salad” to his site, it seems highly likely that he’s on (y)our page, Nick.
November 26, 2008 at 1:16 pm
John Emerson
I’d say Iran-Contra was worse, because by and large Reagan got away with it. Congress backed down, mostly because North was so popular with the solid authoritarian constituency, partly maybe because they themselves were too much into continuity and authority to be willing to risk another constitutional crisis.
Ever since 1968 there’s been a large, fanatical constituency which drew exactly the opposite lessons from events than we did. They aren’t a majority, but they’re adamant and noisy, and they’re a very hefty minority.
Makes me sad about the Doors becoming indirectly affiliated with Oliver North through Danny Sugarman and Fawn Hall.
November 26, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Charlieford
What’s Fawn Hall up to these days, btw?
November 26, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Charlieford
Well, here’s something: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHRzwvHZFxc
November 26, 2008 at 1:44 pm
What’s On The Menu | Social Services for Feral Children
[…] The Edge of the American West is a difficult blog to classify. I’ve been reading it for some time, but it still resists my efforts to put it into a square or a round hole, as the case may be. It’s just a group of really intelligent people, probably all hippies, writing about whatever interests them, which tends toward politics and economics but could be music or the merits and demerits of various central California farmers’ markets. It’s a good, well-rounded blog, a difficult thing to find in these days of specialist sites and big bloggers who want to replace the New York Times. I’d like to highlight reminder that, even in the glory days of the Republic twenty years ago, we couldn’t trust the government. […]
November 26, 2008 at 2:27 pm
J Thomas
Those famous pictures of Rummy glad handing Saddam are from that same period – when we were supporting Iraq in its conflict with Iran.
Here’s how it went, though if somebody wants to say it isn’t proven I won’t argue with them.
War between iraq and iran. An iraqi expatriate around that time told me the US government bribed key members of the iraqi government to attack, because we were mad at the iranians but we weren’t ready to fight them ourselves.
Once the war was going strong both iraq and iran sold as much oil as they could in violation of their OPEC obligations, because they had to finance their war. So the USA got cheap oil for the duration.
After awhile iraq had trouble keeping the war going. They settled on a strategy of attrition, they would slowly fall back and make the iranians take as many casualties as possible. As part of that they built a giant water trap — easily visible from space — one of the largest man-made water structures in the world. And we gave them poison gas factories and training in using gas. So the war dragged on.
After a longer while the iranians had trouble keeping the war going. And we made a deal to give them spare parts and missiles etc that could help them fight longer. (I think it was somewhat earlier than this that Kissinger made his famous remark, “Too bad they can’t both lose.”. Well, they both did.)
North used israeli-government intermediaries for his caper. To use US parts and missiles and such he’d have had to tell people what they were for and why he had the authority to take them. Instead he used stuff we’d already given to israel. So when the iranians opened up their first shipment they found stuff with israeli markings, and it was sabotaged so it wouldn’t work. They were understandably aggrieved. They didn’t want anybody to know they’d done a deal with the israeli devil and got tricked. And of course when word got out the iraqis were also understandably aggrieved. Not to mention the US Congress. The only ones who came out with an unblemished reputation were the israelis, that no one should have expected better from in the first place. And that’s where the iranian aphorism came from — “Beware israelis bearing treaties.”.
November 26, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Mark Boggs
Does anybody else find it ironic that we end up going through the same thing again with the fact that this current administration may simply walk away from their transgressions after Jan. 20th? The only hearings we get might be these “truth commissions” to find out what happened but not to hold folks accountable.
You can’t help but feel like every time this happens, the distance between our elected officials and the laws that the rest of us live by gets farther and farther and with more and more precedence for letting it happen. Which in turn allows them to act with less and less consideration of the laws they are elected to uphold.
JThomas – Your scenario sounds not only plausible but something entirely consistent with the United States doing things and then being stunned when the laws of unintended consequence kicks in.
November 26, 2008 at 5:28 pm
silbey
the distance between our elected officials and the laws that the rest of us live by gets farther and farther and with more and more precedence for letting it happen.
I don’t think that this is particularly new in American history. Heck, in the history of government, period.
November 26, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Vance
Just to be clear, I think Silbey is saying that the distance is not generally increasing (not that its increase is not new). If so, I agree.
November 28, 2008 at 1:46 am
jeffbowers
The problem with this administration’s transgressions, in contrast to the Iran-Contra scandal, is that there is plenty of complicity to go around. Congress could have curtailed or prevented some of the worst excesses, but even Democrats have gone along with, or at least turned a blind eye to, torture and the erosion of civil rights. The past eight years have not been about some rogue element in government; rather they have demonstrated a failure of government itself as well as an abrogation of our responsibility as citizens to hold government accountable. We were understandably frightened and angry as a nation after 9/11, but elements of our collective response should be viewed as a national shame. Prosecuting Bush, Cheny and Co. may allow us to wash our hands of this sad chapter in the American project. It won’t mean much, though, if all blame falls on the executive branch: refusal to accept and address our role as enablers is the best indicator that history will probably repeat itself.
November 28, 2008 at 8:39 am
Michael Turner
The defining thing about Iran-Contra is that nobody went down for it. This is what makes it worse than Watergate and why it went disappeared into the memory hole.
With Iran-Contra, most of the story came out under testimony given in exchange for immunity. With Watergate, there was also a lot of that, but only in the interests of also getting some convictions (and chasing Nixon out of the White House, finally.)
Watergate destroyed major careers, permanently. With Iran-Contra, some people got so rehabilitated they even ended up working for the White House again. John Poindexter, for one.
November 28, 2008 at 9:34 am
jeffbowers
That’s an interesting point, Michael. Maybe we remember these shoddy events in history through the person (or persons) that end up taking the fall for them. I wonder if we haven’t already reached that point with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, etc. There’s fairly broad agreement of their ultimate responsibility for the mess we’ve made.
If a truth commission ends up with solid evidence to prosecute, I’ll heartily support it. Nonetheless, I think that taking the tack that we are hell bent as a nation on taking retribution on these perps will result in more heat than light. This situation, where a wartime administration played on the insecurities of a terrorized nation and crossed several moral bright lines in its own zeal to punish, is different from Iran-Contra, a largely administrative conspiracy with Constitutional overtones that was limited to just a handful of people. This country’s embrace of torture and the scary incursions into our private lives still says as much about us as it does about the Bush administration. I’m just not sure that righteous justice is what’s called for here. We’re more in need of reflection as a people, and in taking a good hard look at ourselves, hopefully we’ll develop the resolve to never let something like this happen again.
November 28, 2008 at 10:37 am
J Thomas
If a truth commission ends up with solid evidence to prosecute, I’ll heartily support it. Nonetheless, I think that taking the tack that we are hell bent as a nation on taking retribution on these perps will result in more heat than light.
We need to find perps who have done specific wrong things and prosecute them. If we don’t, it will all be matters of opinion from here on out and we still have a bunch of guys who think torture is only a war crime when the enemy does it. It makes a difference to get it firmly established that they believe in doing something that’s illegal.
Unless we get clear scapegoats we won’t admit as a nation that there’s any guilt here at all.
But we have such giant problems we can’t spend too much of our attention on it. Ideally, prosecute these guys but keep a steady stream of more important information going to the media, so that they don’t get a whole lot of drama out of it.
December 1, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Barry
“If a truth commission ends up with solid evidence to prosecute, I’ll heartily support it. Nonetheless, I think that taking the tack that we are hell bent as a nation on taking retribution on these perps will result in more heat than light. ”
Interesting that some people are prepared to have little or no light, in return for no heat.
Which is a lesson that the right has learned, that fighting back works.