When Ronald Reagan admitted two weeks ago that he had discussed contributions to the Nicaraguan contras with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in 1985, news reports suggested that the President had knowingly contravened the Boland amendment. Or so it seemed to White House Aide Thomas Griscom, who marched into the office of Chief of Staff Howard Baker. Said Griscom: "At some point you've gotta say whoa!"
At the start of last week Baker did. Though Reagan claims that Fahd offered his contra contribution voluntarily, Baker asserted that the President would have been within his rights to ask for the money outright. "I've been absolutely astonished to hear people say that it was illegal for . . . the President to solicit funds for the contras," the chief of staff declared on NBC's Meet the Press. The Boland amendment, he said, "never mentioned the President."
Baker's remarks signaled a surprising new White House strategy in coping with what has emerged as a central question posed by Congress's hearings about the Iran-contra affair: Did Ronald Reagan violate U.S. law? Reagan and his aides have begun freely admitting that he was deeply involved in encouraging private support for the contras during the period when the Boland amendment barred "direct or indirect" U.S. aid. But they argued that the amendment simply did not apply to the President -- and if it had, it would have been unconstitutional.
Hints of such a defense had surfaced briefly in the past but were quickly submerged by the President's insistence that he had been only dimly aware of what his lieutenants had been doing to aid the contras. Once the congressional hearings started, however, that pretense could not be maintained. Witness after witness described what appeared to be clear violations of the Boland amendment and indicated that Reagan had been deeply involved in the efforts to help the contras.
This new "Yes, but it wasn't illegal" tack is part of a broader White House attempt to shift the focus of the Iran-contra drama. As long as Reagan and other top officials were pleading ignorance, each new disclosure about their ties to Oliver North's secret contra-supply network qualified as a front-page headline. Now the Administration is stipulating that it did indeed support the contra cause but that this was well within the bounds of the shifting congressional restrictions that existed between 1983 and 1986. Thus the very real moral and political questions about a secret policy that was clearly designed to thwart the Boland amendment has temporarily given way to a trickier legal dispute: Exactly what did that amendment and other laws forbid, and to whom did they apply?
The Boland amendment went through several congressional rewrites (see chart). Originally it forbade any expenditures "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua." Then it placed a $24 million limit on aid to "military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua." The most restrictive version, in effect from October 1984 to December 1985, stated that "no funds available" to the CIA, the Defense Department or any "entity of the U.S. involved in intelligence activities" could be used "directly or indirectly" to support the contras.