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As ingratiating as he was industrious, North made many friends around the White House, especially among his superiors. William Clark, Allen's successor, took a shine to the intrepid Marine, and his replacement, Robert McFarlane, looked upon Ollie as another son, but one in need of supervision. Only Admiral John Poindexter seemed relatively immune to Ollie's charm, but North still almost always got his way with Poindexter. Among his male colleagues, North could swear like a dirtwater Marine, but when a woman entered the room, he cleaned up his speech. Says one woman at the White House: "With women, he did his Gary Cooper, aw shucks routine."
During 1984, after Congress cut off funds for the contras, North became obsessed with the men he referred to as freedom fighters. He kept a shoe box filled with pictures of contra leaders and talked about how he did not want to lose Nicaragua the way he saw the U.S. lose Viet Nam. North had been in the NSC longer than many of his superiors, and he began to believe in his own indispensability. "Being in the White House is heady," says a colleague. "You start carrying the cross by yourself, and if you don't do it, democracy falls."
Sometimes North would work 24 hours at a time, and it seemed to affect his judgment. "When Ollie didn't sleep at night, he'd come up with even crazier ideas," says a colleague. "During the TWA hijacking in 1985, he called me in the middle of the night with some absolutely foolish idea. I told him, 'What you suggested is the most ridiculous idea I ever heard. Go home and get some sleep!' "
Poindexter thought North was too emotionally involved with the contras and tried to get him transferred to the Naval War College. In mid-1986, McFarlane, in a computer message to Poindexter, proposed that "in Ollie's interest I would get him transferred or sent to Bethesda for disability review board."
"Ollie was always on the edge and wound enormously tight all the time," said a former colleague. In June of last year, in a memo to Poindexter about the contras, North actually seemed lost, demoralized. "What we most need is to get the CIA re-engaged in this effort so that it can be better managed than it now is by one slightly confused Marine Lieut. Colonel . . . At this point I'm not sure who on our side knows what. Help." Yet North seemed aware of the consequences of his actions. "He said it often enough and to everybody around him," says a colleague, "that if anybody was going to be a fall guy, Ollie North was going to be the one."
Since he was fired in November, North has divided his time between his two- acre farmstead in rural Virginia and his lawyer's downtown Washington offices, with perfunctory appearances at Marine headquarters at the Pentagon, where he has a desk in the Office of Manpower and Policy Planning. For once, North is not working overtime. He has ten months to go before reaching the 20- year Marine retirement plateau.