The screen split. On one side of it, Ronald Reagan was seen ambling sidelong and smiling across the South Lawn of the White House. He waved to an off- camera crowd, deflected shouted questions with a shrug, and at the steps to his helicopter, smartly saluted the Marine guard standing at attention.
At that moment, on the left side of the television screen, another Marine, Oliver North, leaned forward in the witness chair in the Senate Caucus Room, listening, his eyes gone now from disingenuous to wounded, then brightening to a righteous glint.
Blip. The Reagan side of the picture disappeared. The President's helicopter, Americans were told, would lift off the White House lawn and bear him away, toward a speech in Connecticut that had nothing to do with the Iran- contra hearings. It was a strange effect, a kind of moral vanishing. Reagan at that moment became an absence.
What remained on the screen was the astonishing drama of Ollie North. For four days last week a remarkable American pageant -- presented on television, Reagan's natural medium --was dominated by a 43-year-old Marine lieutenant colonel, the man whom Reagan had fired from the National Security Council staff last November.
Oliver North achieved a kind of evanescent coup d'etat in the American imagination. It was a fascinating and impressive transaction. And slightly spooky.
North charged up Capitol Hill and took the forum away from the politicians. He played over the heads of the joint congressional committee, aiming his passionate rhetoric and complex charm at the 50 million people watching on television, the real audience and jury at the proceedings. The obscure, middle-level NSC staff member -- said to be a "loose cannon," an aberrant zealot from the White House basement -- did not behave like a guilty character caught at misdeeds, like a raccoon startled by a flashlight in the middle of the night.
Instead, he arrived surrounded by an aura of honor and injured virtue. The force was with him. He played brilliantly upon the collective values of America, upon its nostalgias, its memories of a thousand movies (James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, John Wayne in They Were Expendable) and Norman Rockwell Boy Scout icons. Ironically, he played precisely those American chords of myth and dreaming with which Ronald Reagan orchestrated his triumphal campaigns of 1980 and 1984. In the fading seasons of Reagan's presidency, young Ollie North was splendid at the Old Man's game.
By the end of four days of testimony, North had accumulated a foot-high pile of telegrams of support (GOD BLESS YOU, GOOD LUCK AGAINST THOSE ILL-BRED HYENAS). Dozens of floral bouquets were delivered to the Norths on Capitol Hill.
A TIME poll taken Thursday night showed that 84% felt that he was telling the truth when he said his actions were approved by higher-ups, and more people tended to believe him than to believe the President. North had won a certain amount of raw popular support -- an evident success with Americans that at least for the moment bemused and intimidated the congressional committee that had come to grill him. That popularity, however, might not help him later in courts of law.