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North's performance was a complicated masterpiece of rhetoric and evasion, of passion and manipulation. He constantly turned the question of what he did into a discourse on why he did it. One does not expect Marine lieutenant colonels to be mysterious. North displayed last week a personality capable of contradictions, which he somehow arranged to achieve a weird harmonic. When the dramatics and tonal effects were stripped away, North's defense was simple. It was based on two main themes, each impenetrable, together impregnable. The themes were 1) "I assumed I had the authority," and 2) "I don't recall."
But it was the dramatics that captured Americans. North begins with luminous self-possession and a chestful of medals. The war in Viet Nam was an interesting half-buried theme of North's witness before the committee. He came home from the war a hero: Silver Star, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts. The residue of the war (martyrdom, loss, pride of service, loyalty to comrades) played against North's current situation as scapegoat, martyr and lone champion of the all-but-lost cause of the contras.
Some Marines did not think that North, who served in the White House as a civilian, should have worn his uniform to the hearings. But North, gifted with impeccable theatrical instincts, knew that the costume would be necessary. It fit well with the resplendent armor of his belief in what he was doing and therefore in his explanations of it.
North is an interestingly modulated man. Sometimes one saw in him a haunting and lovable pleading -- dignified, controlled -- that would ignite into eloquence or jolts of fury. He was impressively self-contained, yet funny and easy as well. He was a boyish All-American engaged in dark, Machiavellian games, Beaver Cleaver playing Dungeons and Dragons for keeps. He was adorable and dangerous. The vocabulary was often breezy, almost childish; the diversion of funds to the contras, he said, was a "neat idea." He impersonated a sort of G.I. Joe action figure who might have belonged on Saturday morning kids' television. And yet when the members of the committee, a little dazed, ended their session at week's end, they realized that they had been in the presence of a highly intelligent and articulate man. A few people even thought that the work North did for the National Security Council, sneaking around in the back alleys of diplomacy, might have been beneath him.
North is a natural actor and a conjurer of illusion. His face is an instrument that he plays with an almost unconscious genius. His countenance is dominated by his eyes. Now they are the eyes of a vulnerable child: innocence at risk in a dark forest. Now an indignation rises in them, dark weathers of injured virtue. And an instant later, there comes across the landscape of North's face something chilling, a glimpse perhaps of the capacity to kill, and the eyes constrict their apertures a little, taking aim. The altar boy who might charm the nuns could take on ferocities. His voice was low and passionate. It cracked in the affecting way that Jimmy Stewart's does, although sometimes, with a force of anger behind it, the voice sounded like Kirk Douglas' in a manic moment.