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The Boy Scout and patriot had the nation rooting for him. Charismatic politicians, and demagogues, have always known how to dramatize life as a struggle between black and white, between good and evil. A committee counsel came to ask North about the nearly $14,000 security system he had installed at his suburban Virginia house, a setup that was paid for by Major General Richard Secord. North delivered a magnificent aria in which he described how the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal had targeted him for assassination. He told how Nidal's group had brutally murdered Natasha Simpson, 11, daughter of an American journalist, in the Christmas 1985 massacre at the Rome airport. "I have an eleven-year-old daughter," said North, melodramatically. He offered a challenge. "I'll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, O.K.? But I am not willing to have my wife and my four children meet Abu Nidal or his organization on his terms."
After that performance, the committee for the moment dared not ask about the snow tires that North was said to have purchased using some of the money from the Iranian arms sales.
Eventually, North had so won over his audience that when Senate Counsel Arthur Liman came stalking after him, a curious effect set in, even among some who thought that North was lying. One wanted to shout at the screen, like kids at a Saturday matinee of long ago, "Watch out, Ollie! He's setting a trap!"
What happened in the Senate Caucus Room last week was a sort of drama of the moral settlement of America. First there was the frontier, the wild places where savages roamed and life was dangerous and action was survival. The pioneer, the early cowboy, the vigilante all kept guns loaded and shot fast. One did not survive by regulations and laws and merely mental, abstract things. Justice was a rougher business, and even at that ran a distant second to coming out of it alive. "The essential American soul," D.H. Lawrence once extravagantly wrote, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."
Ollie North's world is still a frontier (Latin America, the Middle East) where savages and terrorists wander. Something in Americans sympathizes with that view of the world, with a bit of Teddy Roosevelt roughriding and a distaste for legal punctilio. In Texas lore there is a defense for homicide that goes like this: "He needed killing." Case dismissed.
It is a mind-set out of the American West, the sort of ethic that says a horse thief needs to be hanged and hanged now, in the interests of efficiency and emphasis. What makes such an ethic palatable, and even attractive, is the underlying sense that the American, divinely sponsored, is inherently fair. If fairness is guaranteed, why get exercised about the fine print? Ollie North believes that the overarching justice of his projects, such as funding the Nicaraguan resistance, legitimized his efforts to skirt the Boland amendment.
But after the pioneers and the cattlemen, of course, came the schoolmarms and the lawyers and the congressional committees. The untrammeled open plains need to be fenced and organized and submitted to the rule of law. After action governed by conscience comes behavior governed by regulation, the broader organization of a more complicated society.