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The congressional committee represents that later stage of the nation's development. North appeals to Americans as a magnetic character in the older style. Americans have a visceral attraction to cowboy morality. It is part of their folklore. When they see that it succeeds -- in the capture of the Achille Lauro hijackers, for example, or even in the invasion of Grenada -- they cheer it on. However, they are intensely wary of that ethic when it is turned loose, unsupervised, in a world made dangerous not just by terrorists but by nuclear weapons.
Part of Americans' sympathy with North arises, again, from the principle of fairness. They see him as a man who was following orders, and who is unfairly being asked to take the rap for men higher up.
Foreigners are sometimes bemused -- and appalled -- by the American habit of putting on spectacular show trials of the Watergate kind. Is America a sort of regicide society, a nation with a compulsion periodically to tear out the wiring of its own Government? One had thought Reagan would be the first President since Eisenhower to retire happily after two terms.
Another question: If the Constitution's system of checks and balances demands this kind of congressional surveillance of the presidency, why do the hearings so often lose their way in labyrinthine detail? Why don't Congressmen examine larger social and moral and political issues? The dense tangle of the Iran-contra affair, with its elaborate deceits and boxes within boxes, is, in the light of day, fairly simple. It involves two issues.
- One is Iran, where an incapacity to face hard decisions about hostages led the Administration to contravene its own boycott and sell arms to a terrorist state, thereby subverting the moral and political authority of the President. It is curious that the Reagan Administration, with its weakness for the cowboy ethic, should be so unwilling to face necessary losses, so sentimental about getting hostages home when the price of the rescue might be the collapse of an immense structure of policy -- and would inevitably mean the taking of far more hostages.
The second issue is Nicaragua. The Administration for years has failed to win popular or congressional approval for its policies in support of the contras. So the White House has done things of highly questionable legality in order to circumvent the Boland amendment.
The net result of the Administration's handling of the two issues is fiasco both ways.
Ironically, Oliver North won more support for the contras in four days of testimony than Ronald Reagan has been able to stir up in six years. While North was testifying last week, the dispirited contra lobby in Washington came alive and mobilized its mailing lists again.