(6 of 7)
North accused the committees of "snickering" when the hosiery item was posted in a wall enlargement. "You know that I've got a beautiful secretary," he said of his assistant Fawn Hall. "And the good Lord gave her the gift of beauty, and the people snicker that Ollie North might have been doing a little hanky-panky with his secretary. Ollie North has been loyal to his wife since the day he married her." When he asked his "best friend" Betsy about the purchase, she told him, "You old buffoon, you went there to buy leotards for our two little girls."
Overall, North's defense was simple but masterly. He was just following orders. "If the Commander in Chief tells this lieutenant colonel to go stand in the corner and sit on his head," he declared, "I will do so." And if a question got sticky, North had another defense: "I don't recall." In his final morning in the week's testimony, the selective memory of the obviously bright officer failed on no fewer than 30 occasions. Earlier, North could not even recall why at one point $41 million had been deposited in the Swiss accounts controlled by Secord and Hakim.
North plucked the patriotic heartstrings perhaps more musically than even the President, turning to his favor a question about whether the day of his firing was "one of the worst days in your life." No, he replied, "most of those were days when young Marines died." The medals on his chest, said North, were really earned by the "young Marines that I led." He lectured the legislators on the Communist threat around the world, implying that he knew far better than they how to protect America against it.
The bravura performance drew a flood of flowers and yellow telegrams that swept to Capitol Hill in support of the man who starred at his own show trial. The "Olliegrams" were stacked on the witness table, as though shielding the colonel from any hostile questions. Jumping on the Ollie bandwagon, two Republican Congressmen interrupted the proceedings to criticize Counsel Liman for being too "prosecutorial." In fact, Liman approached North with unusual restraint, probing more for revelations about his superiors than to slash at his story. Explained Liman later: "This is not a trial. We're not handing down verdicts. These hearings are about democracy and how foreign policy is made."
Still, Liman and House Chief Counsel John Nields managed to sketch some broader themes than North's more limited view of how a democracy functions. Nields pounced on North's complaint that his contra support role had been publicized in Moscow, Havana and Managua. "All our enemies knew it," replied Nields solemnly, "and you wanted to conceal it from the United States Congress."
Liman rather sympathetically led North into nearly conceding that his superiors had abandoned him when all the secrecy was punctured -- which pushed the Marine officer into the difficult spot of trying to avoid portraying his bosses as either a willful part of a cover-up or too meek to defend their policy convictions. North had his most arduous time trying to justify the creation of Casey's covert "slush fund" that not even the President need be told about. (Some of the proposed uses were for U.S.-Israeli operations that North explained in a closed session.)