At high noon on Wednesday, July 15, almost eight months after he was relieved of his White House duties, Admiral John Poindexter made it official: there was no smoking gun. Ronald Reagan, his former National Security Adviser claimed under oath, had not been told that profits from the ill-conceived arms deals with Iran were diverted to support the Nicaraguan contras. "I made a very deliberate decision not to ask the President so that I could insulate him from the decision and provide some future deniability," the loyal admiral insisted. Then he lit his pipe, sending up a puff of white smoke. "The buck stops here with me."
What? No smoking gun? Does this whole wrenching affair boil down, then, to an unbridled colonel's renegade sense of duty and an enigmatic admiral's faulty notions about where the buck stops?
The White House has tried to cast it that way. Last November it faced rapid-fire revelations about an unhinged 15-month effort to trade arms for hostages with Iran's saturnine Ayatullah Khomeini. In addition, a plane carrying American gunrunners had been downed over Nicaragua, and the Administration's flat denials of complicity were being revealed as lies. Then Attorney General Edwin Meese stumbled upon the diversion of funds from one enterprise to the other.
At last there was something tangible that the American mind knew how to address: an apparent legal transgression, a scandal involving the misuse of money. The diversion became a diversion of its own, distracting attention from the thornier basic issues involved. The messy, demanding job of weighing a policy -- several policies, really -- and passing judgment gave way to the tidier task of searching for a smoking gun. There was even a ready-made framework from an earlier, dissimilar, scandal: What did the President know?
Not too much, at least according to Poindexter's testimony. Yet now that most of the evidence is in, the more basic questions about responsibility have become even more troubling. The Iranian arms deals and covert contra supply operations, dubious enough on their own, were part of a larger, even more insidious pattern: the establishment of a runaway foreign policy that relied on lies and deceptions to function outside the rule of law. Could the buck for such an apparatus really have stopped with John Poindexter?
The mere fact that the tranquil-looking admiral could claim that this was the case illustrates what was so dangerously wrong about the Iran-contra operation. At every step of the way, it was designed to avoid the political accountability that is at the heart of American democracy. The authorizations and findings required for the Iranian arms deals either were never sent to the proper officials or were destroyed and conveniently forgotten. Gunrunning to the contras was handled by a network of ragtag profiteers coordinated by a colonel on the National Security Council staff. And the President was, or so his aides say, deliberately shielded from knowledge of the diversion of funds to keep him from being damaged if the operation came to light.
Unlike Oliver North, Admiral Poindexter took the spear of responsibility in his own chest. But through the testimony of both was threaded a common theme: their goal was to cast a shroud of deniability around their activities.