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North admitted he had shredded evidence and altered crucial documents. He admitted he had repeatedly lied to the Congress: "Lying does not come easy to me. But we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies." The TV fans loved him for the dangers he had passed. They rushed to buy Ollie North posters, and a few even talked of his running for President. That may be difficult if, as widely expected, North is indicted in 1988 by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. By now, the Olliemania of midsummer is little more than a distant memory, and a California entrepreneur who lost $30,000 in unsold Ollie dolls is converting his leftover inventory into Gorbachev dolls.
The Determined Peacemaker
The basic idea behind financing the contras was to force major concessions from the Sandinista regime, and perhaps to overthrow it entirely. After much maneuvering in Washington, Reagan in August announced his peace plan, which called for an immediate cease-fire and required the Sandinistas to give up all Cuban and Soviet-bloc aid, open negotiations with the contras, release all political prisoners, restore civil liberties and hold elections soon. Reagan was pleased to regard this as a bipartisan plan because it had won the co- sponsorship of Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright.
What it had not won, however, was the support of Central America. The same week that the Reagan-Wright plan was announced, the Presidents of five Central American nations gathered in Guatemala City and signed a plan of their own. This was largely the handiwork of Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias Sanchez, a soft-spoken, stiffly formal politician who had taken office only 15 months before. Arias labored quietly and relentlessly to come up with a peace agreement that all the region's combatants might endorse. Arias' plan was much easier on the Sandinistas than the U.S. proposals had been, but it did require a cease-fire in November, restoration of civil liberties and a dialogue with all opposition groups once they have laid down arms. Though the White House promptly criticized the Arias plan as unenforceable and thus dangerous, his measure undeniably superseded the Washington blueprint. Even Wright abandoned Reagan and called U.S. demands on Nicaragua "ridiculous."
For his efforts, Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But as he went to Stockholm to accept it in mid-December, he received the unsettling news that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra had announced plans for a large military buildup. Arias denounced the move as a violation of the Guatemala accord. At about the same time, U.S. congressional leaders approved a compromise measure to renew nonmilitary aid to the contras through February. The contras, meanwhile, launched what they called their biggest offensive of the war. All in all, Arias' prizewinning peace plan was starting to look shaky.
The Bear That Ate the Billions