Uncle Ronnie and his Contra Buddies

In Brief

What happens when you get a bad actor, anti-Communist rhetoric, some rogue assassins and a nasty book? Senate hearings! SEE Ronald Wilson Reagan forget what he did before! THRILL to the stumblings of Robert McFarlane! SCREAM out in rapture to the Administration invoking both the Founding Fathers and the Pope erroneously to support an erstwhile rebellion! DRINK the waters of Lethe and totally forget this ever happened, even ten years ago, and try to name national monuments after the man in charge!

Party On

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When you meet President Reagan, you ask yourself, "How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be governor, much less President?" -Henry Kissinger

The least knowledgeable President I've ever met, on any subject. -Tip O'Neill, on President Reagan

On the tenth anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation, former Nixon speech writer (and current Comedy Central game show host[1]) Benjamin J. Stein wrote a Washington Post op-ed column called "Was Watergate Really Such a Big Deal?" Stein thought not.

"Really, who now knows what Watergate was about? What was all the shouting about?" he wrote. "If whatever Nixon did was so obscure that no one can even remember what he did any longer... how drastic could it have been? ...if the nation chased a President out of office for the only time in 200 years and no one clearly remembers why, something went drastically wrong...." Wrote the Post in an editorial, "Not to put too fine a point on it, we think we can remember."

Presidential scandal was seen in such a light in 1984. Conservatives were secretly hoping that the scars of the Nixon presidency had begun to heal when the American people weren't quite ready. They had elected a two-bit actor into the White House, who had the irksome habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. From Paul Slansky's brilliant The Clothes Have No Emperor (all quotes are, unless noted):

President Reagan again indulged his penchant for whimsy during a sound check: "My fellow Americans," he joked, "I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."[2]

Under his jokey demeanor lurked a potentially pokey intellect, something the mainstream media took care in exploring: the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on "The Mind of the President," reporting though Reagan "likes to say... that he is a 'voracious reader' and 'history buff' ...neither he nor his friends, when asked, could think of particular history books he had read or historians he liked."

It was in the hands of this man that the Cold War escalated in unlikely places. A little history: in 1979, the Sandinista horde tossed out the Nicaraguan leader Somoza. They'd done this with a nod from Castro, infuriating conservative Americans who were stuck in anti-Communist mode. After all, Cuba just wasn't keepin' it real ideologically, and it just wouldn't do to have another Communist neighbor in the Americas. Castro had also been getting friendly with Jamaica[3] and Grenada, and things just weren't looking good for democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Irked, the US gave millions to the imaginatively named Contra rebels (the group trying to overthrow the Sandinistas) and went so far as to build airstrips and amass troops on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border in 1983 to make it look like we were thinking of invading.

The following year, the US mined a few harbors in Nicaragua, well in keeping with its self-proclaimed role as guarantor of Central American sovereignty.[4] Couple this with the curious discovery of a manual authored by the CIA for the Contras that explained how to wage guerrilla warfare on the Sandinista government. In the more infamous passages, it detailed how to "neutralize" officials. At various points, the Administration attempted to explain away this finding. William Casey, CIA director at the time, claimed the "thrust and purpose" of the document was to improve rebel skills in "face-to-face communication," perhaps thinking that a booklet titled Operaciones Sicologicas en Guerra de Guerrillas ("Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warefare") was really about expressing one's feelings. Reagan went on to unsuccessfully claim that the term "neutralize" in the manual didn't mean "assassinate". It meant "remove from office," he explained. "You just say to the fellow that is sitting there in the office, 'You're not in the office any more.'" Between the mining of international harbors and penning of dirty books behind its back, Congress was ticked off so much that it scrapped Contra funding altogether. It makes us wish something more serious like a stained dress had turned up so that they'd have demanded his impeachment.

Reagan was bummed. His John Wayne vision of America couldn't come true without a decent enemy or stand-up fight. Desperate to get Contra aid back, he said the Nicaraguan rebels, a bunch of gun-toting thugs in the forests of Latin America, were "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers." Historical novelist Howard Fast responded that this was "an explosion of such incredible ignorance that... he is not fit for public office of any kind." When Reagan also purported that he had received verbal support from the Pontiff concerning his Central American policies the Vatican quickly and firmly issued a denial. The president had also been heckled at the European Parliament, and he claimed things down south were far worse than the spoiled Europeans might imagine. "They haven't been there," he said piously. "I have." In actuality, he had not.

If the Commies were going to be ousted, something had to be done. Reagan, no stranger to international negotiations in which he had no business,[5] just took the operation underground and bypassed Congress. It must have only seemed proper to fund illegal operations with something equally sketchy, so Reagan plucked monies from illegal arms sales to Iran. And to cap it off, he had begun sending these arms to get hostages back, thus effectively undermining any Administration rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists. And thus began the machinations which eventually blew up into what is now known as the Iran-Conta scandal: some of Reagan's staff controlled covert foreign policy actions against the will of Congress, while he pretended not to know about it. One wonders if Reagan was going to take credit for these actions if they had turned out as planned, or if he would have had the strength and modesty to let them slide.[6] Weapons were exchanged, as were hostages, as were more monies.[7] At one point the infamous Oliver North accidentally deposited several million dollars into the account of a Swiss businessman by transposing the numbers on his bank account.

In what might otherwise have been a boring first week of October, 1986, things began to unravel. With the nation hot off the infamous public beating of Dan Rather,[8] three Americans died on a supply run to the contras when their plane was shot down by the Nicaraguan government. A survivor, Gene Hasenfus, was captured, and the White House, State Department, and CIA all immediately disavowed knowledge of the run. Various government officials ran around wondering what was going on, and by early November a Lebanese newspaper reported that the US had been clandestinely supplying Iran with arms. The following day, a spokesman for the Iranian Parliament claimed that a former National Security Council adviser Robert McFarlane and a small bunch traveled to Iran on a secret diplomatic mission posing as Irish flight crew members. The purpose of this mission was to trade US weapons for help in stopping terrorism. The spokesman, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, claimed these men brought a Bible signed by the President and a cake in the shape of a key, which was supposed to be "a key to open US-Iran relations." Here at History House we giggle at the prospect of a collection of patriotic US agents, pretending to be flight attendants or baggage handlers, schlepping a goofy cake across continents while purporting to be on some important diplomatic mission. Would the Iranians really have appreciated a Bible signed by President Reagan? One does wonder.

A furor erupted, and in the end it was mostly blamed on the suddenly-conveniently-dead William Casey. Despite running thoroughly illegal foreign policy from his office, Reagan still has enough support behind him to have folks clamoring for his addition to Mount Rushmore. And when we look for rationale from the men who took the fall, we find nothing resembling reason:

Robert McFarlane was asked why he failed to protest foolhardy administration policy. "If I'd done that," he explains, "Bill Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger would have said I was some kind of Commie."

Footnotes

1. Of "Win Ben Stein's Money" fame. We here at History House suspect that Ben Stein's fifteen minutes of fame are just about up.
2. Four months later Bootsy Collins sampled the joke into a funk single, which made a ten-week appearance on the Billboard dance chart.
3. History House wonders just how laid back a Communist Jamaican might be.
4. President Monroe (of the Monroe Doctrine) would have been proud.
5. The Reagan camp had actually negotiated with Lebanese terrorists prior to his election in 1980 to secure the return of hostages. While it was a pleasant enough outcome, a rogue political candidate operating clandestine foreign policy acts in the name of the United States is quite illegal, and potentially treasonous. From Brown, 234
6. In a Presidency reknowned for grandstanding and public appearances, we certainly don't think so.
7. How much money must one have before one has monies? We suspect it is an awful lot.
8. The broadcaster was pummeled by two well-dressed men on Park Avenue who loudly demanded, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" The incident was never explained, although REM did write a fun song about it. We will note, once again, the the public beating of famous figures is more common than you may think. Refer to our four week series on Voltaire's public beatings.

Bibliography

1. Paul Slansky. The Clothes Have No Emperor. Simon & Schuster, 1989.
2. Jeremy M. Brown. Explaining the Reagan Years in Central America. University Press of America, 1995.

 
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