> Iran-Contra has never quite lived up to its potential as a political scandal. Watergate fires on all cylinders: a villainous president, a Constitutional Crisis™, a smoking gun, a resignation. You can make a pretty good movie about Watergate. But Iran-Contra? All of those hearings and court cases, all those thousands of pages of testimony and diaries and internal documents have never coalesced into a memorable political fable. Sure, some rogue spies and security state officials were so committed to fighting baddies that they sold a few weapons and supported a few freedom fighters in ways that may technically have violated some statutes. But what was the harm? It certainly did no lasting damage to Ronald Reagan’s reputation. The only people who still care about Iran-Contra are history buffs and the civics-obsessed.
> A new book on the scandal shows that this is entirely the wrong way to think about it. In The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (The University of North Carolina Press, March 4), Alan McPherson argues convincingly that Iran-Contra should be plotted not as a minor sideshow in the Cold War’s final act, nor as a case study in flawed national-security policymaking, but as a key moment in the collapse of democratic norms. McPherson was inspired to return to the improvised, personalized diplomacy of the affair while watching the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. But his argument has become even more compelling in the first weeks of Trump 2.0. In McPherson’s telling, Iran-Contra was an assault on democratic governance by an extremist executive branch. The results — corruption, deception, willful illegality, lack of accountability — are starting to look familiar.
> Iran-Contra was not one scandal, but two. Each was relatively simple. Scandal 1 — the Iran bit — involved the secret sale of weapons to Iran in hopes that this would lead to the freeing of American hostages held by Iranian allies in Lebanon. It was a scandal because the Reagan administration had promised not to negotiate with hostage takers, because the State Department was embargoing Iran, because it was a violation of the Arms Export Control Act, and because it didn’t work: While three hostages were released, three more were quickly taken in their place. Scandal 2 — the Contra piece — involved the secret sending of arms to a right-wing guerilla army seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This was a scandal because Congress had declared such support illegal.
> Defying Congress and the law required operating in secrecy, which also meant sidelining the federal bureaucracy. Policy was conducted instead by a small cluster of officials close to the White House, who delegated key tasks to a coterie of allies who weren’t elected, some of whom weren’t even really part of the government. McPherson is particularly good at highlighting the corruption that flourished in such a freewheeling environment. Weapons sales to Iran were managed by a small firm known, appropriately, as “The Enterprise” — operating for profit, its owners marked up the price of the missiles and decided to pay themselves millions of dollars in commission.
> Much of the money being raised for the Contras was handled in similarly shady ways. A tax-exempt nonprofit organization (the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty) hit up wealthy GOP donors at fundraisers held in DC. Donating more than $300,000 — tax-deductible! — might get you face time and a photo-op with Reagan himself. The staff of the nonprofit were skimming off the top; only $4.5 million of the $10 million they raised ever made it to the Contras. More money came from foreign governments seeking to curry favor with the Oval Office: $32 million from the Saudis and $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei (though the Sultan was given the wrong account numbers, and the money was accidentally transferred to a Swiss shipping tycoon).
> The weapons dealers were taking a cut of the Contra business, too. One of the ex-CIA men running things on the ground in Central America complained that The Enterprise was “ripping off the Contras. Buying shoddy stuff and selling it for high prices.” This kind of self-dealing wasn’t rare in Reagan’s DC. More than 100 administration officials, McPherson notes, were either forced out or resigned amid allegations of corruption. Since the late 19th century, the US had erected a series of firewalls intended to prevent the use of office for personal gain: a rash of ethics-in-government laws, and the slow construction of an apolitical civil service, its staffers dedicated to implementation of the law and afforded sufficient job security to avoid the whims of any particular administration. The ultimate backstop dated to the Constitution’s separation of powers: the idea that Congress would be motivated to check Executive overreach in order to preserve its own legislative authority.
> But the Reagan administration, whose broadest goal was the deregulation of the US economy, intended to disrupt this vision of governance. On the campaign trail, Reagan had railed against “Washington bureaucrats… [who] have picked our pocket through inflation, bused our children and ridiculed our desire for a strong national defense.” Immediately upon swearing the oath of office, he paused in the Capitol to sign an executive order freezing all government hiring and promising a “significant reduction in the size of the Federal work force.” On the same day, in violation of the law, he fired all 15 inspectors general so that he could appoint his own people. (His press secretary said he wanted inspectors “meaner than a junkyard dog in ferreting out waste and mismanagement.”) Later executive orders would centralize oversight of all agency regulations in the White House Office of Management and Budget.
> This was all part of a radical revision of the role of the presidency. Lawyers in the Reagan administration embraced what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory — a reading of the Constitution in which the president has sole and complete authority over the executive branch. That meant sidelining Congress and ending the independence of the bureaucracy. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s second attorney general — who would resign in 1988 amid corruption allegations — believed “the entire system of independent agencies may be unconstitutional.” Iran-Contra was a perfect illustration of the theory in practice: Congress could be ignored, and policy would run through the White House.
> Proponents of the Unitary Executive Theory frequently argue that the president must have control because only the president — not the unelected bureaucracy — is accountable to the people. But as Iran-Contra illustrates, a powerful executive, operating in secret, has wide latitude to avoid accountability. When the Iran and Contra scandals broke in the fall of 1986, the officials responsible began destroying evidence. They shredded reams of paper, deleted hundreds of answering-machine messages — it was the ’80s — and deleted email from their inboxes. (They were unaware that there were backups on the mainframe. It was the ’80s.)
> The large holes in the paper trail would make it hard to piece together exactly how informed Reagan had been about the particulars of the Iran and Contra operations. No smoking gun could be found to show he was aware of what became the center of the scandal: the fact that some of the proceeds from the Iran sales had been diverted to the Contras. This was known as the Diversion, and that’s exactly what it was. Focusing on the hyphen in Iran-Contra — turning the two scandals into one — made the whole thing seem much more complicated. It also raised the bar for proving presidential wrongdoing much higher than it needed to be, for there was no doubt that Reagan had approved of both the Iran and Contra policies in a general sense.
Catching the president in a lie would turn out to be tricky. At first, Reagan simply denied what had been happening: “We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages.” This was untrue, but was the president lying?
> The actor-turned-president had a complex relationship with facts; one of Reagan’s kids would say that “he makes things up and believes them.” Evidence exists that Reagan had been informed about the Iran deals. But, as McPherson recounts, when the scandal broke he used his diary to rail against the “false stories” being spread by the “circle of sharks” in the media. The architect of Iran-Contra, National Security Council staffer Oliver North — a man who spoke “a blue haze of bulls—” in the words of one colleague, and was about “30-to-50% bulls—” in the eyes of another — thought that “Reagan wasn’t exactly lying, but he wasn’t telling the truth either. He believed what he said.”
> This kind of epistemological hair-splitting carried on until the end, aided by Reagan’s notoriously — and increasingly — poor memory for detail. It became, as a result, more acceptable to blur the lines between fact and fantasy and feeling. (Reagan: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”) In a 1992 article in The Nation, playwright Steve Tesich saw Iran-Contra as a prime instance of what he dubbed a newly emerging “post-truth” society: “President Reagan perceived correctly that the public really didn’t want to know the truth. So he lied to us, but he didn’t have to work hard at it.” The title of the piece was “A Government of Lies.” Meanwhile, the lawyers went into overdrive to protect the presidency from the multiple inquiries that had been launched: a presidential commission; a joint Congressional committee, with its televised hearings; an independent counsel; criminal trials.
1 Comment
> Iran-Contra has never quite lived up to its potential as a political scandal. Watergate fires on all cylinders: a villainous president, a Constitutional Crisis™, a smoking gun, a resignation. You can make a pretty good movie about Watergate. But Iran-Contra? All of those hearings and court cases, all those thousands of pages of testimony and diaries and internal documents have never coalesced into a memorable political fable. Sure, some rogue spies and security state officials were so committed to fighting baddies that they sold a few weapons and supported a few freedom fighters in ways that may technically have violated some statutes. But what was the harm? It certainly did no lasting damage to Ronald Reagan’s reputation. The only people who still care about Iran-Contra are history buffs and the civics-obsessed.
> A new book on the scandal shows that this is entirely the wrong way to think about it. In The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (The University of North Carolina Press, March 4), Alan McPherson argues convincingly that Iran-Contra should be plotted not as a minor sideshow in the Cold War’s final act, nor as a case study in flawed national-security policymaking, but as a key moment in the collapse of democratic norms. McPherson was inspired to return to the improvised, personalized diplomacy of the affair while watching the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. But his argument has become even more compelling in the first weeks of Trump 2.0. In McPherson’s telling, Iran-Contra was an assault on democratic governance by an extremist executive branch. The results — corruption, deception, willful illegality, lack of accountability — are starting to look familiar.
> Iran-Contra was not one scandal, but two. Each was relatively simple. Scandal 1 — the Iran bit — involved the secret sale of weapons to Iran in hopes that this would lead to the freeing of American hostages held by Iranian allies in Lebanon. It was a scandal because the Reagan administration had promised not to negotiate with hostage takers, because the State Department was embargoing Iran, because it was a violation of the Arms Export Control Act, and because it didn’t work: While three hostages were released, three more were quickly taken in their place. Scandal 2 — the Contra piece — involved the secret sending of arms to a right-wing guerilla army seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This was a scandal because Congress had declared such support illegal.
> Defying Congress and the law required operating in secrecy, which also meant sidelining the federal bureaucracy. Policy was conducted instead by a small cluster of officials close to the White House, who delegated key tasks to a coterie of allies who weren’t elected, some of whom weren’t even really part of the government. McPherson is particularly good at highlighting the corruption that flourished in such a freewheeling environment. Weapons sales to Iran were managed by a small firm known, appropriately, as “The Enterprise” — operating for profit, its owners marked up the price of the missiles and decided to pay themselves millions of dollars in commission.
> Much of the money being raised for the Contras was handled in similarly shady ways. A tax-exempt nonprofit organization (the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty) hit up wealthy GOP donors at fundraisers held in DC. Donating more than $300,000 — tax-deductible! — might get you face time and a photo-op with Reagan himself. The staff of the nonprofit were skimming off the top; only $4.5 million of the $10 million they raised ever made it to the Contras. More money came from foreign governments seeking to curry favor with the Oval Office: $32 million from the Saudis and $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei (though the Sultan was given the wrong account numbers, and the money was accidentally transferred to a Swiss shipping tycoon).
> The weapons dealers were taking a cut of the Contra business, too. One of the ex-CIA men running things on the ground in Central America complained that The Enterprise was “ripping off the Contras. Buying shoddy stuff and selling it for high prices.” This kind of self-dealing wasn’t rare in Reagan’s DC. More than 100 administration officials, McPherson notes, were either forced out or resigned amid allegations of corruption. Since the late 19th century, the US had erected a series of firewalls intended to prevent the use of office for personal gain: a rash of ethics-in-government laws, and the slow construction of an apolitical civil service, its staffers dedicated to implementation of the law and afforded sufficient job security to avoid the whims of any particular administration. The ultimate backstop dated to the Constitution’s separation of powers: the idea that Congress would be motivated to check Executive overreach in order to preserve its own legislative authority.
> But the Reagan administration, whose broadest goal was the deregulation of the US economy, intended to disrupt this vision of governance. On the campaign trail, Reagan had railed against “Washington bureaucrats… [who] have picked our pocket through inflation, bused our children and ridiculed our desire for a strong national defense.” Immediately upon swearing the oath of office, he paused in the Capitol to sign an executive order freezing all government hiring and promising a “significant reduction in the size of the Federal work force.” On the same day, in violation of the law, he fired all 15 inspectors general so that he could appoint his own people. (His press secretary said he wanted inspectors “meaner than a junkyard dog in ferreting out waste and mismanagement.”) Later executive orders would centralize oversight of all agency regulations in the White House Office of Management and Budget.
> This was all part of a radical revision of the role of the presidency. Lawyers in the Reagan administration embraced what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory — a reading of the Constitution in which the president has sole and complete authority over the executive branch. That meant sidelining Congress and ending the independence of the bureaucracy. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s second attorney general — who would resign in 1988 amid corruption allegations — believed “the entire system of independent agencies may be unconstitutional.” Iran-Contra was a perfect illustration of the theory in practice: Congress could be ignored, and policy would run through the White House.
> Proponents of the Unitary Executive Theory frequently argue that the president must have control because only the president — not the unelected bureaucracy — is accountable to the people. But as Iran-Contra illustrates, a powerful executive, operating in secret, has wide latitude to avoid accountability. When the Iran and Contra scandals broke in the fall of 1986, the officials responsible began destroying evidence. They shredded reams of paper, deleted hundreds of answering-machine messages — it was the ’80s — and deleted email from their inboxes. (They were unaware that there were backups on the mainframe. It was the ’80s.)
> The large holes in the paper trail would make it hard to piece together exactly how informed Reagan had been about the particulars of the Iran and Contra operations. No smoking gun could be found to show he was aware of what became the center of the scandal: the fact that some of the proceeds from the Iran sales had been diverted to the Contras. This was known as the Diversion, and that’s exactly what it was. Focusing on the hyphen in Iran-Contra — turning the two scandals into one — made the whole thing seem much more complicated. It also raised the bar for proving presidential wrongdoing much higher than it needed to be, for there was no doubt that Reagan had approved of both the Iran and Contra policies in a general sense.
Catching the president in a lie would turn out to be tricky. At first, Reagan simply denied what had been happening: “We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages.” This was untrue, but was the president lying?
> The actor-turned-president had a complex relationship with facts; one of Reagan’s kids would say that “he makes things up and believes them.” Evidence exists that Reagan had been informed about the Iran deals. But, as McPherson recounts, when the scandal broke he used his diary to rail against the “false stories” being spread by the “circle of sharks” in the media. The architect of Iran-Contra, National Security Council staffer Oliver North — a man who spoke “a blue haze of bulls—” in the words of one colleague, and was about “30-to-50% bulls—” in the eyes of another — thought that “Reagan wasn’t exactly lying, but he wasn’t telling the truth either. He believed what he said.”
> This kind of epistemological hair-splitting carried on until the end, aided by Reagan’s notoriously — and increasingly — poor memory for detail. It became, as a result, more acceptable to blur the lines between fact and fantasy and feeling. (Reagan: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”) In a 1992 article in The Nation, playwright Steve Tesich saw Iran-Contra as a prime instance of what he dubbed a newly emerging “post-truth” society: “President Reagan perceived correctly that the public really didn’t want to know the truth. So he lied to us, but he didn’t have to work hard at it.” The title of the piece was “A Government of Lies.” Meanwhile, the lawyers went into overdrive to protect the presidency from the multiple inquiries that had been launched: a presidential commission; a joint Congressional committee, with its televised hearings; an independent counsel; criminal trials.