Timothy Noah: Happy Birthday, Iran-Contra! ... An anniversary the media overlooked
This anniversary fixation makes it all the more baffling that one particularly significant anniversary recently went unnoticed: the 20th anniversary, on Nov. 25, of the Iran-Contra scandal. On that day in 1986, Attorney General Ed Meese confirmed press reports that the Reagan White House had sold arms secretly to Iran and, defying legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president, gave the proceeds to a group (the"Contras") that was trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. An independent prosecutor was promptly assigned to the case, and Congress created a joint investigative committee that many believed would lead to the impeachment of President Reagan. That didn't happen, of course. But Iran-Contra was a hugely significant political event.
Why no anniversary coverage? It certainly wasn't because that date was crowded with other news. Nov. 25 fell this year on a Saturday during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Newsrooms were half-empty, and front pages were padded out with stories like"Cities Compete In Hipness Battle to Attract Young" (New York Times). Yet apart from an AP story about the National Security Archive's document-rich commemoration, I found precisely zero newspaper or magazine articles when I checked the Nexis and Google News databases for recent stories containing the words Iran, Contra, anniversary, and 20. (The Nation magazine covered the anniversary via David Corn's"Capital Games" Web log, but even that came three days late.)
In puzzling over this omission, I have arrived at two hypotheses:
1.) The Iran-Contra scandal, though important, was also mind-numbingly complex. Political junkies had perhaps been spoiled by Watergate, the most gratifyingly novelistic political scandal that this country managed to produce during the 20th century. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Wilfrid Sheed advised readers to approach Watergate"like Madame Bovary, with a minimum of interpretation and extraneous blather. Just let it happen to you." Iran-Contra was more like Finnegans Wake. Where Watergate had boasted a spectacularly paranoid president, a bungled break-in whose perps landed in jail, and transcripts of actual White House conversations, Iran-Contra substituted a president sliding (or pretending to slide) into a baffled dotage, legally dubious financial transactions, shadowy meetings with third-party funding sources, and a very spotty documentary record, this last because many of the relevant documents were either shredded well before the investigators were set loose or made unavailable to prosecutors on (often shaky) grounds of national security. Iran-Contra's interdisciplinarity, reflected in the scandal's very name, added another layer of difficulty. Like quarrelsome Joyce scholars feuding over textual corruptions, experts on Iran-Contra argue to this day about whether the scandal's center of gravity was the arming of Iran (a violation of the Arms Export Control Act) or use of the proceeds to arm the Nicaraguan Contras (a violation of the Boland Amendment). Writing about all this can give even the most dedicated journalist a migraine. (If you nonetheless want to read Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's final report, click here.)
2.) To the extent one can tease out a story line, the Iran-Contra saga is at odds with what we"know" about some of the characters involved, a great many of whom hold positions of power in the current Bush administration. For example, the conventional wisdom holds that Robert Gates is a white knight brought in to restore to greatness to a Pentagon yoked for six years to a preening blowhard. Yet Gates, who served as a high-ranking CIA official during the Reagan administration, appears to have been well aware at the time of illegal White House activities concerning the Contras and was not especially candid about this to Iran-Contra investigators. (For the evidence, click here and scroll down to documents 6a, 6b, and 6c.)
Another contemporary narrative holds that President George W. Bush is dwarfed in stature by his statesmanlike father. But that isn't easy to square with the conclusion of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh˜a Republican˜that Bush senior,"[c]ontrary to his public statements ? was fully aware of the Iran arms sales" and some of the Contra-related shenanigans, too. Walsh further hinted that the elder Bush, at the end of his presidency, pardoned Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in order to avoid being called as a witness at Weinberger's trial, a circumstance that would have required the ex-president to come clean about his own involvement in the scandal.