The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Washington is in its full Watergate crouch. This time it took about two minutes following the Iran-contra money-deal revelation.

Young reporters all over town have visions of Pulitzer Prizes dancing in their heads. Senators like Massachusetts' John Kerry, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee who for almost a year has been investigating the National Security Council's superoperator Oliver North, dream of a starring role in nationally televised hearings from the famous Senate Caucus Room. We have not had anything good up there since John Dean took the stand. At the end of this + particular dark tunnel, Kerry, if he and his managers handle things well, might see a burst of light and a chance to capture the presidential chalice.

Big-time lawyers smell big fees in the coming legal battles. Democrats taste new power and are in an uncharacteristic season of teeth-gritting, determined self-control so that they don't blow their main chance by allowing instant hysteria to take over.

"Half a dozen of those guys over at the Washington Post are already Pulitzer candidates, and the New York Times hasn't even figured out whom to interview," said one Washington media observer as he watched the hometown paper, so wise in the ways of political scandal, get off the starting block ahead of the pack. But the pack is coming on hard. As in Watergate 14 years ago, the Times will surely bring in the reserves for the journalistic war that is now declared and may in the end prove as important as the political inquest about to start over the Iranian-contra episode.

Standing on the steps of a Washington luncheon club last week, one of the capital's top lawyers watched the NSC's newly resigned Vice Admiral John Poindexter depart and mused aloud, "If I were a young lawyer in this city, I'd get hold of Oliver North right now and sign him up. I know him, and he's a hell of a guy. If they hold hearings on him, he'll be a national hero. There will be a book and then a movie, and he'll get just about any price he wants on the lecture circuit."

At the center of this frenzied drama is Ronald Reagan. His presidency is at stake. Come to think of it, it is our presidency too. But that is often forgotten in this singular city, which is at once saddened by the spectacle of another wounded President and exhilarated by the pursuit and the adventure of what amounts to a duel to the death on the nightly news.

A couple of decades ago, when a scandal broke in Washington, almost nobody thought first of the President. Venal, clumsy aides were the instant suspects. Watergate turned all that on its head. We saw that the American presidency had gathered almost all the political authority of the federal establishment, and very little could happen without presidential involvement. With ultimate power came ultimate credit -- or blame.

Almost from the first day of the Iranian money disclosures, Reagan has been suspect. He has been spared some savaging because of his well-known style of delegating authority and his disdain for details and the fact he has claimed no knowledge of the transfers of money. His word in the past has been good.

That is not enough in these days. He must prove his innocence beyond any doubt or lose his power to govern, perhaps lose his job. If Reagan was aware in almost any way, no matter how oblique or remote, that funds from our dealings with Iran would go to the contras, yet another national tragedy may be unavoidable.

Once the Congress, the courts, the huge media complex become engaged in examining an unhappy event like this one, the American system demands a conclusion. The wheels grind to the end. Only purity survives, and sometimes not even that.