The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

There is great political drama just over the hill, and you can feel it coming along Washington's broad avenues. It is planned and predictable, the kind the television networks love because they can position their cameras and correspondents for programmed hype.

This week Ronald Reagan finishes his sixth week of rehabilitation after his prostate surgery, and he will emerge from the heavy White House shroud, once again to confront the full rush of events in the world.

In just another few days one of the big events will rumble out of the spartan offices behind the gray metal door of Room 5221 in the New Executive Office Building, its explosive potential held between two cool-blue covers. The report from former Senator John Tower's commission to investigate Iranscam and the errant apparatus of the National Security Council may run to several hundred pages of raw data.

It will be the most complete and unobstructed view of this tragedy so far. The narrative -- already 200 pages -- is in delicate negotiations with security experts because much of it came from secret intercepts and a new cache of computer data unearthed in the most cloistered chambers of the NSC as late as last week. The sad story is one of arrogance, deception, shock and cover-up in varying degrees.

The three commission members (Tower plus former Secretary of State Ed Muskie and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft) and their staff of 21 interviewed 56 witnesses, including the three former Presidents and Reagan, who in two hours and 25 minutes of questioning cracked only one joke, an epoch of solemnity. Transcripts of other sessions are encyclopedic. Extracting the critical facts in three months, an investigative equivalent of the 40-yard dash, often kept the staff on duty through weekends and into the early hours.

The commission members flew off one Wednesday to Paris and interviewed Arms Trader Manucher Ghorbanifar for more than five hours in the elegant chambers of the Hotel Plaza Athenee. Then they walked down the avenue a few blocks to see Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi sybarite, in the pillowed splendor of his apartment.

From the archives the commission exhumed the stories of Truman's defense budget, Ike's U-2 crisis, Kennedy's Operation Mongoose (the plot against Castro), Carter's treatment of the Shah and many other shadowy maneuvers from the past.

Getting hold of some of the personal notes that Reagan made for his memoirs was a dubious enterprise. The commission asked, the President unwisely acceded, though the precedent is probably more important than the material, rumored to be colorful but unrevealing. Reagan personally selected what he wanted the commission to see from his handwritten files and had it typed up. A ! White House courier brought the pages and sat primly by while the investigators read the notes, then returned them to the courier. Gentlemen all.

The attempts to trace the Israeli connection did not fare so well. The commission was rebuffed when it asked help from the Israeli government and when it sought out Israel's Ambassador in Washington.

In all likelihood the commission's new data will overshadow its recommendations on improving the NSC operation. The probe back through history has shown that the system has worked pretty well, according to one participant. "There have been screw-ups in every Administration," says this fellow. "In the end it comes down to people. Good people make it work. Get bad people and it fails."

Scowcroft, pondering what the commission has learned, poses the central question and then answers it. "Can we design a system that gives the President the flexibility he must have and guarantees that he will not make a mistake? The answer is no. What we can do is make sure that the President has all the information available for his decision and is told the good and bad consequences that will flow from his action. But if he wants to go off the deep end, there is no system in the world that can stop him."