The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The old mahogany table in the Senate Caucus Room over which Joe McCarthy glowered at imagined Reds and Bobby Kennedy threw his darts at Jimmy Hoffa and Sam Ervin dispensed his country wisdom to the Watergate bunglers has been dismantled and stored away.

Have to have a bigger table to handle the Iran investigation. Everything is bigger. Instead of a dozen Senators listening to the witnesses, there will be 26 members from both Senate and House special committees. And so carpenters are hammering together a two-tiered, angled estrade out of used plywood that will be felted and draped in burgundy for the opening of the great drama next Tuesday. The harried staff is jangled by several hundred phone calls every day now, mostly from the nation's media, wanting everything from seats at the show to film clips of the confrontations. The first division of space in the famous old chamber gives 150 seats (with writing tables) to the media and 65 seats to the American public.

The political impresarios are eager to get their respective Senators and House members on center stage, believing this may be the best chance to raise a heretofore unnoticed statesman to worldwide prominence. Television producers are a good deal more cautious. If every one of those 26 people has to give an + opening statement, which may be necessary to preserve decorum, and the first witness is the pedantic Robert McFarlane, as is now expected, a countrywide snore may rise in the first few hours.

There are deeper worries by some thoughtful folks, chief among them Brent Scowcroft. He was one of the three members of the Tower board, whose report shook the White House and has set the stage for the congressional hearings. Recently he spoke publicly on this issue for the first time, to a small gathering at Georgetown University. "I found myself wondering how well any past operation would have fared if subjected to the same microscopic scrutiny which we gave to this affair," said Scowcroft. "We all make mistakes. The thing that is troublesome is whether or not the national tolerance for error is being so reduced by the unrelenting pursuit such as we ((the Tower board)) undertook, and such as the media undertook, that respect of the people for Government itself suffers unjustly. Disdain for Government leads the best people to shun service in that Government; less talented people are even more prone to provide grist for investigative reporting, which further tarnishes the image of Government, and so on."

From his vantage point behind the table of the Tower board, Scowcroft noted a disturbing pattern. "I was struck by the number of times that front- page stories on Iran-contra appeared containing only the thinnest and most speculative of new material, just enough to generate a headline and to provide a hook on which to hang a rehash of the same old stories. In this manner the issue seemed to be able to sustain itself as big news, almost regardless of the emergence of new material."

Scowcroft has little doubt that the new hearings will be filled with stories of strange characters in the bazaars and jungles of exotic places, throwing money in all directions. But if those misadventures are hyped by the gigantic political-media apparatus now assembling, given the absence of any presidential scandal beyond the misconception and mismanagement already revealed, then it will be another sad day for the long-suffering public servants like Scowcroft. They struggle to correct and shape American security policy, realizing that along the way officials will often falter; but trust in the nation must somehow be preserved, particularly during the gaudy telling of scandals that we now produce for the world to see and hear.