Charging Up Capitol Hill

By LANCE MORROW

The screen split. On one side of it, Ronald Reagan was seen ambling sidelong and smiling across the South Lawn of the White House. He waved to an off- camera crowd, deflected shouted questions with a shrug, and at the steps to his helicopter, smartly saluted the Marine guard standing at attention.

At that moment, on the left side of the television screen, another Marine, Oliver North, leaned forward in the witness chair in the Senate Caucus Room, listening, his eyes gone now from disingenuous to wounded, then brightening to a righteous glint.

Blip. The Reagan side of the picture disappeared. The President's helicopter, Americans were told, would lift off the White House lawn and bear him away, toward a speech in Connecticut that had nothing to do with the Iran- contra hearings. It was a strange effect, a kind of moral vanishing. Reagan at that moment became an absence.

What remained on the screen was the astonishing drama of Ollie North. For four days last week a remarkable American pageant -- presented on television, Reagan's natural medium --was dominated by a 43-year-old Marine lieutenant colonel, the man whom Reagan had fired from the National Security Council staff last November.

Oliver North achieved a kind of evanescent coup d'etat in the American imagination. It was a fascinating and impressive transaction. And slightly spooky.

North charged up Capitol Hill and took the forum away from the politicians. He played over the heads of the joint congressional committee, aiming his passionate rhetoric and complex charm at the 50 million people watching on television, the real audience and jury at the proceedings. The obscure, middle-level NSC staff member -- said to be a "loose cannon," an aberrant zealot from the White House basement -- did not behave like a guilty character caught at misdeeds, like a raccoon startled by a flashlight in the middle of the night.

Instead, he arrived surrounded by an aura of honor and injured virtue. The force was with him. He played brilliantly upon the collective values of America, upon its nostalgias, its memories of a thousand movies (James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, John Wayne in They Were Expendable) and Norman Rockwell Boy Scout icons. Ironically, he played precisely those American chords of myth and dreaming with which Ronald Reagan orchestrated his triumphal campaigns of 1980 and 1984. In the fading seasons of Reagan's presidency, young Ollie North was splendid at the Old Man's game.

By the end of four days of testimony, North had accumulated a foot-high pile of telegrams of support (GOD BLESS YOU, GOOD LUCK AGAINST THOSE ILL-BRED HYENAS). Dozens of floral bouquets were delivered to the Norths on Capitol Hill.

A TIME poll taken Thursday night showed that 84% felt that he was telling the truth when he said his actions were approved by higher-ups, and more people tended to believe him than to believe the President. North had won a certain amount of raw popular support -- an evident success with Americans that at least for the moment bemused and intimidated the congressional committee that had come to grill him. That popularity, however, might not help him later in courts of law.

North's performance was a complicated masterpiece of rhetoric and evasion, of passion and manipulation. He constantly turned the question of what he did into a discourse on why he did it. One does not expect Marine lieutenant colonels to be mysterious. North displayed last week a personality capable of contradictions, which he somehow arranged to achieve a weird harmonic. When the dramatics and tonal effects were stripped away, North's defense was simple. It was based on two main themes, each impenetrable, together impregnable. The themes were 1) "I assumed I had the authority," and 2) "I don't recall."

But it was the dramatics that captured Americans. North begins with luminous self-possession and a chestful of medals. The war in Viet Nam was an interesting half-buried theme of North's witness before the committee. He came home from the war a hero: Silver Star, Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts. The residue of the war (martyrdom, loss, pride of service, loyalty to comrades) played against North's current situation as scapegoat, martyr and lone champion of the all-but-lost cause of the contras.

Some Marines did not think that North, who served in the White House as a civilian, should have worn his uniform to the hearings. But North, gifted with impeccable theatrical instincts, knew that the costume would be necessary. It fit well with the resplendent armor of his belief in what he was doing and therefore in his explanations of it.

North is an interestingly modulated man. Sometimes one saw in him a haunting and lovable pleading -- dignified, controlled -- that would ignite into eloquence or jolts of fury. He was impressively self-contained, yet funny and easy as well. He was a boyish All-American engaged in dark, Machiavellian games, Beaver Cleaver playing Dungeons and Dragons for keeps. He was adorable and dangerous. The vocabulary was often breezy, almost childish; the diversion of funds to the contras, he said, was a "neat idea." He impersonated a sort of G.I. Joe action figure who might have belonged on Saturday morning kids' television. And yet when the members of the committee, a little dazed, ended their session at week's end, they realized that they had been in the presence of a highly intelligent and articulate man. A few people even thought that the work North did for the National Security Council, sneaking around in the back alleys of diplomacy, might have been beneath him.

North is a natural actor and a conjurer of illusion. His face is an instrument that he plays with an almost unconscious genius. His countenance is dominated by his eyes. Now they are the eyes of a vulnerable child: innocence at risk in a dark forest. Now an indignation rises in them, dark weathers of injured virtue. And an instant later, there comes across the landscape of North's face something chilling, a glimpse perhaps of the capacity to kill, and the eyes constrict their apertures a little, taking aim. The altar boy who might charm the nuns could take on ferocities. His voice was low and passionate. It cracked in the affecting way that Jimmy Stewart's does, although sometimes, with a force of anger behind it, the voice sounded like Kirk Douglas' in a manic moment.

The Boy Scout and patriot had the nation rooting for him. Charismatic politicians, and demagogues, have always known how to dramatize life as a struggle between black and white, between good and evil. A committee counsel came to ask North about the nearly $14,000 security system he had installed at his suburban Virginia house, a setup that was paid for by Major General Richard Secord. North delivered a magnificent aria in which he described how the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal had targeted him for assassination. He told how Nidal's group had brutally murdered Natasha Simpson, 11, daughter of an American journalist, in the Christmas 1985 massacre at the Rome airport. "I have an eleven-year-old daughter," said North, melodramatically. He offered a challenge. "I'll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, O.K.? But I am not willing to have my wife and my four children meet Abu Nidal or his organization on his terms."

After that performance, the committee for the moment dared not ask about the snow tires that North was said to have purchased using some of the money from the Iranian arms sales.

Eventually, North had so won over his audience that when Senate Counsel Arthur Liman came stalking after him, a curious effect set in, even among some who thought that North was lying. One wanted to shout at the screen, like kids at a Saturday matinee of long ago, "Watch out, Ollie! He's setting a trap!"

What happened in the Senate Caucus Room last week was a sort of drama of the moral settlement of America. First there was the frontier, the wild places where savages roamed and life was dangerous and action was survival. The pioneer, the early cowboy, the vigilante all kept guns loaded and shot fast. One did not survive by regulations and laws and merely mental, abstract things. Justice was a rougher business, and even at that ran a distant second to coming out of it alive. "The essential American soul," D.H. Lawrence once extravagantly wrote, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

Ollie North's world is still a frontier (Latin America, the Middle East) where savages and terrorists wander. Something in Americans sympathizes with that view of the world, with a bit of Teddy Roosevelt roughriding and a distaste for legal punctilio. In Texas lore there is a defense for homicide that goes like this: "He needed killing." Case dismissed.

It is a mind-set out of the American West, the sort of ethic that says a horse thief needs to be hanged and hanged now, in the interests of efficiency and emphasis. What makes such an ethic palatable, and even attractive, is the underlying sense that the American, divinely sponsored, is inherently fair. If fairness is guaranteed, why get exercised about the fine print? Ollie North believes that the overarching justice of his projects, such as funding the Nicaraguan resistance, legitimized his efforts to skirt the Boland amendment.

But after the pioneers and the cattlemen, of course, came the schoolmarms and the lawyers and the congressional committees. The untrammeled open plains need to be fenced and organized and submitted to the rule of law. After action governed by conscience comes behavior governed by regulation, the broader organization of a more complicated society.

The congressional committee represents that later stage of the nation's development. North appeals to Americans as a magnetic character in the older style. Americans have a visceral attraction to cowboy morality. It is part of their folklore. When they see that it succeeds -- in the capture of the Achille Lauro hijackers, for example, or even in the invasion of Grenada -- they cheer it on. However, they are intensely wary of that ethic when it is turned loose, unsupervised, in a world made dangerous not just by terrorists but by nuclear weapons.

Part of Americans' sympathy with North arises, again, from the principle of fairness. They see him as a man who was following orders, and who is unfairly being asked to take the rap for men higher up.

Foreigners are sometimes bemused -- and appalled -- by the American habit of putting on spectacular show trials of the Watergate kind. Is America a sort of regicide society, a nation with a compulsion periodically to tear out the wiring of its own Government? One had thought Reagan would be the first President since Eisenhower to retire happily after two terms.

Another question: If the Constitution's system of checks and balances demands this kind of congressional surveillance of the presidency, why do the hearings so often lose their way in labyrinthine detail? Why don't Congressmen examine larger social and moral and political issues? The dense tangle of the Iran-contra affair, with its elaborate deceits and boxes within boxes, is, in the light of day, fairly simple. It involves two issues.

- One is Iran, where an incapacity to face hard decisions about hostages led the Administration to contravene its own boycott and sell arms to a terrorist state, thereby subverting the moral and political authority of the President. It is curious that the Reagan Administration, with its weakness for the cowboy ethic, should be so unwilling to face necessary losses, so sentimental about getting hostages home when the price of the rescue might be the collapse of an immense structure of policy -- and would inevitably mean the taking of far more hostages.

The second issue is Nicaragua. The Administration for years has failed to win popular or congressional approval for its policies in support of the contras. So the White House has done things of highly questionable legality in order to circumvent the Boland amendment.

The net result of the Administration's handling of the two issues is fiasco both ways.

Ironically, Oliver North won more support for the contras in four days of testimony than Ronald Reagan has been able to stir up in six years. While North was testifying last week, the dispirited contra lobby in Washington came alive and mobilized its mailing lists again.

The Iran-contra hearings last week may have had more to do with theater and symbolism than with great constitutional questions. Throughout American history, the President and Congress have collided on the question of who runs the nation's foreign policy. The Iran-contra affair demonstrates the danger at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue: the problem of unexamined, undisciplined policy by the Executive, and the problem of a foreign policy excessively inhibited and micromanaged by the Congress. In either case, the American system of checks and balances sometimes makes it difficult for foreigners to deal with the U.S. with confidence. They may fear that private deals of the Ollie North kind will be exposed, by Congress, the press, or both. Or they may fear, as the contras did, that a President's policy of support may presently be rescinded on Capitol Hill.

The results of the hearings for Ronald Reagan are cross-grained. North's credibility does not rub off on the President. On the contrary. The Administration had been worried that North would be torn apart on Capitol Hill and taint Reagan in the process. Yet it was North's boffo performance that somehow diminished the President: North stood tall in defense of the covert crusade on behalf of the contras, in contrast to Reagan's feckless refrain about not being quite sure what was happening. North's loyalties were unwavering, even toward the President who had summarily dismissed him. Having scrambled so hard to distance itself from North, the White House will find it hard to bask in his temporary aura.

At the same time, North's passionate defense does tend to validate the President's policies toward the contras and to draw some of the poison out of the public's attitudes toward the whole Iran-contra misadventure. North left an impression of projects that at least were passionately well meant.

The President may achieve an arms-control agreement in the fall. But his time left for achievement in the White House is short. Once the 1988 primaries begin, Reagan will have virtually departed into history.

It is difficult to predict where Oliver North's destiny will take him. Americans may decide that he won them a little too easily, and sobriety may set in. His moment may be fleeting. The special prosecutor lies in wait. It may be, semper fi, that he will grow old in the corps. Perhaps he will reverse Ronald Reagan's trajectory and find a home in Hollywood. Politics? North has already proved that he is almost dangerously gifted at the persuasive arts.