Never Give Up

By Hugh Sidey/Washington

The curtain is down on the summer's Iran-contra drama, and Ronald Reagan is getting ready for his final 17-month run in Washington, which could be a corker. In the Oval Office last week for an interview with TIME, he looked healthier and more vigorous than recent press accounts have portrayed him. Yet he has been burned and battered by events and people, and his caution was like armor -- a shield that every modern President adopts eventually, no matter what vows he makes about open communion to the end. "There's always a target painted on the Chief Executive's door," he says.

In a few hours Reagan would speak to the nation about his Administration's great scandal and would harvest yet more criticism. "The fact of the matter is that there's nothing I can say that will make the situation right," he would say later, in a statement that was both apologetic and defiant. "I was stubborn in my pursuit of a policy that went astray." It was a speech that satisfied neither friends nor enemies. But it was one that was inside the President as simple and pure as a diamond and had to come out, audience acceptance or not. "Well," he told TIME earlier in the day, his nose still scarred and red from his skin-cancer operation, "I'll be sitting at the same desk, so I can always duck."

But when the time came for the speech Reagan didn't duck, and won't. He let the critics take their shots: "The old Reagan magic, the energy and passion are gone," said the dyspeptic conservative Richard Viguerie. "He should have had Ollie North write his speech, but instead he was on the defensive." Democrats just shook their heads over the scandal's unresolved issues and condemned a misguided Chief Executive. Rebutted Maine's Senator George Mitchell: "Let there be no misunderstanding. The mistakes were not only in the execution of policies. The major mistakes were in the policies themselves."

As Reagan spoke privately that day about his nine-month Iran-contra ordeal, one had the feeling that nothing had changed, yet everything was different. He remains stubborn and unbowed and believing and upbeat; he refuses to hold a grudge. The essence of his talk in the afternoon light of the Oval Office was that a foreign policy operation, born of the best of intentions, went wrong. But the damage, he is certain, will fade. Reagan is calling for the nation to forget and move into the future. Details be damned; unanswered questions be hanged. The great congressional inquisition is finished. Does that mean it is all over? Yes, says Reagan, "as far as the audience is concerned." And Reagan has read the American audience better than any other politician of this decade.

The mill of scandal will grind on. In October, Congress will publish a multivolume report on its findings. Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh and his cast of 28 lawyers have vowed to pursue this case to the end. "If the investigation . . . establishes probable cause to believe that crimes have been committed, it is the duty of the independent counsel to prosecute," Walsh told the American Bar Association last week. "High office, well- intended policies or popular policies do not place anyone above the law." But the impression left by that 40-minute session in the White House was that Iranscam is a script that may never have a climax. Reagan is free because he did not know. "I knew I'd told the truth," he says, "and that the truth would have to come out, and did." It is hard for Washington, so conditioned by guile and intrigue, to accept that. Yet Reagan's eyeball-to-eyeball insistence can sway almost any doubter.

O.K., Mr. President, but how do you feel now about Oliver North and John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane, the aides who ran amuck with your policies? "Well," says Reagan, resplendent in the dark brown suit that has been the bane of the gray-pinstripe fraternity for 6 1/2 years, "I heard them out. I can understand why they did what they did and what their motives were, and certainly they weren't bad motives. And I'm just sorry that it turned out that way." There was no hint of bitterness or even anger in his husky voice.

Why didn't the President call North into his office when the scandal broke last November and ask him to lay out what he had been doing? "Whether our thinking was right or wrong at that point -- and we were all agreed here that with this now exposed and my not having been told, that they ((North and Poindexter)) just had to leave the National Security Council -- they could not continue. So I thought of that before I thought of any questions or anything, and I think they both felt the same way."

The logic of Reagan's response to the crisis last fall is plainly fixed in his mind. When asked what his big mistake may have been, he slides around the question, drawn again into that belief that sustains him. He was protecting lives, daring to believe that there might be a change in Iran that would lead to better relations.

How did he react to the congressional hearings? Is there any truth to reports of a melancholy Reagan worrying and brooding about each hour's revelations? "Actually," says the President, "I didn't change my pattern or my schedule much at all. I might have a few minutes and step into the next room and turn on the TV just to see who was on and so forth. I didn't have to depend on the press. Our legal counsel kept me informed with a summary."

In his speech, Reagan was somewhat conciliatory toward Congress. "Probably the biggest lesson we can draw from the hearings is that the Executive and Legislative branches of Government need to regain trust in each other," he said. "We've seen the results of that mistrust in the form of lies, leaks, divisions and mistakes." Privately he holds a skeptical view of the role Congress has played in the scandal: "For years there has been a kind of friction between the Executive Branch and the legislature and an attempt to erode the powers of the President . . . For half a century now, with only an exception of a few years, the Congress, both houses, have been of one party. And I think if you check back, every President of the opposite party has been investigated for something or other. But I don't recall any investigations of ^ the Presidents (personally) when the Presidents and the legislature were of the same party."

Reagan looks a bit older; he has a few more gray hairs per square inch, an extra wrinkle or two. But he's no despairing husk. "I feel just fine," he says. "I haven't slowed down any. The pace is the same. I do know that -- other than my nose -- the last operation that I had ((to remove polyps from his colon in June)), I did without anesthetic and got up off the table and went upstairs and put on my ranch clothes and went to Camp David and finished the day with a swim there, and the next day with a horseback ride."

He points out that he has enjoyed every one of his careers, from lifeguarding to sportscasting to acting. Politics? "I fought like a tiger against ever running for office," he recalls, but once he captured the California statehouse in 1967, he and Nancy made a surprising discovery. "I have to tell you, we'd only been in the Governor's mansion a few months, and one night we looked at each other, sitting in the living room in Sacramento, and said, 'This makes everything else we've ever done look as dull as dishwater.' "

On Thursday Reagan boarded Air Force One and headed west with a stop in the wide grasslands of North Platte, Neb., for some political tub thumping. By week's end he had rushed into the embrace of his ranch in California, where, after a near miss between his helicopter and a small private plane, he was preparing for a 24-day assault on scraggly brush along his riding trails.

The great Houdini of American politics is neither as wounded and agonized as his critics claim or would like, nor as robust as he used to be. One thing is sure in this extraordinary season of end and intermission and beginning: he will fight as long as he breathes. In the Oval Office, Reagan was asked about his retirement. "I have a hunch I will be back on the mashed-potato circuit," he says, "campaigning for things I believe in and people I believe in." He could have added: and looking for the rainbow just beyond the thunderheads that always threaten but have not yet driven him down.