Incredible, Uncredible? : To Recapture Public Trust Reagan Must Admit Error

Covert operations. Deception on a massive scale. Blatant disregard for congressional prerogatives. Flagrant violations of federal law. Recriminations among top Administration officials. Money laundering. Resignations and firings. Endless rumors. Shocking revelations on an almost daily basis. Stonewalling. Scapegoating. Cover-ups. Internal investigations. Congressional hearings. Queries of “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

All terribly familiar, and all terribly depressing. Is the current scandal over covert arms shipments to Iran and illicit military aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua another Watergate? Not quite. Watergate was a criminal conspiracy. Moreover, the most shocking revelation so far--that a skimming operation took profits made on arms sales to Iran and transfered them to the contras --was made by the Administration.

The Reagan Administration’s arms initiative is a much classier operation than Watergate. It is international in scope. It is not a sleazy political burglary but a full-scale covert intelligence operation motivated by a sincere, if misguided, interpretation of national security. George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall once made the distinction between honest and dishonest graft, and it may apply here: illicit activity for the public good, rather than for private gain.

In both cases, however, one finds the same mentality: the assumption that the President is above the law, the view that “reasons of state” can justify anything.

What is at stake is Reagan’s credibility. The Administration’s credibility has already been challenged several times this fall. According to polls, the public did not believe the President in September when he said there was no deal to exchange accused Soviet spy Gennady F. Zakharov for American reporter Nicholas S. Daniloff. In October, when a plane carrying supplies to the contras was shot down over Nicaragua, the survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, implicated the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. Administration officials denied government involvement. Again, the public did not believe the Administration.

After the revelations concerning secret arms shipments to Iran came out, the public did not believe the President when he said, on Nov. 13, “The United States has not swapped boatloads or planeloads of American weapons for the return of American hostages.” His own State Department disputed the President’s statement that “there has been no evidence of Iranian government complicity in acts of terrorism against the United States.” And last week, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III told Americans that no one in the Administration knew about the operation to divert funds from Iran to the contras except Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter.

It has become virtually impossible for a President to regain credibility once it is lost. That was not always so. Dwight D. Eisenhower managed to recover after May, 1960, when the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 Air Force reconnaissance plane inside Soviet territory. At first, the Administration claimed it was a weather observation mission. Within days, however, Eisenhower admitted it was a spy plane and that such flights had been standard procedure.

A year later, in April, 1961, the Kennedy Administration faced a credibility crisis over the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy, too, acted swiftly to undo the damage by claiming full responsibility. “There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he told the press.

Lyndon B. Johnson lost his credibility after the North Vietnamese Tet offensive in 1968. Johnson never acknowledged a policy failure in Vietnam and never claimed personal responsibility for the disaster; he also never regained his credibility. Neither did Nixon, who never acknowledged either guilt or responsibility for Watergate.

The lesson is that when the President’s credibility is threatened, action must be taken swiftly and forcefully. No excuses, no cover-ups: “I made a mistake, I am responsible and here’s what we intend to do about it.”

Reagan has accepted responsibility for the Iran situation but has stubbornly refused to admit what the whole world knows--that the initiative was a mistake. “I don’t see that it has been a fiasco or a great failure of any kind,” the President said at his news conference. The President does not even accept responsibility for the contra connection, saying last Tuesday, “I was not fully informed on the nature of one of the activities undertaken in connection with this initiative.”

The Administration now faces a two-front war. On Iran--the eastern front--Reagan claims responsibility but says there was no mistake. On Nicaragua--the southern front--Reagan acknowledges the mistake (“This action raises serious questions of propriety.”) but assumes no responsibility.

The President has to act quickly, on both fronts, by acknowledging errors and accepting responsibility. In the Iran situation, Reagan says he took a “high-risk gamble” by waiving the arms embargo against Iran and “deferring” notification of Congress. The public is willing to put up with secrecy, hypocrisy and even a little deception if it is clear that a legitimate public purpose was involved. This month’s Times poll found that, by 50%-42%, the public feels that there are times when the U.S. government is justified in deliberately misleading the public. The problem is that no valid objective seems to have been achieved by the Iran operation.

Reagan listed four objectives in his Nov. 13 speech--including renewing a relationship with Iran, ending the Iran-Iraq war and eliminating state-sponsored terrorism. None has been achieved. The fourth objective was to facilitate the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon. Three were released. That is certainly a meaningful objective to most Americans. But Reagan strenuously denies that he made any deal to get them out. Thus, the one plausible payoff of the Iran operation is the one the President refuses to acknowledge. (In any case, three more hostages have been taken since September, so the payoff is probably moot.)

As for the President’s policy of talking a tough line on terrorism while condoning the sale of arms to a terrorist regime, that’s the sort of thing he has always gotten away with before. Reagan is famous for saying one thing and doing another--on the budget deficit, on the religious right’s social agenda, in his dealings with the Soviet Union, in previous hostage crises and in the Philippines and South Africa. He has gotten away with inconsistency because there has always been a legitimate public purpose behind it. His luck may have run out in Iran, however, where the overriding purpose of his policy is unclear.

Reagan has one advantage in dealing with the contra issue. That is his reputation of being detached from the details of policy-making in his Administration. Anyone who knew Johnson or Nixon or Carter knew that very little went on in the White House that those Presidents didn’t know about. With Reagan, the claim that he didn’t know what was going on is plausible. As George Will has pointed out, the President of the United States is not a prime minister who can resign when his policies are discredited. He is the head of state, and anything that discredits the President shakes the foundations of government. The White House staff must therefore protect the President’s deniability by not allowing him to know everything and frankly, the President’s own limitations tend to aid his deniability. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) observed last week, “I think the President was not fully aware, or informed, or capable of assimilating all the information his staff gave him.”

How the President didn’t know is just as important as what he didn’t know. It could be that information about the contra operation was concealed from him. That would raise serious questions about the quality of the White House operation. It could be that Reagan was told about the operation but failed to grasp its meaning or significance. Or it could be that he didn’t want to know about it--and let it be known that he didn’t want to know. In each case, a certain amount of culpability is involved and the President must acknowledge it.

In some respects, Reagan is at a disadvantage in facing the current crisis. He has always enjoyed a special relationship with the public, a relationship that has been the source of his political effectiveness. Anything that makes Reagan look deceitful endangers that relationship, and therefore his political effectiveness. Moreover, the very amateurishness of the Iran and Nicaragua operations is embarrassing. This is an Administration that sold itself as competent. The Reagan team could get things done. They hit the ground running. All of which was intended to contrast with their predecessors. The ineptitude of the Iran and Nicaragua operations has made Carter look good. That is something no one, especially Reagan, ever expected.

The Reagan Administration could choose between two quite different precedents for dealing with foreign policy crises. One was Lebanon. After U.S. troops got bogged down in what was a hopeless operation, including the tragic loss of 241 American lives, Reagan decided to acknowledge his mistake, cut his losses and pull out. It worked. The public appreciated the President’s wisdom in doing what Johnson and Nixon never had the sense to do in Vietnam.

The second precedent was Bitburg. Facing a firestorm of criticism, the President decided to go through with his decision to lay a wreath at a German military cemetery where Nazi SS soldiers were buried. That also worked. The President got credit for toughing it out and doing what he thought was right, even if the press thought it was wrong.

Unfortunately, the Administration chose the Bitburg model rather than the Lebanon model this time. The Reagan team was probably emboldened by its more recent experience with the Iceland summit. After the summit, a coordinated public relations campaign turned what at first appeared to be a failure into a political triumph. If they could turn Reykjavik into a success, the Reaganites undoubtedly felt they could do anything. A little “spin control” and Iran and Nicaragua would become Iceland. Not quite. What happened instead was that the story started spinning out of control.

Can Reagan get out of this mess? He has one great advantage: He is personally secure. The worst quality in a President is personal insecurity; that is the flaw that doomed Johnson, Nixon and Carter. Reagan’s personal security is what enabled him to pull out of Lebanon. Imagine Johnson doing the same thing. He would have treated Lebanon as a test of his manhood. Reagan’s personal security sometimes goes too far and becomes blinkered obstinacy. That appears to be the case right now. Someone the President trusts must convince him that his current course is doomed. Once he believes that, he is probably secure enough to admit his mistake. And the electorate’s reserve of affection is probably strong enough for the public to forgive him.

Who can get through to the President? Only one person: Nancy Reagan. The First Lady’s job is to protect the President from his worst tendencies. Those include an inability to see the obvious and excess loyalty to his subordinates. Nancy Reagan has always kept a watchful eye on the people around the President to make sure no one takes advantage of him. They are doing that now, and her quasi-constitutional function is to put a stop to it.

What should the First Lady advise the President to do?

The President has accepted Poindexter’s resignation, and he has fired North. That is not enough. He has appointed a blue-ribbon commission to study the role of the NSC. That is not enough. He could ask for Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s resignation but that would be a mistake right now. Shultz has indeed behaved badly, putting his own reputation ahead of the President’s. But getting rid of him now would look like scapegoating, since Shultz is known to have had serious doubts about the Iran operation from the beginning.

The person who must go is White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan. He has served the President badly and has antagonized Congress and the press. Regan is one of only two people North and Poindexter are likely to have been answerable to. The other is Vice President George Bush, who has been acting as NSC operations manager. If Bush’s fingerprints show up on the contra deal, then he will join his predecessor, Spiro T. Agnew, in political oblivion (which, for Republicans, means Palm Springs). Assuming Bush is not implicated, the buck stops with Regan. He must say publicly that he knew what was going on and the President didn’t. That is perfectly consistent with Regan’s recent comments on on the arms sale to Iran. “It was a very courageous thing for the President to do,” Regan said. “We allowed him to do it.”

As for Regan’s successor, one man could restore confidence in the White House. That would be Regan’s predecessor, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III. Baker left the White House in a blaze of glory. The whole operation has deteriorated since his departure. No single step would do as much to restore the confidence of Congress and the press.

Without those decisive steps, the crisis will linger for months, probably through the end of the Reagan Administration, destroying the President’s effectiveness and dooming any Republican successor. The press will take charge of the issue for the next two months until the 100th Congress convenes in January. Then the new Congress, controlled by Democrats, will milk it for all it is worth. As the press secretary of the Democratic National Committee predicted last week, “There are probably more shoes left to drop in this case than Imelda Marcos had in her closet.”