Damage Control

With his credibility wounded and the effectiveness of his remaining two years in office at stake, President Reagan has moved to rebuild the congressional and public confidence that disclosures of his Administration’s arms deals with Iran have so gravely eroded. He has endorsed the appointment of a Watergate-style independent counsel to conduct an investigation of the scandal that will be free from political taint. He has not sought to claim executive privilege to block testimony by former subordinates before congressional committees. And he has brought Frank Carlucci, an experienced public servant, into the White House as his new national-security adviser. To these necessary steps one more must now be added. The President should fire his chief of staff, Donald T. Regan.

Regan must go because, by either commission or omission, he bears a central responsibility for the ill-conceived plan that made a shambles of America’s anti-terrorism policy and a mockery of congressional intent. Time will determine how much Regan knew of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran and the diversion of funds to Nicaraguan contras and perhaps rebel forces elsewhere. What is clear already is that Regan, who has always insisted on controlling whatever goes on in the White House, at a minimum should have known what the national-security apparatus was up to, and should have had the sense to stop it.

The three Administration officials who have so far been identified as White House participants in the Iran arms deal--Adm. John M. Poindexter, Robert C. McFarlane and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North --are all active or former military officers who have spent their adult lives carrying out the orders of their superiors. It is not inconceivable that, alone or in combination, they might have initiated actions whose consequences would bring dishonor to their government and embarrassment or worse to themselves. It is, though, extremely unlikely. What they did almost certainly was done with the approval of higher authority. In the Reagan White House the chain of command in such matters is a short one. It goes to the President, and it passes through his chief of staff. Donald Regan, a zealous acquirer of power, made sure of that.

The President says that he will cooperate fully in revealing and punishing any illegal activities that have occurred, and there is no reason to doubt that pledge. But if he is content to define the problem that he and his Administration face only as one of exposing crime and meting out punishment, then he is, not untypically, reducing it to its simplest and least consequential dimensions. In doing that he is wholly missing the point of what got him into this mess.

The wrongdoing that has taken place is not so much the product of a faulty process as of a fundamentally flawed cast of mind. The real problem that the President faces is one of judgment, of a view of the world and its affairs that too often fails to perceive how events and actions can sometimes explosively interrelate. It is an attitude that is prepared to ignore what Congress has explicitly required or what the public will support. It is the problem of a mind-set that sees public relations as the means to transform failures into triumphs, and that regards public deception as a fair and even preferable tool for furthering a cause.

It is in the nation’s interest no less than the President’s that confidence be restored in his Administration. Bringing out the full truth in the Iran arms scandal is only a beginning. It will be a beginning of only limited significance if the President does not use this opportunity to enlist some new advisers, to listen to what the wisest and most experienced among them have to say.