The Buck Stops There

The Tower Commission’s report on the Iran arms deal is a relentless indictment of executive failure in the conduct of foreign policy. That failure begins at the very top, with President Reagan himself.

Were it not for Reagan’s aloofness from the details of governance, were it not for his indifference to his constitutional obligations to overseethe proper conduct of policy, the aides who took it upon themselves to act so irresponsibly in his name would have been unable to ignore the long-established processes governing the activities of the National Security Council. If those processes had been followed, if the checks and balancesbuilt into the system had not been bypassed, the Iran arms deal almost certainly would have died a-borning, and Reagan and his Administration would have been spared the anguished embarrassment that exposure of their ignorance, arrogance and attempted deception has brought.

Former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), the chairman of the presidentially appointed commission, expressed his panel’s view when he said that the Iran arms deal and the covert effort to fund Nicaraguan contras from its profits was an “aberration” from a system that has served the nation well. Former Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Me.), a second member of the panel, similarly reflected the opinion of his colleagues when he placed the blame for this aberration squarely on the President. The NSC system works, as he said, when the President makes it work. A President whose consistent management style is to detach himself from details, to delegate authority in the widest possible way, is a President who is asking for trouble. That is particularly so when a President grants key advisers a degree of responsibility that is not justified by either their talents or their ethical standards.

The Iran arms deal was both an intellectual and a moral failure. The President’s primary and enduring interest throughout was to win the release of American hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. The rest, opening a channel to “moderates” in Iran and the like, was plain eyewash. Sending arms to Iran, a terrorist state, was the currency, the ransom by which the hostages were to be retrieved. “The king wills it.” That ancient excuse for justifying the most wrongheaded or nastiest of actions became the marching orders for those who sought to give the President what he wanted while satisfying their own agendas. That involved deceiving others within the Administration. It involved deliberately cutting out those whose expertise, about Iran or about their nation’s laws, could have stopped the shameful thing that they were doing dead in its tracks.

The President’s NSC adviser, Adm. John M. Poindexter, and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the NSC staff were central to this enterprise. The Tower Commission has confirmed that they had plenty of help, including William J. Casey, the director of central intelligence, and Donald T. Regan, the President’s chief of staff who, while bragging about his control over all that went on in the White House, failed miserably to save the President from falling into the hole that was being dug beneath his feet.

The commission--as its third member, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, noted--has not been able to answer all the questions that have been raised. The precise nature of Israel’s full role remains unclear because its government flatly refused to cooperate with the commission--odd behavior indeed from a nation that is usually so ready to talk about its shared values and close alliance with the United States. Through lack of cooperation elsewhere, the commission was similarly unable to trace the money that supposedly went to the contras. Other investigators may have better luck.

The Tower Commission report is a bleak but vital examination of how a government went astray because its President failed to meet his responsibility to be in charge. That President instead chose to bestow authority on men who, neither elected by the people nor in most cases answerable to Congress, were able for a time to hide their activities in a cocoon of secrecy. The result was a betrayal of process and a betrayalof principle. Blame the subordinates, certainly, but first and foremost blame the leader whose boredom with the essential nuts and bolts of governing, combined with an almost obsessive emotional involvement with the fate of the hostages, produced an environment where others were able to run wild.