Tower Commission Report on Iran-Contra Scandal

In your extensive coverage of the Tower Commission report, you failed to give the President his earned points for consistency.

Just consider. When he spoke of getting the “government off our backs,” he was laying the foundation for his own freedom to lie back and be free of it. When he spoke of “standing tall in the saddle,” the roundup of his ideological cowboys was part of the equation. (In fact, dozens of his aides have wound up in trouble with the law.)

If we call up the right cards on our personal memories, we can all recall a long list of occasions when the President failed to remember. We were pleased to accept his disengagement as part of our folksy fantasy. Why, when his conscious mind was lulled to sleep with our complicity, do we now, like the Tower Commission, ask that he should henceforth engage himself in behavior that presupposes a wide-awake state?

“Let Reagan be Reagan?” He has never been anything else. His slogans appealed to us because they made a complex world simple. So we didn’t have to think. Since he didn’t. We were glad to be beguiled by shared myths.

Yet the whole point of the Constitution we celebrate was the pleasure of figuring things out for ourselves, of sharing the happiness that unfolds with contemplation and involvement.

When we were lulled to sleep, like our public relations President, our custom-made idol, we became abdicating citizens, no longer engaging in behavior that derives from a wide-awake state. In this exercise of “being laid back” we have permitted politics to consist of succeeding moments that vanish, before our memory, like the President’s, can be organized and consciously recorded. In the process, we have come to accept, as inevitable, the game of illusions, lies, corruption, greed, and call it democracy.

As the President tries to understand what all the excitement is about, the people he was supposed to serve might consider the same question. The Tower Commission report suggests he distanced himself from hands-on leadership. But, when we delegate control of our lives to PR specialists, money-bag magicians, and photo opportunists, so do we.

NANCY REEVES

San Diego