Secretaries on the D.C. Hot Seat : Fawn Hall’s Testimony Before Iran-Contra Hearings on the Oliver North Controversy May Stretch the Concept of an Employee’s Loyalty to the Boss

It may be Fawn Hall at the microphone of the Iran- contra congressional hearings this week. But whenever a Washington secretary is dragged into trouble, all Washington secretaries sit on the hot seat.

“There’s no doubt that when she testifies, the role of the Washington secretary comes back to everybody’s mind,” said Carolyn Shields, a secretary in the Carter White House, “and all the others will come up too.”

Ah, yes. The Others.

Rose Mary Woods, the secretary to President Nixon, who said she accidentally erased 18 minutes of a White House tape, one of the central bits of intrigue of the Watergate scandal.

Elizabeth Ray, who admitted that she could not type, earned her $14,000 government salary by being the mistress of Rep. Wayne Hays. Some time after Ray’s revelation, Hays recovered from an overdose of sleeping pills and resigned from Congress.

Now there is Fawn Hall, who can definitely type and who is expected to be called as a witness, possibly this afternoon.

Hall, who has accepted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, told investigators that while working for Lt. Col. Oliver North on the National Security Council, she made changes in about four documents on her IBM Displaywriter word processor, backdating them and making printouts, which were substituted for the original documents in files on the Iran-contra arms deal.

Hall’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, said that as Hall’s day at the hearings approached, Hall was indeed nervous.

“She’s a human being, and anyone who isn’t apprehensive about it, including myself, wouldn’t be human,” said Cacheris. “She’d like to get it over with and retreat into whatever it is she is going to do.

“She may decide to stay and be a secretary. That is not demeaning at all. It is a job she has found fulfilling. She enjoyed her job and I’m sure she wishes she were still there.”

Hall still is a secretary, but is now with the Department of the Navy.

Other Washington secretaries were asked for their opinions of the case, and most agreed that backdating and shredding official documents was wrong, and that if they were asked to do it, they would realize it was wrong. But there were mixed feelings about whether Hall should have done it.

“I think she was just dead wrong. Regardless of what she says on that stand, it’s not going to change my feelings about that,” Shields said.

Vyvyanne Lee, a former secretary to Health and Human Services Secretary Otis Bowen and now a paralegal trainee in the department, thought about Hall testifying before the committee and said: “It is probably the most scary feeling in the world. I just wish her the best--because she is a secretary, you know? She was just doing her job.”

Working at the White House, especially in a sensitive, secretive area, as Hall did, can have a powerful effect on judgment, some secretaries said.

“It’s completely different in the White House,” said Tricia Wilson, who worked for Ed Morgan at the White House domestic council and later at the department of the Treasury in the 1970s. Morgan, one of Nixon’s lawyers, was sentenced in 1974 to four months in prison for backdating documents on Nixon’s tax returns. Now a secretary for another government official she preferred not to name, Wilson did not work for Morgan at the time he backdated documents, saying it only haunts her “on my resume.”

When Wilson worked for Morgan at the White House, she remembered “being in awe of where you’re working. You can’t help but be impressed with the fact that you’re working at the White House with the brightest people in the country. Plus, you’re working for the President of the United States, and when he asks you to do something, even if the request comes through other people, you get the feeling of, ‘Who am I to not do this?’ If I were in Fawn’s place, I don’t know what I would have done. I just say that unless you actually work there it’s hard to realize what position these people were actually in.

“You’ve got to understand it would be a difficult decision to balk a directive of that sort. I’m sympathetic to these people who get caught up in these situations because I know it’s difficult to be the person to make waves. And I would imagine that it’s harder, the lower down on the totem pole you go, to be the person who says ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t right.’ ”

Secretaries, especially young pretty ones, are glorified in many quarters for their unquestioning loyalty to their bosses. But some secretaries say there’s a point where that loyalty should end.

“If somebody asked you to drive the get-away car in a bank robbery, unless you have a gun to your neck, you don’t have to do it,” said Carol Browning, who has spent the last 21 years as the secretary to William Brock as he went from congressman, to senator, to head of the Republican National Committee and now Secretary of Labor. “Blind loyalty is not real loyalty.

“If you’re under orders to do something and it’s illegal, she’s just as guilty as he is. If I were asked to do something illegal, I would question it. But I’m not at the NSC, either.”

Many secretaries responded that way: I don’t like what she did, but . . . .

“I’m appalled,” said Becky Hendrix, who has worked in the White House and now is the secretary for Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.). “I would have told him, ‘No.’ What is she, 27? It’s not like her life is over. She could have said no and found another job. Of course you don’t know how he asked her to do this.”

‘A Tough Call’

Trying to imagine whether she would have followed orders to alter documents, Trudy Werner, the secretary to former White House foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, “That’s really a tough call. If you feel personally that there is a very good reason for it, you might be able to do it. But secretaries are not automatons who do everything they’re told. We’re not robots. We do think, we do have minds and we do know right from wrong.”

Lee, the former HHS secretary who hopes to become a lawyer, said that “being a government secretary, one has a tendency to do what one is asked with little or no questions asked, unless it’s totally against one’s principles. Secretaries have a great deal of loyalty to their bosses, and her job could have been in jeopardy. I’m not going to say how I would have handled it because I don’t know. I wasn’t there with her, I don’t know the atmosphere and there must have been a lot of variables.”

Some sympathy came from Elizabeth Andros Gaston, who has worked for Secretaries of State Edmund Muskie and Alexander Haig, and now for George Shultz. Gaston said, “I would hope they (the public) wouldn’t think badly of Fawn.

“Loyalty is a prime attribute in a secretary. You can get caught up in doing the very best job you can. No one knows what they would do until they are faced with it. I can’t sit here and say I wouldn’t do that. That’s a toughie.

“Obviously she was working hard and she was very loyal to her supervisor, but she also had the gumption to come forward when she realized her loyalty had gone too far, and rectify that mistake.”

Cynics might say Hall has come forward to avoid going to jail.

Righting a Wrong

“I can’t judge that. I see it as just trying to right a wrong. I would hope the public would see it as heroic,” said Gaston, who previously worked in U.S. embassies in Cairo, Moscow, Tokyo, Saigon and Beijing.

Gaston is typical of Washington secretaries in that she works long hours, from about 8 in the morning to 7 at night, and never becomes famous for it. Most government secretaries earn at the lower end of a $20,000 to $40,000 salary range. Their reward is the excitement of being involved in a small way in important world events.

The consensus of the secretaries seemed to be that the magnitude of trouble encountered by Hall, Woods and Ray is rare. But conflicts involving loyalty to the boss and loyalty to one’s principles do crop up, if on a smaller scale.

“I suppose everyone has been asked to do things that they don’t feel exactly comfortable about doing,” said Connie Gerrard Romero, who has been a secretary in the White House press office for 23 years. “Your whole reason for your job is to make things easier for your boss. That’s the philosophy of your job. But your first loyalty has to be to your own ethics, your own integrity. If it’s anything against the law, you shouldn’t do it. I can’t think of anything that extreme I’ve been asked to do. I was surprised that this sort of thing would happen after Watergate.”

Watergate brought with it the biggest secretary mystery-scandal of all, one that will probably always remain unsolved. Did Rose Mary Woods really accidentally erase the 18-minute gap in the tape with a foot pedal while leaning over and answering the phone?

“If you’re under stress and strain, you can make a mistake,” said Browning, Brock’s secretary. “If she did do it (on purpose), I think she would have done it to protect her boss. At that time there were no indictments, so I don’t know that I have any problems with her doing that. It didn’t become an issue until much, much later. My point is that if Oliver North knew that investigators were coming the next day to see those documents, that’s totally different from erasing a tape.”

Woods kept a low profile after her brush with fame, and even lived in the Watergate apartment complex. She has undergone surgery for cancer. Her attorney, Charles Rhyne, refused to answer questions about Wood’s current activities or health, and Woods was unreachable for comment.

Elizabeth Ray seemed to have mixed feelings about her fame. It left her yearning for an entertainment career, which she is still pursuing in a so-far unsuccessful manner in New York City. Ray responded to questions but would not discuss anything about Hall, Washington secretaries or her own experience in Washington.

“It’s passe. It’s over and it’s over the hill,” said Ray, who made a lot of money on a novel, “The Washington Fringe Benefit,” which was published shortly after the scandal. “I have a different life style. I’m alive and well and living in New York City. I am pursuing my acting career, into writing novels, I’ve written a play and I’m working on a nightclub act that is singing and comedy. I think my best is comedy; it really is.”

Ray’s scandal always reminds the public of the sexual hanky-panky that can be going on between any boss and secretary, always a delicate subject.

“I think it probably is a problem for good-looking, sexy secretaries,” said Shields. During the Ray scandal, Shields remembers herself being an overweight secretary attending the Democratic Convention, wearing a button that said, “I Can Type.”

“A senator looked over and saw it,” said Shields, “and he said, ‘I bet you can!’ What an ego-deflator.”

Fawn Hall’s future is an interesting thing to contemplate, given the fact that she was already a part-time model and is besieged with requests to pose for Playboy, act on television and otherwise exploit her beauty and notoriety. So far Hall, whose mother, Wilma, is a secretary for the National Security Council’s Latin American directorate, has declined all offers outside of her secretarial duties in the Dept. of the Navy. But that hasn’t stopped observers from discussing her looks, and what effect they have on the whole matter. If a male aide had shredded documents would the papers dub him “America’s Sweetheart” and the producers swamp him with calls?

“There’s still that chauvinism there. If it had been a man, people possibly would be more angry about it,” said Pat Thorne, secretary to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Thomas. “Someone as attractive as she is, people think that she’s just there as a beauty and maybe she does whatever she’s told no matter what it was. I think a lot of people think secretaries don’t think and don’t know how to think, but they do.”

Discussing Hall’s appearance before the investigating committee, Thorne said, “I’m not sure I’d want to go through something like that. It will probably make secretaries think twice about some things.”

Washington’s inner circle is well aware of the power secretaries hold, as gate-keepers and secret-holders. “The things they know; they know everything, “ said a long-time Washington reporter. They also control who talks to the boss and who doesn’t, a powerful political weapon.

“I give them flowers and perfume. I don’t mess around,” said the reporter, who declined to be named, because he said, “secretaries are too important to me.”