Speak No Evil

The nation now has sworn testimony that the secrecy that obsessed the Reagan Administration officials most deeply involved in the Iran- contra scandal was in fact carried to its ultimate extreme. No one, it seems, bothered to tell the President in whose name all the jiggery-pokery was taking place that profits from the Iran arms sale were skimmed off to support Nicaraguan insurgents. Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, national-security adviser at the time, says that it was his decision not to burden President Reagan with this information. A relieved White House has hailed as welcome news the assurance that the President didn’t have the foggiest idea what his subordinates were up to.

Poindexter says that he kept Reagan in the dark so as to afford him “deniability” if the diversion ever became known, and because he regardedthe covert shift of funds to the contras as a mere “detail” in the implementation of the President’s policy to keep the insurgency alive. This matter-of-fact acknowledgement of a startling assumption of authority raises the inevitable question: If Reagan wasn’t told about something as legally consequential and politically explosive as the diversion of funds to the contras, what else might his staff have kept from him over the more than six years of his presidency?

Poindexter indicates that he was quite comfortable with hiding information from Reagan, since he was convinced that the President “would approve it (the diversion) if asked.” White House officials insist that Reagan would have rejected the diversion scheme if confronted with it. Poindexter, if he is telling the truth, says he believed that he knew his boss’ mind--a conviction presumably based on Reagan’s insistence that the contras had to be kept going. Reagan’s current aides say that he would never have approved such underhanded methods. There, unresolved and probably unresolvable, the matter rests. To the White House it adds up to a political plus for the President. Sometimes it indeed pays to be ignorant.