THE IRAN--CONTRA HEARINGS : Portrait Painted by Shultz Shows President as Take-Charge Leader

In his two extraordinary days of testimony about the Iran- contra scandal, Secretary of State George P. Shultz told congressional investigating committees as much about President Reagan as about himself.

And the President whose portrait he painted was a take-charge, brass-tacks leader, a firm decision-maker with a solid grasp of detail.

“He is not a trimmer,” Shultz insisted. “He looks at something and he decides, he takes a position. And as I have observed it, his positions have been good positions. One of his outstanding attributes is his capacity for judgment and his willingness to be decisive and stand up to the decisions he makes.”

Different Picture

It was as if Shultz worked for a different President from the one served by Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, who had been Reagan’s national security adviser until he resigned last November over the Iran arms sales and the diversion of some of the profits to Nicaragua’s contras.

Only a week earlier, Poindexter had described a President given to loose policy guidance and hands-off-the-wheel control. As national security adviser, Poindexter said, he operated with so much leeway that he felt free to approve the diversion of Iran arms sale profits to the contras without presidential approval.

If the President had known about the diversion, he would have approved it, Poindexter testified. But the President, according to Poindexter, wanted only to lay out broad policy guidelines; he did not want to be bothered with such operational details. Shultz showed little patience with that reading of the President’s character.

“I have worked with him closely for five years as secretary of state . . . and I have come to have a profound respect for his capacity to make good decisions,” he told Rep. Peter W. Rodino Jr. (D-N.J.).

Most of the time, anyway. Shultz conceded that it was Reagan who rejected Shultz’s advice and went ahead with the arms sales to Iran.

Opposing Perceptions

He wrote that off as a case in which he and the President had differing perceptions. He accepted, he said, that the President came to believe a token amount of arms could lead to the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon.

If it was a character flaw that led Reagan astray, Shultz suggested, it was an excess of compassion. He recalled Reagan in December, 1985, brushing aside a question of the legality of the arms shipments with the comment: “The American people will never forgive me if I fail to get these hostages out over this legal question.”

The secretary, on the other hand, saw a swap of arms for hostages on any scale as something beyond the pale, a violation of the rule not to do business with terrorists. In a light moment, he recalled the sage observation of the late Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Ill.), who said in a discussion of the risk of violating a principle: “It all begins with a cigar.”

Inevitably, Shultz was asked whether Reagan had purposely deceived him when he did not tell him about signing three different findings in which he authorized arms shipments to Iran. With the secretary bristling, the question was gently and decorously put by Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), who was once a federal judge.

In his even monotone, which crept up the scale only rarely in two days of testimony, Shultz replied: “If the thrust of your question is that the President was part of an effort to keep me from knowing what was going on, I don’t buy that.”

Questioned Himself

Shultz confessed that in the wake of the disclosure of the secret diversion of Iran arms sale profits to the contras, he had asked himself whether he had done enough to prevent such a debacle from occurring.

He provided his own answer: “I have to tell you that as this hearing has gone on and I have seen . . . the systematic way in which the National Security Council staff deliberately deceived me . . . my sense of ‘did I do enough’ has given way to a little edge of anger about it.”

Shultz offered his own explanation of what had gone wrong. It had little to do with a failure in the Oval Office.

It was, instead, a matter of presidential advisers and intelligence gatherers getting involved in making policy and running covert operations. The chief culprits, in the secretary of state’s cast of heroes and villains, were Poindexter and the late CIA Director William J. Casey, two of the ringleaders of the covert Iran arms sales and the diversion of profits to the contras.

Poindexter, as Shultz reminded the committee, was national security adviser ; as head of the White House National Security Council staff, he was supposed to put policy options before the President. And, Shultz said, the CIA director cannot be trusted to provide sound and impartial intelligence if he also becomes a policy advocate.

Apogee of Career

Shultz returned to his central theme over and over, and it was evident from their comments that few members of the investigating committee disagreed with it. Indeed, Shultz left Capitol Hill Friday at what was perhaps the apogee of his long career in the Republican Establishment.

He had helped Congress lift its investigation to serious consideration of whether legislative remedies are needed to keep the National Security Council staff from getting into shenanigans like the Iran-contra affair.

“You are a good and honest man,” Sen. Paul S. Trible Jr. (R-Va.) told him, “and for your leadership, your service and your wise counsel, every American should be grateful.”

Not all committee members were as grateful as Trible, especially some who had been moved only a few days ago to pay tribute to Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, Poindexter’s aide on the NSC staff.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) suggested that Shultz had not spoken up forcefully enough in opposition to the Iran arms sales after Reagan initially came down in favor of the sales. He wondered whether “you yielded to temptation when your advice was rejected to refuse to have anything to do with the project and, in effect, to sit back and wait for the day when you could say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

‘Things I Needed to Know’

“I didn’t refuse to have anything to do with it, senator,” Shultz shot back. “I said I wanted to know the things I needed to know to do my job.”

But on at least one point, Hatch came down squarely on Shultz’s side--on his reading of Reagan’s character.

“You and other witnesses,” Hatch said approvingly, “have portrayed him as a strong leader, as a strong decision-maker, as a decisive leader and one who doesn’t shy away from tough choices. And if he’s given the facts, he’ll generally make the right choice.”