Shultz’s View

For George P. Shultz, usually one of the most guarded and unemotional of men, the time came last week to let it all hang out. With passionate candor the secretary of state revealed the frustration and anger that he felt as the full extent of the deceit practiced by other high Reagam Administration officials in the Iran- contra affair came to be revealed. Testifying before congressional investigating committees without any notes or lawyerly promptings to help him keep his story straight, Shultz proved to be easily the most forthright and believable of the major witnesses who have yet been heard. What he had to say was as memorable for its tone as for its substance.

In setting the scene for the decision-making that led to the folly of the Iran arms deal, Shultz painted a bleak and sometimes bizarre picture of almost constant guerrilla warfare in the top ranks of the Administration. The particular battle that was being waged was not, however, for the hearts and minds of men, but soley for the ear of the President. At stake was primacy of influence in advising on foreign policy, a role that traditionally falls to the secretary of state but that in this case was being contested by William J. Casey, the late director of Central Intelligence, and by Adm. John M. Poindexter, the President’s former national-security adviser. As Shultz tells it, both men were masters of intrigue and duplicity.

Freezing out dissenters, of whom Shultz was one, and deliberately avoiding the counsel of experts, Casey, Poindexter and their allies singlemindedly pursued plans to trade weapons to Iran for hostages--an effort that from its inception should have been recognized as absurd and as doomed to failure. As the inherent pitfalls of this scheme became more apparent, as mercenary intermediaries assumed ever larger and more dubious roles, efforts intensified to hide the truth of what was going on from others in the top levels of government. Most of all, Shultz testified, it was the President himself who was victimized by this deception.

For all its considerable drama and emphatic tone, Shultz’s testimony for the most part simply supported what had earlier become known or what could plausibly be inferred. That included, though it was not Shultz’s intent to do so, a depiction of President Reagan’s management skills and alertness that cannot be regarded as either flattering or reassuring.

For the President that Shultz sees as being so humiliatingly misled by a few of his trusted advisers clearly was not someone who had tried very hard to get a grip on the substance of policy. He was not a man who knew the things that he should have known if he was to ask the right questions that early on might have exposed the terrible foolishness of what was being proposed.

The President that Shultz described--confirming the analysis made earlier in the Tower Commission report--in the end was one whose detachment, lack of interest in necessary detail and over-credulous reliance on the advice of only a few aides produced a prescription for trouble. The President, Shultz said, was duped by some of those whom he most trusted. No doubt. But what also seems apparent, though Shultz did not say it, is that the opportunity for the deception seems certainly to have been encouraged by Reagan’s own inadequacies.