IT’S PROCESS OVER PEOPLE AT HEARINGS

It’s just another manic-depressive Monday.

The televised Iran- contra hearings do work on your emotions, and there seems to be no middle ground. You’re either high or you’re low, way up or way down, soaring or sad. You’re riding a cloud or crawling on your belly, depending on your personal vision of America and feelings about who’s testifying or questioning or posturing. Your mood is also affected by public reaction to the hearings.

A letter came in angrily criticizing my observation that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s pro-contra slide show omitted alleged atrocities by the anti-Sandinista rebels. “Of course . . . atrocities will occur on both sides during a war,” the letter stated. “But whose side are you on?”

Americans who say no to Sandinista atrocities, but yes to contra atrocities? Our atrocities (for contra supporters) are better than their atrocities? A segment of the public that regards these hearings as an endorsement of that view?

Now that’s depressing.

But not all is grim. Thursday and Friday--when Secretary of State George P. Shultz testified before the select congressional panel investigating the Iran-contra affair--were feel-good days. They were uppers not for partisan reasons, but because America was shown on TV putting its best foot forward even while tripping.

Most of the criticisms you may have about the hearings are probably justified. Yes, there’s an artificial “hothouse” atmosphere, packs of reporters and still photographers, and TV’s cameras and white heat. You have people making points and reputations. You have actors as witnesses and interrogators. You have partisan politicians from both sides who blow out speeches to impress the constituents back home, who are only occasionally profound, but frequently long-winded, superfluous and self-serving. Have you ever seen so many people in one room who were so “deeply disturbed,” who were so self-righteous and sanctimonious, as if their own political lives were without blemish?

Put all that aside, though. In the broadest sense, it doesn’t matter.

If you’re disturbed by the form of the hearings or the details of execution, you have to feel buoyed by the TV-delivered process.

Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or something else. Whether you feel the heavies outnumber the heroes. No matter your feelings about the witnesses or panel members. No matter if you believe that the hearings are unfocused or misdirected or unfair or political or excessive, all of which has been true at some point.

Just the same, you have to applaud not only the drama and the show, but also--and especially--the process.

Think about it. What an astonishing spectacle to see the top man in President Reagan’s cabinet on live TV, testifying before a congressional panel about screw-ups--”I’d like to wring somebody’s neck,” Shultz said Friday--in an Administration of which he is a critical part. There he was, at once blasting and defending, trying, as a loyal team player, to separate the President from presidentially endorsed policy.

Yes, it’s true that dirty linen is heady time for reporters. We’re salivating, smacking our lips. But free expression--on live TV no less--is every American’s time. Embarrassing and painful to many, yes. But more importantly, open. And it could happen only in this nation.

That’s what North and Poindexter and some of their supporters on the panel did not seem to understand when they criticized these hearings as being an act of self destruction and self ridicule before a global audience.

As super-patriots, they somehow missed the point: that the steely spine of our system is openness, not secrecy, and that these hearings, zits and all, are an exercise of might, not of weakness.

Speaking of strength, nowhere has spot coverage of the hearings been brawnier than on National Public Radio, mostly because of the man some people love to boo, Daniel Schorr.

Schorr will always be recalled as the CBS correspondent who gave the Village Voice a secret report of the House Intelligence Committee on improper activities of the CIA and FBI in 1976, and then was accused of allowing suspicion to fall on Lesley Stahl for leaking the report.

He later went on to work for Cable News Network, and is now NPR’s special correspondent. There are always reports that Schorr is hard to get along with, but he is also someone whom journalism cannot get along without. He’s been so valuable as an analyst at the hearings, supported by the able anchoring of Linda Wertheimer, that NPR should bed him down at night in a Brinks truck.

Schorr is the human impaler, the man who’s never met a euphemism he liked. There is no soft edge that he won’t sharpen with incisive, jugular-slicing observations, all properly within his purview as an analyst.

His comments about Reagan--who was painted in earlier testimony as almost an outsider in his own Administration--have been brutally blunt, yet fair.

On Friday, in comparing Shultz with earlier, seemingly less candid witnesses, Schorr noted that the secretary of state is from an era when public service was practiced as an “art form.” The same description applies to Schorr’s journalism.

And also to the continued work of Judy Woodruff, Elizabeth Drew and Cokie Roberts at the hearings for “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” on PBS. How obnoxious that a trio of women on a newscast is still considered by many to be an oddity--perhaps even a gimmick--while three males would go unnoticed.

Besides excelling in their roles--Woodruff the anchor, Drew the analyst and Roberts the congressional correspondent in the field--their conversational tone is what sets them apart from their more ponderous counterparts on other networks. While watching the PBS crew, you have no sense of anyone competing for air time or even clock watching, no sense of words being weightily read from a stone tablet.

Woodruff asked Sen. George Mitchell (D-Me.) Friday if he expected more major developments when the hearings resume Tuesday. “My advice to you would be to stay tuned,” he replied.

Finally, good advice from a politician.