Reagan’s Royal Obsession: No Wiser Than George III’s

The mosaic of testimony emerging from the Iran- contra hearings gives a picture of President Reagan quite different from the conventional Washington dinner-party view or the critical judgment of the Tower Commission. Not exactly the remote chairman of the board who was always taken by surprise at what his subordinates did, not merely a man who took pride in not getting involved in the morass of details as Jimmy Carter did, Adm. John M. Poindexter’s Ronald Reagan shapes up as a man obsessed with overthrowing the government in Nicaragua.

“Can’t we do something unilaterally?” he asks after Congress passes the Boland Amendment. The question, which Poindexter claims to have taken as his commission to use the profits from trading arms for hostages to subsidize secret attacks on Nicaragua, is in the great tradition of autocratic rulers. In olden days kings merely had to make their wishes known for some loyal servant to turn royal passion into policy. Henry II of England, for example, just had to ask, “Who will free me from this turbulent priest?” and Thomas a Becket was promptly martyred in the cathedral.

The history of royal obsessives weighed heavily on the Founding Fathers. After all, they had just got through dealing with one. “George, be King, “ the courtiers told the neurotic youth, and George III tried so hard that he lost America for the Empire. He had some help, to be sure, but, as Barbara Tuchman recounts it, royal passion was responsible for that particular march of folly. In more recent times the royal passion of a commoner brought disaster to Britain. “I want Nasser destroyed, can’t you understand?” Prime Minister Anthony Eden screamed at his old friend at the Foreign Office, Anthony Nutting, who was advising against the disastrous 1956 invasion of Egypt, which marked the end of British power in the Middle East.

It was the arbitrary nature of kingly power that worried men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, for not only does arbitrary power threaten liberties, it is very likely to be exercised foolishly. Those who, like Benjamin Franklin, came to the Constitutional Convention as experienced diplomats might have anticipated what Alexis de Toqueville observed many years later: Democracy and diplomacy make a bad fit, because the qualities needed for successful management of foreign affairs--secrecy, consistency, agility and the ability to make quick decisions--are more likely “to belong to a single man.”

The impatience with the slowness of democracy and the fickleness of the public mood has been expressed by Americans long before Oliver North. But the Constitution was based on the collective judgment of 55 remarkable men that the risks of inaction and confusion that are inherent in the democratic process are significantly less than the dangers of royal obsession. If we don’t think so now, we should change the Constitution. Until we do change it, we should live under its rules.

This year particularly we are treating the Constitution as an icon without really appreciating what it is saying to us. The President was directed to share power with the Senate because of the fear, expressed even by such a skeptic of democracy as Alexander Hamilton, that a single man might “betray the interests of the state.” He was worried that a President might be bribed by a foreign power to sell out the country if the Senate didn’t share in the treaty power. A greater danger is that he might damage the interests of the nation by exercising bad judgment on his own. An important function of checks and balances is to provide a reality check on the judgment of one fallible human being.

Reagan’s royal obsession with Nicaragua has seriously damaged the United States. He has asserted a towering American interest in a desperately poor country of 2.9 million people without making the case that it represents a national-security threat to the United States. He has offered no credible strategy for accomplishing his objectives, for, as harassed as the Sandinistas are, the contras can neither win nor govern. The President’s response to the disasters that his policies have already wrought is to defend the deception of Congress and to redouble his efforts.

If the President is committed to “victory,” it will require American military intervention. To avoid that, Congress must reassert its role as a check on presidential passion.