ADMINISTRATION Amaterus : DUES AND DON’TS

The Watergate scandal was due to the arrogance of power and the Iran- contra scandal was due to the arrogance of popu larity, Henry A. Kissinger tells us. It seems a nice formulation, yet his comparison is misleading. Many Presidents have been immensely powerful and some have been immensely popular, but none flouted the law and the people’s wishes as Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan did--with the zealous help of their aides. And the “arrogance” part of the parallel is hardly new, for serious abuses of the law in high places are often due to arrogance in one form or another.

A more fitting explanation is that the two cases are not different but alike, and that both were due to the arrogance of amateurs.

To go back a bit in our history, from the time that the political bosses’ control over nominations of presidential candidates was broken in the 1960s, the parties’ national committees had far less, indeed often little, to say about the choices, which were largely turned over to voters in primary elections. Without the committees’ financial support, candidates more than ever had to raise the stuff on their own--and still do, even with federal matching funds. Their solution, now the only way to run for the presidency, was to hire campaign-staff members whose main qualifications were zeal and the willingness to work stupefyingly long hours for humiliatingly low pay. Naturally, most were amateurs at the uniquely complex business of politics, because professionals were inclined to wait and see which candidates had the best chances, and then go work for them.

Once the winner took over the White House, he appointed people from his campaign staff to key posts throughout his Administration--not because they were competent to handle such jobs but because he could rely on their loyalty, and because they had helped make him President. In sum, people good enough to win a national election were assumed to be good enough to run the government.

The first notable result of that assumption was the Bay of Pigs. Later, in the Johnson Administration--manned by skilled political professionals and led by a man of uncommon political experience and brilliance--the professors, not the professionals, drove a President into retirement. Lyndon B. Johnson’s tragedy was that he heeded the advice of such Kennedy Administration carry-over amateurs as Walt W. Rostow and McGeorge Bundy about expanding America’s role in the Vietnam War. But at least he saw his mistake, and observed, after Nixon brought his own amateurs into the White House, that they would wreck his Administration, too. Colossally inept, they knew little and cared nothing about the basic nature of our political system, and they nearly brought it down.

When Jimmy Carter came out of the woods, he was the most amateurish national politician to take over the White House since Henry A. Wallace tried to in 1948. At least Carter and his crowd of amateurs (who nearly lost the election although Carter came out of the Democratic National Convention 30 points ahead of Gerald R. Ford in the polls) were fairly decent and fairly honest. But they tried to run the nation as they had the campaign--by blaming everything that was wrong or went wrong on Congress, which doomed any chance of Carter’s governing successfully.

Reagan, the supreme political amateur of modern presidential history, has of course relied on his personal popularity to get him out of a stunning number of political blunders. Finally, though, he came a cropper in the Iran- contra mess not merely because of his own misjudgment but because of his aides’ failure to protect him from himself and from some of them. They failed because they understood so little about politics and their duty to the President they were supposed to serve. This time, most disastrously, the amateurs were amateurs with a profound difference: All were military men. By training, and by experience, the military mind is usually adrift in the sea of politics--with such rare exceptions as Gen. George C. Marshall, a wizard in international matters, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who learned as Supreme Allied commander in Europe for World War II about compromise and consensus, the chief ingredients of politics.

During the Iran- contra hearings, former Lt. Col. Robert C. McFarlane, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, along with their outside point man, Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, demonstrated their failure--unvaryingly except for degrees of eloquence--to grasp the simplest and most fundamental principles of this republic. In effect, each in turn said that what he had done was justified by patriotism as he defined it. This kind of circular reasoning made the White House go around--and around--until it dizzyingly fell in upon itself. Obtusely and proudly defiant to a man, they clearly believed that what was right was what they did.

In the past three months of the hearings, the committee members and their lawyers have spent so much time trying to find out if any laws were broken--most of all, any of the various Boland amendments prohibiting military aid to the contras-- that they paid scant attention to the far more calamitous, and lunatic, foreign policy acts of these righteously patriotic amateurs. They have shaken the fragile balance of the Iran-Iraq War, thereby jeopardizing its containment and increasing the possibility that the Soviet Union will intervene on more than its current clandestine and modest scale. They have betrayed our allies and helped the President dishonor his promises not to give arms to either side in that war and, above all, not to negotiate with terrorists, who are now emboldened to strike elsewhere and more often. They have sold weapons to Iran--”defensive” weapons, they call them, as if defensive weapons don’t kill people--and have probably helped the Iranians kill additional hundreds or thousands of our putative Iraqi friends, thus confirming the belief abroad that for Americans only American lives count; in this case, of course, it was the lives of the American hostages, who shouldn’t have been where they were in the first place, except for the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Beirut.

Probably even more disastrous, they have wrested the most delicate and vital instruments of foreign policy from experienced hands in the State Department to use as clumsily and absurdly as they pleased--with a cake and a Bible to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the mad foe of everything American (undoubtedly including its pastry), with the promise to go to war with the Soviet Union if it intervened on Iraq’s side and with a nine-point agreement to help free 17 Dawa terrorists imprisoned in Kuwait (for bombing the U.S. embassy there) so they could wreak more havoc upon the innocent. And they have claimed that their primary purpose was to make contact with “moderate” elements in the Iranian government, when it is composed of fanatics sworn to harm the United States at any cost.

Of course, throughout the preposterous charade, all that the Iranians had to do, once our government had put itself in their hands, was what they did--reveal the story amid vast international laughter, dismay, bewilderment, anger, disgust and contempt.

Once the Iranians had spilt these political jumping beans and the Iran- contra committee was formed to investigate, the amateurs took the stand and, one after the other, condemned Congress, to which they had admittedly lied repeatedly in the past, for harming our country by broadcasting their misdeeds to the world. In the years that they carried out their crackbrained “policies,” apparently they never paused to ask themselves, or each other, whether in helping the President have his wrongheaded way they betrayed their primary duty to assist and guide him in upholding his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”