Reagan Not Damaged Domestically, Ex-Senator Believes : Tower Says Iran Hearings Hurt Congress

Former Texas Sen. John Tower said Monday that the Iran- contra hearings hurt the President internationally but not domestically and that they damaged Congress because former White House aide Oliver L. North became a hero to many, public support for the Nicaraguan rebels increased and no “smoking gun” was found.

Nothing came out of the hearings that would cause him to alter significantly the report released in February by the presidentially appointed inquiry he headed on the affair, the Texas Republican said, adding that the congressional sessions should have been conducted in private.

Nothing New in Hearings

“The impact of the hearings probably was more on the international image of the United States and the President as a leader than any impact on the American public . . . because nothing substantively new came out during the hearings,” Tower said in a session with reporters--his first since the congressional hearings ended a week ago.

“The President has maintained stoutly all along that he did not know (of the diversion of Iran arms sale proceeds to Nicaragua’s rebels) and the hearings only confirmed that assertion on his part. But, obviously, it kept before the public eye the flaw in policy that the Administration had made at the outset with the Iranian arms transfer.

“The most dangerous thing you can do in Washington is to walk between a member of Congress and a television camera,” Tower said, and he suggested that the hearings were public because Congress likes to appease “the networks’ desire for sensation.”

“I think the investigative aspects of this could have been conducted with much more effectiveness and efficiency and dispatch if it had been behind closed doors,” he said.

Tower said that the public testimony risked disclosure of sensitive national security information and undercut the stature of the United States among its allies, who he said are perplexed by this country’s propensity for “public self-flagellation.”

The three-month inquiry conducted by the Tower Commission, which included former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, relied on private interviews and documentary evidence in producing its report, which was highly critical of the Administration’s actions.

Tower, now a teacher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, dismissed the conflicts in testimony among some witnesses at the congressional hearings as sincere differences in recollection by honest men and said he had no reason to doubt their credibility.

Indeed, he said, North, a central figure in the arms sale, was such a convincing witness that Congress may have a more difficult time resisting Administration efforts to continue U.S. aid to the contras.

Although he called North a “patriotic American,” Tower said of the Marine lieutenant colonel’s conduct: “I don’t think it should be termed an act of heroism if one consciously and willingly goes beyond the law, because ours is a government of laws and not of men.”

Tower said that two important aspects of the Iran-contra affair were not fully resolved by the congressional investigation: what became of all the proceeds from the Iran arms sales and how much of a role Israel played in the shipments to Iran.

On the latter, he said: “If you think Congress is going to touch that political hot potato, you’ll be waiting for a long time,” because the pro-Israel lobby is a powerful force in Washington.