Still Kidding Himself

Those who looked for introspection in President Reagan’s address to the nation Wednesday night came away disappointed. What the White House had billed as Reagan’s personal reflections on Congress’ investigation into the Iran- contra scandal turned out to be personal, perhaps, but hardly reflective. The President repeated the truism that he is ultimately accountable to the American people. He repeated that he had let his preoccupation with the fate of the hostages intrude into areas where it didn’t belong. But he still could not bring himself to acknowledge fully the originating role that his own self-deception played in the whole sordid affair.

The record, though, is clear. It was the President who made the first and fundamental decision to trade arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon. It was the President who approved the scheme, call it what he will, to pay ransom to the sponsors of terrorism. Ever since the report of the Tower Commission was issued last February, Reagan has accepted the facts of what happened. What he still won’t acknowledge are the ugly consequences that flow from those facts.

“No President,” he sternly told the nation Wednesday night, “should ever be protected from the truth.” The profound complement to that idea is that no President should ever try to kid himself that the truth he sees before him is really something else. Reagan kidded himself by pretending that the deal he was striking with Iran had little to do with ransoming hostages. On Wednesday night he was still talking of this foolish and doomed effort as a policy that “went astray.” That is a remarkably gentle term, it seems to us, to describe the fiasco that followed--the betrayal of the President’s own anti-terrorism policy, the deceiving of friends and allies, the temptation put in the way of loyalists and opportunists to commit a variety of criminal acts.