It Was North’s Slide Show, but It Was Dornan Making a Sale

Rep. Robert Dornan brought what he called “the infamous Ollie North slide show” to Santa Ana Saturday, but found it almost impossible to stick to the script written by Col. North for prospective private backers of aid to the Nicaraguan contras .

“I want to talk to you in straight talk, like Ollie North,” Dornan said, calling on those in the audience to be aware of the threat posed by “world communism and world terrorism.”

The town meeting, held in a high school gymnasium, got off to a rocky start when an elderly woman in the audience--one of 50 anti- contra demonstrators who picketed outside before the meeting--stood up and loudly criticized the Garden Grove Republican for his support of U.S. intervention in Central America.

“Yell once more and your ass is going to be thrown out!” Dornan shouted at the woman, to the cheers of the nearly 1,000 people who had come to a town meeting held for constituents.

The competition dispensed with, Dornan spoke for approximately two hours, for the most part using the script and slide show--the same one North was prevented from giving to the congressional Iran-contra hearings--only as a faint point of reference, at times digressing from his own frequent digressions and attacking a whole range of targets, some far afield of Central America.

Many of the slides in the presentation prompted the irrepressible lawmaker to recount his own military exploits around the world in various planes, helicopters and even a parachute. Dates in the script reminded him of meetings he had held with various political leaders in the hemisphere, including one in the Oval Office of the White House. He rattled off a blizzard dates of events and numerical designations of weapons technology.

A satellite photograph that Dornan identified as a prison prompted the assertion that under the Sandinista government in Nicaragua the only buildings being constructed are prisons and military facilities.

One Aside or Another

In one aside or another, Dornan touched on the late Dean Paul Martin, who died in a National Guard plane crash, Mother Teresa, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plans for the U.S. Supreme Court, the history of the Republican Party and the Bolshevik Revolution, the failings of Karl Marx, the pirates Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, the late Anastasio Somoza’s nickname (“Tacho”), CBS Chairman Lawrence Tisch and NATO code names for Soviet aircraft.

A few of the feature films he brought into the monologue were “The Untouchables,” “Red Dawn,” “Platoon” (which he referred to as “Spittoon”), “Salvador” (“a Communist training film”), “Scarface,” “Star Wars” and “Walker,” the last a movie recently shot in Nicaragua which he called “pro-Communist.”

The American press also came in for a lambasting in general, with Dornan classifying most of the Washington corps “left of center,” and in particular, saying one article in Newsweek was so biased it “could have been written by Tomas Borge,” the Sandinista minister of the interior.

At the close of the slide show, when the script began a soft-sell pitch for contributions, Dornan volunteered that when the contras were soliciting private support, “I sent them several hundred dollars.”

The Dornan/North analysis of the Central American situation was vigorously disputed by anti-contra demonstrators before the slide show.

“When will we realize that the nature of this war is to kill civilians, women and children,” asked Clare Weber, a member of the anti-intervention organization Witness for Peace. “To destroy schools and health centers for the poor is the object--it’s not an accident,” she said.

The Rev. Maurice Ogden, a Unitarian minister and a member of the Orange County Central American Network, attacked Dornan’s comparison of those fighting with the contras in Nicaragua with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought on the side of the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War.

Sold Bumper Stickers

“It is an insult to decency to compare the Lincoln Brigade with the paid creatures that are spreading rape, murder and pillage in Nicaragua today,” Ogden said.

Nearby, opponents of the Sandinistas also carried placards and sold bumper stickers reading “Oliver North: American Hero.”

Several hundred members of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a local Latino rights organization, attended the presentation in order to deliver letters of support to Congress to amend the new immigration law to prevent the separation of families. In answer to a question from the group’s director, Nativo V. Lopez, following the slide presentation, Dornan said he supported the unification of families that included some members who did not qualify for amnesty and legalization under the new act.