‘Still Ignorant’ on Iran-Contra, Reagan Insists

Former President Ronald Reagan acknowledges that the Iran-Contra affair hurt his effectiveness in the last two years of his term, but he defends his actions in his new memoir.

Reagan also says he is “still ignorant” about all the facts in the scheme in which weapons were sold to Iran and the profits diverted to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

In his book, “An American Life,” Reagan said that if he could relive the past, he would bring former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter and his then-aide, Oliver L. North, to the Oval Office to explain the Iran-Contra affair to him.

Excerpts of the book, made available Sunday, appear in this week’s issue of Time magazine.

“ ‘OK John and Ollie, level with me,’ ” Reagan wrote about what he would say. “ ‘Tell me what really happened and what it is that you have been hiding from me. Tell me everything.’

“If I had done that, at least I wouldn’t be sitting here, writing this book, still ignorant of some of the things that went on during the Iran-Contra affair,” he wrote. Poindexter and North were most involved in the diversion.

Reagan insisted that the sale of weapons to Iran was not intended to swap arms for American hostages held in Lebanon. “But I know it may not look that way to some people,” he said.

Reagan said he was hurt by the scandal, the most serious of his eight-year Administration.

“The cloud that descended over my credibility during Iran-Contra undoubtedly affected my last two years in office,” he said.

Reagan said his greatest regret as President was sending Marines to Lebanon, where a suicide bomber attacked the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, killing 241 servicemen.

Reagan said he had believed that it was a good idea to deploy Marines in war-torn Lebanon as peacekeepers. But he said American officials did not realize how vulnerable the servicemen were in the barracks on a wide-open space.

“In any case, sending the Marines to Beirut was the source of my greatest regret and greatest sorrow,” Reagan wrote.