Ollie North, Semper Fi : Iran-Contra: The former Marine still believes in the Reagan legacy. But his cloak-and-dagger world is no more.

The cockeyed, boyish charisma is still there: the puppy-dog eyes, the low husky voice, the gap-toothed grin, the look of utter sincerity--real or contrived--that made him a television natural in his dramatic congressional hearings four years ago.

Oliver L. North, the Marine lieutenant colonel who carried out the orders of his White House superiors too well, is back and talking--but still telling no secrets.

Little more than a month after prosecutor Lawrence Walsh dropped all criminal charges against him--an appeals court set aside his three felony convictions on technical grounds--North is on the road, selling the memoirs of a 48-year-old retired Marine who found himself, by his account, scapegoat for the mistakes of an entire Administration.

“Ronald Reagan knew everything,” North says, insisting that the President he served must have known that his minions were skimming profits from the secret sale of missiles to Iran and using the money to buy guns for Nicaraguan rebels.

”. . . And this guy was cast over the side,” he adds, with a characteristic third-person reference to himself.

Is that a message that will play in Peoria? The first week on the hustings hasn’t been great. Former aides to Reagan denounced him as a turncoat and a whiner. The widow of the late CIA Director William J. Casey called his account of Casey’s views on the scandal “a fantasy and a lie.” NBC’s Today Show dropped him from its guest roster, saying--in perhaps the unkindest cut of all--that there’s no news left in the man.

So North has tried to backpedal a bit from his Reagan charge, complaining, as authors do, that the press was focusing “on just one line of a 446-page book.” Never mind that the one line, dressed up in italics in the front of Chapter 1, was clearly intended to draw exactly the kind of press coverage it got.

The test North faces is more than a narrow debate over his evidence of what Reagan did or did not know. He--and we--are about to discover whether “Olliemania” was a passing fancy, a transient humor that swept the country in 1987, an expression of distaste for his congressional inquisitors--or whether, as his supporters hope, Oliver North actually has a political future.

And, in a sense, he is asking us to look again at the legacy of Reagan, to wrestle with the ambiguities of our recent past, from the standpoint of a true believer who felt betrayed and abandoned in the end.

“I have enormous regard for Ronald Wilson Reagan,” he insists, switching visibly into major-sincerity mode. “I believe the world has changed for the better because of him.”

It’s just that Reagan should have been proud of what his covert operators did, instead of disavowing them and leaving them to the prosecutors, he says.

“He’s still trying to distance himself from it, and I think unnecessarily,” North argues. “I don’t think he needs to be ashamed of it.”

Something is out of sync here. It isn’t just that the schemes North helped carry out--the secret arms sales, the diverted profits, the Contra air force, the ensuing cover-up--had members of Congress talking seriously about impeaching the President of the United States.

It’s also that he’s talking about a vanished world: Reagan’s Washington, a city of fierce political polarization--even fiercer than today--and now-forgotten crises, from the Cold War chill of the early 1980s to the anti-communist crusades in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

It is difficult, now, to remember the passions of that day, when Reagan rode into Washington to reverse half a century of Big Government and roll back the Evil Empire. “1981 really polarized things in this town,” North recalls.

North has emerged from his five years of fighting congressional inquests and criminal charges like a Rip van Winkle from that near-but-distant past. What he did, he argues, can be understood only in the context of its time.

He says he is repentant--but only up to a point. “Bargaining missiles for human lives” was “outrageous,” he admits, but adds: “I continue to believe that saving a life--or trying to--is more important than trying to preserve a policy.”

Lying to Congress, he says now, was a mistake--mostly because it made life so complicated. “When you do that, you create a whole bunch of new responsibilities,” he notes, lapsing into witness-speak. (Responsibilities, in this context, meaning the tangled web of deception that issues from the initial decision to lie.)

But when Casey lied to his subordinates at the CIA, telling them North was not running secret operations in Central America, that was justified: “He wanted to protect his own people.”

And when North, national security adviser John M. Poindexter and others prepared false testimony for Congress in 1986, he insists, “I did not have a sense at the time that a group of people were sitting in John Poindexter’s office concocting perjured testimony. What everybody was trying to do was put the best possible face on what had happened.”

Even today, North is capable of considerable evasiveness. On the subject of George Bush, for example, he is studiously vague. He volunteers cheerfully that Bush knew much of what he was doing, saw many of the “hundreds of thousands of memos” he wrote, was given detailed briefings on the Iranian arms-for-hostage deals and even sent North a handwritten note thanking him for his “tireless work with the hostage thing and with Central America.”

But when he is reminded that Bush denied knowing that arms were being traded for hostages, North turns more careful. “I have no reason to dispute that,” he says.

And he is careful to say little or nothing that might go beyond the already-copious public record. He left a roomful of veteran Iran-Contra reporters grumbling on Tuesday afternoon, and Ted Koppel visibly disgruntled Tuesday evening, when their questions about the scandal’s unsolved mysteries hit a series of affable brick walls.

That should make North’s 20-city book tour a classic of the genre. He ducks hard questions, changes the subject, throws out non sequiturs like an airplane scattering chaff. But when it comes to spinning anecdotes and pronouncing memorable lines, he’s polished and ready--Ollie North playing Ollie North. After all, he’s had five years to prepare for the part.

Sample: “I was willing to die for Ronald Reagan.” Pause. “I wasn’t willing to go to jail for him.”

And he is, undeniably, good at it. Now that he’s out from under the prosecutor’s lash, North says he plans to sell his book, get to know his family again--and think about a possible future in politics.

His first few answers to questions about running for office are characteristic brushoff lines: “I’m going to stick to running for husband and father.”

Then, with a grin: “The thought of having to call Ted Kennedy ‘Dear colleague’ is appalling.” (Followed by another third-person aside to himself: “Oh God, North, not again!”)

But, finally, he admits some interest in considering it after his children are a bit older: “Anything’s possible.”

Friends and backers have urged North to run for the Senate, either from Virginia, where he lives now (and where Democrat Chuck Robb will be up for reelection in 1994), or from North Carolina, where he was once stationed as a Marine (and where Democrat Terry Sanford will also be up in 1994).

Does he have what it takes? His 20-city book tour should tell. It will also reveal whether his publisher, HarperCollins, made a good bet by printing a whopping 500,000 copies of his book, titled “Under Fire: An American Story.”

But if it’s any indication, even a couple of hard-bitten reporters turned out to be susceptible to Ollie’s deadly charm.

After peppering him with questions about missile sales and false testimony and the inner workings of the CIA, they approached him shyly--and asked if he would mind autographing their copies of his book.

North savored the irony of the moment with a radiant smile.

“Semper Fidelis,” he scrawled on the flyleaf in his odd, loopy, left-handed script. “Oliver L. North.”