OK, So All Politicians Lie--but North Is Just Too Good at It

So Oliver L. North is running for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, and his announcement has occasioned a fit of Washington apoplexy. Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia says North is unfit for the job. TV journalists have essentially called North a liar to his face.

But so far, the critics have not managed to explain what bothers them so violently about North. Unless they do better, he will roll right over his opposition.

It is not hard to see the cause of the indignation. North, after all, not only said during the Iran-Contra hearings that he had lied to Congress, but he portrayed the legislative branch of the federal government as a body not worthy of being given the truth. Now he says he wants to sit there. His audience can be forgiven for smelling hypocritical opportunism.

Moreover, the lying looks like a habit. Even before North’s announcement, the Reader’s Digest, in a piece by Rachel Flick Wildavsky, presented the evidence. North claimed he was close to President Ronald Reagan and told how he and Reagan had watched, on television, the homecoming of U.S. students evacuated from Grenada. But Reagan spokesman Marlin Fitzwater says Reagan never saw North that day. North also said he was close to the late CIA director William J. Casey, visiting Casey’s home and attending his wake at Mrs. Casey’s behest. But she says she never saw North at the house, and that he went to the wake on his own initiative, not hers.

The Digest is known as a conservative publication, and most of the specific “lying” charges against North have been made by his ideological allies--including retired Gen. John K. Singlaub and former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III. True, many of North’s enemies are liberals who cannot stand his politics--but something about him makes even a lot of conservative skins crawl.

Yet, these accusations do not ring quite true. Political types who say they can’t stand lying sound about as reasonable as a bunch of surgeons protesting they can’t abide blood. Political people lie all the time, even--or especially--to Congress. Iran-Contra prosecutions in this area were difficult partly because the laws prohibiting such lies had almost never been applied to political testimony--despite a history replete with omissions, misimpressions and falsehoods. More generally, no one has leveled with us about Travelgate or Whitewater. So why the sudden burst of sensitivity?

At first, I hesitated to write about this question, conflict-of-interest fervor being what it now is, because my husband represented another defendant in the Iran-Contra affair.

Then I remembered that even before Iran-Contra, I had my own, independently verifiable experience with then-Col. North. At the time, Congress was already suspicious of North’s pro-Contra activities. The White House put out the convenient word that North was being fired from his job on the National Security Council staff because of his overzealousness on the Contras’ behalf. North made himself available to presumptively friendly journalists.

I bit.

On the phone, North named a time and place. He said if I had to call him back, I should use only my first name.

That was the first false note. This guy is calling from a place where people have stratospheric security clearances and access to all official phone logs. The minute I write a piece about him, everyone will know where it came from. And he wants to hold a first-names-only charade?

But we met on the appointed day in a dark cave of a restaurant down the street from the White House. North introduced himself and began talking. He was fascinating. He told about the U.S. politics of Contra aid and the Contras’ internal political and military situation. Some of the material, I knew, was secret. I took furious notes.

But after an hour of this, another funny feeling hit me: Why is this man talking to me so trustingly, confidingly, sincerely, intensely? Why is he telling me so much? How does he know I will protect him just because I’m a pal of an ally of his?

Later, I called friends who knew North. I told them about the funny feeling and asked whether there wasn’t something inappropriate--too politically intimate--in the way North had acted toward a near-stranger. They said it was all right; Ollie was straight.

I wrote a piece contorted like a pretzel by its ambivalence, but, on balance, favorable to North. Soon after, the Iran-Contra scandal told me what a bill of goods I’d been sold.

OK, it’s true that Hell hath no fury like a journalist taken for a ride--but there is another lesson in this. The problem is not that North lies; the problem is that he seems so good at it.

The symbolism of North’s Iran-Contra history reinforces his current credibility: He clashed with a Congress perceived, often for good reason, as inconstant and pusillanimous. He, by contrast, stood for patriotism and keeping promises. They lost. He won.

He has also shored up his credibility by his post-Iran-Contra behavior. His critics say he has made lots of money, but he has also spent a lot of time practicing old-fashioned Virginia politics--traveling to every corner of the state, making fund-raising appearances for other Republican candidates, eating bad food, building alliances. He has been paying conventional dues and honoring commitments, thus making it harder for his foes to persuade others that he must be disbelieved.

Yet, more important is North’s manner--well-developed before the first klieg light ever hit him. The cute smile, the husky and touchingly hesitant voice and the sincere eyes never stop. When challenged, he doesn’t falter. His response is never small-minded. Ugly charges do not distract him from his own rhetorical mission.

You can see that something is not quite right. Sometimes, the intensity does not match the topic. Every so often, you can detect the manipulative inner machinery at work. But then it disappears, leaving you with the certainty that inside that head something disciplined and fleet-footed is going on, not just the normal messy thought process that governs us more ordinary types.

It is hard to describe this bothersome quality. That is what makes North so good. You end up saying, “He lied on such-and-such occasion” or “His appeal to traditional values sounds like snake oil.” Yet, many of your listeners will just scratch their heads and answer, “It’s all right. Ollie’s straight.”

This skill of North’s means he can go far in American politics. Seeing that fact makes us critics even more apoplectic. Some think they will fight his appeal by exposing his extreme policies, but they should not count on it: North will likely take respectable conservative positions and articulate the respectable conservative arguments for them.

The national press, in short, will probably not be able to knock North out. In the media-driven, moralistic politics that many of his critics helped create, he is a champion. The task of rendering final judgment on him will have to be left to the people of Virginia--who, in the end, may do a better job of it than national opinion leaders have managed so far.