Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (82 page)

In the wake of the disaster, President Reagan appointed a special commission to determine the cause of the accident. Its fourteen members were led by former secretary of state William P. Rogers, who made it clear from the outset that NASA would emerge unscathed at least publicly, and included Apollo hero Neil Armstrong and America’s first woman in space, Sally Ride. In June 1986, the commission reported that the accident was caused by a failure of an O-ring in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster.

An O-ring? Think of the rubber ring that seals the top of a Mason jar of preserves. More sophisticated versions of these rubber rings sealed the joint between the two lower segments of the booster. The dramatic high point of the hearings came when committee member Richard P. Feynman, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and one of the country’s most prominent physicists, dipped a piece of O-ring into a glass of ice water and used a vise clamp that came from from a local hardware store to show that the cold rubber was brittle. Design flaws in the joint and unusually cold weather during launch caused these O-rings to fail, a possibility that was apparent in test reports from one of the shuttle’s contractors.

The commission had hit upon the physical cause of the disaster but the ultimate cause was the decision to hurry a launch to justify the shuttle program, which was falling further and further behind schedule and costing more than it was ever predicted to cost. The fact that NASA wanted to keep Christa McAuliffe’s classroom lesson plan intact also played a role in the decision to launch, as did President Reagan’s schedule. He was supposed to deliver the State of the Union Address that same night and planned to refer to the shuttle and McAuliffe. Although no direct evidence of political involvement in the launch decision was produced during the commission’s hearings, many critics of NASA believed that the space agency was responding to White House pressure to stick to the schedule.

Why was Ronald Reagan called the “Teflon president”?

Ronald Reagan had a neat trick. When reporters yelled questions at him from a roped-off distance, he would cup his ear and apologize that he couldn’t hear. In fact, he had some hearing troubles. But when it came to many issues, he had perfect political pitch. Whether winning a crowd with a quip, relating an anecdote to win points in a speech, or leading the nation in mourning, as he did after the space shuttle disaster, Reagan was finely tuned in to an admiring public that genuinely liked him, as even his most begrudging critics acknowledged. But through his eight years in the White House and in the period since President Reagan left office, many views of the Reagan presidency have served up a different perspective. They depicted a detached, disinterested executive who asked no questions, ignored details, and allowed subordinates to run amok. Even the revelation that the first lady consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was taken seriously, seemed to slide off Reagan’s back. As Bob Woodward later wrote, “the secret practice of making scheduling decisions based on astrology was irritating and irrational. [White House Chief of Staff Donald] Regan believed it was the most closely guarded domestic secret in the Reagan White House.” Almost every memoir by former administration figures—most notably those by David Stockman and Donald Regan—as well as a number of books about Reagan’s administration by journalists, such as Hedrick Smith’s
The Power Game
and
The Acting President
by Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, present a picture of Reagan as ill informed and disengaged, with a poor memory and little interest in details.

Yet, through most of it, Ronald Reagan held on to extraordinary public approval ratings, if national polls are to be trusted. Reagan’s uncanny ability to keep the controversies and problems of his eight years in office from sticking to him prompted the gently derisive nickname of “Teflon president.” Part of that “Teflon” image was simply a matter of Reagan’s extraordinary good luck. The fact that the American embassy hostages held in Teheran were freed at the moment Reagan took office, and through no effort of his own, seemed to give the Reagan years the first blush of serendipity. This image got another boost when Reagan survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, and the country reveled in press reports of how he joked with the emergency room staff. It was only after George Bush’s election that Reagan’s onetime White House physician stated that the Twenty-fifth Amendment should have been invoked to transfer presidential powers temporarily to Vice President Bush while Reagan was under general anesthesia and recovering from emergency surgery. (Bush did become the first “acting president” under the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1985 while Reagan had cancer surgery.)

But he emerged from the shooting unbowed, sitting taller in the saddle than ever in the American estimation. The surge in his approval polls after the shooting helped him ramrod through Congress the tax cuts and Pentagon spending plans he called for. After a generation of failed and disgraced presidents, Washington observers were marveling at Reagan’s considerable power. This gloss of invincibility and his personal affability carried Reagan through scandals at the highest levels of his administration, all of which he was able to shrug off with a chuckle, a wave, and a bemused shrug. Even the public embarrassment of his wife feeding him lines to shout to reporters didn’t dent the armor. The revelations of gross corruption by a large number of administration officials—the so-called sleaze factor that bubbled beneath the surface for his eight years—continued after Reagan’s departure. In the summer of 1989, a new scandal broke through in revelations of abuses in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), led by a cabinet secretary, Samuel Pierce, whom Reagan once failed to recognize at a Rose Garden party.

Even major policy disasters seemed to roll off his back. When a terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed 239 marines assigned to an indefensible position with no real justification for their presence other than to assert American interests in the area, Reagan assumed “responsibility” without any damage to his image and popularity. An American air raid on the home of Libyan strongman Muammar Khaddafy left only two American pilots and some civilians dead, including one of the Libyan leader’s children. Yet Reagan’s popularity soared after what amounted to an attempted assassination.

But Reagan’s armor got its most severe test with the series of events that came to be called Iran-Contra. Although the full story of these events may never be learned, President Reagan personally escaped that controversy unscathed, even if it did serve to cripple his administration’s final days.

The “facts” in Iran-Contra are still shrouded in some mystery, obfuscated by denials and silence from some of the key participants, including Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, who died before the extent of his involvement was fully known to the press and the public. The situation went back to a problem that had bedeviled Jimmy Carter right up to Ronald Reagan’s inauguration—American hostages held in the Middle East. Unlike the Carter hostage dilemma, in which American diplomatic personnel were held by a surrogate arm of the Iranian government and whose whereabouts were known, the hostage situation facing Reagan involved a number of separate hostages held in the chaotic anarchy of civil war–ridden Lebanon by mysterious parties, assumed to be linked to Iranian leadership. In addition, one of these hostages, William Buckley, was the CIA head of station in Beirut, a fact likely known to his kidnappers. Reagan was personally tormented by the plight of the hostages and their families, but publicly stuck to his guns that there would be no yielding to terrorist demands. Such a trade-off, it was stated, would only encourage further hostage taking.

In the summer of 1985, Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, was approached by a group of Israelis with a plan for winning release of the hostages. That plan involved a rather dubious Iranian arms merchant who proposed that Teheran would use its influence to free the hostages in return for a few hundred U.S. antitank missiles, which Iran needed to carry on its long war of attrition with neighboring Iraq. To McFarlane, the deal presented an opportunity not only to free the hostages but to establish contact with so-called moderates within the Iranian government. After returning from surgery to remove a malignancy, President Reagan met with key staffers to discuss the arms-for-hostages deal. Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger both voiced strong opposition. (The two later said George Bush was present; Bush claimed he was not present at any meeting at which Shultz and Weinberger objected to the deal and always professed he was “out of the loop” on Iran-Contra.) No decision was voiced at the meeting, and Shultz and Weinberger left thinking the idea was dead.

But in McFarlane’s account, Reagan called him with a go-ahead. Reagan would say he had no recollection of such a call. No formal record of this major decision was ever made. The first shipment of arms went through, and one hostage was released. The Iranian arms dealer withheld the news that CIA man Buckley, the man McFarlane wanted out most, was already dead, tortured before being executed. A second arms shipment, now being handled by one of McFarlane’s Security Council deputies, Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, went awry, and no hostages were released.

While
Let’s Make a Deal
went on with Iran, the Reagan administration was in the thick of another foreign policy struggle—the ongoing support of a rebel army known as the Contras, committed to overthrowing the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The Democratic-
controlled Congress had taken the upper hand in its power struggle with the White House over Contra aid by passing an amendment that cut off all U.S. funds for the rebel army. But inside the White House, plans were hatched to make an end run around Congress by soliciting foreign money for the Contras, and that was done, with large amounts of private cash donations coming from wealthy conservative Republicans and, later, the Saudis. With money in the till, the problem became one of its disbursement. Even though Reagan was advised that sending such funds might be considered an impeachable offense, the plan went ahead, and that job was turned over to the same man who was in charge of the Iranian situation—Oliver North.

The man Reagan was later to call “a national hero” even as he fired him was seen by some White House staff as a power-grabbing zealot, delusional and willing to lie about his contacts and closeness with the president to advance his cause. A battle veteran of Vietnam and a fire-breathing anti-Communist, North had been involved in planning the military strike on the Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow a Marxist government there on the pretext of rescuing American medical students.

To help him run his secret war in Nicaragua, North recruited a number of characters with past connections to the CIA and the American military, chief among them former Air Force general Richard Secord. At about this time, someone—nobody wants to take credit—came up with the idea of using profits being made from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras. Hence the title Iran-Contra. CIA chief Casey was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea and became North’s chief White House patron, soon expanding the idea into what was called a permanent “off-the-shelf” covert enterprise that would circumvent congressional oversight of CIA secret operations.

One of the many ironies in this muddle was that the story was broken by an obscure Middle Eastern magazine, which revealed that McFarlane and North had been to Teheran, where McFarlane had tried to deliver a Bible and a birthday cake to the Ayatollah Khomeini as a goodwill gesture. Within days of this revelation, the strings began to unravel in the White House, and a seemingly befuddled Ronald Reagan issued a stream of conflicting statements and press conferences that were contradicted as soon as he made them. On November 13, 1986, Reagan had given a national address in which he said that the United States had sent Iran “a small amount of defensive weapons” and “We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages.” Both assertions were completely false.

The immediate outcome of the story was the formation of a presidential commission composed of Senator John Tower, a conservative Republican (later to be rejected by the Senate as George Bush’s defense secretary, owing to reports of his drinking and womanizing); former senator Edmund Muskie, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state; and retired General Brent Scowcroft, a former subordinate of Henry Kissinger. The Tower Commission released its report early in 1987, and it was a scathing rebuke of Reagan.

In an introduction to one published version of the report,
New York Times
Washington correspondent R. W. Apple Jr. wrote of the findings:

The board painted a picture of Ronald Reagan very different from what the world had become accustomed to in the last six years. No trace here of the lopsided smile, the easy wave, the confident mien that carried him through every past crisis; this portrait is of a man confused, distracted, so remote that he failed utterly to control the implementation of his vision of an initiative that would free American hostages and reestablish American influence in Iran, with all of its present and future strategic importance. At times, in fact, the report makes the president sound like the inhabitant of a never-never land of imaginary policies.

The Tower Commission was followed by a congressional investigation in which all the deceptions, lies to Congress and the public, and illegality attached to large amounts of money passing through various sticky fingers began to be revealed. Although never taken as seriously by the public as was Watergate, the abuses of Iran-Contra were dangerous: a president seemingly out of touch with reality and allowing very junior officers to control major foreign policy adventures without any oversight; a plan to set up a secret CIA operation to circumvent the Congress; an attempt to ignore a law by using a technicality, a maneuver that even the president’s closest advisers said might be an impeachable offense. With images of Richard Nixon’s resignation and departure in disgrace still vivid, the specter of another impeachment proceeding was not theoretical.