What Oliver North’s Trial Means to US
Two Years Earlier, when Congress first investigated the Iran-contra scandal, Colonel Oliver North had charmed the nation on TV. He seemed gutsy and principled, a brash patriot in a marine uniform, staring down his inquisitors with nothing-to-hide answers. Now, however, dressed in civilian blue pin stripes, testifying in his own behalf as a criminal defendant, Ollie did not look so heroic. His starchy righteousness went limp. His answers retreated to niggling legalisms; his pained tone sounded whiny.
“I was raised to know the difference between right and wrong,” North kept reminding the jury. “I knew it wasn’t right not to tell the truth on these things, but I didn’t drink it was unlawful.”
The prosecutor, John W. Keker, pounced on Ollie’s sanctimonious distinctions. “Didn’t any moral bell go off in your head?” Keker asked. “Wasn’t there anything from your upbringing, your moral training, your marine background, that told you, ‘This does not seem right’?”
Ollie fidgeted. “Sure,” he said. “I’m not proud of this.”
Oliver North’s many lies were, in fact, the heart of the criminal charges against him. The evidence shows that he lied to Congress about the secret war he was running from inside the Reagan White House long after Congress had legislated a halt to it; that he lied to his associates about his own derring-do; that he lied to the attorney general when he came around to investigate the rumors of scandal. Once caught, North destroyed official records and altered documents, hoping to keep the lies alive.
Even Gerhard A. Gesell, the elderly federal judge who presided over the nine-week trial, was moved occasionally to tweak the famous defendant about his dubious sense of principle. “Did you at any time consider just not doing it?” the judge asked.
Ollie didn’t understand the question.
“Just say, ‘No, I won’t do it’?” the judge said.
Ollie said that option had not occurred to him.
But is it a crime to tell a lie? In his self-pleading, North sounded like a cold-war bureaucrat updating the Nuremberg defense: He was only following orders. President Reagan, he claimed, had directed him to keep the war against Nicaragua going — in spite of the congressional restrictions and the strong opposition reflected in public-opinion surveys. His superiors had insisted that he keep his activities secret, even if that meant promulgating official lies. He was only doing his sacred duty.
In response, the prosecutor made the simple but valuable point that a government of representative democracy cannot function in an atmosphere of deceit – when one branch is lying to another and lying to the sovereign citizens as well. That straightforward moral standard has been badly abused during the cold-war era, when gross lies have been told in high places under cover of “national security,” and cynics assume that truthfulness is probably too much to expect from government. Unfortunately, the cynics may be partly right — the trial also demonstrated that this standard has not yet been applied to people at the very top, such as George Bush and Ronald Reagan. But at least the trial of Ollie North resurrected an important idea that lying in government is not only morally wrong but potentially criminal.
This time around, Colonel North did not get away with the patriotic bilge that had intimidated his congressional interrogators. North’s defense lawyer, Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., trotted out the rhetoric of marine loyalty to explain his client’s behavior, but the defendant himself wisely laid off the hero talk. Indeed, it was North who seemed a bit intimidated this time – knowing, as he did, that the prosecutor himself was also a Vietnam veteran, also a marine infantry commander, also wounded in combat, also decorated for heroism. Unlike North, John Keker does not wear Semper Fi on his sleeve.
“Being a marine is an honor — not an excuse,” the prosecutor declared in his opening statement to the jury. “Being a marine is a responsibility – not a defense.”
As Keker bore down on the facts of the case, it became increasingly difficult to recall exactly why the nation had fallen for Ollie in the first place. The prosecutor was relentlessly focused and cool, while North was flamboyant and self-dramatizing. If you ever got stuck in a foxhole under hostile fire, it is fairly obvious which man you would want to have as your commander.
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