THE CHANGING GUARD

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605450003-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 22, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605450003-2
ON PAGE
22 February 1987 L_
biggest scandal since Watergate by an
obscure magazine in the Middle East.
WASHINGTON
,/ James -estnn
The
Changing
Guard
WASHINGTON
A big change has come over
Washington in the last few
weeks. People are beginning to
talk about the Reagan Administra-
tion in the past tense. The reporters
are still running around like blind
dogs in a meat house, but almost
everybody else seems willing to leave
the recent White House scandals to
the investigators, the historians and
the psychological novelists.
Suddenly, a lot of officials have dis-
covered that they want to spend more
time with their wives and children.
President Reagan says quietly and
almost enviously that he won't stand
in the way of anybody who wants to
go home, and a lot of people are tak-
ing him up on it.
Pat Buchanan has decided he does-
n't want to run for President after all,
maybe remembering that the last Bu-
chanan we had in the White House
wasn't very happy. Other official
cheerleaders are packing up. The
President hasn't had a news confer-
ence since the explosion, but he has a
new press secretary and so does Vice
President Bush. Richard Perle is
leaving the Pentagon to concentrate
on fiction, which is no big change.
There has been an outbreak of amne-
sia here since the turn of the year.
Everybody agrees that something
went wrong on the way to the Iranian
"moderates" and , the Nicaraguan
"freedom fighters," but few can re-
member exactly what happened and
those who can aren't talking.
But despite new poisonous disclo-
sures every week, it doesn't seem to
matter now whether the President
knew or didn't know what Colonel
North and Admiral Poindexter were up
to in the basement of the White House.
There is general agreement here that
Mr. Reagan was deceiving Congress if
not breaking the law, and that knowing
or not knowing, it was a disgrace.
Everybody is embarrassed: George
Shultz to-discover that the White House
was running a secret foreign policy be-
hind his back; chief of staff Regan to
discover he didn't know what his staff
was doing; the Congress to discover
that intelligence oversight committees
were bypassed, and the press to dis-
cover that it had been scooped on the
What hurts here is not primarily
what Washington doesn't know now,
but what it has known and ignored or
minimized for a very long time. It has
known since the beginning of this Ad-
ministration that the President dele-
gated more authority to his squab-
bling Cabinet and staff than any other
President in memory.
Ever since the secret mining of the
Nicaraguan harbors and the air raid on
Libya, it has known that the Adminis-
tration was engaged in covert opera-
tions without informing Congress, and
was conniving with private gunrunners
to arm the contras and overthrow the
Government in Managua, where it,
maintains "diplomatic relations."
It was not, however, until it was dis-
covered that the Administration was
shipping arms to the terrorists in Iran
and sneaking the profits to the contras
that the whole squalid business was ex-
posed. As one senator complained: "It
was like finding that John Wayne was
selling liquor to the Indians."
At first, it was thought that maybe
these blunders were the result of the
President's casual if not careless ad-
ministrative procedures, carried out
by zealots who thought they could de-
fend democracy abroad by defying it
and corrupting it at home.
It was only later when the Congress
began to examine the mindless and ill-
prepared Reagan nuclear arms negoti-
ations with Mr. Gorbachev at Reykja-
vik that it was realized that the Presi-
dent's shallow knowledge of the facts
and his feeble grasp of the possible
consequences began to seem not only
reckless but dangerous.
For a time, the Administration
hoped that these mistakes would re-
cede in memory and that the Presi-
dent's popularity and guileless affabil-
ity would carry him through, but this
has not happened - at least not yet.
The Administration still seems
stunned and bewildered, not knowing
quite what has happened or what may
happen tomorrow as the investiga-
tions proceed under the scrutiny of a
Democratic-controlled Congress.
The human tragedies are painful and
the unraveling process will no doubt go
on, but there are consolations. The
demonstration is correcting the proce-
dures of the National Security Council,
and the Congress is reviewing the poli-
cies that have led to such deficits and
mistrust at home and abroad.
Fortunately this crisis has come at
the threshold of a new Presidential
election campaign. Unfortunately
neither Governor Cuomo of New
York nor Senator Sam Nunn of Geor-
gia will be in the race. But the people
will have a chance to consider the
candidates' character and experi-
ence, the procedures by which they
are chosen and the regulations of the
200-year-old Constitution under which
they are supposed to serve. 0
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605450003-2