Faces of Power by Brown Seyom

Author:Brown, Seyom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL040010, Political Science/Government/Executive Branch, HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran in ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false. … We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages—nor will we.47

In his press conference six days later, fending off a question alleging that the United States had condoned Israeli arms shipments to Iran, Reagan insisted, that the question “[was] based on a supposition that [was] false. We did not condone, and do not condone, the shipment of arms from other countries,” he said. Knowing that the U.S.-Israel-Iran connection was being uncovered, Poindexter drafted a hasty correction that was immediately issued in the president’s name, admitting: “There was a third country involved in our secret project with Iran.” But the statement still claimed that “all of the shipments of the token amounts of defensive arms and parts that I have authorized or condoned taken in total could be placed aboard a single cargo aircraft.”48

As congressional investigations of the Iran-Contra affair began to reveal the true extent and modalities of the administration’s Iranian arms-for-hostages initiative, the president countered with denials that this was not “ransom” since the U.S. government had not dealt directly with the captors of the hostages but only with intermediaries.

Speakes, in his memoir, still could not bring himself to suspect Reagan: “Frankly, I don’t believe the man can tell a lie. The man can make a mistake and the man can hear something so many times that he believes something is true when it really isn’t, but he simply isn’t a liar.”49 Gary Wills is probably closer to the mark in showing Reagan to be capable of believing things to be true if they are true to him in an emotional sense (in particular, his tendency to confuse roles he played in the movies with what actually happened to him) even though they may not withstand empirical validation. Wills quotes a revealing confession by Reagan: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me it is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”50

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