Oliver North: He’s Turning Up Everywhere

Not only has Lt. Col. Oliver North been a uniformed TV omnipresence all week, his face is plastered on the covers of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and Life. Time, as usual, stepped back a bit for the wide picture. It sees the escapades of North, a “can-do zealot,” as part of a larger problem stemming from the Reagan Administration’s aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy and over-reliance on covert operations.

In their pre-hearing previews, U.S. News and Newsweek dwell more on North’s background and character. “The picture that emerges of Oliver North,” finds U.S. News, “is of a driven, and at times, deeply conflicted man whose intensely passionate belief in the United States and its ideals somehow impelled him, tragically, to compromise those very beliefs and ideals. It’s a picture that’s at once poignant, puzzling and, in the end, deeply troubling.”

Newsweek, however, located a different true North: “The picture that emerges resembles less a spit-and-polish former altar boy than that of an overzealous amateur with a penchant for self-promotion, hype and outright lies.” After verbally fragging Marine Corps officers as “a bunch of dangerous boneheads” in his Newsweek essay on the hearings, ex-Army man Gore Vidal asks why no one in Congress is “lifting the lid on anything important, like . . . the CIA.” Conservative tough guy and former Reagan Administration communications director Pat Buchanan says the country is already bored by the whole affair and charges that Democrats in Congress are deliberately prolonging the hearings in order to “slowly bleed Ronald Reagan of his popularity, to break his presidency.”

Life magazine’s fluffy picture spread on the All-American, church-going suburban family man includes an “exclusive” interview (through a North family friend) with North’s wife, Betsy, who says she “rarely knew where he was going” on his travels. She does, however, divulge how she met Larry (a boyhood name North acquired before he started picking up monikers like “Belly Button”) and how, since he’s been sticking around the house a bit more of late, they’ve been drawn closer together.

More frivolously, but ultimately more revealing, is Life’s printing of the report card of a just-graduated Princetonian named Brooke Christa Shields, who racked up 21 As and 8 Bs in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department. Brooke loaded up on quite a few acting, dancing and ceramics courses.”