Deceptive Snippets

The White House waited four days before it issued a clarifying statement to President Reagan’s remark that nothing in the Iran- contra hearings indicated to him that laws had been broken. The President, the statement noted, didn’t really mean to suggest that no laws had been broken. What he meant was that he didn’t hear of any laws being broken in the brief bits of testimony that he happened to catch on television. In attempting to set the record straight the White House again succeeded in calling attention to the political perils that are invited by basing beliefs on only snippets of information. This President especially ought to be familiar with those perils.

The fact is, of course, that the congressional investigating committees have turned up a lot of evidence to show that numerous laws were violated. Among the felonies that can be readily inferred from testimony that the President apparently didn’t hear are these: the illegal diversion of government funds; the unauthorized destruction of government documents; conspiracy to obstruct justice, and, both in the committee hearing room and out, lying to government officials. That’s a pretty formidable list for openers. When the committee’s report is issued this fall, the list could be extended. It certainly will grow when independent prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh starts getting criminal indictments from the grand jury that he has been talking to.

What is most important about the hearings that have just concluded, though, is not that some people who worked at the center of or on the periphery of the Administration have been revealed to be rogues, cheats and liars. What is important is that the hearings confirmed, as well as added considerable detail to, the earlier findings of the Tower Commission that described an amazing failure of the administrative process in the White House. The commission saw this as a weakness in the President’s management style. Clearly it was far more. For the origin of the Iran-contra scandal--the seed that in time produced a jungle of chicanery, deception, misjudgments and betrayal of trust--can be traced directly to Reagan’s eager willingness, against the advice of his most knowledgeable aides, to try to ransom hostages in Lebanon by selling arms to the sponsors of terrorism in Iran. That decision was not so much a failure of management as it was a failure of good sense.

From this, all else followed: the profiteering on the sales of arms; the diversion of funds, in part to the Nicaraguan contras but in the main to the private bank accounts of shadowy intermediaries and middlemen, and, ultimately, the attempt to cover up both illicit financial schemes and the usurpation of presidential authority. The consensus of the investigating committees’ members is that the full truth of what happened will probably never be known. Perhaps. But that doesn’t preclude reaching informed judgments about where the political, moral and legal blame for what took place properly lies.