AFTER THE SUCCESS of the Scowcroft Commission, President Reagan invited Scowcroft to serve on the Commission on Defense Management (1985–1986)—also known as the Packard Commission—with the mandate to evaluate the Department of Defense’s budget, monitor Pentagon procurement, and oversee the organizational and operational coordination of the military. Reagan also named Scowcroft to the Defense Policy Board, a standing commission charged with providing independent analysis and advice for the secretary of defense on long-range strategic planning and other topics.
Scowcroft served on these and other government boards, achieving results by virtue of his expertise on complex and sensitive matters as well as his analytical ability, common sense, interpersonal skills, and cordiality. Indicatively, Kissinger, Al Haig, and Zbigniew Brzezinski each served on fewer boards than did Scowcroft.
Of course, Scowcroft had his own reasons for agreeing to serve. One reason was that he enjoyed working on several tasks at the same time; at least since his days at West Point, Scowcroft had liked dealing with diverse challenges and difficult puzzles that involved significant issues—which is one reason the long hours spent writing his PhD dissertation and the days on end seated behind a desk in the Pentagon had held limited appeal.
Another was Scowcroft’s extraordinary dedication to public service. Most retired military officers and former government officials—indeed, most Americans—are patriotic, but only a few are consistently willing to dedicate themselves to time-consuming, unpaid, and often sensitive projects on their nation’s behalf. But Scowcroft invariably and unselfishly agreed to participate.
So on November 3, 1986, when the news broke that the Reagan administration had traded weapons to Iran for the release of American hostages, Scowcroft got a call.
The preceding five presidencies had all come to premature ends, whether because of assassination (Kennedy), the Vietnam War (Johnson), Watergate (Nixon), the Nixon pardon (Ford), and the Iranian hostages (Carter), as the New York Times’ R. W. Apple Jr. wrote in his introduction to the Tower Commission’s report. Now the news of the Iranian arms deal threatened to wreck the Reagan presidency, uncovering the “stumbling, short-sighted stewardship of the national trust from the President on down,” Apple reported. It revealed a “National Security Council led by reckless cowboys, off on their own on a wild ride, taking direct operational control of matters that are the customary province of more sober agencies such as the CIA, the State Department and the Defense Department.”159
The scandal had two components. The first, which first came to light in a story published in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Shiraa, was the news of an arms-for-hostages deal carried out by national security advisor Robert McFarlane assisted by David Kimche, Michael Ledeen, and other Israeli and American middlemen. In direct violation of the law, the White House had agreed to sell more than thirty-five hundred state-of-the-art TOW antitank weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages being held in Lebanon by the militant group Hezbollah. Reagan desperately wanted the seven captives freed and didn’t care how it happened. As one senior government official who served under four Republican presidents said, “President Reagan imposed his will on issues that he cared about.”160
The second part of the scandal was the secret transfer of funds from US weapons sales in the Middle East to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels for use in the fight against their country’s socialist government. Leading this effort were Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North and Vice Adm. John Poindexter. North, Poindexter, and several other middlemen—including Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, Secord’s Iranian business partner Albert Hakim, Israeli counterterrorism expert Amiram Nir, Saudi moneyman Adnan Khashoggi, exiled Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, and Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub—had diverted the proceeds from the Iranian weapons sales to support the Contras. When attorney general Edwin Meese found out on November 25 that the funds from arms sales had been diverted to support the Contras, he had North fired, and Poindexter submitted his resignation.161 Again, the president had wanted to help the Contras, and he didn’t especially care how it was done.
The scandal revealed an NSC process that was out of control—at least out of the control of Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Reagan delegated operational control to his national security advisor and the NSC staff instead, thereby bypassing the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA—although not DCI William J. Casey—and other departments and agencies. Since neither the national security advisor nor the NSC staff was subject to congressional oversight, the White House was able to hide its actions from Congress—which was important in this case, because Congress had earlier passed the Boland Amendments, which prohibited any US government agency from providing aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.
Members of Congress and journalists excoriated Reagan upon learning the news. In substantive terms, both components of Iran-Contra were worse than the burglary of the Democratic National Party headquarters that launched the Watergate scandal. The arms-for-hostages deal also directly contradicted the president’s own stated position during the 1980 campaign that the US government would never negotiate with kidnappers, terrorists, or any others who tried to hold the United States hostage. The criticism reached a crescendo immediately after Reagan’s disastrous news conference of November 19, 1986, in which the president appeared “nervous [and] bumbling, got his facts wrong and contradicted information that had already been acknowledged in the press,” in Bud McFarlane’s description, “but still refused to admit that a mistake had been made.”162
The Iran-Contra scandal renewed talk about presidential impeachment, angered members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, brought the White House’s legislative program to a standstill, and disillusioned the American public once again. The Reagan administration seemed to be turning back the clock to the early 1970s, to the dark days of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Watergate. Reagan’s job approval rating dropped twenty-one points in just a month, the sharpest one-month decline in the history of presidential polling dating back to 1936—even worse than the drop in President Ford’s approval rating following the Nixon pardon.163
The Reagan administration had “a Watergate-type problem,” said Donald Regan, White House chief of staff. But with polls in late 1986 showing that 59 percent of Americans still trusted the president and that fewer than one in ten respondents identified Iran-Contra as the United States’ most important issue, Reagan’s political advisers figured the best strategy was to put the scandal “beside” them, in the words of W. Dennis Thomas, the deputy chief of staff—they wanted to stay abreast of Iran-Contra, even if they couldn’t get ahead of the problem. And the best way to do this was to go on the offensive.
So in late November, the White House set up an internal group for handling its strategy on Iran-Contra, with David Abshire, who was the president’s special counselor, responsible for “all aspects of the Iran matter.” The White House also coordinated its efforts with sympathetic members of Congress, fellow Republicans, and political allies across the country, asking them to speak out in support of the administration, talk to their members and constituents, and write op-eds for major news publications.164
Separately, the president tried to limit the damage by appointing Frank Carlucci as the new national security advisor in December 1986 (deputy national security advisor Alton G. Keel Jr., a former assistant secretary of the Air Force, had filled in as acting national security advisor between November 25 and December 2). William Webster then took over as DCI in January 1987, following Casey’s death in December.
But the biggest step the president took to stanch the hemorrhaging was to sign executive order 12575 on December 1, 1986, creating the President’s Special Review Board.165
At the press conference announcing the board, Reagan told the reporters he wanted “all the facts to come out.”166 However, that was not what the executive order specified. It actually defined the board’s authority quite narrowly, to “conduct a comprehensive study of the future role and procedures of the National Security Council (NSC) staff in the development, coordination, oversight, and conduct of foreign and national security policy.” In particular, it was to “review the NSC staff’s proper role in operational activities, especially extremely sensitive diplomatic, military, and intelligence missions.” The board was then to “provide recommendations to the President based upon its analysis of the manner in which foreign and national security policies established by the President have been implemented by the NSC staff.” And this was what Chief of Staff Regan told the board’s members: that he hoped they “would take particular care to look into the question of whether and under what circumstances the National Security Council staff was and should be directly involved in the operational aspects of sensitive diplomatic, military, or intelligence missions, such as the [terrorist hijackings of the cruise ship] Achille Lauro [and] TWA [flight 847], and Grenada and Iran.”167 The text of the executive order said nothing about assigning responsibility or taking legal action, and in his press conference announcing the formation of the board, President Reagan never elaborated on what he meant by having “all the facts come out.” And he never said that the board was to determine legality or assign responsibility.168
Donald Regan wanted a commission with just three members, feeling this would facilitate quicker action and minimize the chance that the board would produce a divided report. Furthermore, since there were few prominent public figures who were at once familiar with the national security process, acceptable to key members of Congress, available on short notice, and perceived as being political responsible, it would be easier to find members for a small commission.169
Regan and his aides chose former Republican senator John Tower of Texas as the board’s chairman. Tower, who had retired from the Senate in 1984, had been chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1981 to 1984 and had previously served under Reagan as an arms control negotiator. At the time, he was working as a defense consultant, serving on the boards of three defense industry companies, and teaching part-time. The White House also suggested former Democratic senator Edmund Muskie, who had been chairman of the Senate Budget Committee from 1973 to 1981, a vice presidential candidate in 1968, a presidential candidate in 1972, and (briefly) Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. Brent Scowcroft was to be the board’s third member. Each member of the bipartisan group had extensive experience in different aspects of national security and brought different perspectives to the board. If the president was serious about “turning to outside advice” in order to regroup for his last two years in office, the Washington Post editorialized, then he had “the right men.”170
Scowcroft admitted he wasn’t very excited about being asked to serve on the Tower Commission (as it became known), considering the seriousness of the task and the amount of work that the group would face.171 But the Iran-Contra scandal threatened to destroy the legitimacy of the national security advisor position and the whole NSC process, which struck a nerve with Scowcroft, and he was more than willing to help out on an issue of such central importance to him. Furthermore, Scowcroft believed he “knew as much about the NSC system as anyone” and had already developed his own positions on covert operations and the NSC process more generally. For example, he’d previously spoken out against the CIA’s mining of Nicaraguan harbors and said that he thought the secret operations were “hurting the CIA.” He also regarded the appointment as an honor.172
The fact that he would be put in a position to examine the actions of former colleagues and friends didn’t bother him, he said, since “I had no idea what had happened.” The prospect of investigating Bud McFarlane—a man to whom he had been a mentor, someone whom he liked and respected, and who had been a “tremendous asset” as his right-hand man during the Nixon and Ford administrations—didn’t affect his decision.173
The two men had remained close throughout the Reagan years. McFarlane had recommended that Reagan replace Richard Allen as national security advisor with Scowcroft, and later urged his appointment as chair of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces.174 And when the Iran-Contra story first broke, Scowcroft had phoned McFarlane to warn him that Don Regan was suggesting to reporters that the whole affair was his doing. “Regan is hanging you out to dry,” Scowcroft told his friend—something McFarlane, who called Regan his “nemesis,” also suspected.175
Scowcroft was also close to Vice President George Bush, his former colleague and good friend.176 But although Bush had picked intelligence as one of his areas of specialization and attended the White House NSC meetings as a matter of course, Scowcroft said he wasn’t concerned about Bush’s role.177 Part of the reason was that it wasn’t clear that the vice president was in a decision-making position or part of the operational chain of command. In any case, as of late 1986, few people had any idea of even the basic contours of the Iran-Contra affair—Scowcroft, Muskie, and Tower certainly didn’t—and those who did know weren’t telling.
So Scowcroft compartmentalized, just as he had done throughout his career, separating his personal relationships from his official duties on the Tower Commission.
The commission and its twenty-three-person staff began their investigation on December 1, 1986, borrowing a small suite of offices on the fifth floor of the New Executive Office Building, immediately west of the White House and on the other side of Seventeenth Street.
Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft quickly decided to go beyond their explicit mandate and interpret their mission more broadly than stated in the president’s executive order. They would “find out what had happened and why.” And while they agreed that they weren’t going to assign “blame or innocence,” they did tell the members of their staff “to lay out all the facts.”178 The board therefore began to sort through the “shopping carts” full of documents brought over from the NSC offices and the White House and to interview those who were involved. Thanks to a tech-savvy staff member, the commission was also able to recover deleted e-mails in the NSC’s mainframe computer. In the end, they would talk to more than fifty officials, including McFarlane, who by then was at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from a Valium overdose—an attempted suicide.
One set of interviews was with former national security advisors, former directors of central intelligence, and other former top officials—the “Wise Men,” as Scowcroft called them. The goal was to glean lessons from past crises that might help reveal how the NSC process should best be organized for handling sensitive issues.179 The other set of interviews was with individuals directly involved in Iran-Contra. Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft therefore interviewed President Reagan, Shultz, Weinberger, Bush, Regan, McFarlane, Richard Armitage, and others to find out exactly what had happened and why. The Tower Commission’s legal counsel, Clark McFadden, usually led off the questioning, with Tower, Scowcroft, and Muskie participating almost equally.180
Much of their time was spent simply trying to reconstruct a day-to-day chronology of the confusing set of events, a harder task than it might seem because of the many months that “The Enterprise”—Richard Secord’s name for the operation—was in operation, the several countries involved, and the many participants. With four large file cabinets of documents to sort through, Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft divided their responsibilities. Tower researched the political dynamics of the participants in the deals and determined the cause-and-effect relationships. Muskie looked at the legal implications of Iran-Contra. And Scowcroft analyzed the NSC process.
Making their job tougher still was the fact that there wasn’t any previous investigation of Iran-Contra to build upon. Although the FBI, the independent special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and David Abshire were each conducting their own investigations, none of them would share what they knew with the Tower Board.181
Notwithstanding the pressure on Tower, Scowcroft, Muskie, and their staff and the intense workweeks, the board functioned remarkably smoothly. Although they initially had some “sharp disagreements,” Scowcroft said, and although Scowcroft experienced Muskie’s “famous temper,” the three developed a surprisingly collegial and cordial relationship. Tower and Muskie were initially wary of each other, each believing the other to be a strong partisan, but they soon came to have an easy relationship.
Neither man was worried about political bias on Scowcroft’s part. Scowcroft had known Tower, a fellow Republican and conservative on defense issues, from his work on the Scowcroft Commission and found him to be a considerate chairman. He wasn’t “impetuous or opinionated,” Scowcroft said, but “thoughtful and judicious” and an “upstanding human being.” He became a “good friend.”182 Scowcroft had more doubts about Muskie, who’d been a member of the Democratic Congresses of the early 1970s. He was concerned that the former Maine senator might be impetuous or opinionated, but he discovered that the opposite was the truth. Over the course of their long hours spent working together, he found Muskie to be serious, judicious, kind, and an “outstanding human being.” The two men grew to be quite close, helped by the fact Scowcroft gave Muskie a ride home each day. Not once could Scowcroft recall an occasion when the three of them couldn’t reach an agreement on how to proceed or on what they should conclude.183
The fact that the members of the board worked well together didn’t lessen their workload. Not only were there the file cabinets full of papers to sort through, but their inquiries were hindered by the fact that Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord, and several others refused to be interviewed. Unbeknownst to Scowcroft and Muskie, Tower, as chairman, came under particular stress. White House officials—Tower doesn’t name names in his autobiography, although Don Regan or someone on his staff was probably involved—pressured Tower to ignore the president’s initial statement of January 26, 1987, in which Reagan plainly and directly admitted that he had approved of the arms-for-hostages deal, warning Tower that the commission’s findings would have both political and personal ramifications for him.184
Seeking to understand the historical role of the national security advisor and the NSC process, the three board members had outside experts draft case histories on the lessons learned from important events in the history of national security, such as the U-2 crisis of 1960, the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969–1970, the seizure of the Mayaguez in 1975, and the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979.185 They also questioned the Wise Men about their thoughts on the Iran-Contra affair, on the role of the national security advisor and the NSC in the national security policy process (including operations), on interagency relations, on institutional memory across presidential administrations, on secrecy, on congressional participation in national security policy, and on other topics. Because they were interested in practical experience, they didn’t consult academic studies about the organization of national security or the presidency.186
The board and their staff worked seven days a week, including many “eighteen-and twenty-hour marathons” fueled by pizza, fast food, and Chinese carryout. Tower twice asked President Reagan for two-week extensions; both were granted. The board and the staff also moved into the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) so that Stephen Hadley and Nicholas Rostow, who were drafting most of the report, would have better locations in which to write. Hadley, an attorney by training, drafted the introduction, overview, conclusions, and recommendations; Rostow, also an attorney and the son of Eugene Rostow (an under secretary of state in the Johnson administration), composed the blow-by-blow chronological narrative.187
Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft released the 550-page Tower Commission report on Thursday, February 26, 1987, eleven weeks after they’d started. Before releasing the report, Tower called Abshire and told him that the three of them wanted to brief the president personally before the report went public—without having to go through Chief of Staff Regan. So at 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday, February 25, Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft went over to the White House, and Scowcroft explained to the president why the three of them had reached the conclusion that the White House had in fact been dealing arms for hostages. Reagan “appeared to have accepted the reality” of Iran-Contra, Scowcroft, Tower, and Abshire all agreed; they thought it had been a good meeting.188
A few days later, Tower secretly helped White House officials—along with Nancy Reagan—draft the president’s national address of March 4, which was to be a response to the commission’s report. Remarkably, it was Tower himself, journalist Lou Cannon reports, who convinced a reluctant Reagan to admit his wrongdoing. “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” the president said on national television. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower Board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs,” he admitted, “to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind. There are reasons why it happened, but there are no excuses. It was a mistake.”189
What Reagan did not include in the speech is also revealing. Shultz and Weinberger both requested that the president insert text in the speech challenging the Tower Commission’s findings; they wanted Reagan to say that both officials “vigorously opposed the arms sales to Iran and they so advised me several times.” But Howard Baker, the new chief of staff, and Vice President Bush strongly disagreed with inserting the proposed text, and Baker, along with Stu Spencer and others, persuaded Reagan to accept the commission’s report unconditionally.
The speech was well received. “President Reagan gave the right speech last night,” the Washington Post editorialized the next day.190
THE TOWER COMMISSION’S report was an indictment of the Reagan presidency. The commission determined that the president had agreed to secure the release of the American hostages being held in Lebanon and that he appeared “to have proceeded with a concept of the initiative that was not accurately reflected in the reality of the operation.” Although the president’s delegation of policy making was justified, he hadn’t taken the critical step of ensuring accountability for what turned out to be a complex, “high stakes” operation, the board found. Neither had he conducted a critical performance review of the operations.
Nor had chief of staff Don Regan, national security advisors McFarlane and Poindexter, and other White House officials lived up to the president’s trust. Worse yet, the two most senior and most important cabinet members, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense, knew what was happening but looked the other way. Although both men expressed their opposition to the arms-for-hostages deal—and later the diversion of weapons sales to the Contras—they didn’t go any further. After the December 7, 1985, meeting in which Reagan and his top advisers discussed the hostage situation in Lebanon, Weinberger said he thought that Shultz’s and his arguments against the proposed operations had “strangled the baby in the cradle.” But the two men didn’t insist on discipline within the NSC process or on the accountability of national security policy, and they distanced themselves from the unfolding events. Instead, DCI William Casey, who played a “highly significant” role, encouraged Colonel North to take on “direct operational control,” McFarlane reported.191
“What happened,” Scowcroft told the press, was “that the system did not compensate for the management style of the President.” Reagan “perhaps did not ask enough questions,” he conceded, “but it was incumbent upon other participants in the system to insure that the president was absolutely clear about what was going on. There should have been bells ringing, lights flashing, and so on.” The president, the board concluded, had been betrayed by his top advisers and his NSC staff—all of whom should have known better.192
Scowcroft himself drafted the section of the report that directly addressed the board’s mandate. He found that the national security policy-making process had become dysfunctional. The Reagan administration had no set process in place for deciding and conducting national security policy, nor had the president and his several national security advisors coordinated the administration’s foreign policy across the State Department, Defense Department, and other relevant departments and agencies.
Scowcroft then specifically addressed the role of the national security advisor and NSC staff in making US foreign policy. The essential quality of the national security process, in his analysis, was its fundamental dependence on the president. The role of the NSC, after all, is purely advisory; the NSC principals meet as advisers to the president, not as representatives of their particular offices or departments or as advocates of particular policy or partisan positions. The president decides the role he wants the NSC to play in making US policy and how he wants to organize the NSC process.
The ability of the national security advisor to manage national security policy accordingly depends on his or her relationship with the president, on the other NSC principals, and on the departmental and agency heads involved in particular issues. The national security advisor does more than manage policy formation and oversee its implementation, however. He or she also has to advise the president on a regular basis. In this capacity, the national security advisor is in a unique position, since the occupant of the post is not subject to Senate confirmation and has no department or agency to defend. The national security advisor cannot overshadow the other foreign policy principals or exclude them from the policy-making process—but to be effective, he or she can’t be subordinate to them, either.
Scowcroft recommended that NSC staff members be drawn from both within and outside the US government and that they reflect a balanced selection of officials from the various departments and agencies relevant to national security affairs, just so long as there are clear vertical lines of authority and individual staff members are held accountable. Scowcroft reasoned that the small size of the NSC staff allows it to be particularly flexible and therefore effective.
Thus, Scowcroft defended the latitude and discretion afforded by the NSC system, even as he strongly criticized the performance of the NSC process under President Reagan. He argued that to introduce new rules for the NSC system or rewrite the National Security Act would destroy the very flexibility that had served US presidents well from Eisenhower on.193
Scowcroft concluded that it was incumbent on presidents and national security advisors to make the NSC system work as it was supposed to. He proposed no changes to the National Security Act of 1947 and recommended that the national security advisor continue to be free of Senate confirmation. Other recommendations were that the national security advisor serve as chair of senior interagency committees, that the national security advisor formulate precise procedures for the handling of covert actions, that the role of the NSC’s legal counsel be strengthened and enhanced, and that as little policy as possible be accomplished through intermediaries—whether private-sector contractors, other non-US-government personnel, or foreign nationals. Thus, neither Scowcroft nor the board used the Iran-Contra scandal as an occasion to criticize or amend the National Security Act of 1947. Instead, they reaffirmed the fundamental merits of the NSC system.
Although there had been other mishandled crises and botched operations in the recent history of the United States, the Tower Commission was the first government panel to undertake a comprehensive review of the institutions established under the National Security Act. Scowcroft’s assessment of the NSC system amounted to a cautious and measured response to the Iran-Contra scandal.194 For Stephen Hadley, the report was “Brent’s view . . . of how the national security advisor should do it.” And what the Tower board recommended was Scowcroft’s interpretation of the role of the national security advisor and the NSC. “It’s what he did for Ford,” Hadley said, “and it’s what he did for Bush 41. And I think it has become the starting point for every national security advisor. This really is how it ought to work. And if you’re going to depart from this model, you better have a pretty good reason, because this is the one that works best.”195
When he spoke to the Tower Commission, Kissinger essentially endorsed Scowcroft’s vision of the role of the national security advisor: “While I cannot say I was overjoyed when President Ford decided to separate the two functions [of secretary of state and national security advisor], it was a good decision and it worked ideally. With Scowcroft as Security Advisor and me as Secretary of State we had what I consider the nearly ideal arrangement. A White House staff, NSC or otherwise, has an important choice,” he said. “Do they want to utilize the psychology of the President or do they want to compensate for it? I think their duty is to compensate for it. If you know that here’s a President who is given to flighty actions or intuitive actions, it is your duty to make him sit down and think about it. If he is an excessive worrier, then your duty is to show him the opportunities.”196
These were Scowcroft’s views as well. Scowcroft was “keenly focused” on saving the NSC system and on preserving the national security advisor position, Stephen Hadley commented in an interview.197 He accomplished both goals.
The press liked the report. “Without question, the week’s most gripping reading is the Tower commission’s report on the National Security Council,” the Cleveland Plain-Dealer editorialized. “A product of remarkable skill and objectivity, the document exposes the NSC and its staff as rogue policymakers.” Other journalists and members of the public praised the commission’s report for its comprehensiveness, straightforwardness, and well-stated criticisms of the national security advisors, the NSC system, and President Reagan. “Scowcroft and his colleagues have shown an admirable sense of contempt and outrage for an ‘unprofessional’ operation and a clumsy attempt to cover it up in the White House,” the Boston Globe editorialized. “President Reagan was ‘poorly served,’” it concluded. And yet “Scowcroft and former Sens. John Tower and Edmund Muskie . . . also conclude that President Reagan himself, through a policy of selling arms to Iran, poorly served the country.” The Globe recommended that the American public, members of Congress, White House officials, foreign governments, and “especially . . . young military officers who might think of circumventing a chain of command through ‘cowboy’ antics” give the report “the closest study.”198
But in some ways the Tower Commission was business as usual. It accomplished what Washington commissions are supposed to do: it provided cover for a besieged Reagan presidency. Some thought the report whitewashed the whole affair, since it held Reagan responsible only for his inattention to foreign policy and poor management of national security issues. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, a longtime Washington national security correspondent who was especially critical of the Reagan administration, thought the board’s agenda was essentially to take a look, but not too close a look, at the scandal and to “protect the president at a time when nobody wanted to go down [the impeachment] path again. You had a president who was popular more because he looked and sounded like a president than he was a president and they didn’t want to endanger that.”199
Vice President George Bush escaped the focus of the Tower Commission—and of the other investigations, for that matter—despite the fact that he was at several of the key Iran-Contra meetings (those of August 6, 1985, and January 7, 1986, for instance), that he was copied on the key memos, and that he traveled to the Middle East on behalf of the president for the purpose of getting the hostages released. Even though Bush had not been at the December 7, 1985, meeting, he was clearly in the loop. And he presumably could have resigned or threatened to resign had he felt it was necessary to bring attention to the gravity of what going on.200 But as Pincus pointed out, “Nobody stood up and said ‘Don’t do that.’”201 And that failure certainly extended to Bush.
Still, it’s important to remember that the Tower Commission was never in a position to perform a comprehensive and thorough investigation, given the serious constraints it was operating under. With their harsh criticism of the NSC process under Reagan, Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft probably went as far as they could—perhaps further than we might expect—in view of their mandate merely to examine the operation of the NSC. “The sad, shared secret of the Reagan White House,” the Washington Post’s Lou Cannon writes, “was that no one in the presidential entourage had confidence in the judgment or capacities of the president,” with the result that the president’s aides “did not hesitate to manipulate him.”202 The Tower report helped to show how that manipulation happened.
Another of the Tower board’s constraints was its lack of authority to subpoena witnesses and take sworn testimony (in contrast to the special prosecutor and the House and Senate committees investigating Iran-Contra). Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft could only request interviews with people of interest. And if interviewees chose to lie—the president contradicted his statement of January 26, for instance, and McFarlane changed his story three times—the Tower group had no legal sanctions that it could impose. Neither would the president use his power as commander in chief to order Colonel North or Admiral Poindexter to testify before the board.203
A third constraint was the tight schedule. With only sixty days to issue its report—later extended by four weeks—the board didn’t have much time considering the scale and intricacies of the Iran-Contra affair. By comparison, the congressional investigation had almost a year to complete its study, and Lawrence Walsh had several years to conduct his investigation.204 Under the circumstances, it’s little wonder Tower, Muskie, Scowcroft, and their staff didn’t uncover the whole story of the Iran-Contra affair, and that investigative journalists, historians, and other writers were later able to produce more comprehensive analyses.
Scowcroft emphasized that the three of them and their staff had written an “honest report.” But he said he doubted that the whole truth about the Iran-Contra affair would ever come out. Arthur Liman, the counsel for the Senate investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, also believed that “there was much the Tower Commission never found out” and that “great gaps remained in the story” because of the White House’s lack of cooperation and the death of William Casey. “Still,” Liman said, “within its limitations, the commission did a remarkable job of rescuing and putting together all the documents that had survived shredding by the NSC staff.”205
Looking back, Scowcroft presumed that Reagan had given his approval of the NSC’s rogue operations, but he, Tower, and Muskie couldn’t find definitive proof of that. McFarlane’s statements and Reagan’s inconsistent and contradictory answers to the board’s questions weren’t enough. Without testimony from multiple witnesses, an audio recording of Reagan’s approval, or a signed presidential finding, there was no smoking gun.206
In retrospect, however, there is no doubt President Reagan ordered and approved of the arms-for-hostages swap and the diversion of funds to the Contras, as Reagan admitted in his first interview with the Tower Commission. In fact, the two actions were “intertwined” and constituted “a single continuum of cover foreign-policy actions,” as journalists Murray Waas and Craig Unger observed. It is almost certain, too, that there had been a signed presidential finding authorizing the operations and that Poindexter had destroyed it. Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft suspected as much, Nicholas Rostow reports, but they had no proof.207 Without the irrefutable evidence and with the doubt caused by Reagan’s apparently confused mind—very possibly a result of the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease—Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft had no real choice except to give the president the benefit of the doubt.
To Richard Secord, Michael Ledeen, and others, it understandably appeared as though the commission members went “easy” on Reagan.208 Yet it’s noteworthy that the longer and more comprehensive investigations by the House and Senate special committee and by the special prosecutor were also unable to definitively assign responsibility to Reagan.
Navy Cmdr. Paul B. Thompson, a lawyer on Reagan’s NSC staff and an active participant in Iran-Contra—he told Rostow he was “the one person who represents the whole story”—had a different criticism. He characterized Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft as focusing narrowly on the lack of professionalism of the president’s advisers and believing merely that things had gone “too far.” Thompson saw Scowcroft as a “plain vanilla bureaucrat,” someone devoted simply to upholding the existing political system rather than probing its flaws.209
Scowcroft was never merely a “plain vanilla bureaucrat,” of course, but it’s certainly true that he was dedicated to upholding the 1947 National Security Act and to preserving presidential power. The Tower Commission’s report didn’t “ultimately question either the wisdom or the constitutionality of unrestrained executive discretion in national security affairs,” as law professor Harold Hongju Koh writes in his critical overview of the Iran-Contra affair. On the contrary, the board reaffirmed the president’s command of the national security process, as Koh points out, and sought to have the national security advisor play an even stronger, more definitive role in the making and implementation of US foreign policy.210
An incident recounted by former Newsweek reporter Robert Parry is suggestive of Scowcroft’s position. On March 10, 1987, Parry attended a dinner party hosted by Evan Thomas, then Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. During the dinner, “the soft-spoken” Scowcroft mused, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but if I were advising Admiral Poindexter and he had told the President about the diversion [of funds from the Iranian weapons sales to the Contras], I would advise him to say that he hadn’t.” Parry was “startled” by Scowcroft’s statement and inferred that he “really wasn’t interested in the truth.” He “stopped eating and asked Scowcroft if he understood the implication of his remark. ‘General,’ I said, ‘you’re not suggesting that the admiral should commit perjury, are you?’ There was a brief silence around the table, as if I had committed some social faux pas.” Newsweek editor Maynard Parker then loudly declared, “Sometimes, you have to do what’s good for the country.” After brief laughter, Parry writes, the awkwardness passed.211
It might seem surprising that one former national security advisor would advise another to lie. But Scowcroft would consider such surprise naive. He wasn’t so much condoning perjury as advising that presidential aides act to uphold the institutions of government. According to this view, it would be disloyal for a national security advisor not to withhold the truth, if by so doing he or she could save the president from potential disaster. For Scowcroft, duty came first: duty to the president and to the government of the United States—especially at a time when there were calls for Reagan’s impeachment and the possibility of another governmental and constitutional crisis. This was also Pincus’s analysis: “The game was to protect the president.”212
Poindexter would later admit that Reagan knew of the arms-for-hostages deal. “I can remember pretty clearly what [the president] said” at the December 7 meeting in the White House residence, Poindexter told the Senate Select Committee in the spring of 1987. The president “pulled up a stool. He was sitting there and very thoughtful. He said, ‘Gentleman, I think we ought to go ahead. . . . As far as the hostages are concerned, I just couldn’t sleep if we didn’t pursue every possibility.’ He—again, contrary to some of the reports—he clearly understood the sensitive public aspects of this.” Poindexter recalled that Reagan then said words to the effect of “If we succeed in this, we will all be heroes; if we don’t, it will be very difficult.” But Poindexter would deny the president knew of the transfer of funds to the Contras and claim that he’d done everything on his own authority as national security advisor.213
The Tower Commission wasn’t very successful at damage control. The House and Senate committees uncovered additional information, and the Walsh investigation continued throughout Bush’s presidency. On December 24, 1992, less than two weeks before Caspar Weinberger was to testify at his own trial and fewer than four weeks before Bill Clinton assumed office, Bush pardoned Weinberger, McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and three CIA officers, all of whom had been indicted for lying under oath to Congress in their Iran-Contra testimony. Defense secretary Dick Cheney, Vice President Dan Quayle, treasury secretary Nicholas Brady, and other advisers recommended that Bush issue the last-minute pardons; Scowcroft and Baker argued against the pardons. The pardons exonerated the very individuals who could have implicated Bush in the Iran-Contra affair. And because there would now be no trial, Bush’s diaries wouldn’t be made public, and neither would any other documentation that could have pointed to his involvement in Iran-Contra. The pardons triggered an onslaught of protests from members of Congress and political correspondents, with some charging that Bush had subverted justice.
The following summer, in August 1993, the special prosecutor issued his report on Iran-Contra. Walsh reported that McFarlane and North had been made scapegoats for their bosses within the administration and that Shultz and Weinberger had “lied or downplayed their roles and their awareness of the affair.” Furthermore, General Colin Powell, Weinberger’s assistant at the time—and one of those the Tower board didn’t interview—almost certainly knew of the thirty to forty notepads on Iran-Contra that the defense secretary kept in his desk drawer. Powell also had to know of the arms-for-hostages deal and the diversion of profits from weapons sales to the Contras, since the TOW missiles being transferred to the CIA came from Army supply accounts.214 Walsh wrote of President Reagan’s and Vice President Bush’s complicity in Iran-Contra, too, but he didn’t charge either official with any criminal wrongdoing.215
The later investigations revealed aspects of Iran-Contra that the Tower Commission did not uncover, to be sure. But the board’s purpose wasn’t to be dispositive and put all the other investigations to rest, as the political scientist Kenneth Kitts points out. Rather, its purpose was to present the Reagan presidency and the Iran-Contra affair in as favorable a light as possible—to influence subsequent thinking about Iran-Contra and limit the damage.216
A “commission’s job is to purge the system,” Hadley observed. Hadley remembers John Tower saying at one point, “Look, our job is to give the President of the United States a punch in the stomach. And we’re going to say it was arms for hostages, and you shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong.”217 This is exactly what the Tower Commission concluded.
In the end, the president got off the hook. Vice President Bush would be able to run successfully for president, despite his knowledge of and apparent support for the Iran-Contra operations.218 And—rightly or wrongly—the Reagan presidency would come to be perceived as one of the most popular and successful presidencies in American history, with the Iran-Contra affair regarded as merely a long, unsavory footnote to the Reagan legacy.
For Scowcroft, the investigation affirmed the central importance of the national security advisor’s role as an “honest broker,” someone who would centralize, organize, and coordinate information bearing on US foreign policy—not a policy entrepreneur or the president’s personal agent, operating beyond the reach of the other foreign policy principals and congressional leaders. But Scowcroft still wanted the national security advisor to be able to serve as the president’s special diplomatic agent and not be subject to Senate confirmation. Otherwise, he said, “the NSC becomes useless.”219
One of the board’s most troubling findings, in Scowcroft’s view, was that the CIA appeared to have allowed its intelligence analysis to be influenced by the NSC’s goals, thereby compromising the integrity of the NSC process. Tower, Muskie, and Scowcroft saw evidence that CIA officials had made intelligence analysis and policy recommendations, specifically “a revised Special National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in May 1985,” in response to “pressure from members of the National Security Council.” There had been “close coordination between the NSC and the writing of the revised estimate,” Scowcroft told the New York Times. He added, “You don’t want cooked intelligence,” using a phrase that would later resonate in the debate over the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The head of the CIA’s directorate of intelligence analysis at the time was none other than Robert Gates.220
Scowcroft’s work on the President’s Special Review Board had given him a practical opportunity to research and reflect on the role of the NSC and the national security director in the larger foreign policy process. He emerged from the assignment with a clear notion of how that process ought to work for the benefit of the president’s administration and the nation. Twenty months later, beginning on January 20, 1989, Scowcroft would have the opportunity to put his ideas into practice.