I was talking to a journalist from Arizona the other day, and he said we should all be careful about jumping to conclusions about this hideous scandal that is hovering over the White House. “We can’t just treat this like a remake of Watergate,” he said. “This one might turn out to be entirely different.”
“You’re right,” I said. “This will be more like the Carson Sink.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “That had nothing to do with politics. It was a strange animal ’die-off of some kind, a mysterious environmental disaster—even biologists are baffled.”
“Not really,” I said. “They know it was poison, and it killed everything it touched.”
Which is more or less true. The Carson Sink is a national wildlife preserve, where all of the animals died or at least most of them, and the few that survived straggled off across the desert to poison other places. There were geese, egrets, coots, ravens, ducks, blue herons, white pelicans and something like 3 million fish. . . . “This used to be a nice place,” said one local. “We used to come here and feed the birds. Now we can’t even eat them.”
That will not be the problem in Washington. Cannibalism is still fashionable there, but it is more in the nature of a local art form than random feeding on flesh, and the food chain is so full of poison that the natives have long since developed powerful immune systems, and many appear to thrive on it.
Both William Casey and Robert McFarlane, for instance, were eaten so quickly that some people compared them to the deadly poison Fugu fish, which is considered a rare delicacy in Japan, eaten only by ranking gourmets.
Casey, former head of the CIA, was eaten within hours of his first and final exposure to the dread Iran/contra toxin. He was gone so fast that nobody even talked to him, consumed by reports of a brain tumor that allegedly rendered him speechless.
McFarlane, a former national security adviser to the president, survived a bit longer than Casey, but he eventually met the same fate. Not long after he went before the Senate Intelligence Committee and uttered testimony that seemed damaging to President Reagan’s credibility, he fell into a funk and swallowed 30 Valiums in what was called “an apparent suicide attempt.” It failed, and he is now “resting comfortably,” they say, in the maximum security tower at Bethesda Naval Hospital, down the hall from William Casey.
McFarlane will not be there for long. They will be needing those beds pretty soon, when the investigation gets rolling and the other boys from the White House start testifying under oath. Valium sales will soar, and the stomach pumps at Bethesda will be kept cranked up at all times. By late spring the VIP ward will be so crowded that it will look like one of those nightmarish hospital-in-the-street scenes out of “Gone With the Wind.” . . . There will be uncontrolled howling and weeping, and many patients will be chained together like common criminals, with numbers inked on their foreheads and subpoenas attached to the backs of their gray pajamas with super glue and duct tape.
The last big whack to hit Washington was the Watergate scandal, which ripped many people out by the roots, including Richard Nixon and a whole cast of top-level villains from the staff of the White House and the national Republican Party. . . . Many of these went to prison, some were crushed, and a few of the worst and most dangerous became obscenely rich.
But that is where the parallel ends. Gordon Liddy was the Bad Boy in the Watergate crowd—the meanest of the mean—but all he did was commit a few burglaries, shred some papers and shoot out a street light in front of McGovern for President headquarters on Capitol Hill. . . . And for that he served four years in prison, where he wired his jaws shut and took full advantage of a federally financed “phys/ed program” that got him certified as a sixth-degree Black Belt in karate by the time of his release.
But all Gordon did was follow a set of queer orders, steal a few documents and threaten to cripple anyone who objected. His main crime was scaring people, which ranks very low on the felony schedule and exists in a whole different world from the genuinely major crimes that USMC Lt. Col. Oliver North is eventually going to have to answer for.
Gordon Liddy was cruel, but he never did anything even remotely like running a neo-Nazi shadow government out of the White House basement, skimming millions of dollars off the top of illegal arms sales to hostile foreign governments or selling weapons to a hate-crazed international terrorist like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, who was paying North millions of dollars for TOW missiles with one hand while admittedly using the other to finance the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed nearby 300 of North’s people.
That is a long way from “Semper Fi,” and there is a steel bed with D-rings already reserved at Bethesda for the eventual presence of Ollie North. He is hiding behind the Fifth Amendment now—along with his one-time boss at the White House, former NSC chief Vice Adm. John Poindexter.
But that dike will not hold forever, and when it finally breaks there will be bodies all over the landscape hanging grotesquely in the tangled branches like the coots and the cormorants and the bloated white pelican carcasses in the trees around Carson Sink.
Many will be called, and more than a few will be chosen. The Presidential Suite at Bethesda is on 24-hour standby status, as always, and there is a posh corner ward full of needles, pumps and other powerful instruments that has been set aside in the name of Vice President George Bush. He is fatally allergic to Valium, they say—but before this Iran/ contra nightmare is over he is going to need a very strong medicine.
There is nobody in Washington who believes that these cowboys and lackeys and geeks like North, Poindexter and McFarlane were acting on their own—that they were running that whole monumentally crooked circus without the consent of Vice President, White House heir apparent and ex-CIA Director George Bush.
No. There are limits to the art of damage control, and this one will not be dismissed as some kind of “environmental mystery” like Carson Sink, or a low-rent burglary like Watergate.
February 16, 1987