Original subtitles

Up till now, I have been telling you

the part of the Iran-Contra story

that was hidden from the American public.

But when a U.S. cargo plane went down in Central America

and a Lebanese magazine reported on a secret trip

to Iran by senior Reagan officials,

the contours of a strange scheme became visible.

And all of a sudden,

the walls of Oliver North's room 392 were breached.

The country had a lot of questions.

And it wasn't just North's destiny

that would hang in the balance,

but also the legacy

of the president he had served.

The brewing scandal felt eerily familiar

to one the country had been through a decade before.

Everybody remembered Watergate as, like,

this television event.

So a lot of people just wanted to write

about the television event

and about the people involved in it,

you know, some of these real characters,

when that wasn't the story at all.

It was far more sophisticated,

complex and frankly scarier than Watergate--

far scarier than Watergate.

I'm Leon Neyfakh.

This is Fiasco--

the Story of Iran-Contra.

Before we look at the public face of Iran-Contra,

let's take a moment to remember how it all began.

Place your left hand on the Bible

and raise your right hand and repeat...

In January of 1981, Reagan became president

of the United States in a landslide.

The American people were giving up on Jimmy Carter,

a president who had been crippled

by the 1979 hostage crisis.

Reagan's promise that he would be tough

on terror struck a chord.

The United States gives terrorists no rewards

and no guarantees.

We make no concessions. We make no deals.

Ronald Reagan set Americans' expectations

and the world's expectations

that this would be the toughest

anti-terrorist American administration

that anyone had ever seen.

But halfway through Reagan's second term,

the United States still had hostages in Lebanon.

While some had been freed,

even more had been taken captive

amid ongoing negotiations with Iran.

In his interactions with the press, Ronald Reagan,

the one-time great communicator, began to falter.

It seemed the president now found himself trapped

in a situation he couldn't talk his way out of.

If your arms shipments had no effect

on the release of the hostages,

then how do you explain the release of the hostages

at the same time that the shipments were coming in?

The--it's a strange situation. As I say, we...

Publicly, the president was issuing

firm denials of wrongdoing...

There was no deception intended by us.

We had to have it limited

to only the barest number of people that had to know.

I was not breaking any law in doing that.

...while privately the administration was scrambling

to manage the fallout of the arms-for-hostages scandal.

The public had yet to find out

that that was just one half of a convoluted plot

that connected it to another brewing controversy:

America's secret support for the Contra War in Nicaragua.

It's going to be very hard indeed for the president

to regain a tactical advantage on this.

Tonight, they called on Attorney General Meese

to set up an independent investigation

of both the arms deal and the Contra connection.

Ed Meese, the attorney general,

had long been a close confidant of Ronald Reagan,

dating back to when Reagan was governor of California

and Meese was his chief of staff.

Mutual friends would say that theirs was a relationship

based on fierce loyalty.

Look, is that-- is that something

that you shouldn't have with an attorney general?

That doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

I mean, I think you could have a close relationship

with the attorney general

as long as the attorney general understands

that his first responsibility is to protect the Constitution

and protect and enforce the laws of this country.

So help me God.

- Congratulations, sir. - Thank you.

His first responsibility

is not to the president, but to the country.

I will try to carry out the job

in a way that will merit your confidence.

I appreciate it.

I've got a problem with a neighbor out around--

When the Reagan White House needed help,

they called in Meese to provide the guidance

he had always loyally given.

In this case, they wanted Meese

to put the facts together to help them understand

what had actually happened.

My name is Chuck Cooper.

I was the assistant attorney general

for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice

during the second term of the Reagan administration.

My office had been very much involved

with Ed Meese, the attorney general,

in trying to identify the sweep of legal issues

that had been raised by these events.

Reagan instructed Ed Meese to take control

and that everybody in the administration,

in these agencies, were to cooperate with Ed

and his effort to get to the bottom of the facts.

There was a meeting in Admiral Poindexter's office

in the White House,

and Ed Meese asked me to come along to this meeting.

And we were going over prepared testimony

that CIA Director Casey

was going to deliver the following day.

And while we were going through this,

the person in the room,

who was clearly the person in possession of the facts,

was Colonel North who, at that time, I didn't know.

As we were going over it, line by line,

Casey's written prepared statement,

I remember very well that Oliver North insisted

that a particular factual change be made

in that prepared testimony.

The CIA director, Bill Casey,

planned to testify that his department

hadn't known about their aircraft

carrying shipments of Hawk missiles to Iran

until after the fact.

Col. North insisted that that be revised to say no one

in the United States government knew that that had happened.

Ed Meese and I certainly didn't have any reason at all

to question Oliver North's understanding of the facts,

and we didn't.

And, as far as we could tell, no one else in the room

had any reason to question Oliver North.

As I was leaving,

Peter Wallison saw me in the hall.

He asked me to join him in his office.

While Chuck Cooper was in my office,

we were going over some testimony

that Bill Casey was going to make.

The counsel to the State Department called me

and said that Secretary of State Shultz

had heard someone tell the president

that some Hawk missiles had been sent to Iran

and the hostages would be released.

And that was directly contrary

to what we had just agreed upon

was the fact that no one

in the United States government knew

about these 85 arms shipments.

But we had to find out what the actual facts were.

And the trouble is the facts kept changing.

That, to us, was a very serious problem.

Too many people inside the administration

were saying different things

that didn't jibe with each other.

And the president was getting a little bit

too close to the fire here.

He could get burned from this.

And so Meese's goal for himself

was to make the case

that Reagan knew nothing about it.

And so he went about interviewing

most of the key players.

As word of Meese's investigation spread,

Reagan's national security advisor,

John Poindexter, called Oliver North to tell him

that investigators would be coming to search his office.

North had been taking notes and writing memos

for years at this point, and the call from Poindexter

set off a frenzy in North's office.

Ollie North knew that

Ed Meese's investigators

were on the trail that could expose the diversion

and who knows what else.

So he told his secretary, Fawn Hall, "We're in trouble.

We've got to get rid of some of these documents."

North needed to get rid of any evidence

that would expose the diversion of funds

from the sale of weapons in Iran

to support the Contras in Nicaragua.

He was determined to protect the president.

Where they could, Oliver North and Fawn Hall

altered the documents to align

with North's altered chronology of events.

But with investigators making the rounds,

they finally took stacks of documents

and began to shred them.

At one point, North and Hall had stuffed

so many documents into one of his shredders

that it jammed.

Meanwhile, across the street at the White House,

John Poindexter was also cleaning house.

The only thing that I know that was destroyed

was the preliminary draft of the covert finding,

which I destroyed.

The so-called finding

that Poindexter destroyed

was a document signed by Reagan

stating that the purpose of the arms sales

was to rescue American hostages.

I decided that

the first version of the finding

was not a complete explanation of what we were doing,

was not important,

and so I personally destroyed it.

I brought it home and put it in a can

and lit a match to it.

So that took care of that at least.

But there was also the matter

of something called the PROFS system,

an early version of email

that John Poindexter, Bud McFarlane,

and Oliver North had used

to communicate about the arms deals.

As Meese's investigators began combing

the National Security Council files,

Poindexter deleted thousands of notes from his computer.

When Ed Meese sent

two of his very senior aides

to Oliver North's office to look for files,

North was still there.

He happened to be shredding documents

as they were investigating.

Meese's investigators were looking

for a couple of things, one:

whether this had been truly an exchange of weapons

for the release of hostages.

At the same time, they wanted to know, was it authorized?

If so, was it disclosed to Congress?

The two investigators

were trying to be quiet

so as not to tip off Oliver North

to anything they might find.

Then, suddenly,

one of them stumbled upon something amazing--

a document that tied the illegal weapons deal

with Iran explicitly

to another covert operation entirely.

And one of the investigators remembers

kicking the other under the table

and showing him the memo that raised the idea

of diverting arms sales revenues

from the Iran deals to the Nicaraguan Contras.

But they didn't want North to know

that they had found this item.

Meese's aides, Brad Reynolds and John Richardson,

read the memo, slipped it back into the file,

quietly put everything back in its place,

and left to meet with Meese.

Meanwhile, North was still at work next door.

Oliver North and Fawn Hall tried to destroy

everything they could,

but by the time they knew they had to leave,

they hadn't shredded everything.

So Fawn Hall, North's loyal secretary,

stuffed some documents in her boots

and in the back of her blouse

and turned around and asked North,

"Does this look all right?"

And she marched out of the Old Executive Office Building,

next to the White House,

with documents inside her blouse.

We met at the Old Ebbitt Grill,

in a booth, the four of us--

Ed Meese, me, Brad Reynolds, and John Richardson,

and we're kind of reporting to Ed

what we had learned.

Brad said, "Ed, I've come across something."

He reported that it said

$12 million from the transfer of arms

to the Iranians would be placed

in an account controlled by the Contras,

or for the benefit of the Contras.

And that, obviously, stunned everybody.

Nobody even remotely suspected anything like that

would be connected with this arms-for-hostages scenario.

And Ed, for the only time in my--now, what--

almost 40-year relationship,

heard him use a four-letter word.

And he just looked and he said, "Oh, shit."

And that discovery,

of the fact that the diversion had occurred

was what turned

an Iran scandal and a Contra scandal

into the Iran-Contra scandal.

The diversion memo was discovered.

Here was something that everybody was going to agree

was a terrible thing.

The immediate question was--

what were the implications of that revelation?

That diversion was a misuse of federal funds,

had not been authorized by Congress,

and, at least insofar as those of us at the--

in the booth at the Old Ebbitt Grill knew,

it had had no authorization by the president.

And so it was a diversion that was completely unauthorized

by any lawful authority.

The investigators went to confront North

about the document.

They hoped that he would tell them

that the so-called diversion of funds

had just been an idea,

that they could just forget about it and move on.

Instead, North told them that it had really happened.

That meant they would need to tell the president.

Ed made clear to the president his advice,

that these facts, and in particular the diversion,

would need to be disclosed to Congress

and to the American people very soon.

When Ed Meese briefed Reagan

about the diversion of funds,

Reagan was just absolutely blown away.

He was totally unaware of it.

The next morning,

President Reagan agreed to hold a press conference.

Though he didn't fully understand

the scandal just yet,

he knew one thing-- heads would have to roll.

Yesterday, Secretary Meese

provided me and the White House chief of staff

with a report on his preliminary findings.

They found the diversion of funds,

and they decided that they would focus on that issue

because they could reasonably portray it

as something the president did not know about,

and that was known to so few people

that they could just sweep those guys out the front door,

sacrifice them, and make this thing go away.

Vice Admiral John Poindexter

has asked to be relieved of his assignment

as assistant to the president for National Security Affairs

and return to another assignment in the Navy.

Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North has been relieved of his duties

on the National Security Council staff.

So I was in the White House press room.

I'm going to ask Attorney General Meese to brief you

on what we presently know of what he has found out.

Is anyone else gonna be let go, sir?

And it was at that point that Ed Meese said...

Certain monies, which were received

in the transaction between representatives of Israel

and representatives of Iran,

were taken and made available

to the forces in Central America

which are opposing

the Sandinista government there.

Our estimate is that it is somewhere

between $10 million and $30 million.

And I can remember that moment.

There was a gasp by the reporters in the room.

It was as if time had sort of skipped a moment.

It was a, "Wait, what did he just say?"

Ed Meese's press conference

shocked the leaders of Israel and the Contras,

both of whom he had just implicated in the operation.

Immediately, Meese fielded a call

from Israel's prime minister, Shimon Peres,

who stated plainly that he would not

be taking responsibility for the diversion.

In Miami, another denial was coming

from the leaders of the Contras,

who were now being asked to account for $30 million

said to have been funneled into their war.

There has been no secret bank account

and there has been no arrangements by Colonel North

to such effect.

And in Nicaragua,

the president of the Sandinista government

now had his suspicions confirmed.

It appears clear to us

that this is a scandalous situation

in which President Reagan is involved,

in which he is really sacrificing Poindexter

and that other one to find a way

to save face in this situation.

Back in Washington, Congress was in an uproar.

It's gonna be a cold day in Washington, D.C.

before any more money goes into Nicaragua.

This thing has boiled down into the darndest charade

I ever heard of.

Nothing could have happened of this sort

without the president knowing it.

The attorney general said later

former National Security Advisor McFarlane

had also been aware of the scheme.

Bud McFarlane called North

to see what had happened with the diversion memo.

North replied, "I missed one."

With the scandal now out in the open,

the former national security advisor

struggled to cope with his role

in the decision-making that had led up to it.

Remorse doesn't quite capture it.

I--

I'd failed my country and allowed it

to incur an enormous embarrassment internationally.

And I had exercised bad judgment

in allowing it to go as far as it did.

Even with North and Poindexter fired,

the administration couldn't save Reagan

from public scrutiny.

His approval ratings, which had been at 67 percent

before the announcement, plummeted immediately.

The public didn't think they were getting the full story.

41 percent say they don't think

the president was telling the truth

when he said he was not fully informed.

It's kinda hard to imagine

him not knowing what's going on,

seeing as how he's the president.

It's my opinion-- making it look

like our president is pretty dumb.

If Reagan didn't know about it, he should have.

It seemed to me like that he's dealing

a little bit above the law.

I think he should step down.

I think his credibility is

totally, totally shot at this point.

I really never trusted any of the governments

when they're in power.

Now, it just reaffirms my thoughts.

I feel that I moved to Maui, and I don't have to deal

with all this political stuff.

On November 26, 1986,

the day after his bombshell

press conference with Ed Meese,

President Reagan appeared at the White House's

annual Thanksgiving ceremony.

Mr. President, what did you know

about money going to the Contras?

All I know is this is just going to taste wonderful,

and I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

But a warm smile and a one-liner

weren't going to get Reagan through this.

Three separate investigations were announced.

First, there was the Tower Commission,

a three-person panel focused on finding out

what went wrong in the White House.

Also, a team of prosecutors

in the Office of the Independent Counsel

began a criminal probe.

At the same time, Congress prepared for public hearings.

I'm Pamela Naughton, and I was assistant counsel

to the Select House Committee on Iran-Contra.

When I was growing up,

we watched the Watergate hearings.

Once the administration admitted

that there had been a diversion to the Contras,

I just had a feeling I would be part of it.

We actually worked in the attic of the U.S. Capitol building.

The attic allowed Naughton

and the other investigators to set up a temporary SCIF,

a restricted area designed

to keep classified information secret.

The SCIF was like working in a cave.

And I have to confess, once in a while,

we'd sneak up to the roof and sunbathe.

And now I imagine you can't do that anymore.

The committees quickly ran into a roadblock

when key people in the investigation

began pleading the Fifth.

Oliver North and John Poindexter, among others,

refused to cooperate

without being granted immunity,

which would make anything they said

in the congressional investigation off-limits

in the criminal proceedings.

There are about 13 charges

of obstruction of investigation

and false statements.

Ultimately, Congress did grant the men immunity

in exchange for their testimony.

The agreement meant they would fully cooperate

and also that they would turn over any documentation

or recordings they had,

including whatever remained of Oliver North's notes.

He was a prodigious note-taker.

When the notebooks arrived, that was a very, very big deal.

And we made copies immediately,

and everybody started reading them.

Although the three investigations ran separately,

each one produced reams of evidence

that together pointed to a very different reality

than what the White House

had been selling to the American public.

The big bombshell

that the Tower Commission came up with

was the discovery

of John Poindexter's deleted email files--

over 5,000 emails deleted.

And you can see the records nowadays

where, you know, let's say, November 25th,

at00 in the morning, he had 5,200 emails.

November 25th, later in the day,

after the press conference, zero emails.

And that broke the scandal wide open.

The messages showed that Oliver North

had communicated with Poindexter at every step.

That brought the whole fiasco one step closer to Reagan.

Because John Poindexter and Oliver North

had pleaded the Fifth, the Tower Commission

wasn't able to meet with them for interviews.

But on several occasions, the commission did meet

with the president himself.

This proved to be a turning point also

because Reagan's story changed over time.

He said, basically,

"I was aware of and I authorized the Israelis

to participate in this-- in these arms deals."

Later on, just a couple weeks later,

he claimed that he didn't know anything

about what had happened.

So, how do you resolve this?

Last month,

the president's statement to the board agreed

with McFarlane's, but after a number of meetings

with Chief of Staff Donald Regan,

the president told the board he was mistaken

and hadn't given approval until much later.

We knew it was going to scar Reagan,

that he would have this indelible

Iran-Contra scar forever.

It was something that I was very upset about,

knowing that it hurt him, that it set him back.

Questions increasingly focused

on whether Reagan knew about North

diverting proceeds from the Iran deal

to the Contras in Nicaragua.

There were people in Congress talking about impeachment

if it had been found that Ronald Reagan's fingerprints

were on that flagrantly illegal deal.

He's caught between that dilemma

of either being accused of having known

or being accused of having not known.

Whichever it was is bound to lead to some criticism.

Bud McFarlane struggled with the accusations.

McFarlane was under intense pressure

as the scandal unfolded.

He was a lifelong servant of the government,

in the military, the Congress, and the executive branch,

suddenly being vilified

as someone who might bring down the president.

This was how everything was cast.

What we had done

could cost Ronald Reagan his presidency.

I reached the conclusion

that, at least, if you can't turn things around,

maybe you can atone for what's happened here

by acknowledging your own role in it

and your failure in it.

Before he was to meet

with the Tower Commission for his third interview,

McFarlane grew increasingly desperate.

He drafted letters to his wife, to his lawyer,

and to members of the House

and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Then he swallowed at least 20 pills of Valium.

One of the most important figures

in the Iran-Contra affair,

Robert McFarlane, is in a hospital tonight.

The former national security advisor

apparently took an overdose of Valium,

a tranquilizer often prescribed to ease stress and anxiety.

It was foolish, looking back,

but it's just more a comment

on how deep the depression had become.

And I won't develop for you the nature of depression

and how it develops and how it can worsen

and lead to a cycle of decline.

And yet, that was what was happening.

It was very, very, very hard for him.

And as some people say, there are some people

who bend under pressure and some who break.

And at a certain point, Bud broke,

and it led him to try to commit suicide.

And I understand that.

Those who were involved, sure,

they all bear a measure of responsibility.

But they weren't decision-makers.

I was, effectively.

Everything that got done in that administration

on national security affairs,

it did so because I had approved it,

I had recommended it,

and the president had approved what I had urged.

I could only atone from here on out

by being honest and telling the truth

and not taking the Fifth.

On February 28, 1987,

Reagan's long-time speechwriter, Landon Parvin,

drove through the back gates of the White House

towards the East Wing.

In his briefcase, he had secreted

a thickly bound packet,

covered with his own underlines and notes

from interviews he had done with Reagan's staff.

My name is Landon Parvin,

and I was a Reagan speechwriter.

Parvin had the reputation of someone

who could write a politician out of any tough bind.

Iran-Contra was a job for Landon Parvin.

I definitely felt it was a crisis.

You could feel it on the news.

You could feel it in the building.

I felt it-- the people I talked to.

The Tower Report, as it came to be called,

had just been released.

Please be seated.

Yes, the president made mistakes.

I think that's very plain English.

The president did make mistakes.

Nancy Reagan had set up a secret meeting

in the White House residence

to craft her husband's public response.

Going into that Friday meeting, he looked upset.

He looked shaken.

You know, he usually had an ebullience about him,

but I didn't detect that.

He was dressed very casually.

He was in a--he was in a running suit, I think.

The casualness of his dress

belied, I think, how seriously he was taking it.

John Tower was very direct,

and the big question

was whether the president could admit

he traded arms for hostages.

Everyone said he had-- he had to.

I mean, there was talk of impeachment.

So this was not something that could be dismissed.

It had to be addressed.

In 300 sobering pages,

the Tower Report sharply criticized

the Reagan administration.

The president's aides were accused

of hiding information from Congress

and failing to adequately convey

to the president the risks of what they were doing.

The report saved its harshest critique

for President Reagan himself,

saying that, as a leader, he had been out to lunch.

Everyone at the meeting agreed

that he would now need to come out

and admit to the arms deals.

Everyone, that is, except for Ronald Reagan.

I go home, and I start writing.

What I was most worried about

was how the president would react

to admitting he traded arms for hostages.

And I had been in a dilemma

how to say it so he would accept it.

I figured out the psychology of how to get him

to accept something he didn't want to accept.

A few months ago, I told the American people

I did not trade arms for hostages.

My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true.

But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

We had a window there,

while he was shaken up by it,

that he could say what needed to be said.

That window soon closed.

In the coming months,

practically everyone on Reagan's team

would lay out their version of events under oath.

It would be up to the public to decipher

if what they were saying was true.

Good evening. Throughout the Iran-Contra affair,

a central question has been--

what did President Reagan know and when did he know it?

29 remotely controlled still cameras

will record the scene

as will every television network in America.

In May of 1987, the world tuned in to watch

the joint House and Senate hearings.

By now, interest in the scandal

was at a fever pitch.

The line to get

into the Senate Russell Building Caucus Room

was early and long.

This is an historic moment. It's like Watergate.

The Senate hearings were

in the big Caucus Room.

People will recognize it

because it has the big high-back chairs in the back.

Very ornate.

It was a spectacle.

The joint hearings of the House Select Committee

to investigate covert arms transactions

with Iran will come to order.

Normally, in a courtroom,

you're within ten feet of the witness box.

You can have a dialogue with the witness,

and it's unobstructed.

When you're in Congress, you're up on this dais,

the witness is down in the well,

and there's 50 photographers between you,

and they're constantly snapping like little birds.

They're crawling around and walking around,

and people are going in and out of the hearing room.

We had demonstrators. We had people holding signs.

Why don't you ask him about how many noncombatants

have been killed by this putrid--?

It's an almost impossible forum

in which to find the facts.

Mr. Secord, will you please rise?

First to testify was Richard Secord.

Remember him?

He had managed the logistics of the Iran arms sales

and the resupply operation to the Contras.

Do you swear to tell the truth,

the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,

- so help you God? - I do.

Secord agreed to testify without immunity,

which meant that anything he said

could be used against him in the criminal investigation.

My lawyer thought I was insane

for insisting on doing that.

Am I correct, Mr. Secord, that you were engaged

in selling arms to the Contras for profit?

That's correct.

My position was

if we allow the others to go first,

after they grant immunity, the storyline will be set,

and we'll never recover from it.

Did you testify yesterday

that you directed your secretary to shred documents?

Didn't you tell us also you had wanted

to talk to the president of the United States?

Was it ever contemplated

that you would obtain profits

or any other kind of remuneration

in connection with the Iranian initiative?

No. None.

I have no idea, sir. I don't remember.

There are some deeply troubling aspects

to your testimony, and I guess that's the point

of the hard questions that have been posed.

A couple of the attorneys harassed me

until I thought I couldn't stand it.

But I'm glad we did it that way.

We got a special prosecutor over here across the street

that's trying to throw all of us in jail

for performing our duty as we saw it.

I haven't focused on some technical issue

like you're bringing up here. This is crazy.

Secord's defiant, unapologetic testimony

set the tone for what was to come--

testy exchanges with counsel and bombshell revelations.

The following week, Bud McFarlane took the stand.

- I do. - Thank you.

And he too spoke without immunity.

To have done nothing, while safe,

would have been irresponsible.

That there are many other issues that are of great--

- Senate House Committee-- - Democracy.

More than the legal argument--

Their policies with--

Is this the first you ever heard

of a November 1985 Hawk shipment?

I do believe it was.

I was the lead interrogator

at the hearings for Chuck Cooper.

I had to prepare the testimony,

and in order that I could concentrate,

the chairman of the Judiciary Committee

let me use his private office.

I wanted to do a good job, and he's trying to buck me up,

and he says, "You know, I just wanna tell you,"

he says, "You're gonna be the first woman lawyer ever

"to ask a question

"at any congressional-- major congressional hearing.

Think about that. I know you can do it."

Well, that wasn't exactly helping.

Our first witness this morning

will be Mr. Charles Cooper.

When we got to the testimony

and Chairman Inouye called on me to start the questioning,

he referred to me as Mr. Naughton.

Mr. Naughton?

Oh, Ms. Naughton. I'm sorry.

I almost wanted to say, "Thank you, Ms. Chairman,"

but I decided not to do that.

- Good morning, Mr. Cooper. - Good morning.

Mr. Cooper, did you have any knowledge of U.S. sales

of military equipment to Iran prior to November 1986?

I did not.

In a congressional investigation,

there are essentially no rules.

There's no judge who's gonna discipline the witness

and/or his lawyer because nobody hit the gavel

and said that you're out of order.

Once you ask your question,

they can go talk about the moon

or the sun and the stars, and you have no control.

Did anyone else in the room during that meeting

mention CIA involvement in the 1985 Hawk shipment?

Uh, I am drawing a blank from my memory.

If I could consult the notes I took at that meeting--

It's very frustrating.

Thank you very much, Mr. Cooper.

Mr. Chairman, that ends my examination of the witness.

The hearing will please come to order.

While the hearings dominated the airwaves,

the president himself ignored the coverage.

We were in Italy in 1987

for the economic summit, the G7.

We had a break, and we went back to our hotel,

said, "Hey, we've got some time.

You want to put the hearings on?"

He said, "Sure. Let's see what's going on."

He was probably everybody's--

every secretary's dream of a boss.

Fawn Hall was testifying,

and Reagan's looking at her, and I'm looking at her.

And Reagan said to me-- he looked at me and he said,

"Jim," he said, "So that's who Fawn Hall is."

And I said, "Yeah."

I said, "I wouldn't have known her either."

It's the eve of the Oliver North testimony,

and there is great anticipation,

but no advance word on what he will say.

North's four days of testimony

should be a climactic moment,

when the committee begins getting answers

to some of the key questions.

North's long-awaited public testimony

begins tomorrow morning.

The hearing will please come to order.

Once Oliver North was granted criminal immunity,

he finally appeared before the committee.

The world was eager to hear

whether he had received approval from the president,

whether he had personally profited from the deals,

and how he had carried out the cover-up.

Colonel North, please rise.

Oliver North took hold of that proceeding

and made it his own.

He came dressed in his full uniform

with his medals.

Do you solemnly swear...

He just looked like this red-blooded American hero.

- I do. - Please be seated.

Usually, congressional investigators

expect a witness before them

to be contrite or perhaps evasive.

But Ollie North turned the tables on them

by going on the offense.

I believe that this is a strange process

that you are putting me and others through.

Thousands of hours of testimony.

You make the rulings as to what is proper

and what is not proper.

From where I sit, it is not the fairest process.

Plain and simple, the Congress is to blame

because of the fickle, vacillating,

unpredictable, on-again-off-again policy

toward the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance.

And the poor members

of the congressional committee

didn't quite know what they were up against.

- Lieutenant-- - First of all,

I'm a Lieutenant Colonel.

I have been a Lieutenant Colonel

for a couple of years now.

The government of the United States gave me a shredder.

I mean, I didn't buy it myself.

I did not discuss this

with the attorney general until January.

It wasn't some secret Ollie North

in the middle of the night, flying off on his own hook.

Ollie North didn't do that.

You're misunderstanding what I said.

With the Vietnam War

still a recent memory,

the former marine facing a majority

Democrat congress reignited old tensions.

Would that have made a difference?

You're the person who surfaced it.

Don't get angry, counsel.

I'm gonna answer your question.

That came off even better

when you put him across

from the House lead counsel, John Nields,

who was this kind of hippy-looking guy,

with hair down to his shoulders.

This is the culture wars,

you know, embodied in these two people.

- Where are these memoranda? - Which memoranda?

The memoranda that you sent up

seeking the president's approval.

I think I shredded most of that.

Did I--did I get them all?

He was guilty as sin.

They had him dead to rights.

But by the time he testified,

much of that didn't seem to matter

for a large part of the country

because Ollie North was such

a terrifically effective communicator at saying,

in effect, "I did it all for love of country,

"to protect American lives,

and I would do it all again."

I saw that idea

of using the Ayatollah Khomeini's money

to support the Nicaraguan freedom fighters

as a good one.

I still do.

North seemed to inspire

a kind of fever dream on the right...

Ollie! Ollie! Ollie!

Setting off a craze

that came to be known as "Olliemania."

The appeal of Oliver North, the man,

swept the country as the week went along.

North has dominated the front page

of the Denver Post all week.

He's definitely winning the hearts of America.

He doesn't seem like a crazed patriot,

which I think is what I expected.

Seemed like an all-American boy.

They feel Ollie North is a hero.

But North's testimony

was not the final word on the scandal.

The joint hearings of the House and Senate committees

will come to order.

And although Reagan reportedly did not tune in

to much of the hearings,

there was one witness he was eager to hear from.

Admiral Poindexter, would you stand to take the oath, please?

That of his national security adviser,

John Poindexter,

who had overseen much of North's activity.

We were on Air Force One.

Reagan and I were just talking about the day.

And he took his hand, and he crossed his fingers,

and he said, "This is the day

"that John Poindexter will clear me once and for all.

"He will tell Congress,

"and at the same time will be telling the world,

that I did not know about the diversion of funds."

I made a very deliberate decision

not to ask the president

so that I could insulate him from the decision.

You know, the buck stops here with me.

I made the decision.

I felt that I had the authority to do it.

I thought it was a good idea.

But I did not want him to be associated with the decision.

Once Poindexter told the world

that Reagan had not known about the diversion,

the air kind of left the Iran-Contra scandal.

Nevertheless, towards the end of the year,

the congressional committees delivered

their final report on the affair.

In it, they identified malfeasance

from within the administration's top ranks.

The common ingredients in the Iran-Contra affair

were secrecy, deception, and a disdain for law.

But there was only so much responsibility

that men like Poindexter, North, and McFarlane could hold.

"The ultimate responsibility for Iran-Contra,"

the report said, "rested with the president."

We believe that the president is responsible

for the actions and attitudes of his staff.

If the president did not know, he should have.

Iran-Contra is unusual as a scandal

because there is so much on the public record

about what happened.

So we actually know a lot more

about the covert world from Iran-Contra

than we do from almost any other story of that generation.

But we still don't know for a fact

whether Ronald Reagan knew about

or approved the diversion of funds.

Ultimately, Congress found President Reagan

to be a negligent leader.

But without the full story of what he knew

and when he knew it, and without public support,

they decided against trying to impeach him.

In those days, impeachment was not something

that the Congress talked a lot about.

And it was a very unusual weapon to use.

Even though it was used against President Nixon,

I think the sense was

it was not something that should be abused.

With impeachment off the table,

Reagan was free and clear to finish his second term.

You know, Reagan was always focused

on the positiveness of any situation.

When he had his major surgery to get the tumor out,

immediately thereafter, the head of the National Cancer Institute

held a press conference and made the broad statement,

"President Reagan has cancer."

But Reagan--

In interviews following his surgery,

Reagan said over and over again that he never had cancer.

And people would pause, "Well, what do you mean?"

And he said, "Well, I didn't have cancer.

This tumor, it had cancer, but I didn't have cancer."

And that was Reagan's way of rationalizing,

always taking the bright side, the sunny side.

He was the eternal optimist.

By 1988,

Reagan's final year in the White House,

criminal charges were being filed

against many of the people involved in Iran-Contra.

But by that point, the majority of the country

seemed to have simply moved on.

The show was over.

There was a large chunk of society

that was sitting there going,

"How is he getting away with this?"

But there was another chunk of society going,

"Move on. We've got other things to do."

And, in fact, big events were happening.

Gorbachev was in power.

Reagan was meeting with him in Reykjavik,

and they were starting to dismantle

the nuclear machinery.

It is my impression

that we can deal with President Reagan.

We can continue dialogue with him.

We can continue searching for solutions.

And the Cold War was about to end.

All sorts of things were going on that overtook Iran-Contra

and put it on the sidelines of history.

Nine days before he left the White House,

there was one subject nagging Reagan's presidency.

There were still several hostages

being held captive in Beirut.

Some of them had been abducted during his time in office.

What about the American hostages in Lebanon?

Do you think there is any chance

that they may be released as you're leaving office?

I can only pray and continue what we've--We've been exploring

every channel possible for their release.

And they've never been out of my mind

since they were so unfairly seized.

When Reagan finished his second term,

he held the highest approval rating of any president

since Franklin Roosevelt.

Smile.

And his vice president,

George H.W. Bush,

was voted in as his successor.

That I will faithfully execute

the office of president of the United States.

Meanwhile, Bush and the rest

of the administration continued

to face scrutiny from criminal investigators.

The independent counsel probe, initiated back in 1986,

revealed wrongdoing

at the highest levels of the White House,

leading to felony and misdemeanor charges

against multiple members of Reagan's administration.

That included Oliver North and John Poindexter.

In the end, there were plenty of convictions,

but most of them were ultimately undone.

Happy Thanksgiving.

On George H.W. Bush's

first Thanksgiving as president,

he instituted the turkey pardon as a permanent annual tradition.

Let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey,

that he will not end up on anyone's dinner table.

Not this guy.

He is granted a presidential pardon as of right now.

For Bush, it turned out to be good practice.

On Christmas Eve, a few years later,

he held another pardoning ceremony,

this time granting clemency to several top officials

implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Mr. Bush granted executive clemency

to six public officials

involved in the Iran-Contra affair.

The Constitution is quite clear on the powers of the president,

and sometimes the president has to make a very difficult call,

and that's what I have done.

Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh

says the lesson is clear.

Is the message here, if you work for the government,

you're above the law?

That depends on the president you work for.

Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel,

famously said of the Bush pardons

that they completed the cover-up.

He was exactly right.

The Bush pardons basically shut the door

on further investigation and accountability

in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Most all of the key officials

who authorized and implemented

those operations got off scot-free.

Yes, their lives were disrupted for a while.

Arguably, their legacies weren't even really dented.

They went on to lead the rest of their lives.

But the lesson was really not learned,

and the safeguards against preventing

these extra-constitutionally illegal abuses of power

from happening again were really not put in place.

And it is just a matter of time

before we have other scandals of similar magnitude.

To me, one of the big lessons

of this entire affair

is how enormous the discretionary powers

of the president of the United States are.

Congress, or the American public,

can try and limit a president with laws,

with regulations, with norms.

But we and the Congress have granted

so many discretionary powers to a president,

whether it's by how he can use funds,

how he can use the CIA,

how he or she can simply pick up the telephone

and call a foreign leader and ask for a favor.

It may eventually turn into a scandal.

It may eventually damage that president's standing,

but there is no effective way from stopping a president

from doing it in the first place.

It certainly showed a management failure

of the National Security Council

during the Reagan administration.

I think that there were people who were so committed

to continuing to oppose the Soviets

that, you know, they did things

that they thought were in the gray area.

While, ultimately, when you're president,

the buck stops at your desk,

and Ronald Reagan has to accept responsibility

for everything that happened on his watch.

He clearly had no knowledge of it.

He would not have approved of it.

I also think that the stand that he took against Communism

has been vindicated by history

and by our ultimate victory in the Cold War

by defeating the Soviet Union

without ever having to fire a single shot.

Ultimately, Reagan did prevail,

and his policies were vindicated.

I think he's been vindicated by history.

In his speech welcoming home

the Tehran hostages back in 1981,

Reagan had depicted an America so respected and so feared

that there was no limit to what it would do for its citizens.

As it turned out, it would be

almost three years after Reagan left office

that the last of the American hostages in Beirut

would be released.

Although Reagan himself sidestepped any lasting damage,

Iran-Contra has continued to reverberate

in every corner of the world the scheme touched.

Americans sometimes don't understand

the resentment in which American foreign policy

is held in weaker countries.

Don't understand that Iranians, for example,

carry within them the story of the CIA's intervention

against an earlier democratic regime

that overthrew the regime and restored the Shah to power.

Most of us never heard that story in school.

We often don't understand that Latin Americans,

much as they admire the United States,

also bear the burden of this enormously powerful neighbor

that, throughout its history,

has asserted the power to intervene in their countries

to determine who ought to be in charge.

In 1990, after more than a decade of civil war,

a political neophyte named Violeta Chamorro

was elected president of Nicaragua.

She was a pro-Contra activist whose campaign

had the full backing of the United States.

My high school and college years,

I was living in the United States

knowing full well that--you know,

that our tax dollars were supporting a war

that theoretically was about stopping Communism.

But the end result

was two percent of the population dead.

A war that is based, again, right,

on profoundly racist views

that agency is not allowed for Nicaraguans.

People in the U.S. can elect whoever they want to elect,

but that will not be allowed for Nicaraguans,

as if there are limits being placed

on the humanity of Nicaraguans

by people who will never,

ever, ever, you know, suffer the consequences.

If it's true that most of the real consequences

of the Iran-Contra scandal were suffered

by people far away from Washington, D.C.,

it still remains the case that Reagan came closer

to the fate of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter,

than anyone remembers.

In a very real sense,

a series of decisions made Reagan

the hostage he never thought he would be.

And maybe that's the great warning buried

in all of this--

how quickly and quietly a country

often seen as the most powerful on Earth

can become trapped inside a cage of its own making

and how easily it could all happen again.

Ultimately, many of those involved in Iran-Contra

went free.

In a speech in 1988,

the founder of the Moral Majority,

Jerry Falwell,

introduced Oliver North as a true American hero

and compared him to Jesus Christ.

The first question's always asked,

"Why are you having an indicted man

to speak to the students at Liberty University?"

I said, "Well, we serve a savior who was indicted."

From my first time

in the Naval Academy, I mean,

it's in your bones.

You know what your job is.

Serve the country.

And don't blame somebody else.

Don't make up excuse, circumstances,

this kind of blarney.

You can at least stand up,

tell the truth,

take responsibility.

Sure, if I had to do it again, I would not have let it go on.

But I did.

And there is no changing the facts.