In August 1993, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh issued his final report on the Iran-contra scandal. His ultimate findings made the front page of many newspapers, but by no means all, for journalists and citizens alike were weary of the story after seven years of partisan finger-pointing, fragmentary reporting, internecine recrimination and never-ending attempts at spin control. The Walsh report, in theory, should have put Iran-contra to rest, allowing the participants in the scandal and the public to get on with their lives.
That hasn't happened, of course, and in retrospect it's unreasonable to think that any formal document could do justice, in every sense of the term, to Iran-contra.
In skeletal summary, the story seems the first draft of a B-movie: U.S. government officials secretly sell state-of-the-art military arms to shady figures in one country in order to procure the release of political hostages in another, with the proceeds sent, again in secret and against U.S. law, to guerrilla fighters in a third country. Add figures such as Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams and Caspar Weinberger (not to mention Fawn Hall), and you have the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy.
There's one figure even Shakespeare might have trouble with, ++ however: Robert "Bud" McFarlane, decorated Marine, one-time national security adviser, chief Iran-contra scapegoat, famously failed suicide, and now author of "Special Trust," the latest, and surely one of the last, first-person accounts of the scandal.
By the time one finishes this memoir, Mr. McFarlane seems like Gloucester in "King Lear," the attempted suicide whose loyalty earns him virtually nothing. Like Gloucester, too, McFarlane is blind, at least metaphorically; he never saw betrayal coming, failing to understand -- then -- that the Marine's motto of "semper fidelis" is an almost meaningless concept in the political arena, even when voiced by a fellow corpsman.
Oliver North has called "Special Trust" "a pitiful and mean-spirited attempt [by Mr. McFarlane] to glue his broken reputation back together again." Leave out "pitiful" and "mean-spirited," and in fact that's not a bad description; Mr. McFarlane's book, like every other political memoir, is self-serving, taking as its starting point the idea that negotiating with Iranian dissidents during the Khomeini regime was at first a reasonable diplomatic strategy that subsequently took on a life of its own, with terrible consequences.
On the whole, though, "Special Trust" is a responsible and plausible volume, for Mr. McFarlane is less interested in generating sympathy and wreaking vengeance than in putting Iran-contra in context. He eventually levels some very serious charges -- near the book's close he characterizes Mr. North as "deceitful, mendacious, and traitorous" -- but by then, Mr. McFarlane has earned the right to call names. It's hard to believe at times that Mr. McFarlane was really so trusting of his political and intelligence peers as he professes, but by the same token it's easy to see, given Mr. McFarlane's personal history, why he would presume that such trust was fundamental and beyond question.
Mr. McFarlane, now head of an international energy-development company, does not come out of "Special Trust" smelling like a rose. The book, first of all, is peculiarly well-shaped; one can't help feeling that Mr. McFarlane's friend and lawyer, Washington lawyer Leonard Garment, made sure his client's public account of Iran-contra jibed well with the existing record.
The biggest surprise in "Special Trust" is the fact that Mr. McFarlane says relatively little about Oliver North. The second biggest is that the book has been produced by a new and unknown publisher, Cadell & Davies. Mr. McFarlane charges in the acknowledgments to this volume that the major publisher with whom he originally signed turned out to be interested only in "sensationalism."
Mr. McFarlane's portrait of Iran-contra defies the one we carry in our heads. In the end, however, the discrepancy makes his memoir more trustworthy rather than less.
In Mr. McFarlane's tableau, Mr. North "violated the special trust" placed in him by the American people, and one can't help but conclude that Mr. McFarlane harbors similar thoughts about big-time book publishing. Sad but true, and frightening to boot; it now seems more important in our culture to be able to project an image of integrity and fidelity than actually to possess those qualities, that we measure someone's credibility not against the evidence, but by the ability to convince.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: "Special Trust"
Authors: Robert C. McFarlane and Zofia Smardz
Publisher: Cadell & Davies
Length, price: 389 pages, $25