Word: contras
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...Watergate began to drag his conservative cause and many former colleagues into disrepute. Safire not only survived that debacle but prevailed: he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978, and his twice-a-week columns continue to display reportorial zeal and refreshing unpredictability. At the conclusion of the Iran-contra hearings, for example, he lectured his "fellow contra supporters" on the necessity of prosecuting members of the White House staff who broke the law. Away from politics, Safire writes essays in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on language, its uses and abuses, and has become a formidable pop grammarian...
...taping one's own phone for posterity seem both sordid and self-incriminating. Anointing a personal Boswell to hang around the house also turned out to be troublesome, as shown by the ill-conceived rumblings about summoning Edmund Morris, the President's designated biographer, to testify before the Iran-contra probers. Not even silicon chips offer much promise anymore. Those electronic messages that national-security staffers zapped to one another's computer screens, which were fortunately recorded in deep memory for future scribes, violated the cardinal rule of modern government: never leave footprints. Electronic memory shredders will, no doubt...
...involved. After all, only history is at stake. But if top officials knew in the back of their minds that future generations were listening in, it might have a salutary effect on the present. Had the judgment of history been hovering over their shoulders, the architects of the Iran- contra affair, for example, might have reflected a moment longer on the long- term implications of their actions. Indeed, the dulling of our historical sense could be one reason that the U.S. needs so many special prosecutors these days...
...Iran-contra debacle clearly showed the dangers of relying on semiprivate operators to handle such tricky covert missions. The CIA's legal authority and practical capacity to operate in the gray area between intelligence activity and paramilitary action have come under grave question. The business of conducting covert wars in an open and democratic society has never come easily to the Pentagon either. America's armed forces traditionally resemble a sheriff prepared for a shootout on Main Street at high noon but not for a back-alley brawl...
...Army did avoid one of the worst blunders of the Iran-contra affair. Though some of its clandestine activities were initially kept from legislators, to their displeasure, most were properly described to congressional oversight committees. Partly as a consequence, and somewhat paradoxically, the Army escaped the intense spotlight that the many Iran- contra investigations have cast on covert operations in general...