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03/31/2006:

"Weinberger, Bushes & Iran-Contra"

On Christmas Eve Day 1992, as many Americans were wrapping holiday gifts or rushing off to visit relatives, the nation’s history took a turn that blacked out key chapters of the recent past and foreshadowed troubling developments in the future.

At the center of that historic moment was former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who died on March 28 at the age of 88. In 1992, he was one of six defendants in the Iran-Contra scandal who received Christmas Eve pardons from President George H.W. Bush less than a month before Bush left office.

If Bush had not granted those pardons, Weinberger would have gone on trial in early 1993 facing perjury and obstruction charges, a courtroom drama that could have changed how Americans perceived key figures from the Reagan administration, including Colin Powell and President Bush himself.

At stake was not only Weinberger’s guilt or innocence but more importantly the legacy of the Reagan-Bush era. Quite likely, too, President Bush would have been caught up in this final unraveling of the Iran-Contra cover-up – and the prospects for his family’s resumption of political power might have been dealt a fatal blow.

The Weinberger trial might have foreclosed the possibility that George W. Bush would ride his father’s reputation to the White House eight years later.

The trial also represented the last best chance to explain to the American people the constitutional conflict that was festering beneath the surface of the Iran-Contra Affair, essentially the President’s assertion of unfettered power to conduct foreign policy even in defiance of laws passed by Congress.

In the early-to-mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan had sought to avoid a head-on clash with Congress by taking his foreign policy underground, using cutouts like Israel to ship missiles to Iran and White House aide Oliver North to funnel supplies to the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

After those operations were exposed in 1986, Congress also tried to avert a constitutional showdown by papering over the illegal presidential actions and accepting the cover story that top officials, such as Reagan and Bush, were mostly out of the loop.

But those unresolved constitutional questions exploded back to the surface after Sept. 11, 2001, when George W. Bush asserted virtually unlimited presidential authority to override or ignore federal law as Commander in Chief. In effect, the younger George Bush was staking out power openly that Reagan and the elder George Bush had exercised only in secret.
consortiumnews.com