Oliver North Master Crafter of the Political Lie | The Reagan Era
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2017
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Whistlestop travels back to October 5, 1986 when an American plane went down as it was carrying arms to "Contra" guerrillas fighting the communist regime in Nicaragua and the lies about the Iran Contra affair flared up.
Whistlestop is Slate's podcast about presidential history. Hosted by political correspondent and Political Gabfest panelist John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable (or even forgotten) moments from America's Presidential carnival.
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Podcast production and edit by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald.
Email: whistlestop@slate.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop Series 2, a podcast about the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation. |
| 0:08.7 | July 7, 1987, a 43-year-old lieutenant colonel, Oliver North raised his right hand before a select committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. |
| 0:19.2 | And the colonel promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. |
| 0:23.0 | The first big truth he told was that he was a liar. I will tell you right now, counsel, and all the |
| 0:29.9 | members here get that I misled the Congress. The hearing, an attempt to get to the truth of the matter, |
| 0:37.4 | what did President Ronald |
| 0:38.7 | Reagan know? Was there a cover-up? Were laws broken? Turned into an epistemological and theoretical |
| 0:45.5 | were around the mulberry bush about the nature of truth. Truth is just a social construct, |
| 0:51.7 | man. Your narrative is your narrative, and my narrative is my narrative. |
| 0:55.8 | Well, it didn't get that bad, but it almost did. And in the process, Oliver North became a sorting |
| 1:00.9 | device. In the march to the partisan splits we see today, like Alger Hiss, John Dean, Anita Hill, |
| 1:07.7 | he was a star of congressional testimony who held the country transfixed |
| 1:11.1 | and deepened the country's partisan divisions. To conservatives, North was a hero, working around |
| 1:17.1 | the bureaucracy to free American hostages and fund the contras in the global fight against |
| 1:21.8 | communism. If he did something wrong, he was a hero in error and loyal, I should say, to a revered President Ronald Reagan, |
| 1:29.1 | the GOP icon to his critics. North was a rogue ideologue with delusions of grandeur who had |
| 1:34.4 | circumvented Congress and the White House and run a separate government within the executive |
| 1:39.3 | branch. As the Brown University website devoted to the Iran-Contra affair points out at the start, |
| 1:47.0 | the headline on the front of the Wall Street Journal, the day of North's testimony, was |
| 1:51.5 | which Colonel North will tell his story to the nation, the villain who deceived or hero who |
| 1:57.6 | obeyed? Readers of the Washingtonian magazine had voted Colonel Oliver North, the top |
| 2:02.8 | villain of the year, and the biggest hero. The whole around contra business started off like a Tom |
... |
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