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PAGE 18
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER
30,
1986
The President's associates tell differing stories of how
Mr.
Reagan is
holding up to the biggest crisis of his long political career, but the
consensus seems generally positive, and that the Chief Executive is
anxious for facts to soon surface that he feels will vindicate him. But
a quick solution is precisely what is not in the works. The controversy
is, by all accounts, likely to drag o n f o r many months, probably through
all of 1987. Investigators are not likely to stop at the Iran-contra
issue but probe every nook and cranny of activities of the
administration's National Security Counsel, asking eyebrow-raising
questions about whether this
or
that activity is on the up-and-up.
In sum, "Watergate
11"
is going to dominate headlines for the foreseeable
future. The power and prestige of the office of the Presidency will be
impaired and many important issues will not be given their due either by
government
or
the media. In this report we present press commentary
concerning the weakened presidency and a major foreign policy impact
area--Europe. First of all, the Democratic governor of Arizona, Bruce
Babbit, wrote a column in the December 16
LOS
ANGELES TIMES in which he
said:
This prolonged self-flagellation may turn out to be almost as
damaaina to the national interest as the remarkable events that
brouiht@it on. The Iran-contra story has what insiders call
"legs"--the incremental disclosures
-
could well
90
on
for
months, =moralizing
allies =detracting from
the
President's capacity
-
to govern.
To
what end? The main point of the exercise,
so
far as
Congress is concerned, cannot be the discovery and punishment
of crime: We will have an independent counsel for that. The
congressional agenda appears instead to be a reassertion to
subject the President's national-security adviser to
congressional confirmation. Others want new disclosure laws
or
a larger congressional role in foreign initiatives. These are
not, I submit, appropriate answers to our troubles. We do not
-
need new shackles
on
the presidency. Compared to any Western
equivaTnt, it is sTacned quite enough.... What we
do
need is
a clear vision of what we stand for in the world. Only the
President can provide it.. Only the President can establish
clear lines of direction and responsibility. Someone must
speak definitively throughout the world for the United States.
-
In the December 17 LOS ANGELES TIMES, Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the first Reagan term, took issue with the
inability of elected, and increasingly narrow-minded, officials to see
the harm being done to the power of the nation as a whole:
Whether the affair stops at the level of a political circus
or
develops into a criminal prosecution, the accomplishments and
goals of the Reagan agenda could be unraveled, pulling down
&
the rocess the effort to restore American ower
and
in-nce
&l=e
to the Establishment view that American power is a
source of tension, hostility and instability in international
affairs and cannot be exercised without broad-based consent in
the world community..
..
F w b f a T r s X t E a t m stake is
+
t e conservatives'