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" Regular readers of the blog know that I am a little bughouse on the subject of the Iran-Contra scandal -- and especially on the fact that most of its principal architects -- including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- were allowed to skate away from crimes that were an order of magnitude worse than the crimes that cost Richard Nixon the White House. Moreover, the utter lack of accountability in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations was the seedbed for most of what has gone wrong with the balance of powers, American foreign policy, and the courtier media ever since. Because we punished nobody for these crimes, we learned nothing from the preposterous hijacking of the country&amp;#039;s foreign policy by, among other people, a congenital liar like Oliver North. Because we punished nobody for these crimes, we allowed many of the players involved, and a lot of the people (like Dick Cheney) who participated in the combination of obfuscation and sabotage that prevented a proper investigation, back into the government under President George W. Bush. They brought with them the absolutist view of the Executive branch that had been the foundation of the cover-up. Torture, the barbering of due process, and the Iraq War were the results. Because we punished nobody for these crimes, a poison was released into the American political system that is still there today. Because the press essentially rolled over on the possibility of punishing these crimes -- Mark Hertsgaard&amp;#039;s On Bended Knee is the essential text on that phenomenon -- the profession embedded in itself a deference to actual power that continues to afflict it. (That Bill Clinton actually was impeached over what he actually was impeached over is a kind of historical funhouse mirror in which to view the crimes of Iran-Contra.) Every institution that was supposed to act as a safety valve against rogue criminality in the government failed utterly. The country and its government, quite simply, has never been the same. There are two books to read that do the best job of explaining how and why. One is Theodore Draper&amp;#039;s A Very Thin Line. The other is Firewall, by Lawrence Walsh.  Walsh, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, died this week at the age of 102. He did the very best he could have done, considering the bungling of the Congress, the deception practiced by his targets under the color of the offices of the public trust that they did so much to dishonor, and the fact that the elite press showed the white feather every time the investigation got close to the Oval Office. In the end he won convictions, but many were overturned, and six defendants were pardoned by Mr. Reagan&amp;#039;s successor, George Bush, who was vice president during the events of Iran-contra. Mr. Walsh belatedly tried to confront his critics. Abandoning his earlier reserve, he called many Reagan administration officials brazenly deceptive. In a 1997 memoir, &amp;quot;Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up,&amp;quot; he concluded that Mr. Reagan must have known of the basic details of the Iran-contra operation and that the president&amp;#039;s advisers had tried to shield him by concealing records and personal notes. That shield - a firewall, as Mr. Walsh described it - was only reinforced by Mr. Bush&amp;#039;s pardons.  It was a clean getaway. And so much of what those thieves stole from the rest of us never had been recovered. We are a lesser country for all of that. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27805/lawrence-walsh-rip-032114/>