Johnson acceded to Clifford's "good for the country" advice. Nixon's "treason"- remained secret; he narrowly won the presidential election against then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey; Johnson went quietly into retirement; the war dragged on another four years claiming the lives of 20,763 more U.S. soldiers and about a million more Vietnamese. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Significance of Nixon's Treason."]
With this ugly Nixon reality kept from the American people, the Right was able to formulate a case blaming almost everyone but Nixon for the eventual U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
Indeed, by the late 1970s, a resurgent right-wing movement had composed a revisionist history of the Vietnam War--accusing liberal Democrats, anti-war youth and skeptical war correspondents of betraying the nation at a time of war, of serving as a veritable fifth column for the enemy.
As a result of this shifting power dynamic--the Right's ascendancy and the Left's decline--mainstream U.S. journalists sought self-protection by soft-peddling critical information about the Reagan administration, thus enabling national security scandals to remain secret or go severely under-reported deep into the 1980s. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
In that climate, the Washington news media had little stomach for exposing the Iran-Contra affair, Nicaraguan contra cocaine trafficking, political murders and even genocide by U.S. allies in Central America, and the dangers of arming Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Islamic extremists in Afghanistan.
Newsweek Dinner
I encountered this new media reality while pressing ahead on some of those scandal stories for the Associated Press and later Newsweek. I came face-to-face with the "good for the country" argument during my early days at Newsweek, at a March 10, 1987, dinner at the home of Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas.
The invited guests of honor were retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who had been one of three members of the Tower Board which had just completed an initial investigation of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, and Rep. Dick Cheney, who was the ranking Republican on the House Iran-Contra panel which was just beginning its work. Also in attendance were top Newsweek executives down from New York and a few other lowly correspondents, like me.
At that time, a key question in the Iran-Contra scandal was whether Reagan's national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, had informed the President about the diversion of profits from arms sales to Iran to Reagan's beloved contras fighting along the Nicaraguan border.
As the catered dinner progressed, Scowcroft piped up: "I probably shouldn't say this, but if I were advising Admiral Poindexter and he had told the President about the diversion, I would advise him to say that he hadn't."
I was startled. Here was a Tower Board member acknowledging that he really wasn't interested in the truth after all, but rather political expediency. Not familiar with the etiquette of these Newsweek affairs, I stopped eating and asked Scowcroft if he understood the implication of his remark.
"General," I said, "you're not suggesting that the admiral should commit perjury, are you?"
There was an awkward silence around the table as if I had committed some social faux pas. Then, Newsweek executive editor Maynard Parker, who was sitting next to me, boomed out: "Sometimes, you have to do what's good for the country."
Parker's riposte was greeted with some manly guffaws; Scowcroft never answered my question; and the uncomfortable moment soon passed.
