About Those Telegrams

Lt. Colonel Oliver North did not achieve hero status as a result of television. Rather, he is a creature of Western Union.

The huge outpouring of tens of thousands of favorable telegrams from people across the country provided the first tangible evidence that North had a following. North's wife sat quietly throughout the hearings, clutching a large stack of the yellow telegrams, occasionally thumbing through them to read words of encouragement as congressman questioned her husband's actions. North waved the signs of support at reporters during post-hearing press-conferences. His only words to the press were his appreciation that so many of his fellow Americans had taken the trouble to call-in the messages which read, "Go Ollie. Stop."

The news media picked up the story immediately, and the term "Olliemania" was coined. The telegrams served to provide North with something his medals proved incapable of. The telegrams gave the National Security Council staffer, who was in charge of much of the Iran-contra affair, a measure of invincibility. To challenge North was to challenge all those telegrams. North seemed to have the voice of the people on his side.

The telegrams worked. When the hearings' chairman, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D.-Hawaii), began his closing statement at the end of North's testimony, he invoked the lesson of the Nuremburg trials. Inouye said that those trials had invalidated the just-following-orders defense for all time. North's attorney, Brendan Sullivan, jumped to his client's defense. Sullivan challenged the Senator, saying that Inouye purported to be listening to the American people. Some 20,000 favorable telegrams were sitting on his desk, the lawyer protested, and that represented the people's will. In the face of such popular acclaim, allusions to the Nuremberg trials in connection with North were offensive, Sullivan said. The appeal was successful, and Inouye dropped the analogy.

But there is another story to those telegrams, one that has been mentioned only in passing. A signifigant portion of the pro-Ollie messages have contained racial slurs. Instead of reading simply "Go Ollie! Stop." a number have read, "Go Ollie! Show that kike, Jap, or Nigger." Underneath the public support of North are signs of the endemic racism that unfortunately is all too American.

The toughest opponents of North, after all, have included a Jewish lawyer (Senate counsel Arthur L. Liman '54), a Jewish Senator (Senate Committee Vice-chairmen Warren Rudman (R.-N.H.), a Japanese Senator (Inouye), and a Black Congressman (Louis Stokes (D.-Ohio)). By contrast, North has presented himself as the true-blue American defending democracy, freedom, God, and country. He is a populist hero, the little guy taking on the government. But as historians have long since pointed out, populism has two faces: one which celebrates the common man, another which reflects racism, anti-semitism, and xenophobia. Both faces of populism have smiled brightly at North's performance.

Senator Rudman was the first to make an issue of the bigoted epithets which have found their way into many of the telegrams Sullivan has so agressively waved in the face of the Iran-Contra committee. He made a spirited and emotional defense of Inouye's character and a stern repudiation of the attitude reflected in those telegrams at one point during the hearings. Rudman's speech warranted scant attention in the press; it illicited a sullen agreement from North. But neither North nor his attorney, nor for that matter Senator Orrin Hatch or Henry Hyde, two of the biggest citers of the telegrams, made any public statement on the issue.

Perhaps the silence stemmed from the belief that some percentage of all those mass telegrams could be dismissed as from the people on the fringes of American society. Probably not. Instead the muted criticism of the racist messages reflected the desire of many congressmen to believe in the "Ollie" myth. Those who continue to refer to the telegrams want to go on worshipping the populist myth without facing up to the myth's darker, racist side.

In his final speech at the end of North's testimony, Representative Stokes made a moving statement in which he reflected the other reaction to North. If bigots are inspired by the sight of a marine in uniform standing up to an ethnically diverse Congress, Blacks like Stokes are left uneasy by that same figure asserting that popular will must be carried out. He said that North's intense belief in loyalty to individuals rather than loyalty to the law was particularly offensive to Black Americans. Stokes said that North seemed not to take the Constitution seriously, but rather was interested in more general and abstract ideas. If a law was by passed, Stokes said of North, it was all right so long as it was in the name of America.

Stokes reminded North, however, that Black Americans viewed their country in a way that was diametrically opposed to his view. The Constitution alone merited a citizen's supreme loyalty, and it is to be followed with the utmost reverence. Even as the general public made its racism known, Blacks put all their faith in the words of the nation's governing charter, Stokes said. The Constitution matters more than the passing will of the majority, and Blacks fear people such as North who abrogate the highest law in the name of the people, Stokes said. By suggesting that North's philosophy was one which frightened Blacks, Stokes indirectly helped to explain the presence of racial slurs in Ollie's mail. The Ohio Congressman was trying to make North aware of the dangers of his own words, words which contained the danger that someday a bigoted majority would be able to strip minorities of their civil rights.

North literally became a folk hero from his testimony, representing the good, bad and ugly strains of the frontier mentality. His lawlessness, his belief in following superiors, his anti-communist zealotry combined his constant incantation of patriotism was bound to bring the bigots to his side. What is distressing is that North never repudiated that segment of his support. Brendan Sullivan was equally quiet. One can only be glad that the civil rights movement happened, enabling Louis Stokes, son of a Black cleaning lady, to sit as a United States Representative at one of the country's most important public hearings and remind his fellow countrymen why the Constitution matters.