At covered-dish suppers and coffee klatsches, North fervently pays homage to Reagan. Gripped on cue by his patented catch in the throat, Ollie invokes the man he “admired and revered and worked for.” In campaign brochures, he recites “the great honor of working in the White House for the man who won the battle of freedom over communism.”
But the feeling isn’t mutual, as Reagan made clear in a letter solicited by former senator Paul Laxalt, a supporter of North’s opponent in the race for the GOP Senate nomination. Reagan wrote that he was “getting pretty steamed” at North’s “false statements” about the Iran-contra affair. It was not true, as Ollie has said, that he “knew everything” about the secret plan to divert profits from Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan contras. “I certainly did not know anything about the Iran-contra diversion,” Reagan Arote. And it was not true, as Ollie has implied, that he ordered aides to mislead Congress. And all those “private” meetings North claims to have had with him over the years? They “just didn’t happen,” the former president wrote.
Reagan’s letter was the biggest event yet in what is shaping up as one of the most vicious, entertaining-and instructive-elections this year. For now, Virginia is the battleground of a new civil war, this one for control of the national Republican Party. On one side are what one party insider calls “The Saturday Evening Post Republicans”: comfortable centrists whose lineage runs from Ike and Ford through Bush and Dole. They are allied now with “movement” conservatives who came to power with Reagan. On the other side is Ollie’s Army, a younger “third wave” crew who think Reaganites have been co-opted by Washington, and who see the party’s salvation in the votes of evangelical Christians, home-schoolers and Ross Perot’s angry and alienated followers.
North initially was considered certain to defeat another Reagan alumnus, former budget director James C. Miller III, for the right to face Democrat Chuck Robb. North had the cash, amassed in a national direct-mail effort. He had the Marine resume, appealing in a state where military tradition is deep and Pentagon spending vast. He had the syrupy sincerity, displayed on TV in 1987 and dolloped out in intervening years at GOP events around the state. North attracted a tight-knit team of young organizers, many trained in the “pro-family” PACs of the ’80s and in Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign.
But North’s mission isn’t turning out to be easy. Miller isn’t the stiff his resume implies. He’s a personable, even garrulous, Georgia native who brags that his grandfather was an illiterate blacksmith. Not conceding the hard right, Miller has more extreme positions than North in opposition to abortion and gun control. “They’re trying the horseshoe strategy,” says North media adviser Mike Murphy, “coming at us from the right and the left.”
More important, North has taken an enormous pounding in the media, and even among media-hating Republicans it may be having a cumulative effect. Days before North’s campaign launch, Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh blasted him in a final report, a document North’s lawyers tried to suppress. He was pummeled by network inter-viewers. Virginia’s current GOP senator, John Warner, has made defeating North a holy mission-and Warner is popular with party regulars who see North as an untrustworthy interloper. Warner and Miller have orchestrated attacks on North from certifiably conservative Reagan loyalists, among them Laxalt, Ed Meese, Cap Weinberger and retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub.
None of that mattered nearly as much as the Reagan pronouncement. “Obviously, it’s not helpful,” says Morton Blackwell, a North supporter and GOP state committeeman. “Ronald Reagan is revered.” In a damage-control trip across the state, North proclaimed be was wrong about what the Gipper knew-even while his aides whispered that Reagan was an unwitting, misinformed tool of desperate Washington insiders. “It’s a classic rear-guard action by a Republican elite,” buffs Murphy. “It shows how desperate they are because we are so close to winning.”
Indeed, North’s team remains ahead in the race to line up loyal supporters among the estimated 11,000 Republicans who are paving $35 each for the privilege of attending this June’s GOP nominating convention in Richmond, Va. North is backed by members of Robertson’s Virginia-based Christian Coalition, and Robertson has written a letter of support. “There are going to be 10,000 snake-handling fundamentalists at that convention,” crows one North strategist. “They’re not going to vote for a guy from the Office of Management and Budget.” Maybe so, but independent counts show Miller, though still behind, gaining. And delegates aren’t legally bound to vote for a particular candidate. “We’re going to start peeling away their people,” predicts Miller polltaker John McLaughlin.
The Miller pitch is aimed at practical party regulars: don’t blow our chance to oust the vulnerable Robb. An ex-Marine like North, Robb has admitted a past weakness for bimbos and beach parties with unsavory crowds. In an extraordinary letter to supporters recently, he confessed to behavior that was “not appropriate for a married man” and touted his wife’s forgiveness of the party animal in him. In a bizarre 1987 memo that recently went public, Robb acknowledged that his liaisons with other women had stopped short of “coital relations”-a new record for specificity in modified limited hangouts. Miller’s argument is that North is more damaged goods than Robb-and that Reagan’s letter underscores the fact. It “devastates” North’s credibility, Miller declared last week.
But none of that matters to Ollie’s fans. At a recent dinner in the Shenandoah Valley, they flocked to the dais to shake his hand, to proffer his book … Under Fire" for an autograph, or simply to experience firsthand the moist-eyed sincerity he made famous on TV. Some supporters are retired-and generally low-ranking-federal bureaucrats and military men who see North as a guy who got the shaft. Others are young adults who respond to his television fame. Many are evangelical Christians, with whom North seems to connect on a deep level of faith.
With communism dead, North seems a trifle lost in the pinstripe suit that replaced the Marine olive drab. But his real appeal is his saga of victimhood. It’s supposed to prove his worth as a candidate: as though he’d been sanctified as an “outsider” and man of the people by the Iran-contra hearings, his trial, and now even by the criticism of Ronald Reagan. “At least all my skeletons are all out of the closet,” North says. It’s a memorable campaign slogan: either a confession of political weakness or a sign that he understands our cynical age far better than his enemies realize.
