Ronald Reagan: Can He Recover?

The big question raised by the Tower commission cannot be found anywhere in its report -- not in the damning findings, not in the eight appendixes, not in the convoluted diagrams, not in the numbingly detailed chronology of misdeeds and folly. At least not in so many words. But it shadows and haunts almost every line on the 288 blue-bound pages: Can Reagan recover?

Not just from the backlash of a misconceived and bungled policy of trading arms for hostages, though that backlash could damage all U.S. foreign relations. Not just from suspicions of illegality in aiding the Nicaraguan contras, though those suspicions threaten to undermine one of the President's most cherished goals. Not even just from further revelations of incompetence, cover-up or worse that may come out of probes by congressional committees and Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh building on the Tower findings, painful and protracted as that process will be.

Rather, the real question for Ronald Reagan and his new chief of staff Howard Baker, the veteran conciliator he summoned to help salvage his foundering Administration, is whether they can somehow redraw the sorry picture of the lack of presidential leadership that emerges from the report. It is a portrait all the more devastating for having been sketched with tight- lipped reluctance by three elder statesmen struggling to be both objective and polite. Reagan stands exposed as a President willfully ignorant of what his aides were doing, myopically unaware of the glaring contradictions between his public and secret policies, complacently dependent on advisers who never once, from start to finish, presented him with any systematic analysis of aims, means, risks and alternatives. And, in the end, as a President unable to recall when, how or even whether he had reached the key decision that started the whole arms-to-Iran affair. Reagan's final word onwhether he had given advance approval for Israeli sales of U.S.-made weapons in 1985, delivered in a letter to the commission after he had first told it that he had and then that he had not: "I'm afraid that I let myself be influenced by others' recollections, not my own . . . the simple truth is, 'I don't remember -- period.' "