Never Give Up

The curtain is down on the summer's Iran-contra drama, and Ronald Reagan is getting ready for his final 17-month run in Washington, which could be a corker. In the Oval Office last week for an interview with TIME, he looked healthier and more vigorous than recent press accounts have portrayed him. Yet he has been burned and battered by events and people, and his caution was like armor -- a shield that every modern President adopts eventually, no matter what vows he makes about open communion to the end. "There's always a target painted on the Chief Executive's door," he says.

In a few hours Reagan would speak to the nation about his Administration's great scandal and would harvest yet more criticism. "The fact of the matter is that there's nothing I can say that will make the situation right," he would say later, in a statement that was both apologetic and defiant. "I was stubborn in my pursuit of a policy that went astray." It was a speech that satisfied neither friends nor enemies. But it was one that was inside the President as simple and pure as a diamond and had to come out, audience acceptance or not. "Well," he told TIME earlier in the day, his nose still scarred and red from his skin-cancer operation, "I'll be sitting at the same desk, so I can always duck."

But when the time came for the speech Reagan didn't duck, and won't. He let the critics take their shots: "The old Reagan magic, the energy and passion are gone," said the dyspeptic conservative Richard Viguerie. "He should have had Ollie North write his speech, but instead he was on the defensive." Democrats just shook their heads over the scandal's unresolved issues and condemned a misguided Chief Executive. Rebutted Maine's Senator George Mitchell: "Let there be no misunderstanding. The mistakes were not only in the execution of policies. The major mistakes were in the policies themselves."

As Reagan spoke privately that day about his nine-month Iran-contra ordeal, one had the feeling that nothing had changed, yet everything was different. He remains stubborn and unbowed and believing and upbeat; he refuses to hold a grudge. The essence of his talk in the afternoon light of the Oval Office was that a foreign policy operation, born of the best of intentions, went wrong. But the damage, he is certain, will fade. Reagan is calling for the nation to forget and move into the future. Details be damned; unanswered questions be hanged. The great congressional inquisition is finished. Does that mean it is all over? Yes, says Reagan, "as far as the audience is concerned." And Reagan has read the American audience better than any other politician of this decade.