Essentially, the Republicans picked option two. Under the guidance of Nixon's Treasury Secretary William Simon, right-wing foundations collaborated to build a powerful new infrastructure, pooling resources to finance right-wing publications, think tanks and anti-journalism attack groups. As this infrastructure took shape in the late 1970s, it imbued the Republicans with more confidence.
So, before Election 1980, the Republican campaign--bolstered by former CIA operatives loyal to former CIA Director George H.W. Bush--resorted to Nixon-style tactics in exploiting President Jimmy Carter's failure to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.
The evidence is now overwhelming that Republican operatives, including campaign chief Bill Casey and some of his close associates, had back-channel contacts with Iran's Islamic regime and other foreign governments to confound Carter's hostage negotiations. Though much of this evidence has seeped out over the past 29 years, some was known in real time.
Senior Carter administration officials, such as National Security Council aide Gary Sick, also were hearing rumors about Republican interference, and President Carter concluded that Israel's hard-line Likud leaders had "cast their lot with Reagan," according to notes I found of a congressional task force interview with Carter a dozen years later.
Carter traced the Israeli opposition to him to a "lingering concern [among] Jewish leaders that I was too friendly with Arabs."-
Israel already had begun playing a key middleman role in delivering secret military shipments to Iran, as Carter knew. But--again for "the good of the country--Carter and his White House kept silent.
Since the first anniversary of the hostage crisis coincidentally fell on Election Day 1980, Reagan benefited from the voters' anger over the national humiliation and scored a resounding victory. [For more details on the 1980 "October Surprise" case, see Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
GOP's Growing Confidence
Though much of the public saw Reagan as a tough guy who had frightened the Iranians into surrendering the hostages on Inauguration Day 1981, the behind-the-scenes reality was different.
In secret, the Reagan administration winked at Israeli weapons shipments to Iran in the first half of 1981, what appeared to be a payoff for Iran's cooperation in sabotaging Carter. Nicholas Veliotes, who was then assistant secretary of state, told a PBS interviewer that he saw those secret shipments as an outgrowth of the covert Republican-Iranian contacts from the campaign.
Veliotes added that those early shipments then became the "germs" of the later Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.
But the Republicans seemed to have little to fear from exposure. Their media infrastructure was rapidly expanding--for instance, the right-wing Washington Times opened in 1982--and America's Left didn't see the need to counter this growing media power on the Right.
The right-wing attack groups also had success targeting mainstream journalists who dug up information that didn't fit with Reagan's propaganda themes--the likes of the New York Times Raymond Bonner, whose brave reporting about right-wing death squads in Central America led to his recall from the region and his resignation from the Times.
This new right-wing muscle, combined with Ronald Reagan's political popularity, made Democrats and mainstream journalists evermore hesitant to pursue negative stories about Republican policies, including evidence that Reagan's favorite "freedom fighters," the Nicaraguan contras, were dabbling in cocaine trafficking and that an illegal contra-aid operation was set up inside the White House.
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