Hero today, gone tomorrow.

THE TRIAL OF Oliver North was like a night at the Kabuki theater: for specialists, filled with details from which they take the pleasure of continual repetition varied by minute differences; for the rest of us, an exercise in stupefaction.

The most remarkable thing, perhaps, is how little we've learned. It's not as if Fawn Hall were making her debut, after all. Ronald Reagan did not testify, which was, in the context of this affair, a familiar absence. The press made much of supposed revelations of George Bush's involvement, even as it conceded that Bush's action-soft-soaping Honduras so that the Contras could stay there-was legal: Congress had forbidden the Administration to pass funds directly through foreign countries, but cutting off all dealings with every country that had dealings with the Contras would have required not only keeping Bush out of Honduras, but ending aid to Israel and refusing to pay Saudi Arabia for oil.

The key questions, now as always, are political.

Why didn't Reagan pardon North? Reagan wanted the Contras to survive. North was attempting to ensure their survival. Was the colonel following the President's orders? Constantine Menges, a conservative who was in a position to know, has argued that North was a grandiose zealot, quite capable of concocting orders out of thin air. But clearly he did not misread Reagan's general intentions. Reagan himself gave credence to the notion that North was doing his bidding when he called North a "hero." With the precedent of Ford's pardon of Nixon before him, he must have calculated that letting North off the hook would have caused an eruption of disapproval that would have devastated the Bush Administration and besmirched his own reputation. So Bush was able to enjoy a twomonth honeymoon, whereupon the Senate rejected John Tower, and congressional normalcy resumed. Crises come early or late, but they come. It would have been best to get this one over sooner.

Why were the Contras in such a perilous position in the first place? The answer is Congress, or two factions of it: the fifty or so members of the House, mostly Democrats, whose continual changes of mind -Ortega coos, cut off aid; Ortega's in Moscow, bring it back-made any final resolution impossible; and the Dear Comandante crowd, the useful idiots (Jim Wright) and worse (George Crockett) who viewed the Sandinistas as Democrats in a hurry, and worked faithfully for their victory. The size of the second faction made the first, smaller faction marginally decisive. So American policy on Nicaragua remained in chaotic stasis.

Why couldn't the White House change Congress's mind? It tried, of course. There was something heroic about the hours of lobbying, on the Hill and at the grassroots. And yet . . . and yet it always fell short of the full-court press. Two elections occurred while Colonel North was laboring at his NSC desk, the Reagan-Mondale wipeout, and the off-year election two years later. If the Republicans had told voters that, for the first time in history, there was a Communist government on the American mainland, a two days' drive from Texas; if the rest of Central America goes, Mexico goes, and if Mexico goes we will have fifty million refugees; here are the congressmen (Faction Two) who desire this result, and here are the congressmen (Faction One) who are making it possible; and if they succeed and we fail, we guarantee years of (that dread post-Vietnam word) recriminations-would the voters have responded?

We'll never know. (Though we do know all about North's tin box.)