Special Trust.

Robert C. "Bud" McFarlane's personal memoir, Special Trust, gives us an opportunity to look again at the Iran-contra affair and other Reagan foreign policy misadventures and remind ourselves what real White House ineptness, secrecy, scandal, contempt for Congress, misuse of government, and destruction of the country's standing abroad are all about.

McFarlane will always be associated in the public mind with a mid-level aide of his at the National Security Council: a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North. And while North may be receding from the political scene after his defeat this November by Chuck Robb in the Virginia Senate race, one of the lessons of McFarlane's book, which covers his 20-year career in the national security bureaucracies and in the White House, is what McFarlane says about North, another striver in uniform working his way up the Washington ladder.

"I came to see that, in fact, Ollie himself never seemed to get the point that however a public servant may feel about what is right in the policy sense, he still must work within a legal framework. Ollie and a lot of other people in this town of Washington approach the political milieu from a `them and us' perspective, a belief that when it comes to ideological struggle, what's right is determined by who wins. All's fair in that contest, they say, and to believe otherwise is naive."

In one telling anecdote, McFarlane describes how, soon after news of the arms shipments to Iran broke, North rushed up to him in a crowded room of people who were trying to put together a chronology of the Iran initiative and insisted to McFarlane that they had not known about the shipments until January 1986, well after the true date. "Today," McFarlane writes, "I see that as a vintage North snow job: Give the guy the bum's rush, don't let him think... [then] give him some artificial reason for why it's not arguable and then get on with it."

McFarlane, who viewed himself as a foreign policy mover-and-shaker because of his prior associations with Henry Kissinger (MacFarlane was his military aide) and Al Haig (McFarlane was counselor in his State Department), relates how he started the ball rolling on what became the biggest scandal in the Reagan administration. The key moment came on July 3, 1985, when the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, David Kimche, dropped by.

In a "let's meet alone for a minute in your White House office" meeting with McFarlane, Kimche spun out the well-worn tale of "dissident" Iranians who wanted to overthrow the fundamentalist regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini but needed U.S. support. (The Israelis have a longstanding interest in keeping a door open to Iran as a counterbalance to the virulently anti-Israeli Iraq.) In this opening gambit, the Iranians wanted to prove their bona fides, so they offered to win release of Americans then held hostage in Beirut as evidence of their influence in Tehran. To show this was not some off-the-cuff idea, Kimche even discussed where in Beirut or elsewhere U.S. forces could pick up the freed men.

"There was no request for arms or quid pro quo," McFarlane notes in an obvious attempt to signal us that somehow, up to then, it was a legitimate deal.

McFarlane discloses for the first time that once Kimche had captured his interest another aspect of the plan emerged that first day. The dissident Iranians or the Israelis--or both--had plans to kill Khomeini. Although McFarlane was fully prepared to enter into secret negotiations with some unknown Iranian "dissidents" to get American hostages back, he "pressed back . . . decisively"--against Kimche's persistence--that "we cannot engage with you in an enterprise in which anyone's purpose is to assassinate the Ayatollah." At that point, McFarlane reports, Kimche "yielded, saying, `all right that's clear.'"

Anyone with a modicum of common sense would have called things off that day, but not McFarlane. Although he had made not killing Khomeini "clear," all the other parts of the deal became less clear and changed sharply without McFarlane or his successors backing out. It started within a month, when he accepted the notion that the White House had to provide its bona fides in the form of arms demanded by and given to the "dissidents," who turned out to be elements of the Khomeini regime.

Iran-contra is just one example of why we should be very wary of condeming the Clinton administration too harshly for its foreign policy blunders. According to McFarlane's account, when it comes to international affairs, Republicans may be the ones who really need to be watched.

Compare the performances he portrays on Lebanon in 1982-1983 of Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, and McFarlane, to the actions of Clinton and then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin in Somalia and elsewhere.

Weinberger openly opposed sending the Marines to Lebanon in the first place. They first went in August with other forces to oversee the evacuation of PLO fighters. In September, when the PLO units had left but before the Lebanese could take over, Weinberger ordered the Marines back aboard their ships "without consultation or notification" with his own commander-in-chief or the White House. That led to the other peacekeeping force's withdrawal, setting the stage for Phalange militiamen to slaughter "more than 600 unarmed women, children, elderly and disabled." McFarlane sums it up this way: "For Weinberger to have precipitated the betrayal of [U.S. diplomat] Phil Habib's pledge to the Palestinians without so much as a phone call to the Secretary of State or the President was criminally irresponsible."

If that weren't enough, McFarlane recalls that Reagan, in response in late September 1982, sent a Marine amphibious unit back to Beirut "out of guilt and compassion, purely as moral support [to the Lebanese government!, without clarity or analysis beyond that level." A year later, 241 of those Marines were killed in a suicide bomb attack on their poorly protected compound. But that was not the end of this Reagan administration foul-up.

As McFarlane puts it, "We knew we had to react. Reagan, after all, had always promised that this government would provide 'swift and effective retribution' against terrorists." McFarlane then chronicles in exquisite detail how no such thing took place.

First the Pentagon resisted expanding the rules of engagement for the Marines that remained in Lebanon and, McFarlane wrote, he believed that "as a result of the bombing, Cap Weinberger adopted an absolute commitment to get us out of Lebanon as soon as possible."

Then he describes how Reagan approved a retaliatory strike on a building in the Bekaa Valley where the CIA had traced the Iranian-run, Shia Muslim commando unit considered to be the instigators of the bombing. The Sixth Fleet commander reported he was ready to strike but never got the order. The reason, McFarlane writes, is that Weinberger called him and said, "I had a request [to strike!, but I denied it." In McFarlane's version, Weinberger said, "I just don't think it was the right thing to do."

And what happened when McFarlane told Reagan that his presidential order, approved at a White House meeting, had been countermanded by Weinberger? The president, whose supposed strength and toughness have often been used to underscore Clinton's alleged waffling, responded: "Gosh, that's real disappointing. That's terrible. We should have blown the daylights out of them. I just don't understand."

There are more events, just as frankly portrayed and illustrative of how little we knew at the time. Reading the book becomes worthwhile not only for what it tells us about McFarlane, but as a reality check when we talk today about foreign affairs under the Clinton administration. Foreign policy wasn't handled better back then--public relations and the press were.