DROP! Someone had thrown a ball at my chest … I sat up, shaken, startled awake … . A dream, probably. Or maybe just a small heart attack."
Elliott Abrams was only 43 last fall [1991] when he was rushed to the hospital from special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s office in Walsh’s official limousine. (Walsh was worried about his image. An earlier victim had attempted suicide.) The doctor said the symptoms seemed to be caused by "this pressure you are under." Abrams was indeed under pressure. He and his lawyers were negotiating the final details of what was to be a much-gloated-over guilty plea: to two charges that he had "withheld information'' about the Contra support network when testifying before Congress as a Reagan Administration official back in 1986.
Abrams passes over this incident relatively quickly in his clear and forceful journal of the few weeks in which Walsh suddenly reactivated his case after years of silence and in effect bastinadoed a settlement out of him. He is also perhaps more discreet than it appears at first sight about the impact of the ordeal on his wife and three small children, although their presence is constant in the narrative. He prefers discussing the legal and political implications. And these are indeed profound and disturbing.
Yet that poor fluttering heart cries out for attention. Like the forgotten moment in Spiro Agnew’s very different memoir, Go Quietly … or Else, when his wife, informed of his decision to accept a nolo plea, faints dead away, it is a reminder that democratic politics is not just a spectator sport. At times, it is literally more than flesh and blood can bear.
The distinguished moral philosophers who edit The New Republic, in the first of what will certainly be many savage notices Abrams will receive, have been harrumphing because his publisher’s blurb draws a parallel with Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s novel about how the Old Bolsheviks were induced to confess during Stalin’s Purge Trials. But the analogy, which was scrupulously qualified, is eminently reasonable.
Like Stalin’s prosecutor, Walsh was able to make headway with Abrams only when he stopped trying to prove that the Reagan Administration had really conspired to evade the vague and varying congressional restrictions on helping the Contras. (The pathetic truth was that the Administration had been so eager to please that Abrams even remembers an internal debate on whether wristwatches could be counted as "humanitarian aid," which at that point was permitted.) Instead, Walsh focused on a surreal logical point: Had Administration officials like Abrams in effect shaped their testimony to Congress to emphasize some things and downplay others?
Of course, Abrams had. Isn’t that what politics is all about? It had never occurred to him that it was against the law. In fact, it’s not against the law — if you are a member of Congress. The Speech and Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution specifically grants the legislative branch absolute protection against such charges, even in the case of outright lies. This is because of the obvious danger that to do otherwise would lead to the criminalizing of political differences. [ More]