Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I landed at Manila International Airport, the location where Ninoy Aquino had been assassinated less than three years before upon his return from exile. Dictators love to mark their territory with an exclamation point. Now, every visiting dignitary taking the ride to the Malacañang Palace would begin that transit disembarking from the place where Marcos had dispatched his leading political opponent once and for all.

  Ambassador Bosworth greeted me at the gate. We rode together in an embassy car to my visit with Marcos, whose office had already informed the embassy he was running an hour late—a tactic I’ve since learned is somewhat comically relied on by autocrats around the world to shape the power dynamic. They love to stick it to you in little ways, like keeping you waiting, to remind you who is holding the cards in the relationship. We made our way down Lacson Avenue while Bosworth told me about its history. The road used to be called Governor Forbes Street.

  If the onetime name of the road weren’t enough to evoke family history, the site of my meeting with President Marcos would have done it. Adobe on the outside, narra wood floor throughout on the inside, mahogany paneling everywhere—Cousin Cameron’s ghost could well have sauntered through the halls of the presidential palace.

  As prepared as I was for the meeting, Marcos had hosted enough American delegations over the years to know what lines of argument would be effective. He complimented my family history in the Philippines, our friendship to his country dating back nearly a century, and expounded on the importance of the relationship with the United States, our close collaboration in the fight against communism. I looked down at my watch: Marcos had opened with a nearly forty-minute-long discourse on the progress the country was making and the importance of the Subic Bay Naval Base, which stood, he argued, as a symbol that Southeast Asia remained a bright beacon of hope against communism. Marcos even invoked his own service in World War II, fighting alongside the Americans—something Ambassador Bosworth would later tell me was fiction. It dawned on me: Why litigate a list of complaints that Marcos would deny when, instead, I could play to his false sense of strength?

  Marcos was arguing that he alone reflected the will of the Filipino people. He said some in the population were like “children,” uneducated and easily transfixed by communist sympathizers like the Aquinos, but that in the end he—Marcos—was the real father of the country. I stressed that it would help the United States in the Cold War if he demonstrated progress on democracy. If he was so popular, couldn’t he embrace elections by a specific date? Marcos was condescending. He said he had nothing to fear from elections but that he knew his country best. He would never lecture me about Massachusetts, he intoned, so why should I suggest I knew what was best for Manila? I suspect he believed that if he outtalked me, I’d simply give up.

  He was wrong.

  After five hours alone with Ferdinand Marcos in the Malacañang Palace, I was convinced that the United States needed to change its policy toward the Philippines. So, on the long flight back to Washington, it wasn’t Cousin Cam on my mind, but Senator Robert C. Byrd. I remembered our conversation more than a year before: have an idea, be an expert, work your colleagues, work the process, and find your opening. That’s exactly what I set out to do.

  I went to see Claiborne Pell, who was now chairman on the Foreign Relations Committee, and the senior Republican on the panel, Indiana’s Richard Lugar. I then met with the assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs at the State Department. I spoke to some of my fellow concerned senators who were on the Appropriations Committee, not just Robert Byrd but Vermont’s Pat Leahy, who believed that in the name of Cold War realism, we had too often ignored American values. I reported to them that President Reagan’s own ambassador didn’t dispute Marcos’s corruption. Word about my activities quickly reached the Marcos lobbyists, who were paid handsome retainers from stolen funds. Paul Manafort and Roger Stone regularly trotted out a gold-plated playbook on the Hill: Marcos was our resolute ally who must not be abandoned in the fight against the communists. But this time, the lobbyists were too late. I had done my homework and worked the process. The result was victory: the first amendment I ever passed as a freshman senator conditioned American foreign aid to the Philippines on free elections.

  In Manila, Marcos figured he was going to show this young whippersnapper who was boss. He called a snap election in order to relegitimize himself, obviously believing that he would be reelected. Because I’d been so active on the issue, President Reagan had no choice but to put me on the official election-monitoring delegation from the United States, paired with Dick Lugar, who had kindly been my partner on the amendment. I will never forget arriving in Manila and seeing this unbelievable flood of people in the streets all decked out in their canary-yellow shirts and carrying banners of pro-democracy protest. Some of us knew at that time there were allegations of fraud. Initially, I was sent down to the southernmost island of Mindanao to observe the morning votes and then came back to Manila. I was sitting in the hotel there when a woman came up to me crying and said, “Senator, you must come with me to the cathedral. There are women there who fear for their lives. They have asked for you.” Thirteen courageous women had walked out of the computer center where votes were being tabulated and taken refuge in a church. I met with them at the cathedral, and they told the story of how they were putting into the computers legitimate and correct vote counts that gave Cory Aquino the victory, but coming out on the tote board were completely fictitious numbers showing votes for Marcos. These women blew the whistle on the dictator.

  I knew the best way to protect these women and the results was for them to tell this story publicly as soon as possible. I gathered our team and the international media at the cathedral. The women stood by the altar, the klieg lights giving them the soft glow of a halo, and one by one they told the world that Marcos was cheating. Their courage and the courage of the Filipino people lit a spark that traveled around the world. It was hard to believe that just months after my insulting meeting with a smug Marcos, the very people in his own country, those he had sneered at and compared to children, had exposed the fraudulent election.

  Marcos wouldn’t concede, but the handwriting was on the wall. Senator Lugar and I joined the rest of the election-monitoring delegation back in Washington for a meeting at the White House. Secretary Shultz presided, and soon White House chief of staff James Baker entered the room to announce that President Reagan himself would be joining us. It was a “pinch yourself” moment. Reagan, his hair ever dark brown even into his seventies, came in and sat down. He insisted that his administration stood on the side of freedom, even if he wasn’t crystal clear which side that was. He said they were deeply concerned about the election irregularities. A few minutes later, he slid a note to James Baker that read, in his elegant handwriting, “Can I leave now?”

  Reagan was a savvy reader of international opinion. He had a natural flair for drama. Baker was a natural diplomatic poker player. The administration was not going to be dragged down with Marcos now that he’d been exposed as a fraud. Reagan sent his friend Senator Paul Laxalt to Manila to deliver the message to Marcos, who was quickly gone, living in exile in Hawaii. God only knows how much gold bullion and cash he had accumulated for his exile.

  I was gratified and energized. Perhaps for the first time since I’d come to the Senate, I felt like I’d made a difference by taking what I knew (foreign policy) and the best of what I was learning (process, people and protocol) to set something in motion. More than that, I felt as if I had tapped into a synergy bigger than any one senator: when you can use the Senate to send a message, when you can point the United States toward its true north and when our values align with people who actually share them all over the world, you can make something happen. Just three years after her husband had died fighting for democracy, Cory Aquino defied the odds and rose to the presidency atop a wave of people. William Cameron Forbes could only have wished for such a development, and Robert C. Byrd didn’t have it in mind when he gave
me a recipe for action, a PAC check and some great lessons about the Senate, but finally I was finding my way.

  CHAPTER 8

  Holding Washington Accountable

  “MY BROTHER SAYS the government is sending arms to the Contras illegally.”

  My legislative director received a call from a constituent recommending we talk to her brother, Jack Mattes, a public defender in Florida. His client claimed to have firsthand knowledge of a secret network with ties to the U.S. government that was illegally supplying the Contras with military aid. If what Mattes was describing was true, the administration was engaging in an illegal war. Perhaps this is why some in the Reagan administration had seemed so determined to stop my early interest in the war in Nicaragua.

  Particularly after my dustup with Senator Goldwater, I was determined to get the truth and I wasn’t going to let anyone put me on the defensive again. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I had followed the law but in the purest of politics been sandbagged by Republicans for something I hadn’t done. Now I was looking at evidence that suggested some element of the Reagan administration had overtly broken the law by doing something Congress had specifically forbidden it from doing, which was to aid the Contras.

  We quietly began to dig into these allegations. Falling back on everything I’d learned as a prosecutor, we wanted to make sure their research was done precisely and meticulously, almost as if we were going to trial.

  All in all, members of our small but energetic team conducted more than fifty interviews over the course of 1986, even traveling to Costa Rica to speak with people who allegedly worked in a U.S.-funded supply network. What we began to uncover was hard to comprehend: mercenaries, drug smuggling, even a fanciful scheme to assassinate a U.S. ambassador and blame it on the Sandinistas.

  I encouraged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to launch a more formal investigation. I also pressed the Department of Justice to launch an investigation based on the evidence that the CIA and others may have been deliberately circumventing the congressional ban on Contra aid.

  At first, neither did much with my request. Nonetheless, our team, undaunted, continued to work. Through a fascinating set of connections involving modern-day buccaneers, a group of coconspirators who reeked of unreliability, we learned that the trafficking of cocaine into the United States was a primary source of funding for the Contras. The hypocrisy was offensive. As a prosecutor, I’d seen drugs rip apart communities. Nancy Reagan was promoting her “Just Say No” effort. But the trail we were uncovering suggested that the federal government was supporting rebels funded by the same drugs that were killing kids on the streets of New Bedford. You couldn’t say no to drugs but say yes to the Contras and look the other way. I knew that the senator I had to go see was the hard-line conservative senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms of North Carolina. It shocked my staff. Jesse and I were worlds apart ideologically. Jesse regularly referred to gay men as “perverts” and sodomites, while I had picked up where Paul Tsongas had left off, authoring a bill to outlaw workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians. My staff argued Jesse was an extremist who would likely reprise Senator Goldwater’s smears against me. They were wrong. I went to see Jesse one-on-one. He listened as I went through the evidence piece by piece. Jesse hated drugs as fervently as he hated communists. He made it clear that his Republican colleague on the relevant subcommittee, Hank Brown from Colorado, could join me in going wherever the facts led us. Jesse Helms was genuine and consistent in his beliefs. I had learned from Ted Kennedy and others that often in the Senate you must compartmentalize to move forward. Jesse and I saw civil rights issues differently, but on drugs, we could find common ground.

  As my team continued to interview people who worked with the Contras, we heard about a network of secret bank accounts, the use of remote airstrips and unmarked planes, and, perhaps most important, the involvement of government officials, including Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a senior staff member of President Reagan’s National Security Council.

  I knew of Oliver North. We were the same generation and had both fought in Vietnam. He had come home from the war a decorated combat vet, with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. I didn’t know what his politics were, but I respected his service and his courage. I wondered how someone with his credentials could be led down a path of illegality. The Marines live by a code. If what we were hearing was true, a Marine should have been horrified.

  It was becoming clear that our inquiry wouldn’t be the end of the story. I thought that a full-fledged Senate investigation was warranted, one that would allow for formal depositions and subpoenaed documents, but my recommendations continued to be shrugged off.

  That changed suddenly on October 5, 1986. A plane was shot down over southern Nicaragua. Two Americans were killed; one American was captured. The plane was filled with military arms, including seventy AK-47s and about one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.

  When President Reagan quickly denied any connection between the plane and the U.S. government, my team and I rushed to release a full report of our findings. We had collected credible evidence that Oliver North and other former military officers had set up a network to ship weapons and ancillary military equipment to the Contras. There was no way the downed plane was a coincidence.

  Later that month, both the Senate and the Justice Department announced investigations into whether and how Americans were assisting the Contras with military aid.

  In November, thanks to a Lebanese news report, we learned that the Contra scandal was even more complicated. The United States was involved in arms sales to Iran, which was at war with Iraq. Before long, administration officials acknowledged that some of the money from the Iran arms sales had been diverted to support the Contras—under the direction of none other than Lieutenant Colonel North.

  Suddenly, seven or eight different committees in Congress wanted to investigate. An orphaned investigation had several fathers claiming paternity. A possible constitutional crisis was on the horizon. The leadership of Congress agreed a special committee would have to be created.

  I learned an unmistakable lesson about seniority in the Senate. I had done the digging and laid the foundation for the inquiry—and taken plenty of criticism for it from the Republicans—but was left on the sidelines while the investigation was handed to a series of more senior Democrats. They were distinguished senators: Chairman Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a World War II veteran who had given his arm in battle; George Mitchell, next in line to serve as majority leader; Sam Nunn, the centrist Democrat from Georgia whose relationships with the Pentagon ran deep; Paul Sarbanes, a liberal who had served in the Senate for twenty years, and one of the most respected members of the Foreign Relations Committee; David Boren, a centrist from Oklahoma; and Howell Heflin, a respected judge from Alabama.

  I didn’t take it personally since there wasn’t a freshman Democrat on the select committee. It also occurred to me that with the buzzed-about inevitability of a Dukakis presidential bid just a year away, no one was going to appoint his former lieutenant governor to a post where the likely Republican nominee, Vice President Bush, might be under the microscope. But the decision still left me feeling I had poured energy into a fight only to be kept out of its final round.

  I learned another lesson. When you’re the first one to pop your head out of a foxhole, you’re in the crosshairs. I had become a lightning rod on the Iran-Contra issue. The Republicans had spent a year arguing that my investigation was a wasteful conspiracy theory. They couldn’t now explain why the House and Senate were convening blue-ribbon joint hearings if I was on a fool’s errand. They would have loved to use me as a convenient whipping boy. By leaving me off the committee, Byrd didn’t give them that chance.

  There was an even bigger truth at play, however. Senate Democrats suspected the investigation was unlikely to end in the impeachment of President Reagan. That’s because the institutionalists were in charge.

  Ch
airman Dan Inouye made that clear to me in a private conversation. Dan had led a life of courage. He was the kind of patriot we should all hope to be. Dan had signed up to serve his country despite the internment of his fellow Japanese Americans at home. In battle, he suffered a grievous injury. After prying a live grenade out of his nearly severed right arm, Dan lobbed it into a German bunker, saving the lives of his brothers-in-arms. He was subsequently shot again in the leg, falling to the ground. When he woke up, his men were hovering over him, and he instructed them: “The war’s not over. Get back to your positions.”

  During his recovery back in the States, he met a young vet named Bob Dole at the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, and they became fast friends. In the Senate, you could see and feel the connection between them.

  Dan had been in the Senate for decades. He had lived and made a lot of history. He confided in me his reaction to living through the Nixon impeachment saga and the resignation of a president. As a member of the Senate committee that investigated Watergate, he had seen the scandal rock the country and fray the national fabric. We might disagree about whether the real source of those divisions was Nixon’s illegality and lies, as opposed to the process charged with addressing them, but those were mere debating points. The bottom line was Inouye had lived through Watergate, and he wasn’t eager to invite a repeat performance.

  Nor was Majority Leader Byrd. He and Dan were institutionalists who were unwilling to see an entire Congress and the next election consumed by the impeachment of a president finishing the final years of a second term. While I wasn’t contemplating let alone cheering for impeachment, my prosecutor and activist instincts told me the full story had to be told. The World War II generation was quietly pushing back. My generation was shaped by a very different war, one that taught us that governments can lie and break laws, and when they do, sunshine and accountability are the required disinfectants.