Oliver North throws a party: what a lovely Cold War it was.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: $150-a-plate dinner given on the anniversary of North's Iran-contra Congressional hearings

Yes, the Cold War is over. I know because I attended Oliver North's victory celebration at the Capitol Hill Hyatt in Washington, D.C. The July 8, $150-a-plate dinner marked the American triumph over the Evil Empire in the worldwide battle for democracy and freedom.

"We won," North declared. "Reagan saved the world from communism."

The party was held on the tenth anniversary of North's testimony before Congress in the Iran-contra hearings. And North estimated that fully 10 percent of Congress was there to revel in the moment with him. "I don't think I've seen so many members of Congress since I was subpoenaed," he said, peering out at the audience.

Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made the opening remarks, claiming credit on behalf of Republicans for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the contra victory in the Nicaraguan elections. "How many more generations were you willing to consign to totalitarianism?" he demanded of the "liberals in Washington." He denounced the Clinton Administration, which "never had the guts to put on a uniform, never had the guts to go fight for this country, and doesn't have the guts to do what's right today."

Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, led us in the Pledge of Allegiance, after first praising Ollie North as "a genuine American hero."

Little Orphan Annie sang the national anthem. Stanton Evans, the master of ceremonies, introduced Annie (a.k.a. Randall Brooks, of Broadway musical fame) by explaining that Ted Turner and Jane Fonda have announced a campaign to get rid of "our American heritage" by doing away with the national anthem and replacing it with "America the Beautiful."

"Well, this is our answer to Ted Turner and Jane Fonda," Evans announced.

As Little Orphan Annie warbled "Oh, Say Can You See," an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the head table.

The audience of about 500 people rose for the invocation by the Reverend Linda Poindexter (wife of Iran-contra conspirator Admiral John Poindexter).

"The Lord be with you," she said. "And also with you," the audience responded. Then she thanked God for guiding our American leaders, "especially President Reagan."

Apparently, we'd all been caught in a time warp. President Reagan? "After all, he's the one we're really honoring this evening." North said (graciously ignoring Reagan's refusal to endorse him in his failed Senate run, not to mention Nancy Reagan's explicit denunciation of him in the crucial final days of his campaign).

Reagan's ghost cast a long, broad-shouldered shadow over the North event -- just as it did during the 1996 Republican convention, which at times seemed more like a requiem for Ronnie than a promotion of current Republican politics.

Besides being so obviously backward-looking, this Reagan nostalgia seems odd because of the total white-out of George Bush, who was as invisible at the North event as he was at the San Diego convention. The Republicans seem to prefer to act as though there never were a forty-second President. (Bush, ironically, played the role of eraser in the Iran-contra affair, pardoning Caspar Weingberger before trial, along with five other alleged Irancontra conspirators, and thus, according to independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, completing the Iran-contra cover-up.)

And just why are conservatives eulogizing Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War anyway, eight years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and somewhat ahead of Reagan's actual demise?

"There's a sense among conservatives that we really haven't celebrated this one cause that brought so many factions together, which was the Cold War and ultimate victory in it," says Keith Appell of Creative Response Concepts, the public-relations firm in Alexandria, Virginia, that helped put on the Oliver North event. "We think Ronald Reagan was the guy who set the tone for the end of the Cold War. Victory in Nicaragua was really the end of communism, and celebrating that needed to be done."

Not to mention the fundraising potential. "It never hurts to raise a few bucks," Appell acknowledges.

Since his sudden rise to fame during the Iran-contra hearings, Oliver North has become a rightwing cash machine. Financial statements he filed when he ran for the Senate in 1992 showed that he had raised more than $20 million since the Iran-contra hearings, mainly through a massive direct-mail operation. His nonprofit organization, the Freedom Alliance, which he built up from his legal-defense-fund mailing lists, collected $150,000 from the "Celebration of Freedom Tenth Anniversary Gala" alone.

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