Special Trust.

• Author: Pincus, Walter

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...