The Nightingale's Song.

• Author: Beschloss, Michael R.

Historians eager to explain Iran-Contra in terms of the hubris and secrecy of the Reagan White House will be startled by this dramatic volume by a former Marine, Annapolis graduate, and current Baltimore Sun reporter. Throwing new light on one of the more bizarre episodes in the modern history of American foreign policy, Robert Timberg traces the lives of Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, and Oliver North of the Reagan National Security Council staff, along with Reagan's Navy Secretary James Webb and Arizona Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam POW. With novelistic skillfulness, Timberg weaves the lives of these men from their days at the U.S. Naval Academy, through the Vietnam War, and into the tapestry of the eighties.

"They are secret-sharers," Timberg writes, "men whose experiences at Annapolis, during the Vietnam War and its aftermath, illuminate a generation, or a portion of a generation--those who went. Each in his own way stands as a flesh-and-blood repository of that generation's anguish and sense of betrayal."

McCain was the son of an Arizona family of old Navy tradition. He was a rebellious, "hard-rock kind of guy" who at the Naval Academy showed himself to be a "natural leader." During the Vietnam War, his plane was downed over Hanoi and he was taken prisoner for five-and-a-half years.

McCain's Annapolis classmate Poindexter was a Boy Scout and banker's son, first in his class, a "cherubic gray eminence" who "thought through a problem and crafted a solution before anyone else realized that a problem existed." After receiving a doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology, Poindexter went to sea and was eventually assigned to the staff of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

The son of a Texas Congressman who rode the Democratic tide in 1932, McFarlane was, from his youth, "vulnerable to intimidation and to a disquieting, at times unseemly haste to accept blame when things went wrong." At Annapolis, he was "unflappable, self-contained, at ease with the system."

North, the grandson of a British emigre, had a far tougher time than McFarlane at the Academy, fighting injury and despondency throughout his years there. But for all their differences, their experiences in Vietnam and their bitterness upon returning from the Far East were strikingly similar. McFarlane was confused and angered by the U.S. press coverage of the war and the demonstrations against it. North, who was wounded in Vietnam, returned with the...