October Surprise

The author worked for Ronald Reagan during his campaign for the Presidency, then served on the White House staff, and the Department of Justice. In 1983 she was the first resignation of conscience from the Reagan-Bush Administration. "Their guiding principles were that loyalty to a royalist version of the Presidency was more important than the Constitution, and that the truth was a 'problem' to be solved."She began to investigate the 1980 deal between the Reagan-Bush team and the Iran: if the Iranians held their Americans captive until Reagan was President, they would be better rewarded. And they were! Releasing the captives in October 1980 would have given President Carter a boost in the polls, and re-election in November.Her book is filled with a many details, and their references. It lacks any pictures of the individuals involved; there is no index, which lessens its use as a reference book (deliberate?).Chapter X, "The Sound of Silence" tells of her attempts to break through the censorship of Network Television. The Congressional Committee that investigated the selling of arms to Iran also refused to look into anything that occurred before 1984. No reason was ever given.Barbara Honegger was first to write an excellent book on the subject. She noted that Richard Allen was also involved in the 1968 affair where Nixon's people tried to sabotage the American-Vietnamese talks in Paris. That trick also worked. If truce was declared in 1968, only 22,000 would have died, not 33,000 more.But the real, unreported scandal of 1980 was the sabotage of the Desert One rescue attempt. Helicopters were sent out over the desert without air filters; the sand and dust soon ruined their engines. Also, no backup or reserves were sent on this critical mission. The failure of this rescue mission prevented the rest of the plan from being carried out. Its success would surely have resulted in President Carter's re-election. Some think that the military-industrial complex was amply rewarded by the greatly increased spending of the Reagan-Bush administration.Yet some of this arms buildup was not for our forces. The author notes that the arms sold to Iran came from the Reforger stores, which were only to be used in repelling a Soviet Bloc invasion. But could this scenario have been only a fantasy used to justify increased military spending?Did the US encourage Iraq to attack Iran? Did we then sell arms to both sides? What was the effect of all this in the end? Fomenting wars to sell arms to both sides, and to mediate a "balance of power"? Isn't this what put a former Empire into world-wide disrepute before its demise?