Robert ‘Bud' McFarlane, Reagan national security adviser, dies at 84

Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane, a former national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan who was the only official in the Reagan White House to voluntarily accept legal blame in the Iran-contra scandal, died May 12 at a hospital in Lansing, Mich. He was 84.

The cause was an exacerbation of a previous lung condition, said his son, Scott McFarlane. McFarlane lived in Washington, D.C., and was hospitalized while visiting with family in Michigan.

A taciturn retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, McFarlane worked in the 1970s and 1980s at the nexus of the military and political establishment. He was a congressman’s son, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

In the early 1970s, he was a military assistant to Henry Kissinger, who was both secretary of state and national security adviser to President Richard Nixon. McFarlane’s later efforts in Iran were often perceived as a misguided effort to emulate Kissinger’s groundbreaking inroads at restoring relations with communist China.

After his military resignation in 1979, McFarlane served on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee and then became counselor to Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr. during the early years of the Reagan White House.

McFarlane was Haig’s point man for difficult assignments in the Middle East and with Congress, and he won plaudits for persuading Congress

to restore money for the MX missile program and to advance nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.

He became deputy national security adviser and, in 1982, he pushed for the deployment of U.S. Marines to Lebanon for a peacekeeping mission. It was a risky move that ended in catastrophe when terrorists bombed the Marine barracks, killing 241 U.S. service members in October 1983 just two weeks into McFarlane’s new job as Reagan’s top security adviser.

It was not until March 1988, after lengthy negotiations by his lawyer, Leonard Garment, with Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, that McFarlane pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts and a grand jury indicted North and Poindexter.