SECURITY ADVISER INVOLVED IN IRAN-CONTRA SCANDAL
Robert C. McFarlane, a former decorated Marine officer who rose in civilian life to be President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser and then fell from grace in the Iran-Contra scandal, died Thursday in Lansing, Mich. He was 84.
McFarlane, who lived in Washington, was visiting family in Michigan at the time. A family friend, Bill Greener, said the death stemmed from an unspecified previous lung condition.
McFarlane pleaded guilty in 1988 to charges of withholding information from Congress in its investigation of the affair, in which the Reagan administration sold arms covertly to Iran beginning in 1985 in exchange for the freedom of Western hostages in Lebanon. Profits from the arms sales were then secretly funneled to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, who were trying to overthrow the country’s Marxist regime, known as the Sandinistas.
Both parts of the scheme were illegal; Congress had imposed an arms embargo against Iran and prohibited U.S. aid to the Contras.
McFarlane, Bud to his friends and associates, was one of many players in the operation, which was run out of the White House with the cooperation of the CIA. But he distinguished himself in its aftermath by his full and unequivocal acceptance of blame for his actions. Everyone else involved had either defended the operation as just and wise or sought to deny responsibility.
The episode stained the
Reagan administration and raised questions as to how much the president was aware of what was going on in his own White House.
And its fallout left McFarlane so ridden with guilt that he attempted suicide in his home in February 1987. While his wife, Jonda, a high school English teacher, was upstairs grading papers, he took an overdose of Valium and got into bed alongside her. When he could not be roused in the morning, he was taken to a hospital and revived. He subsequently underwent many weeks of psychiatric therapy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
It was a stunning act in official Washington. Many considered it an unconcealed howl of pain by someone from whom they would have least expected it — one of the capital’s most selfcontained of public and powerful men.
Killing himself, McFarlane believed at the time, was “the honorable thing to do,” he said in an interview for this obituary in January 2016 at his home in the Watergate complex in Washington.
He earlier had tried to explain his actions by citing the ancient Japanese tradition of the honorable suicide. But he came to realize, he said in the interview, that those ways had no resonance in modern American culture and that most people could not understand such behavior.
McFarlane always asserted — and he was supported by evidence — that he had been involved mostly in the Iran part of the scandal and that he had been ignorant of the more blatantly illegal portion: the sending of profits from the weapons sales to the Nicaraguan Contras.
The scheme began to unravel Oct. 5, 1986, when a plane supplying arms to the
Contras was shot down in Nicaragua, exposing the mission and prompting an investigation by a joint congressional committee and televised hearings. Summoned to testify, McFarlane and his former deputy, Lt. Col. Oliver North — White House figures little known to the public until then — emerged into the glare of national publicity as key players in the affair.
Robert Carl McFarlane was born in Washington on July 12, 1937, the son of a Democratic congressman, William McFarlane, from the Texas Panhandle and a grandson of a Texas Ranger.