ains one of the great unsettled questions of modern American public affairs. How and why did it come about? What did it say about the American political system? And what lessons might it teach for the future?
In a sense, the real beginning of the Iran-Contra affair can be traced back not to Nicaragua or to Iran, but to Vietnam. The fall of Saigon in 1975 left an American public deeply divided on the meaning of the war and the means and goals of American foreign policy. Most Americans had never wholly rejected the war, as the antiwar movement did, but they had grown disenchanted to the point where they were no longer willing to support it, especially not with their sons' lives. Conservatives were convinced that the war effort had been sold out, in effect, by internal dissension and a hostile press. (This view would figure in the heavy controls imposed on the press during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, just as the many parades that followed that war were in many ways really long-delayed Vietnam parades.) Liberals were just as convinced that the U.S. had f
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