FOUR score and several years ago, Lt. Col. Oliver North was sitting in front of a congressional committee investigating the so-called Iran-Contra affair. Gee, Ollie,
the world is a
wacky placeLast week, Ollie was standing in a small banquet room at Indigo restaurant talking about his teeth instead of tow missiles or Sandanistas.
Life is weird that way.
The former National Security aide-turned-radio-talk-show-host was in Honolulu for a University of Hawaii forum, and to meet local radio honchos and talk-show hosts from KHVH, which runs his nationally-syndicated radio show.
One host was Dr. Russell Masunaga, the most famous radio dentist in Hawaii, largely because he's the only radio dentist in Hawaii. He and Ollie were attempting a deep discussion of bicuspids or some other teeth-related matter, but were constantly being interrupted by other guests who wanted to get a picture taken with North.
I just couldn't get over the strangeness of it. Ollie describes his show as "Common Sense Radio," which is ironic. If anyone had been using common sense in 1987, they would have known that it wasn't a hot idea to sell missiles to a country that considered America "The Great Satan." But, hey, that's all past now and Iran seems to be less wacky these days than Iraq, which will be receiving its own supply of U.S. missiles soon, except, not in a good way.
What I remember about Ollie from the old days is that he had exceptionally good taste in secretaries. His secretary, Fawn Hall, was what I would call, before I became politically correct, a "knockout." She made Monica Lewinsky look like a babushka beet harvester. They say Hall fell on hard times after the Iran-Contra deal but, man, she was a heck of a secretary.
She was shredding documents before shredding documents was cool. She shredded so many documents that the shredder broke, and we're talking about an industrial-strength government document shredder, not one of those wimpy Hopaco things.
YOU gotta admire that in a secretary. Ollie did have the common sense to treat his secretary like a secretary and not like, say, an intern.
If you live long enough you get to see some unusual things, like a president admitting he had sex in the Oval Office with someone not his wife and getting away with it. You also see things like Ollie North and another rather notorious Capitol character -- Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy -- performing "Peter and the Wolf" with the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.
Michael Tiknis, the Honolulu Symphony director, cornered Ollie at the Indigo affair and got him to agree to narrate the part of Abraham Lincoln during the symphony's next Memorial Day concert in Honolulu.
Some would find it unusual for a man who almost went to prison for conducting an illegal international arms supply operation out of the White House to play Lincoln, but it's a weird world. Besides, the symphony can use all the help it can get. YOU try raising money for the arts during a bad economy.
Tiknis seemed delighted that Ollie agreed to do the Lincoln portrait and I thought, why not? The world's a different place than it was when Lincoln faced a civil war and when Liddy broke into a hotel room and when Iran took Americans hostage and when Ollie fell on the sword for a lot of superiors who suddenly became blind, deaf and dumb.
It's even different from four score and a few weeks ago, when voters decided they don't care about a third-rate office romance as long as the prime rate is below 7 percent.
The world has become one big talk show, we are all doomed to become hosts and, well, the entire thing is just very weird.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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