3/2/2024 0 Comments Bill moyers secret government"I simply didn't want any outside interference," says the witness.įar from being "loose cannons," Moyers shows, the late CIA director William J. asks former national security adviser John M. "What was the real reason to withhold information from Congress?" House counsel John W. In the short, edited bites, the president's men do not come off so well. Moyers has the enormous advantage of being able to filter out the grandstanding by witnesses, their lawyers and committee members, and to go to the heart of the hearings. In the daylong sessions, the committees were as vulnerable to crowd reaction as an overmatched NFL team. Moyers extinguishes the emotional fire and instead conducts a cool inquiry into the "secret government" which "has been growing like a cancer for 40 years."Īs a television event, the Iran-contra hearings were often hard on the investigative committees. One day we had the duel between the "hippie" interrogator and the "handsome Marine" the next, the skirmish between the battling defense counsel and the untelegenic committee chairman. When broadcast gavel-to-gavel last summer, the hearings often seemed like a battle of personalities. Indirectly, at least, Moyers' last effort in the series is also a redemption of sorts for television. To buttress his case, Moyers calls on former military and intelligence officers to tell in their own words how the White House has used this hidden government to go far beyond what was intended in 1947. The message - once Moyers gets beyond the show's curious MTV-like opening - is that we cannot put this behind us, as President Reagan and his administration would like, because the flaws in the system revealed by Iran-contra are still with us. That was the year Congress set up the basic institutions of what became the secret government - the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. The Iran-contra affair, Moyers shows in this apt conclusion to his epic, is another, predictable step on a long march toward the national security state that began in 1947. The Constitution in Crisis," Channel 26, tonight at 9) to tell us it wasn't just a television matchup with winners and losers. Now comes Bill Moyers in the final 90-minute installment of his 11-hour series on the Constitution ("Moyers: The Secret Government. Ollie won, the committees lost - or maybe it was the other way round. Remember the Iran-contra hearings on television last summer? Heck of a show.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |