ABSTRACT
There is something revealing in Charles Krauthammer’s dilemma that bears closely on Ronald Reagan’s “management style” in the Iran-Contra affairs. On January 17, 1986, President Reagan signed a secret intelligence “finding” authorizing the sale of weapons and spare parts to Iran. Reagan’s choice of a Presidential junta to carry out his policy was more characteristic of a leader of a runaway superpower than a leader of a healthy democracy. The implications of government by secret Presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. Yet government by junta cannot operate without the voluntary ignorance and complaisance of those who are in a position to resist it. Setting up a Presidential junta as a solution to the problem of being both a superpower and a democracy is self-defeating. Without the support of the democratic structure backed up by popular approval, a President will end up the leader neither of a superpower nor of a democracy.
