Presidential Blessings

For a man who once publicly condemned Iran as a member of an “international version of Murder Incorporated” for sponsoring terrorism, Ronald Reagan was far more conciliatory in private. Perhaps the President’s most unusual secret overture to Tehran was highlighted last week when Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, confirmed that Reagan had sent an inscribed Bible as a sign of friendship. Rafsanjani gleefully displayed the leather-bound book bearing Reagan’s signature beneath a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians (Galatians 3: 8). It read, “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the nations shall be blessed in you.’ “

The disclosure raised questions about who delivered the Bible and just what the presidential inscription meant. Since Muslims, Christians and Jews all view Abraham as their common ancestor, the passage was apparently intended to show that Americans and Iranians are, or should be, brothers. White House Spokesman Larry Speakes said the inscribed book — an Open Bible issued by Nashville’s Thomas Nelson Publishers — was “almost certainly” delivered to Iranian representatives in West Germany by Lieut. Colonel Oliver North.

Speakes claimed that North, who was fired last November from his National Security Council post for diverting funds from secret U.S. arms sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan contras, came up with the idea of presenting the Bible. Reagan signed the book on Oct. 3, 1986, in the Oval Office.

The inscribed Bible was one of several apparently bizarre details of U.S. contacts with Iran that Rafsanjani first disclosed last November. Others included the fact that American representatives brought the Iranians a cake and traveled to Iran on false Irish passports. Like the tale of the presidential Bible, the accounts were at first dismissed as apocryphal by the White House, and have since been confirmed.