was opened and the archivists began the long process of declassifying the contents.Yet, because Johnson and Rostow chose to withhold the file on Nixons treason, a distorted history of Watergate took shape and then hardened into what all the Important People of Washington knew to be true. The conventional wisdom was that Nixon was unaware of the Watergate break-in beforehand that it was some harebrained scheme of a few overzealous subordinates and that the President only got involved later in covering it up.Sure, the Washington groupthink went, Nixon had his enemies list and played hardball with his rivals, but he couldnt be blamed for the Watergate break-in, which many insiders regarded as the third-rate burglary that Nixons White House called it.Even journalists and historians who took a broader view of Watergate didnt pursue the remarkable clue from Nixons rant about the missing file on June 17, 1971. Though a few other historians did write, sketchily, about the 1968 events, they also didnt put the events together.So, the beloved saying took shape: the cover-up is worse than the crime. And Official Washington hates to rethink some history that is considered already settled. In this case, it would make too many important people who have expounded on the worse part of Watergate, i.e. the cover-up, look stupid. [For details, see Robert ParrysAmericas Stolen Narrative.]The Iran-Contra Cover-upSimilarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagans Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.The Big Question that insiders were asking after the scandal broke in November 1986 was whether President Reagan knew about the decision by White House aide Oliver North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, to divert some profits from secret arms sales to Iran to secretly buy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.Once, Poindexter testified that he had no recollection of letting Reagan in on that secret and with Reagan a beloved figure to many in Official Washington the inquiry was relegated to insignificance. The remaining investigation focused on smaller questions, like misleading Congress and a scholarly dispute over whether the Presidents foreign policy powers overrode Congress power to appropriate funds).At the start of the Iran-Contra investigation, Attorney General Edwin Meese had set the time parameters from 1984 to 1986, thus keeping outside of the frame the possibility of a much more serious scandal originating during Campaign 1980, i.e., whether Reagans campaign undermined President Jimmy Carters negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carters reelection hopes and ensured Reagans victory.The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in