A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.
When Ronald Reagan's administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning - yet defended the principle behind the scheme.
I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.
I've often found, as I did with 'Bourne,' where I was inspired by the events of Iran-Contra when I designed the CIA for the 'Bourne' franchise, that the reality of how things work is usually more compelling than the superficial, made-up version that Hollywood sometimes does.
Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.
I thought I was done making CIA movies after 'The Bourne Identity.' I really had used my father's work in Iran-Contra on 'The Bourne Identity.' You get one experience like that in your life where you have personal exposure to something, and you put it in a movie. That's it.
Remember how he handled the Iran-contra Never Ending Scandal from Hell? He went on national television, the President of the United States, and said it wasn't his fault, because he was not aware, at the time, of what his foreign policy was.
I thought using the Ayatollah's money to support the Nicaraguan resistance was a neat idea.
I want to make it clear that I honestly answered every question put to me during the so-called Iran-Contra hearings. But if they didn't ask me about something, I wasn't about to reveal things that would put other people in jeopardy.
More of 'The Bourne Identity's script was taken from the events of the Iran Contra, which my father investigated for the Senate, than what was taken from Robert Ludlum's novel.
I actually have several busts of Ronald Reagan that have been presented to me.
Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
And Oliver North was really a good soldier, up to the last moment, shoving memos into the shredder and defending the policy to the end.
Reagan's dead, and he was a lousy President.
Ronald Reagan was very successful.
No politician was more maligned than Ronald Reagan.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
I felt uneasy, but sometimes, like I said before, I believed in Col. North and there was a very solid and very valid reason that he must have been doing this.
You can't have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.
I did not know many of the details relevant to the Iran and contra initiatives.
We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that.
