It’s mother’s Day weekend. So today on Now I’ve Heard Everything a conversation with a woman whose mother was, and is, one of the world’s most famous women, the great Lucille Ball.
I met Lucie Arnaz in 1997 when she was on tour promoting a CD-ROM project she had created called “Lucy and Desi: The Scrapbook.
She was also promoting a companion project, a kind of do-it-yourself family, scrapbook and album, and she was encouraging other sons and daughters to create family memories.
Now, you’ll probably chuckle a bit when you hear us discussing such “cutting edge” technologies as the CD-ROM, but in 1997, they really were.
So here now, from 1997, Lucie Arnaz.
Lucie Arnaz will be 71 in July. She lives in California.
In the 1980s, the presidency of Ronald Reagan was facing two distinct foreign policy challenges.
Members of Hezbollah had taken several Americans hostage in Beirut, Lebanon.
And in Central America, a rebel group known as the Contras was trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
To free the hostages, the Reagan administration undertook a secret plan to sell military missiles to Iran, in hopes that the Iranian government would persuade Hezbollah to release the hostages.
In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the U.S. was funding, arming, and training the Contras. That is, until Congress abruptly cut off the entire funding.
Oliver North with Bill Thompson’s daughter Jennifer
That’s when someone had the idea to take the money that Iran was paying secretly for those missiles and hand it secretly to the Contras. The plan became known later as the Iran-Contra affair.
When this plan became public in 1986, Congress was outraged. Hearings into the Iran. Contra affair began 35 years ago this week, May 5th, 1987.
And witness testimony quickly pointed to one man who seemed to have all the answers to the scandal.
Oliver North was on assignment to the National Security Council, and became the central figure in the Iran Contra scandal.
In July 1987, North appeared before I congressional committee, offering testimony that was at once defensive and defiant.
North was convicted on three felony charges but his convictions were vacated, and the criminal case against him was dropped in 1991.
And a short time later, North published a book called Under Fire. And that’s when he and I had the first of what would be several conversations over the next few years.
So here now from 1991 Lr. Col. Oliver North
Oliver North is 78 now. He lives in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.
Edie Adams was a very popular movie and television star in the 1950s, known widely for her comic impersonations of sexy singers, and her own wonderful singing voice.
But eventually she became even more widely known for being the wife of legendary television comic Ernie Kovacs. The two of them were a hugely popular comic duo.
But their story had a tragic end. In early 1962, Kovacs was killed in an auto accident. He was the only occupant of the car, and it was never known precisely what happened to cause the accident.
I met Edie Adams in 1990, when she finally wrote the book that publishers had been after her to write ever since Ernie kovacs’s death.
