MEESE, EDWIN, III 1931-

ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES,
1985-1988

Scandal

No other member of the Reagan administration, with the exception of Oliver North, was as tainted by scandal as Edwin Meese III. Certainly, no other Reagan official was more disliked, both within the administration and on Capitol Hill, though Reagan himself called Meese his "alter ego." At one point in his tenure as attorney general Meese was under investigation by three special prosecutors, each inquiring into separate allegations of influence peddling, bribery, and cover-up in the Iran-Contra affair. Though Meese was never charged with any crime, the last of the special investigators said that Meese "had probably broken conflict of interest and income-tax laws, though none of the indictments were worthy of prosecution." This statement provoked outrage and derision among congressional staffers who had helped to build cases against Meese, for its logic supposed that the nation's chief law enforcement officer was to be held to a lower standard of conduct than ordinary citizens. Though Meese had figured in virtually every imbroglio of the Reagan administration, like the president himself he was able to shed charges of personal culpability. Nevertheless, the "sleaze factor" emerging from the Reagan presidency jeopardized, but did not undermine, the election campaign of Vice President George Bush in 1988, which feared the political capital to be gained by Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. So when Reagan accepted Meese's resignation in late 1988, before the end of the president's second term, the Bush campaign was relieved. Though officially exonerated of all charges, Meese departed under a cloud; he breezily dismissed all critics as cynical ideologues with an ax to grind.

Growing Up

Born in Oakland, California, to a family that had resided in the state since the Gold Rush days, Meese earned an academic scholarship to Yale University and subsequently earned a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He later served two years on active duty in army intelligence as a lieutenant. Known as a law-and-order man, Meese became a deputy district attorney in his native Alameda County, where he spent his free time riding with patrol officers on their beats. He supervised the mass arrests of seven hundred students during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and was especially tough with members of the Black Panther Party. Coming to the attention of Ronald Reagan, Meese was appointed the governors' special secretary and given broad authority. In 1969 Meese relieved the president of beleaguered San Francisco State University when students occupied administration buildings, overseeing the arrest of their leaders. That same year Meese influenced Governor Reagan to declare a state of emergency in the community conflict over use of land known as People's Park in Berkeley, which led to pitched battles between police and protesters. Campus unrest in the 1960s particularly offended Meese because he believed that demonstrations gave "aid and comfort" to the North Vietnamese, and in 1966 he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that antiwar demonstrations should be made a crime. "Basically, those demonstrations prolonged the war," said Meese, "and cost a lot of American lives. The demonstrations encouraged them (North Vietnamese)…and prevented our elected officials from taking the necessary steps to win the war."

Reagan

During Reagan's second gubernatorial term Meese became his chief of staff and, according to some, the "deputy governor." In 1978 he was appointed a law professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he remained until Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980. Joining as an adviser at first, Meese quickly replaced the first campaign manager, John Sears, and served as the architect of the successful effort to portray Reagan as a tough-talking, law-and-order candidate. When Reagan took office in 1981, Meese became chief of transition, and after other Reagan staffers blocked his appointment as chief of staff, he accepted the newly created cabinet position of counselor to the president and became, according to his enemies within the administration, effectively the "surrogate president."

Counselor to the President,

As counselor to the president Meese took highly public and controversial positions, including asserting that evidence gathered in violation of guidelines established by the Supreme Court should be used in a court of law, and he then defended the president's pardon of two FBI agents who had illegally conducted break-ins. He argued that certain persons identified by the government as dangerous, but charged with no crime, could be held in "preventive detention." He attacked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), calling it a nationwide "criminals' lobby," and declared himself in favor of abolishing the Legal Services Corporation, saying that legal aid for the poor could be provided by local bar associations instead.

Attorney General

Law-and-order conservatives were enamored of Meese, and, disenchanted with Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, they were convinced that the former would far better serve the president as the nation's chief law enforcer. When Smith resigned at the end of Reagan's first term, Meese was nominated, but he ran headlong into political objections to his public positions and questions about unethical behavior. The Office of Government Ethics had found Meese in violation of the minimum standards expected of public officials. During lengthy and charged hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Meese was grilled about many things, including his claim to have inadvertently failed to list a $15,000 interest-free loan provided to him by a former business associate. His response was that "it never occurred to me that an interest-free loan was a thing of value." Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said that Meese appeared to him to be "beneath the office." Nevertheless, Meese promised that his days of playing loosely with ethical standards were over and so won confirmation as attorney general. Controversy and allegations of corruption were to dog him, however, and these intensified as his role in the Iran Contra affair was scrutinized.

Iran-Contra

The report of the congressional committees investigating Iran-Contra, issued in November 1987, stopped short of accusing the attorney general of criminal acts. But the report raised serious doubts about Meese's credibility on the matter of the controversial "finding" at the heart of the scandal. Technically, arms shipments to Iran violated the Arms Control Export Act. However, under certain circumstances, in the name of national security, the president may override the law by issuing a signed finding. The Iran-Contra committees discovered evidence, however, that Reagan had done so ten days after the arms were actually shipped. Could the nation be expected to believe, asked committee members, that the top law enforcement official of the U.S. government had never been asked to render an opinion as to the legality of these measures? Meese insisted he was never consulted. Other issues were raised as well. In 1986 the assistant U.S. attorney for Miami, Florida, uncovered evidence of Oliver North's secret arms-for-the-Contras network, but suddenly found his investigation blocked from above. Information surfaced that Meese had visited the head of the Miami office at that time, who suddenly caused all further inquiries into the matter to languish. Iran-Contra investigators wanted to know why Meese had not dispatched FBI agents instead. Since Meese himself informed the nation of illegal activity on the part of Oliver North in November 1986, committee members also asked why federal agents had not immediately sealed all offices and records in the case. Meese had warned Adm. John Poindexter, Reagan's national security adviser and North's boss, that Department of Justice agents would be visiting him, thereby giving him, and North, time to destroy incriminating documents, a felony that North freely admitted. The Iran-Contra Committee's final report indicated that at the least Meese had bungled badly, though clear questions remained as to the extent of active cover-up. The Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, in his final report stated that Meese had indeed given a legal opinion on arms-for-hostages and that former White House chief of staff Donald Regan had testified under oath that Meese's assertion he was not consulted was false. Walsh believed that Meese was part of a conspiracy both to violate the law and subsequently to disguise that fact, but said that the five-year passage of time since his investigation had begun had rendered proof impossible.

More Investigators

Other independent counsels were named to investigate different matters. At his confirmation hearings in 1984 Meese had promised to sell stock he owned in so-called "Baby Bells," or subsidiaries of American Telephone and Telegraph. Later he was shown to have participated in regulatory meetings that affected the value of the stock from which he continued to draw dividends. In 1986 Meese failed to declare $21,000 in capital gains, calling it an oversight, but some Meese associates said that the attorney general kept meticulous financial records and doubted his self-styled image as a bungler. In 1987 several indictments against various Meese business associates were handed down in the Wedtech scandal. Meese himself was accused of intervening personally to win lucrative defense contracts for his friends. Meese had also placed his investment holdings in a blind trust managed by a Wedtech partner, who subsequently had invested for Meese more money than was in the trust, in effect extending the attorney general an illegal loan. Finally, in what came to be called the Iraqi Pipeline scandal, Meese was investigated for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act after failing to disclose an attempt at bribing a key Israeli official, as detailed to him in a personal memorandum from E. Robert Wallach, who had also figured in the related Wedtech scandal. Meese's response was that he had been so busy he had never gotten around to reading the memo.

Resignation

By 1988, while President Reagan continued to insist that Meese was "a public servant of dedication and integrity," the number two and three men immediately below Meese resigned, saying that their boss had compromised the credibility of the Department of Justice. Other prominent members of the administration urged him to resign for the good of the government, including White House chief of staff Howard Baker, who as a senator had investigated Watergate, and Charles Fried, the solicitor general. Members of the Republican National Committee expressed fears that Meese would jeopardize the party's prospects in November. Even James J. Kilpatrick, the noted conservative journalist and friend of Meese, wrote that the attorney general should resign. Bowing to such pressures, Meese finally did resign, claiming that the special prosecutors had "completely vindicated" him, and returned to California.