Tenure Mired in Politics : The Meese Legacy One of Controversy

By ROBERT L. JACKSON and DAVID LAUTER

July 6, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — In his 3 1/2 years at the helm of the Justice Department, Edwin Meese III became one of the most political and controversial attorneys general of modern times, pressing the conservative agenda on volatile issues including abortion and civil rights and promoting the appointment of federal judges with strong conservative beliefs.

But for all his efforts he failed to win the unanimous applause even of conservatives.

Patrick McGuigan of the Free Congress Foundation, reflecting Tuesday on Meese’s tenure, called him “the greatest attorney general in my lifetime.”

However, Daniel Popeo, director of the Washington Legal Foundation, declared that “his legacy was that he damaged the Reagan legal agenda severely.” So weakened was Meese by his own legal problems that the Justice Department under his leadership repeatedly lost battles over major issues ranging from executive privilege to the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork, Popeo said.

And if Meese won only mixed reviews from conservatives, he drew nothing but brickbats from liberals. Burt Neuborne, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, accused Meese of “ideological rigidity” and called him “the least attractive attorney general in years--he brought that job to the lowest level any of us can remember.”

Pornography Crackdown

Meese was nothing if not active. With mixed results, he led highly publicized campaigns to crack down on narcotics addiction and organized crime and he sought to stamp out what he saw as a rising tide of pornographic literature.

But the former Alameda County, Calif., prosecutor often emerged as a bungler who stumbled badly not only on personal ethical problems but also in his early investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal and in some of his judicial recommendations.

Conservative scholar Bruce Fein said that Meese’s “greatest contribution” was not so much in strengthening law enforcement but “in sparking a genuine debate in the judiciary and academia over how the Constitution should be interpreted.”

Meese’s critics, however, said that his strongly expressed views on constitutional issues--the Supreme Court’s Miranda rule, for instance--often bordered on the ridiculous.

Yale Kamisar, professor of law at the University of Michigan, said that Meese’s repeated attacks on Miranda, the landmark 1966 Supreme Court decision that gave suspects the right to consult an attorney before being questioned by police, “were exaggerated and extreme.”

‘Became a Caricature’

“Meese became a caricature of the law enforcement type who seemed to pick issues that he thought would curry favor with the public,” Kamisar said. He referred in particular to a statement by Meese that “Miranda only helps guilty defendants (because) most innocent people are glad to talk to police.”

“In flailing around on this issue, Meese apparently did not realize that Miranda has been the rule for 20 years and that almost everyone in law enforcement has made peace with it,” Kamisar said. “But Meese liked to posture as the tough guy, the law-and-order guy. He was more rhetoric than substance.”

On the issue of abortion, Meese won the hearts of many conservatives by asking the Supreme Court to reverse Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that permitted women to terminate a pregnancy. But some critics said that he never seemed to know when to stop.

For example, he personally ordered the Justice Department to intervene in a New York state dispute over whether high school teachers could be compelled to take drug tests. The New York State Court of Appeals ignored the department’s amicus curiae brief and ruled in favor of the teachers.

Other Failures

On civil rights, Meese failed on several fronts. Repeatedly he and one of his top aides, Civil Rights Division chief William Bradford Reynolds, were rebuffed by the Supreme Court when they pressed for cutbacks on affirmative action and other changes in federal anti-discrimination laws.

They also lost when they tried to persuade local governments to reopen civil rights cases that had been ended in past years by settlements, including affirmative action provisions.

And within the Reagan Administration, Meese and Reynolds lost a major battle when they tried to persuade the President to revoke a Lyndon Johnson-era executive order directing federal contractors to adopt affirmative action plans. Vice President George Bush and former Labor Secretary William E. Brock III opposed the change and won.

Meese was singled out for sharp criticism last year in the Democratic majority report of the Senate and House committees that investigated the Iranian arms sales and subsequent diversion of profits to Nicaragua’s Contras.

Probe Called Inadequate

The report rebuked Meese for conducting an inadequate investigation early in the scandal, for failing in his role as the President’s legal adviser and for delaying the release of information to the investigating panels. Meese dismissed the criticism as “a great job of Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

On the Iran-Contra issue, Meese also shocked some legal experts by appearing to prejudge the culpability, or lack of it, of two major figures--former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter and his former aide, Oliver L. North.

Speaking in a television interview last year, Meese said that he hoped neither Poindexter nor North would go to jail. “I have great respect, by the way, for both men, and it would be a tragedy, I think, if either of them did fall into those toils of the law,” Meese said.

At the time of Meese’s comments, independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh was conducting a criminal investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal and neither Poindexter nor North had been indicted. They were subsequently indicted on conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges last March.

Meese plunged into another controversy two years ago by creating a pornography commission that contended a link existed between sexually violent materials and “anti-social acts of sexual violence,” a finding disputed by many social scientists. Meese called for a crackdown on the estimated $8-billion-a-year pornography industry.

‘Personal Obtuseness’

Neuborne, of the ACLU, said that Meese exhibited “a kind of personal obtuseness that made it clear he hadn’t the foggiest idea what was going on” in regard to ethical issues.

But with some grudging admiration, Neuborne added:

“The best thing you can say about him was that he wasn’t afraid to ask hard and controversial questions. He talked about questions that other people only whispered about . . . like whether the 14th Amendment was really binding on the states, whether Supreme Court precedents are really binding on the executive. . . . He raised them and resoundingly lost on each one.”

Popeo, the director of the conservative Washington Legal Foundation, predicted that the next attorney general would be unlikely to push conservative issues on which Meese already lost.

“We had a great opportunity,” he said, “and Ed Meese blew it.”

Staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.