As this is written, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese is still hunkered down in his bunker on Constitution Avenue, desperately defending his position as the nation's top law enforcement official against mounting charges of corruption. By now everyone in official Washington has turned against Meese except his perennially loyal president. It seems that nothing short of a felony conviction, or an astrological intervention, will sway Reagan's faith in his old friend.
Meese and Reagan go back a long way. Meese has been with the president since he was governor of California. He stood with Reagan through three presidential campaigns. Meese kept the faith. As White House counsel in the first Reagan term, Meese was a constant and stalwart voice for the New Right agenda. When the president was besieged by conflicting voices, Meese was always there to echo the "Hard Right" instincts of Reagan's heart.
Ever since his appointment to head the Justice Department in 1984, Meese has been beleaguered by charges of conflict of interest. During Meese's confirmation hearings, we learned of the five-figure personal loans from friends that helped him get established when he came to Washington in 1981. It seemed Meese may have returned those favors with government appointments while he was White House chief counsel. There was a lot of smoke, but no indictable offense could be nailed down. Not wishing to anger an extremely popular president, the Senate looked the other way and confirmed the appointment.
But all through Meese's tenure at Justice, nagging little charges kept turning up. His investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal was hardly one for the Crimestoppers' Textbook. He failed to put tough questions to the key players. And he appears to have deliberately sat on his hands for a few days after the story broke, giving everyone involved plenty of time to clean up their files.
Concern about Meese's concept of law and order flared up again with reports that he approved a proposal by U.S. business-people to build a new oil pipeline across Iraq. The problem was that the proposal suggested paying bribes, or protection money, to Israeli officials to keep Israel from bombing the project. Meese says he doesn't recall reading that part of the proposal.
His memory does give him problems. When he testified before the congressional Iran-Contra committee, he suffered no fewer than 340 such memory lapses.
BUT IT'S THE WEDTECH affair that continues to buzz most ominously around the attorney general's head. This one goes back to Meese's White House days. Wedtech was a New York-based manufacturing operation that set out to capitalize on the Reagan-era defense boom by bribing anyone and everyone who could send defense contracts its way. Most of Wedtech's top officers have pleaded guilty to various corruption offenses and are testifying about their company's sordid history. As that testimony dribbles out, Ed Meese's problems get worse and worse.
In 1981 Wedtech hired Robert Wallach as its Washington lobbyist. Wallach was a close associate of Ed Meese and a personal friend since their law school days. Later Wedtech also hired former White House aide Lyn Nofziger for similar work.
Wallach deluged his buddy's White House office with memoranda urging contracts for Wedtech. In 1982, according to testimony at Nofziger's trial, Meese's top assistant at the White House, James Jenkins, staged a heavy-handed intervention with Army officials to get a $32 million contract for Wedtech. Jenkins later left government service for a job at Wedtech. In 1983, when Wedtech was having trouble with a Navy contract to build pontoon bridges, Ed Meese himself reportedly took up the concern with then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.
In February 1984, according to a report in The New Republic, Robert Wallach approached his Wedtech employers with a sure-fire solution for their pontoon problem. Meese's appointment as attorney general had just been announced. The confirmation hearings would require a lot of legal assistance, more than Meese could afford. If Wedtech would foot the bill for Wallach to represent Meese at his confirmation, then the pontoon prize would be won. Wedtech paid Wallach $150,000. Wallach represented Meese at the hearings. In April 1984 Wedtech got the pontoon contract. At this point no one knows if Meese actually knew who was paying his lawyer.
Meese isn't the first of Reagan's close advisers to run into trouble with the law. Nofziger and Michael Deaver, both of whom were with the president since California, have already been convicted for illegal lobbying and perjury, respectively. Dozens of lesser administration officials have run into trouble for failing to disclose their financial dealings or for associating too cozily with business interests concerned with their agencies. And that's not even considering the mammoth political/criminal offenses of the Iran-Contra deal. This pattern of corruption has become enshrined in the popular media as "the sleaze factor."
EVERY ADMINISTRATION has its bad apples. But the Reagan administration's corruption is not only distinguished by its scale. Even more troubling is the fact that no one in the administration, from the president on down, seems to consider it a problem. When the president's men are convicted, they, and their old boss, don't say "I'm sorry." Instead they blame the Congress for passing the laws they violated.
They treat their corruption like a matter of principle, which, in part, it is. There is a strong ideological component to the Reagan administration's sleaze factor. Reagan and those around him see nothing wrong with mixing up private interests and public power because their philosophy lacks any concept of a common good or public interest that transcends individual interests. For decades on end, conservative Republicans have campaigned on the promise to run government like a business. The Reagan administration has finally done it.
The Reaganauts take and give bribes for the same reason they fired the air traffic controllers, sold off public park land, cut taxes for the rich, squeezed the poor, deregulated banks and broadcasters, and advocated privatizing most public services with the possible exception of defense. And even the defense exception was blurred by William Casey's "free-standing, off-the-shelf" privately incorporated secret team.
Many of our highest officials truly believe that the universe is a marketplace in which morality consists of pursuing one's own self-interest as ruthlessly as possible. All their talk of traditional values is confined to the private sphere of home and church. When it comes to public affairs, moral strictures are namby-pamby things designed to thwart individual initiative and dull the competitive urge, which, after all, makes the world go 'round.
Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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