The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Ed Meese makes a lovely target. Broad and a bit blubbery, trusting and more than a shade bumbling, the Attorney General is planted firmly atop the disintegrating ramparts of the Reagan Administration. He is the last centurion of the far right who stands out there, his banner still thrust high.

Meese believes he can defy history. He still does not quite understand what he has done wrong, how he has transgressed. His voice over the telephone is cheery. "If you ask people around the country what it is that Ed Meese did wrong, few could tell you," he insists, booming into the line. "There are a lot of people out to get Ronald Reagan. One way is to get those close to him. The closer you are to Ronald Reagan, the more part of his policies you are, the greater a target you become. And the more resistant you are to that, the harder your enemies try."

Independent Counsel James McKay will soon issue his report on Meese's messy finances and unseemly concern for the friends of his friend, indicted Attorney E. Robert Wallach. McKay has already said he will not recommend indictments. But the report may demonstrate ethical insensitivities on Meese's part that will send the capital into another righteous convulsion. Virtually no Cabinet officer in memory has survived such trauma. The damage to Reagan's legacy, to the Republican Party and to Vice President George Bush's troubled presidential bid has already been severe.

Most of Washington, including a growing number of his fellow conservatives, wishes the Attorney General would quietly leave the field. But like General Ulysses Grant, a warrior Meese greatly admires, he seems determined, as Grant said down in Virginia, "to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer." On that he is backed up so far by the President, who is being placed yet again in the awkward position of choosing between what is best for his presidency and protecting a loyal spear carrier.

Meese sees his antagonists as the traditional liberal assault forces, in league with the media. They come on, in his view, in a set piece of political attack. First, a selected victim is branded as controversial. Then he is labeled an embarrassment to the Government. Finally it is said the fellow has to go. If that tactic proceeds much further unchallenged, Meese believes, such forces will soon paralyze any Government. "I am going to continue the leadership of the Department of Justice," he says. "I am going to wait until the prosecutor's report is issued, and then I am going to stand up as long as I have to and get the facts out. I am going to answer any question that anybody wants to ask."

It is a painful drama to watch. Meese is not, at heart, an evil or fundamentally dishonest man. Unlike some others who have surrounded Reagan over the years, he has not sought to cash in his position for great wealth. But he is careless, perhaps uncomprehending, too hurried and a bad judge of people, events and ethical strictures. Whether or not he has committed a crime, he has too often proved blind to the elevated standards expected of the top law officer in the land. The improprieties are easy for the public to understand: he appeared to help friends who helped him financially.

Along Pennsylvania Avenue, a powerful sympathizer muses that "Ed Meese is one of the nicest people I ever met. He is decent, hardworking, trying to help people all the time. But he does some dumb things. I hope when the report comes out the President puts his arm around Ed and says, 'This vindicates Ed. Now he's tired and wants out. I agree.' "

Battle fatigue may be part of Meese's problem, though he did not see it in himself even as he fired his spokesman Terry Eastland a fortnight ago. It was a bizarre performance. Eastland, a respected conservative, had no inkling that Meese was unhappy with him. Summoned to the Attorney General's office, he walked in innocently, the man with the longest tour at Meese's side of any of the senior staff. It was as if Meese did not know him. And so Eastland became the eleventh top aide to quit or be fired from Justice in two months.

"A siege mentality now," offers another friend. "Meese has dug in. He's going to shut the door on the place when Ronald Reagan leaves. He's never wavered, nor should he."

But at a time when the capital is savagely partisan and gleefully destructive, a perambulating target as juicy as Meese just may not survive. Nor should he. He would do well to leave for his own best interests. "Part of the responsibility of a political man," says the political sage Richard Scammon, "is to take his lumps, whether he deserves them or not. He may be pure as the driven snow and his enemies totally unfair. But who ever said that fairness was a part of this game?"

Meese does not rage when he hears this talk. He is watching the numbers produced by Republican Pollster Richard Wirthlin. So far the Meese issue is only a tiny blip, far below public concern about drugs and jobs. He was rumbling down Pennsylvania Avenue in his limousine last week when an aide showed him a piece of wire copy, quoting Connecticut's Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, who was traveling with Reagan on Air Force One. While saying he would wait for the McKay report before suggesting Meese should resign, Weicker snorted, "I've been battling the son of a bitch ever since he became Attorney General. I don't like him." Meese read the lines and chuckled. "I've known Lowell for 35 years," he said. "I went to college with him ((at Yale)). He hasn't changed."

Neither, apparently, has Meese. And neither, apparently, has Reagan. But the time has come when one or both should act to end this debilitating episode.