Edwin Meese: I See a Hurt in His Eyes

A few close friends gathered round when the awful impact of Edwin Thomas’ $15,000 loan to Ursula Meese began to sink in. “I blew it,” Ed Meese kept repeating in a low tone. “I completely forgot about it.” At one point, when her husband left the room to make a phone call, Ursula broke down and wept. Never before had the friends seen Ursula Meese cry. “I’ve done this to him,” she sobbed, “and he doesn’t deserve it.”

The scene poignantly etched Meese’s troubles as he seeks confirmation as Attorney General. In his early days in the White House, Meese was the confident, unshakable “deputy President.” Supervising both the National Security Council staff and that of its domestic equivalent, the Office of Policy Development, he was one of a handful of aides who could walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. Within a year of the Inauguration, however, his operational influence began to fade. Though an inveterate draftsman of organization charts, Meese was disorganized. Those he chose for staff positions were considered weak and ineffectual. But he was still Reagan’s closest ideological soul mate, valued for his unswerving loyalty and his ability to reflect the President’s political instincts.

Friends say Meese’s dream was to be Attorney General, and when William French Smith stepped aside, Reagan was quick to oblige. Meese’s legal qualifications were hardly overwhelming: a 1958 graduate of the University of California Law School at Berkeley, he spent eight years as deputy district attorney for Alameda County, Calif.; worked briefly as a button-down attorney in private industry; and from 1978 to 1980 taught criminal law at the University of San Diego Law School. (As a professor and consultant, he earned less than $100,000 a year. His White House salary is $72,000.) But for Reagan, it was enough that Meese was a friend, a longtime lieutenant (he served as chief of staff during Reagan’s two terms as Governor of California) and a tough law-and-order man. Indeed, one of Meese’s few hobbies in California was listening to police calls on a home radio set.

In his present difficulties, Meese seems vulnerable, almost pathetic. His friends frankly worry about what he will do in private life if the confirmation controversy forces him out of Government. “He has made his whole life a satellite of someone else,” comments a former Reagan aide. “Without Reagan he never would have been a great success.”

Meese’s intimates insist he was careless, not venal. “He was trying to live up to the Joneses, and the Joneses felt sorry for him,” says one, referring to the loans Meese got from friends. Even so, Meese’s dream of being Attorney General is clearly on hold. “I see a hurt in his eyes,” says his old friend Republican Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada. “He seems bewildered. He can’t understand how this could happen to him.”