Mount Meese: It overlooks many things

“I do not recall having read the specific words that have now mushroomed into importance.” That was the all too typical explanation by Attorney General Edwin Meese of a memo he received suggesting a way to get Israel to guarantee the safety of a proposed Iraqi oil pipeline. Last week Meese’s lawyers released the declassified 1985 memo from E. Robert Wallach, the Attorney General’s former personal attorney. What his Swiss-cheese memory had failed to retain was alarming.

Wallach wrote that Israel “will receive somewhere between $65-70 million a year for ten years” and “a portion of these funds will go directly to ((the)) Labor ((party)).” This suggested arrangement “would be denied everywhere,” the memo predicted — as, indeed, it has been.

President Reagan’s empathy with Meese could be based on a shared affliction: both have difficulty recalling embarrassing details of their own conduct. Among the many things Meese claims to have forgotten:

— Whether he asked Lieut. Colonel Oliver North if the Marine had written the Iran-contra diversion memo, found in North’s files, that touched off the Reagan Administration’s worst scandal.

— Who told him that Reagan had not learned about a November 1985 shipment of Hawk missiles by Israel to Iran until months after it had taken place, as he claimed in his announcement of the diversion. (Reagan later said he could not remember when he learned about this Hawk transfer.)

— Whether he ever talked to James Jenkins, his chief deputy in the White House, about pressing the Army to give a $32 million contract to the Wedtech Corp. This was after Lyn Nofziger, a former Reagan adviser who has been convicted of illegally lobbying the White House for Wedtech, had asked Meese to intervene with the Army. Jenkins then held a White House meeting at which the award was arranged.

— Having been thanked in 1981 by John McKean, who had lent Meese $40,000, for what McKean assumed had been Meese’s help in getting him appointed to the Postal Service board of governors.

— Whether he did anything in 1982 to push Thomas Barrack into a job as Deputy Under Secretary of the Interior. Barrack had helped sell the Meeses’ California home after they moved to Washington.

Meese could be relying on President Nixon’s advice to aides who were ordered to testify about Watergate: “You just say, ‘I don’t remember, I can’t recall.’ ” It did not always work.