Ursula Meese: The Scars of a Senate Confirmation

Attorney general. . . .

It was the job Edwin Meese III had always wanted.

But when he and his wife, Ursula, left San Diego and followed the President to Washington four years ago, they never imagined the price they would pay for that job: a public questioning of Meese’s character and financial dealings that lasted 13 months and still left some observers in doubt.

The Senate confirmation process revealed that the Meeses had at one point been 15 months in arrears on the mortgage payments on both their houses, that an interest-free $15,000 loan and a stock purchase were not reported on financial disclosure statements, and that friends who helped them financially later got government jobs.

‘Beneath the Office’

A U.S. senator, Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, pointed a finger at Meese and labeled his answers at the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings “beneath the office of attorney general.”

Sitting in the audience at the hearing, Ursula Meese had tears in her eyes.

“I thought it was an embarrassing display that he (Biden) was doing,” she explained when asked about it later. “We’ve been vindicated totally. And then to just continually hammer, hammer, hammer away causes one to be embarrassed for the Congress.”

Her voice is calm, and her manner self-assured now. Several times during an interview, she even made jokes and burst into laughter. But friends say she was under tremendous strain at the time of the hearings. The Meeses’ lives became an open book. And the story wasn’t pretty, even if Meese was eventually confirmed by the Senate, 63 to 31.

Ursula Meese was asked if the 13-month ordeal had been worth it.

“It’s hard to say,” she said. “It depends on how much Ed can accomplish in the Justice Department, what he is allowed to do.

“Once you’re in the middle of it, you can’t turn back. You don’t turn and run when you’re right. You stand up and take it. It’s difficult to take at times. But I knew we would be vindicated. There was no question in my mind, ever.

‘Decent People’

“We had to keep on with it. We’re good, decent people. If we backed out, they won another one.”

Going through the 13-month probe of Meese was described by Ursula Meese as “like being pregnant for 13 months. There are periods of hard labor. There are periods of wanting to abort the whole thing. There are periods of nausea.”

The ordeal left her feeling that the advise-and-consent role of the Senate in Cabinet appointments, as dictated by the Constitution, should be done away with.

“It’s just too much. If everything is going to be judged, and they judge you on what you buy and what you don’t buy in stocks. . . . I haven’t got much in stocks, 100 shares here, 37 shares here . . . they come down and get all upset because I have 30 shares of Texaco?

For his part, Edwin Meese said that his wife’s support--their talks, her defense of her husband in the press, her presence every day at the hearings--even when he wasn’t testifying--was “absolutely essential. It’s hard to think how I could have gone through it without her. It probably was harder on her than it was on me,” Meese said, describing his wife as “strong but not overbearing.”

“She takes things in stride very well and has a good sense of what’s important to her. The glitter of Washington doesn’t move her.”

Ursula Meese is embarrassed . . . for the Congress. Not for her husband or herself.

Sure, they missed more than a year of mortgage payments. Yes, they “inadvertently” forgot to list on his financial disclosure statement a $15,000 loan she had accepted to invest in stocks to be cashed in for their children’s education. Yes, they bought stock that lost money. Yes, friends who helped them out of the financial morass later got government jobs.

But the Meeses felt they explained all that, and that Jacob A. Stein, an independent counsel, explained all that, concluding after a 5 1/2-month investigation that there was no basis for criminal charges against Meese.

Some supporters say the Meeses are honest people who didn’t manage their money very well, but Ursula Meese would not even agree with that gentle critique.

Ursula Meese embarrassed? “You know, a lot of people are in the same (financial) situation we are, or have been,” she said during an interview in their spacious home in McLean, Va., an affluent suburb of Washington. A dog barking, a maid vacuuming and several phones ringing provided a constant backdrop of noise.

“But as for being ashamed or embarrassed by it, no,” she continued. “They were circumstances beyond our control. You become ashamed or embarrassed when it’s something you could have changed. We had no choice. We just had to take out the loans and do that.”

The confirmation process is not nearly the worst thing that has happened to Ursula Meese since the family moved to Washington. The Meeses’ 19-year-old son, Scott, was killed in July of 1982, a few miles from the Meese residence, when the car he was driving at high speed veered off the road and hit a tree. Ursula, a frequent traveler, was in South America at the time.

“You cope because you have no choice. I think the thing that probably helped us the most was we got about 3,000 letters. About 80% of them were just total strangers. They just sustained us, the faith people have.”

Was she 100% enthusiastic about the prospect of her husband becoming attorney general?

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I was flattered and pleased, and I knew this was the ideal job for him.

“You’re starry-eyed when you first come to Washington. You think, ‘Oh, this is wonderful.’ After you’ve been here a while, you know it’s nothing but hard, hard, hard work.”

She is currently on a yearlong leave from the William Moss Institute, a nonprofit center founded by a Dallas oil magnate, where she worked on issues regarding the future of the American family. It was an interest that grew during her 10 years as a probation officer in Oakland, working with abused children and on other family matters.

She took the leave, she said, “because I was overextended to such a degree. It just seemed difficult to live 36 hours a day.”

The discovery that Washington life is not all glittery parties came fairly quickly for her. Soon after their move, she said they would stay in Washington only four years, that they couldn’t afford financially to stay any longer.

“Circumstances changed,” she said. “One thing is, unfortunately, we never had to pay the tuition for Princeton (for their late son, Scott), which would have been $50,000, which enabled us to pay off the other loans.”

Through it all she made time to volunteer for several charities and sit on several boards. Recently, the Multiple Sclerosis Society gave her its Humanitarian Award for continued dedication and leadership as a volunteer in the fight against MS.

She travels around the country and around the world, speaking about family violence, observing other cultures and visiting friends. She was a member of the attorney general’s task force on family violence, which issued its final report in September of 1984, and, in July, she will attend the U.N. Decade for Women conference in Nairobi.

In addition to their daughter, Dana, a senior in high school, there always seem to be several people living in the Meese household--a friend going through a divorce, or, currently, a godchild and a niece who came to visit and never left.

The Meeses hope to return to California someday. But, for now, Washington is home.

“I basically like Washington,” she said. “I think we’ve been treated, um, very carefully, reviewed very carefully. But I think, basically, we’re well liked and well thought of in Washington.”