Who’s on First?

Uh, oh, Ed, better watch those baseball analogies. The other day Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III explained his quixotic decision to fire Terry H. Eastland, the Justice Department spokesman, as just a change of management, like Baltimore Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams’ firing his manager during the team’s recent losing streak. What Meese failed to mention was that after Orioles manager Cal Ripken Sr. was ousted, the team lost 14 more consecutive games before its luck changed; even today the Orioles sit deep in the American League cellar.

Maybe Meese identifies with the Orioles because he’s on a losing streak of his own. Since the end of March he has lost his No. 2 man and the head of the criminal division, who quit to distance themselves from Meese’s continuing legal and ethical problems; seven of their immediate deputies, and now Eastland, William A. Schambra, the department’s chief speech writer who resigned to protest Eastland’s firing, and one of their aides. Who’s left?

Firing Eastland--and on the ground that he was not aggressive enough in his defense of the attorney general--seems to us a particularly desperate act. Eastland, an architect of Meese’s policy of urging courts to follow the Constitution’s “original intent,” had bridled at any criticism of the department. He was famous for penning lengthy rebuttals to editorials challenging his bosses. But he referred questions about Meese’s connections with Wedtech Corp. and other legal woes to the attorney general’s personal lawyers.

Meese apparently wants a spokesman who would not only snarl but bite. Eastland has admitted that he could not promise to be “indifferent” to the report that independent counsel James C. McKay will issue later this month on the Meese investigation; the report is expected to question the attorney general’s ethics but conclude that he did not violate any law. There is speculation that Meese fired Eastland to preempt his resignation, which would have raised more questions about why even Republican loyalists don’t want to work for this attorney general. Whether or not the speculation is true, we are certain that, once again, the wrong man is leaving the Justice Department.