Bush Team Relieved at Departure : Meese Removes Focus on Ethics, Aides Say

The resignation announcement by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III was greeted Tuesday with quiet expressions of relief by Vice President George Bush’s campaign organization, which had been working behind the scenes to persuade Meese to resign.

With Republicans trying to fend off efforts by Michael S. Dukakis to portray the Reagan Administration as scandal-plagued and ethically suspect, Meese’s plan to step down this summer “removes the focal point of the issue,” one Republican source with close ties to the White House said.

For Dukakis, the expected Democratic presidential nominee, and other Democrats, Meese and his legal problems have been a perfect foil for months. The mere mention of his name during their speeches has brought laughter and jeers from partisan audiences.

Joke About Horoscopes

For more than a month, for example, a fixture of Dukakis stump speeches has been a joke about how he had recently consulted horoscopes for himself and Meese “and they both said we should consider changing jobs.”

Dukakis also has invoked Meese as a symbol of the Administration’s inability to solve the nation’s drug problems. Speaking to a Boston convention of broadcast editorialists last month, Dukakis declared: “This Administration’s trying to run the war on drugs with a committee. There’s nobody in charge. . . . The chairman of the committee is a guy named Ed Meese. ‘Nuff said.”

Officials close to Bush were reluctant to apply direct pressure on Meese to quit, cognizant of his two-decade personal association with President Reagan as well as their own long service with him.

“We were not part of pushing him or forcing him out of the office at all,” said Craig Fuller, Bush’s chief of staff.

‘Certainly a Minus’

But, others close to the Bush campaign organization said, the vice president’s political operatives over the past four weeks had made it clear to Meese that his continued presence as the nation’s top law enforcement officer “was certainly a minus” in the campaign.

The vice president, in a one-sentence written statement, said only: “Ed did the right thing, and I wish him well.”

One senior Bush aide was less restrained:

“It’s a happy day. It’s a great relief. It’s the realization of something that a lot of people in this campaign have been pushing for a while . . . very intensively and at high levels.”

The timing of Meese’s announcement--made in Sacramento shortly after an independent counsel filed a report that did not recommend criminal prosecution--was particularly welcome to Republicans. It comes only two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, where his problems were expected to be mentioned prominently.

Wright Under Scrutiny

Indeed, Republicans are looking forward to turning the ethics issue on the Democrats, whose convention chairman will be House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, who is himself under scrutiny by a House ethics panel.

“It’s bad news for the Democrats. I don’t think the issue of the sleaze factor goes away but it sure is diluted,” said Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute.

But Susan Estrich, Dukakis’ campaign manager, said in an interview in Boston that the resignation of Meese would not undercut efforts by the Democrats to raise questions about the ethical standards of the Reagan-Bush Administration.

“The record of failure to set high standards for public service does not go away just because Meese himself does not hold this job,” she said.

Dukakis, leaving the Massachusetts Statehouse, told reporters: “This resignation is not going to solve this Administration’s problems.”

Reflecting an effort to keep the ethics issue alive, the governor said the Administration faces “a breaking scandal in the Pentagon which may dwarf any of the others we have had in the past eight years. So this resignation, by itself, doesn’t solve anything.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who finished second to Dukakis in the race for the Democratic nomination, said he did not think Meese’s departure would have a measurable impact on the Dukakis campaign, because “this is just another chapter” in a series of “people leaving under clouds.”

Staff writers Keith Love in Boston and Lee May in New York contributed to this story.