Meese Will Join Heritage Foundation, Hoover Group

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III today announced he will join the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University when he leaves the Justice Department next month.

Meese, the subject of a just-completed 14-month criminal investigation into his involvement with scandal-plagued Wedtech Corp. and other matters, said he looks forward “to a more reflective period, without the white heat and daily pressures that come with high-level 1919251312Cabinet agency.”

Meese was counselor to President Reagan from 1981 to 1985 before becoming attorney general.

Meese said in a statement he will be a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Heritage Foundation working on a variety of public policy issues and will be a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow” at the Hoover Institution.

Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner said in the announcement that Meese is “one of the conservative movement’s most valuable resources.”

Hoover Institution President Glenn Campbell said it will be “very good to have Mr. Meese in our coffee room, so that scholars learn that translating their ideas into policy and programs isn’t quite as simple as they think it is.”

Meese has worked for Reagan longer than any other aide, joining him when Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 and working as a senior staff member until 1974.

“He’s an excellent writer and kept very good diary notes of things that went on (in the Administration),” Martin Anderson, former White House domestic policy adviser and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told the New York Times.

“He could write a crackerjack book on the policy formulation process in the Reagan Administration . . . that would be a scholarly contribution to the literature of political science,” Anderson said.