‘Ed the Ordinary’ Made a Difference

With all the rhetoric attending the release of the independent prosecutor’s report on Edwin Meese III, a stock-taking of his time in Washington, but especially of his tenure as attorney general, is in order.

From the moment he arrived in Washington, Ed Meese has been an enigma. Who was this affable fellow, the Establishment wondered, who could, with only a quip and a chuckle, cut a conservative gash to the very quick of the liberal conscience? Who was this man of enormous political power--spawned by both years of service and personal loyalty to Ronald Reagan--who seemed to have no political ambitions of his own? After nearly eight years, Washington has still not figured him out.

The reason Meese has so confused and captivated the Federal City is because he never sold his soul in order to be accepted. When Esquire magazine dubbed him “Ed the Ordinary” a couple of years ago, it was not meant as flattery. It should have been. In a town infested with glad-handing, backslapping, disloyal prima donnas, Meese’s ordinariness was his great virtue, the source of his political courage and personal strength of character.

The late unpleasantness surrounding the independent counsel has been fuel for the fires of ideological loathing by which his foes have long tried to immolate Ed Meese. He has been caricatured, excoriated and condemned by those who have seen in him what they feared was implicit in President Reagan. The fact that Reagan was overwhelmingly elected twice in no way dampened the liberal fear and loathing of Ed Meese; it only fanned the flames.

Now that era is ending. Meese has resigned and will return to private life.

In the course of his stewardship at the Justice Department, there have been many achievements. For example, white-collar criminals took it on the chin as never before; an inordinate number of spies were nabbed and swiftly punished; defense-contracting fraud was ferreted out of the labyrinths of the Pentagon, and the drug epidemic, from board rooms to the barrios, was declared Public Enemy No. 1.

And it was Meese who pried the lid off the Iran-Contra boondoggle; however embarrassing it was likely to be to the Administration, his sense of public integrity demanded a full and robust investigation. Instead of pulling the plug on the investigation, Meese gave the independent counsel a “back-up” appointment through the Justice Department in the event (then thought likely) that the independent-counsel statute be found unconstitutional. The fact is that we would not know what we know today about this mess if not for Meese.

Being unquestionably the most politically attuned attorney general since Robert Kennedy, Meese also pushed a legal agenda that went beyond courtrooms and prosecutors. He sought to have the abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade, overruled; he fought the moral indignity of affirmative-action quotas, counting by race and sex, and he strove to place on the federal courts judges who would act like judges and not, as the President put it, like “a bunch of sociology majors.”

While the great silent and sullen majority often suspected that the American Civil Liberties Union was a criminals’ lobby, Meese had the nerve to say it. As they watched their favorite cop shows and seethed when some bleeding-heart judge let a crook off on a technicality, Meese gave vent to their frustrations: Miranda vs. Arizona, he said, was an “infamous decision.” While the average citizen puzzled over why Bible reading was banned from the schoolrooms while pornography was allowed to proliferate, Meese argued their cause. The people have a right, he insisted, to order the moral, political and legal content of their lives to a far greater degree than the black-robed moralists of the federal courts were allowing.

That he did not always succeed--Roe was upheld, for example--is not the issue. The most important point is that he tried at all. For by so doing he helped bring back into our national political discourse ideas, like his jurisprudence of original intention, that the liberal intellectual Establishment smugly thought had been banished forever.

Each of the policies that he sought to achieve stemmed from something deeper, from an idea of what good government is all about. The policies themselves were simply the result of the belief that the written Constitution means something; that limited government is the key to individual liberty, and that separated powers and federalism are not arcane legalisms but vital principles of daily governance.

In this sense Meese’s greatest accomplishment has been an intellectual one. He was able and willing to articulate and defend a politics of common sense. In “Ed the Ordinary” the American people had a spokesman in a legal world increasingly--and deliberately--confused and confusing. They are going to miss him far more than they have been led to believe. He made a difference.