Ready for Combat : The Man Who Would Prosecute Oliver North Is a Marine Veteran Known for His Tough Courtroom Stance

John Keker was a young second lieutenant commanding a platoon of 60 Marines in Vietnam 23 years ago when an enemy bullet shattered his elbow and left it permanently disabled.

Now, the retired Marine is enmeshed in a different sort of combat. His target is another bemedaled Marine veteran, the one President Reagan has called a national hero.

With a Washington courtroom as the battlefield, Keker, 45, is leading the effort to prosecute retired Lt. Col. Oliver North in what would be the first criminal trial to come of the Iran-Contra scandal. Semper fidelis aside, if Keker has any loyalty toward a fellow Marine in distress, it does not show.

“What North has been doing for the last five years has, as far as I’m concerned, nothing to do with the Marine Corps,” Keker said in a recent interview at his San Francisco office before shuttling back to Washington.

Simple and Direct Reason

When independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh selected Keker last month to lead a team of three lawyers who will prosecute the former White House aide, he had a simple and direct reason for tapping him.

“The general feeling here is that he’s one of the top trial attorneys in the country,” said James G. Wieghart, spokesman for the special prosecutor.

“John Keker is genuine-tough, the sort of person you would want with you if you were in a tough spot,” said William Brockett, a Yale Law School classmate of Keker, his partner in a flourishing litigation firm, and a Vietnam veteran himself.

And Walsh is in a tough spot, indeed. In the past week, it has become less clear that there will even be a prosecution. Walsh was unable to persuade Reagan Administration officials to declassify documents that North claims to need in his defense, and was forced to ask U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell to dismiss two key charges: conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and theft of $14 million in proceeds from arms sales to Iran to help finance U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua.

Dispute Over Classified Papers

North’s attorney, Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., claims he needs classified documents to defend against the dozen charges that remain, and is trying to persuade Gesell to throw out the rest of the case. In a hearing set for Friday, Keker will step forth to argue that there is no need for classified papers in the pared-down trial.

As pretrial maneuvering continues, lawyers who know Keker say that if anyone can bring the case to trial, it is Keker. After almost 20 years on the defense side of the well, he will play the part of a prosecutor for the first time in the most important case of his career.

The drama of it all is not lost on him .

“When you go to court,” he said, “you get a chance to be a hero, which is a thing that most people repress the desire for. You also get a chance to fail enormously.

“That sort of edge is something that people who are trial lawyers usually like. “You get a chance to do the right thing. You get a chance to do it in a stylish way.”

In the infantry, Keker and North had similar experience in war. Both led platoons in especially bloody battles. Both were wounded and awarded Purple Hearts. North won a Silver Star for heroics in 1969. After Vietnam, however, they took very different paths.

Keker rarely talks in any detail about Vietnam, fends off questions about his wound with a quip, and has a hard time imagining a cause worth the high price of war.

“I don’t like flag-waving. That’s not what I am,” said the San Francisco Democrat, whose firm has taken on such pro - bono causes as fighting random drug testing of college athletes. “Anybody who wants to be a flag-waver can wave the flag. It seems to me that it papers over things that need to be talked about.”

By the time Keker recuperated from his wounds in 1966, he was convinced that the war was a mistake. He retired from the Marines as a first lieutenant, spent his savings traveling with his wife in Europe, and returned to enter Yale where he made the law review, and dabbled in liberal politics of the times.

After graduating, he worked as a law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren, then moved to San Francisco for a job as a deputy federal public defender. In 1973, he went into private practice, and he built a reputation by specializing in white-collar criminal defense and business litigation.

His success is reflected by Keker & Brockett’s office, once a warehouse for wine, later a bawdy nightclub, now a brick and open-beamed showcase where Calistoga, not aged coffee, is offered to visitors. Keker won’t discuss his fees, except to say he can make more in a good hour in San Francisco than the special prosecutor pays in a day. Walsh’s trial attorneys are paid at a rate of $278 a day.

Two years ago, as outlines of the Iran-Contra scandal emerged, Keker sought a job with Walsh. Driven not only by a long-held interest in the secret workings of government but also by simple curiosity, he thought it would be “fun” to find out what really happened in the worst foreign policy failure of the Reagan Administration.

“The political and legal implications struck me as enormous,” Keker said, though he won’t say anything beyond that about North or the trial. “He’ll have his day in court. That’s what everybody is entitled to. What he has to say, what I have to say, will be said in the courtroom.”

‘He Really Was Offended’

Keker’s friends say he wanted the job because he was appalled by the whole messy affair.

“What motivated him,” Brockett said, “was that he was offended by what North had done, rather than a desire to become famous in his time. I think he really was offended.”

To get the job, Keker turned to Charles Renfrew, an executive of Chevron Corp., who, like Walsh, had been a federal judge and deputy U.S. attorney general, serving during the early years of the Reagan Administration.

“I wrote to Ed (Walsh) that if I were in his spot putting together a staff, the first lawyer I would hire is John Keker,” Renfrew said, calling him “uncanny in a courtroom.”

“It came as no shock to me that John would try the case,” Renfrew added. “You’re just going to shoot with your best.”

‘Give No Quarter, Ask No Quarter’

In a courtroom, Keker’s style is one of “give no quarter, ask no quarter,” says William T. McGivern Jr., chief assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco.

“John is probably as unfriendly as anyone you can deal with while the case is going on,” said Palmer Kelly, an assistant U.S. attorney in Austin, Tex., who won a conviction against a client of Keker’s, a lawyer who helped a drug dealer launder money. Kelly placed Keker on a list of the three top lawyers he has ever faced.

“(Sullivan) will try to smoke up the courtroom and throw the jury off the trail. Keker has got to blow the smoke out of the courtroom. Being one of the better ‘smoke’ lawyers himself is certainly going to help,” Kelly said.

The firm that Keker formed with Brockett a decade ago has fewer than 20 lawyers, but nonetheless is often mentioned in legal publications as one of the best litigation firms in the country.

Keker & Brockett built its reputation by winning cases for people charged with white-collar crime, later by handling complex business cases, and more recently by representing lawyers in malpractice suits.

Keker has had his share of glamour cases. He successfully defended George Lucas in a suit accusing Lucas of stealing the concept of the Walkers in the “Empire Strikes Back.”

On leave from Walsh’s staff last year, the Ivy League-educated San Francisco sophisticate questioned experts on such bucolic topics as a cow’s rumen, and ended up with an $8-million libel verdict on behalf of a rancher who claimed that the University of California falsely accused him of poisoning his livestock.

In 1986, Keker defended San Francisco society figure and architect John (Sandy) Walker against vehicular manslaughter charges. Walker’s blood alcohol count was .14%, and he was speeding along narrow Silverado Trail in the Napa Valley wine country in June, 1984, when he lost control of his Mercedes. His passenger, a 26-year-old woman, died.

Keker brought in a world-class race car driver who had helped design the Mercedes brake system to testify that the 368 feet of skid proved that a brake malfunction was to blame for the fiery crash.

“He created a theory out of thin air. There was evidence that the car was going in excess of 90. The car went airborne, hit an oak tree, then uprooted a second oak tree,” said Mark Pollack, the prosecutor.

Though he lost the case, Pollack was effusive in his praise of Keker, saying that he has “developed his skill to the level of an art form.”

“It was a pleasure opposing him.”

Keker began his military service with an ROTC scholarship to Princeton. He had hoped to become a pilot. But when the Navy asked that he become a submarine officer, he became angry and took what he saw as his one out--the Marines.

After graduating cum laude from Princeton, he went to Quantico, Va., for training. There, in December, 1965, he finished with the highest rating in a class of 400 second lieutenants--”one of my proudest accomplishments,” he says.

Newly married to his high school sweetheart, Christina Day, Keker arrived at Camp Pendleton that January, figuring to enjoy Southern California. Twenty-eight days later he was on a ship bound for Vietnam.

When he joined the Marines and realized that there was a chance that he would go to war, Keker dropped his desire to fly and chose the infantry. The decision had to do with his concept of fair fights, he said.

“I really didn’t want to be in an airplane dropping bombs on people. It seemed somehow impersonal. If I was going to kill somebody, I’d rather do it face to face. It just made me more comfortable. It seemed more human to fight as an infantry platoon leader.

“The idea of being in charge of a platoon is a much different experience than just flying an airplane. I must say that to be responsible for a platoon, 60 Marines, and all that that entails, that is a big deal. I don’t think it gets any bigger than that.”

In July, 1966, as the war escalated, the Marines began Operation Hastings, their first foray to the Demilitarized Zone. “At least, they hadn’t gone in officially” before, he said. It was their largest and most violent battle up to that point in the war, according to a Marine spokesman.

“We dealt with mines; we dealt with small attacks. But this was the first knock-down, drag-out fight that we had been in. This was the first bloody, awful battle. And it was--awful. . . . By the time I was wounded, about half the platoon was dead or wounded.”

In all, 126 Marines died. Keker was among 448 who were wounded. He will not talk in detail about it.

“There is no way,” Keker said, “that a person who has been in combat can talk about being in combat, especially in this day and age, especially in relation to the Vietnam War, especially to somebody who has not been in combat, someone who hasn’t been in Vietnam. . . .

Entered Law School

“You end up making yourself out to be a hero or, to the contrary, you make yourself out to be someone who is anti-war, or something. The truth is, you’re a jumble of all of that.

“It’s sort of nobody’s business.”

In February, 1967, after six months in Bethesda Naval Hospital, Keker retired from the Marines. He entered law school that fall. He was, he said, a “concerned citizen” who was involved in “bits and pieces” of campus activism, though his age and experience set him apart.

“I felt like an old man. I had a wife and a kid,” said the father of two sons, ages 20 and 17.

“We were veterans. We respected other veterans,” Brockett added.

On Fire Commission

Like Brockett, who once quit law to play poker professionally, Keker has, on occasion, felt a need to do more than represent clients. He ran unsuccessfully for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Mayor Art Agnos recently appointed him to the San Francisco Fire Commission. He says he’d like to have influence in national issues, but has no desire to leave his chosen city.

“Washington is a one-industry town. The one industry is very interesting. But the diversity of ways of thinking, the things that people are interested in, are just not there. It’s remarkable how much it’s not there.

”. . . All the things that people make fun of California for are things that I like about California. I would not want to live in a place where you’re not exposed to some of the dizziness that is here. I’m not part of the dizziness, but I like it around.”