Records Mystery Revives Arlington Grave Controversy

Federal maritime records offer no evidence that the late M. Larry Lawrence served heroically in the merchant marine during World War II, as cited by the Clinton administration last year when it won the Democratic donor a special burial plot in Arlington National Cemetery, government officials said Thursday.

Reviving a controversy over the awarding of plots in the revered burial ground, Coast Guard and U.S. Maritime Commission officials said that they could find no papers corroborating Lawrence’s claim that he was aboard the Horace Bushnell in 1945 when it was torpedoed by a German submarine.

The officials conceded that the records are old and handwritten and may have gaps.

Still, the disclosure was quickly trumpeted by Republican lawmakers who said that it offered additional grounds for them to forge ahead with their inquiry into allegations that the Clinton administration bent Arlington rules to get sought-after burial space for its friends.

“We have found that Mr. Lawrence’s name does not appear in at least three places where a reasonable person would expect it to appear,” said Rep. Terry Everett (R-Ala.), chairman of the oversight subcommittee of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

Lawrence’s name does not show up in the Coast Guard’s database of merchant seamen, nor does it appear in an official document called the Shipping Articles that describes the 1945 voyage of the Bushnell, officials said. U.S. Maritime Commission records reporting casualties from the Bushnell torpedoing also do not list anyone of his name, nor do they mention anyone who suffered the kind of head injury Lawrence had said he incurred.

“He’s not there,” said Coast Guard Cmdr. Mike Lipinski.

Administration and congressional officials said that they intend to dig deeper and will explore the possibility that Lawrence was traveling under an assumed name to conceal his Jewish identity in case he fell into Nazi hands.

Thursday’s developments gave new life to a controversy that the administration hoped had been put behind it. Last month, GOP lawmakers said that they intended to investigate whether the White House “sold” Arlington plots to big contributors, just as it offered overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom. But the issue seemed destined to be forgotten when the Pentagon released a list showing that, of 69 people who received waivers for burial at Arlington, only one--Lawrence--had contributed sizable sums to the Democrats.

The administration condemned the allegations as “lies” fed by what White House spokesman Mike McCurry called conservative “hate radio.”

Asked Thursday if Lawrence should have been buried at Arlington, McCurry said: “At this point that is speculative, and why don’t we wait and see what the facts are?”

Lawrence, a multimillionaire real estate developer and former owner of the famed Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego, was a major Democratic donor for decades and a close personal friend of President Clinton’s. He gave about $200,000 to the Democrats in 1992. After Clinton’s election, he was named ambassador to Switzerland and was serving in that post when he died of cancer last year.

Lawrence’s merchant marine experience was cited when the administration pushed his diplomatic nomination. And it was the principal reason mentioned by the State Department when it sought a waiver of the usual requirements for Arlington burials, which Lawrence did not meet.

Lawrence frequently described his experience on the Bushnell as a calamity that had led to a turning point in his life. The way he told it to friends, it had “tremendous significance” for his life, one friend recalled Thursday. Clinton himself made a reference to it in his eulogy at Lawrence’s funeral, saying that in later life his friend had “showed the same courage and resolve he had shown as a young merchant marine during World War II.”

In Lawrence’s telling, the torpedo that hit the Bushnell on March 20, 1945, knocked him off the ship, inflicting serious head injuries. Lawrence said that he swam around for a short time in the frigid Baltic waters before he was rescued and that he required months of convalescence.

The casualty report on the Bushnell incident said that four crew members were killed, one died of a heart attack and another crewman suffered shock and temporary paralysis of the legs. But none were thrown overboard, nor were there any head injuries, according to the report.

A senior administration official said Thursday that the FBI, which conducted a background check on Lawrence in 1993 before his ambassador’s nomination, “never checked out his [service] record because it was 48 years old”--probably too old to be tracked down.

Administration officials have argued that Lawrence may also have been entitled to an Arlington plot because he was a sitting ambassador when he died. Three other former ambassadors who lacked the necessary military credentials had been given waivers for burial in Arlington.

Lawrence’s widow, Shelia Davis Lawrence, said in a statement Thursday that she was “shocked and dismayed” by the news conference Everett had called to raise questions about her husband’s service record.