Ed Meese investigation

One listener, probably echoing the curiosity of many others, writes to wonder the name of Ed Meese has not come up in these talks. The answer would be the same, or similar, if somebody else wondered why the name of John DeLorean has not come up.

Let's begin with him. As most people know by now, he has finally, 18 months after he was arrested, come to trial on nine criminal counts, in the main, of having financed a $24 million cocaine deal. One year, almost to the day, after his arrest, the television networks were allowed to show videotapes of DeLorean receiving a bag of cocaine, expressing pleasure at having it and sharing a champagne toast immediately before the man who'd handed it to him revealed himself as a government undercover agent and arrested DeLorean.

The lawyers for the defence held, then, and still do, that a television playback across the nation of DeLorean caught in the act for which he's being tried, would absolutely prejudice a fair trial. DeLorean's lawyers took their protest to the United States Supreme Court when the telecast was first proposed. The court upheld the networks' right and dismissed the protest, so the damning tapes were shown.

On the opening day of the trial, last Wednesday, the government prosecutor maintained that DeLorean was an over-ambitious man who, when he saw his motorcar company on the verge of collapse, was driven into the dirty world of narcotics, was a co-conspirator with the cocaine dealers and hugged the dream of thereby making $40 million in profit.

The defence lawyer maintained that the government's whole case had been concocted by government agents and a paid informer and that the videotaped scene had been set up by government investigators who, otherwise, would have had a weak case, if indeed they'd have had any case at all.

Put simply, the defence is pressing hard on a misgiving that many lawyers and non-lawyers felt when the eerie scene was played over the networks, the misgiving that DeLorean was being made a victim of legal entrapment and if that contention came to be proved, DeLorean would very likely go free, but since he's now come to trial and since the charge against him is one of appalling seriousness and since his guilt is not yet proved, I don't propose to add to the flood of murky surmise and defamation that has already been written and talked. Let him have his day in court on the assumption, which is common to our legal systems and which thousands of journalists are in the business of bypassing, that he's innocent until proved guilty.

The case of Ed Meese, one of the top two or three of the president's closest advisors, is very different in degree, but my reluctance to talk about it has stemmed from the same principle. Mr Meese was nominated by President Reagan to be the next attorney general of the United States, to succeed Mr William French Smith who wants to go back to private practice. The constitution requires that anyone chosen by the president to fill a Cabinet post or a judgeship or an ambassadorship must be questioned at hearings of an appropriate Senate committee, since all such nominees can only be confirmed in their appointment with the advice and consent of the Senate.

So, quite routinely, Mr Meese came before the Senate judiciary committee for what is called a confirmation hearing. One senator, a Democrat from Missouri, had evidently done a lot of digging into Mr Meese's financial affairs and came up with the disclosure, not denied, that at one time Mr Meese had forgotten to report to the tax people an interest-free loan of $15,000, that he had received personal loans from a man and his wife, both of whom subsequently were appointed to government jobs, that he failed to keep up with mortgage payments on his house and that in due course the bank did not foreclose because the house was worth more than the mortgage payments – an enviable trick for the average homeowner to consider.

Now none of these acts is illegal and certainly the buying of favours is standard practice among businessmen and politicians, not to say among all of us who have friends in need. You could certainly go so far as to say that most people not in foreign service careers who get to be ambassadors in any American administration have paid for their appointment in the form of lavish contributions to the campaign fund of the man who won the presidential election. Hence, in the Reagan administration, the wealth of manufacturers and other such amiable rich cronies of the president who were dazzled shortly after the Reagan election to find themselves elevated as ambassador to one or other of the grand capitals in Europe and elsewhere.

By the way, nobody was more unsentimental about disposing of embassy favours than Franklin Roosevelt who, at one time, told a very rich man, otherwise unqualified, exactly what it would cost him to be appointed to Moscow. He paid it. And others among Roosevelt's ambassadors had contributed financially to his election or were newspaper publishers who'd given him powerful editorial support during his election campaigns. Even when some of the senior embassies were given to supremely qualified men – I think, for example, of Lewis Douglas to London and subsequently of David Bruce to Bonn, Paris and London – they were happy freaks in the sense that, apart from their great ability, they were also very rich men.

Right through to the Kennedy administration, it was practically required that an ambassador must be a millionaire. Why? Because, until Kennedy challenged the system, there were two men, powerful men, one in the Senate, another in the House, who controlled the committees that controlled the funds that could be appropriated for external, that is, foreign service, upkeep. Both these men were austere puritans and teetotallers and the senator, in particular, used to scrutinise the required money by way of upkeep that every embassy laid claim to, he called the household upkeep and entertainment budget 'booze allowance'.

Well, because of this lingering puritanical strain, this zeal to keep American ambassadors purer, if not more equal, than others, the amount of money Congress was willing to appropriate for ambassadors to run their households, to entertain and so forth, was pitiful. I remember one ambassador to Britain telling me that he blew his entire annual entertainment allowance – $15,000 – on one 4 July party at Winfield House, to which about 500 people were invited to drink nothing but fruit punch. Teetotal fruit punch.

So it came to be presumed that the first qualification for an American ambassador was the possession of several million dollars. Kennedy fought this presumption and wheedled enough money out of Congress to be able to appoint a soldier to Paris, a first-rate career man to Rome and, of all unlikely candidates, a professor to India. Well, since then, things have changed. Gradually and quietly, without public fuss, Congress will now make ample funds available to able men who are not rich, just like every other civilised country. Mr Carter sent a university president to London and, believe it or not, a college teacher who lives in my apartment house, to Rome. He's back here now, back to teaching and a modest life.

Yet, Mr Reagan has revived the old system with old rich cronies – a remarkable preponderance of Californians among them. So much so that even a commentator as old and temperate as the New York Times' James Reston recently wrote, 'There's really no point in sending rich people to the major embassies of the world because funds are available to send the most knowledgable people in the nation to Paris or Grosvenor Square, regardless of their financial status, but Mr Reagan's appointments to most of the principal embassies', Mr Reston concluded, 'have been a disgrace.'

Now what has this got to do with poor, and I mean poor, Mr Ed Meese? Nothing directly, everything indirectly, as an extension of political cronyism, a well-established habit of American politics which, before now, has caused much mischief and subsequent wringing of hands by American presidents. We won't even go into the horrid case of President Harding, several of whose Cabinet and other government officers went to jail.

Ed Meese is plainly not a rich man and some of the Republican members of the Senate committee that recently gave him a grilling and has held up his appointment were loud in their protest at the verbal inquisition of a man who might have made a packet in business, assuming he'd learn to handle other people's business more expertly than apparently he managed his own, but chose to go into government for a comparatively modest salary.

But Mr Meese's troubles undoubtedly spring from his association with the Reagan clique of rich westerners mostly and the easy-going, though entirely legal, trading of favours and influence to friends and business partners. Absolutely standard business practice. I believe that Mr Meese is entirely sincere in his bewilderment over the present investigation of his financial affairs. I doubt he understands why he's being investigated at all for practices that after – how many years is it – 18 years with Reagan's business friends, must have come to seem perfectly normal.

But Mr Meese has been put up by the president to be attorney general, the government's chief enforcer of the law throughout the United States. Such a man must surely be above even the suspicion of illegality? And though the Senate judiciary committee could not find, as one senator put it, a smoking gun but only a warm instrument, it found enough combustible material to ask for an independent investigation.

Now that would normally be done by the attorney general. Since, however, he is in the post that Mr Meese is being picked to fill, obviously the police commissioner, so to speak, is the last man who should police the successor he approves of. So he appointed a special prosecutor who will put his case before a tribunal of judges. This investigation will take maybe six months.

So in the meantime, let Ed Meese be held to be innocent of wrongdoing.

Next week, same time, same station. Don't miss Reagan in China!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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