Lawrence Walsh, a former federal judge and a mainstay of the U.S. legal establishment who as an independent counsel exposed the lawbreaking in the Reagan administration that gave rise to the Iran-Contra scandal, died Wednesday at his home in Oklahoma City. He was 102. His family confirmed the death. Few U.S. lawyers have had as long and varied a career in both the public and private spheres as Mr. Walsh. Besides sitting on the federal bench, he was a prosecutor, a corporate litigator, counsel to Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, deputy attorney general under President Dwight Eisenhower and a negotiator at the Paris peace talks during the Vietnam War. But it was the Iran-Contra scandal that put him in the public eye as never before. Appointed in 1986 by the judiciary as an independent counsel, Mr. Walsh, a lifelong Republican and an early supporter of President Ronald Reagan, came out of retirement at age 75 to unravel a complicated affair that reached from the White House to Tehran to counterrevolutionary strongholds in the mountains of Nicaragua. At the heart of it were the clandestine efforts of Reagan administration officials to sell arms to Iran, ostensibly to help secure the release of Western hostages in the Middle East, and then use the profits to give covert support to Nicaraguan rebel forces, which were trying to topple the Marxist rulers there known as Sandinistas. Congress had prohibited aid to the rebels, known as Contras. Divisive figure Mr. Walsh spent more than six years and about $37 million on the investigation, the duration and expense of which became ammunition for his critics. They portrayed him as a modern-day Inspector Javert, a relentless, stiff-necked prosecutor who had applied to a highly political event the kind of law-enforcement template he used when he was a rackets-busting district attorney in New York. His supporters, however, saw him as a model of rectitude, as a public servant trying to uphold the rule of law and demonstrate that even powerful government officials were not above it. In the end he won convictions, but many were overturned, and six defendants were pardoned by Reagans successor, George Bush, who had been vice president during the events of Iran-Contra. Mr. Walsh belatedly tried to confront his critics. Abandoning his earlier reserve, he called many Reagan administration officials brazenly deceptive. In a 1997 memoir, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up, he concluded that Reagan must have known of the basic details of the Iran-Contra operation and that the presidents advisers had tried to shield him by concealing records and personal notes. That shield - a firewall, as Mr. Walsh described it - was only reinforced by Bushs pardons. What set Iran-Contra apart from previous political scandals, he wrote, was that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law being applied to perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension. The linchpin of the Iran-Contra scheme was Lt. Col. Oliver North, a 43-year-old Marine and member of the White Houses National Security Council who had destroyed many documents and arranged for others to be smuggled out of the White House in the undergarments of his secretary, Fawn Hall. Norths fame But appearing before Congress in the summer of 1987 in his olive-green uniform, North was defiant rather than contrite, arguing that his efforts had been in the cause of freedom and anti-Communism. His testimony, on national television, brought him instant, polarizing fame. His military bearing, forthright manner and professions of patriotism won many admirers, but to his detractors he was an arrogant lawbreaker seeking refuge behind a patriotic facade and a Marine uniform. Brought to trial, North was convicted, along with Adm. John Poindexter, a former national security adviser. Mr. Walshs task had been greatly complicated by Congress eagerness to hold its own investigation and offer immunity to witnesses. And when North and Poindexter appealed their convictions, a court overturned them, saying the verdicts may have been tainted by witnesses testimony before Congress. Caspar Weinberger, who had been defense secretary, was indicted on charges of concealing knowledge of the events but was pardoned by Bush before he was tried. Tall, elegant and impeccably turned out almost every day in a dark suit and tie and white shirt, Mr. Walsh was often described as resembling a character in a Louis Auchincloss novel about high-caste lawyers in New York. In fact, Lawrence Edward Walsh was born Jan. 8, 1912, in the fishing hamlet of Port Maitland, Nova Scotia, the son of a Canadian country doctor who moved to Queens to find a more prosperous life. Mr. Walsh, who was 2 years old at the time, became a naturalized U.S. citizen eight years later. His father died when Lawrence was 14. Probing corruption After graduating from Flushing High School, he worked his way through Columbia College (class of 1932) and Columbias law school, spending summers as a seaman in the Merchant Marine. Despite hopes of becoming an estates lawyer, Mr. Walsh, at 24, joined a special state investigation of corruption among Brooklyn prosecutors. That led to a job with Dewey, who had been elected Manhattan district attorney in 1937 and begun assembling a team of 70 fresh-faced assistant district attorneys to go after racketeers and corrupt Tamany Hall politicians. Judges called them the boy scouts. Mr. Walsh had recently married Maxine Winton, a former Columbia student from Tampa, Fla. As president of the American Bar Association, Walsh was criticized for endorsing two of Nixons Supreme Court nominees, Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. in 1969 and G. Harrold Carswell the next year. Both were deemed unqualified and rejected by the Senate. Walsh later said he regretted endorsing Carswell. The other major criticism he endured came from his long representation of the pharmaceutical company Richardson-Merrell, of which he was a director. The company made Bendectin, a morning-sickness drug that many women claimed caused birth defects. He was assailed by plaintiffs lawyers for hardball tactics, and after he left the company it was found liable for millions of dollars in damages. Walshs first wife, Maxine, died in 1964. In 1965, he married Mary Alma Porter. She died in December 2012. Walsh had moved to Oklahoma City, his wifes hometown, after retiring in 1982. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Barbara Marie Walsh and Janet Maxine Walsh; a daughter from his second marriage, Elizabeth Porter Walsh; two stepchildren, Sara Porter Walsh and Dale Edward Walsh; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. In his book, Walsh said that he had found a model for his time as independent counsel in the Iran-Contra case in Ernest Hemingways Old Man and the Sea, in which a fisherman labors long and hard to catch a marlin. When he does, he lashes it to the side of his skiff, only to have sharks strip the flesh before he gets to shore. As the independent counsel, I sometimes felt like the old man, he wrote. More often I felt like the marlin.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 19:53:48 +0000
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