With A Friend Like This . . .

By Ed Magnuson

His round face and ready grin make Attorney General Edwin Meese often appear almost cherubic. Not even his harshest critics see him as mean or even unfriendly. Yet Meese is a highly disorganized public official, seemingly oblivious to ethics and reckless in the handling of his modest personal finances. He is now Ronald Reagan's only California confidant left in the Cabinet, but he has been a continual embarrassment to the Administration. Last week it was apparent that his ill-considered advice to the President had been disastrously wrong once again.

It was Meese who bulldozed past the cautions of Chief of Staff Howard Baker and persuaded Reagan to nominate Judge Douglas Ginsburg to the Supreme Court without a full probe of his background. Ginsburg's conservative credentials were all that seemed to matter. "If Meese was going to push Ginsburg as ardently as he did," says Bruce Fein of the conservative Heritage Foundation, "he should have done his homework." Said a former associate: "He never learns."

As the Ginsburg nomination was collapsing, Meese was undergoing scrutiny himself. He spent parts of three days last week in a federal courtroom where yet a second independent counsel and a grand jury are weighing possible criminal charges against him. Normally Attorneys General are on the prosecution, rather than the defense, side of such courtroom scenes. The jury is looking into Meese's intervention in behalf of the Wedtech Corp., a scandal-ridden New York City defense contractor that won $32 million in military contracts before going bankrupt. Some 20 people have faced charges for their activities with the company.

After his aide set up a White House meeting that led to an Army contract for Wedtech, Meese invested $50,000 with a San Francisco financial adviser who turned out to be a member of Wedtech's board. The investment earned $35,000 in 19 months. Independent Counsel James McKay is presumably trying to determine whether the arrangement could have been an indirect payoff for Meese's help to the company. The probe carries echoes of an investigation that delayed Meese's confirmation as Attorney General for six months in 1984. Meese was finally cleared of any criminal conduct by Independent Counsel Jacob Stein, who studied the appointment to federal jobs of several individuals who had helped Meese get bank loans and sell his California house.

Last week Meese became embroiled in still another ethical controversy, this one triggered by his wife Ursula. She admitted to the New York Times that in June she wrote to Federal Judge R. Allan Edgar of Chattanooga to plead for a lenient sentence for a family friend. Joe S. Duncan, the son of Tennessee Republican Congressman John J. Duncan, had been convicted of filing a false federal income tax return in 1982. The Justice Department had urged the judge to sentence Duncan to three years in prison. Edgar imposed the sentence but suspended all except six months of the term.

Mrs. Meese had invoked her husband's name, writing, "My husband, Ed, and I consider Mr. Duncan to be an outstanding, conscientious and sensitive young man . . . We feel that ((he)) should be given very favorable consideration." She did not tell her husband about the letter until after she sent it, Mrs. Meese told the Times, but when she did, he raised no objection.

Despite the problems Meese keeps creating, his view of the world remains so close to that of the President that his advice carries extraordinary weight. In the past such strong buffers as Presidential Aides James Baker, Michael Deaver and Donald Regan kept Meese's shaky judgment from overinfluencing Reagan. Under the less influential Howard Baker, Meese is back in the Oval Office, and the President's California crony is not serving him well.

With reporting by Anne Constable and Elaine Shannon/Washington