The final chapter of Iran-contra has yet to be written, of course. But Walsh may rue not taking his own advice. For the last six years he’s been making federal cases of the infamous arms-for-hostages affair. He’s served longer than any other independent counsel-longer in fact than all but one attorney general in American history. Each time his now $35 million investigation seemed on the verge of concluding, it would lurch off in a new direction, producing fresh charges against senior Reagan administration officials. Walsh’s obsessiveness was part Sisyphus, part Energizer Bunny. Even as Walsh inched closer to the Bush Oval Office, the question was the same from both Democrats and Republicans: would he ever finish?
His supporters offer a portrait of an elder statesman with the purest of motives and most painstaking of methods. “What was he supposed to do when he uncovered evidence of [Caspar] Weinberger’s wrongdoing?” asks one former staff lawyer. “Say ‘It’s too late, people are sick of me, I’m going to give up’?” Yet others portray him as an imperious autocrat who insisted on being called “judge” by underlings, even though he served on the federal bench only three years-in the 1950s.
Some former Walsh employees say he was indecisive and brought a corporate lawyer’s approach to the special prosecutor’s office rather than the dynamic touch so needed. At his old blue-chip law firm, he angered colleagues by devoting more time to trial preparation than the billing department could justify even to well-heeled clients. “He couldn’t make a decision,” says a former Iran-contra staff lawyer. “So he kept on investigating to avoid making a decision.” In the investigation of Lt. Col. Oliver North, FBI agents working for Walsh subpoenaed veterinarian records to determine how Chewie, the family dog, died. (North had claimed that a political enemy committed caninicide.) Walsh’s idea of action after long brainstorming sessions would be to offer up, “Good meeting.”
Several Walsh hands cite the bungled case of North as a classic in prosecutorial procrastination. Throughout the spring and summer of 1987, Walsh aides worked the case against the former White House national-security aide. At the same time, Congress scheduled hearings for July, at which North, given immunity, would be the star witness. Walsh begged Congress to hold off until he could gather and seal more evidence. Congress refused. So Walsh had to decide: indict North early on or risk that something would come out in the hearings to “taint” his evidence. Walsh vacillated, finally electing to wait. North eventually was indicted and found guilty, but an appeals court in 1991 threw out the conviction because of the congressional testimony. Some former staffers argue that Walsh early on should have taken the good, if narrower, case against North, rather than going after the larger conspiracy theory. “We blew it,” says one.
The most cynical among his critics charge that Walsh waltzed on for the worst of reasons: the longer it went, the longer it had to go on-to land him the big catch necessary to justify all that time and taxpayers’ dollars in the first place. Republican critics especially skewer Walsh as a political grenade-thrower for adding a charge against Weinberger just four days before the presidential election. While they don’t suggest Walsh is seeking professional gain-he’s 80 years old-they do say his old-fashioned moralism has made him a dangerous prosecutor. “Walsh is ready to ascend directly to heaven,” says a senior Bush appointee in the Justice Department. “He views himself as doing God’s work.”
Even in the good old days of the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox in 1973, the job has basically been thankless. Congress gets in the way, government agencies obstruct, senior officials plead the Fifth. “It is absolutely absurd to blame Walsh for the length of this investigation,” says Leon Silverman, a former independent counsel. Many of Walsh’s travails stem from the very idea of having prosecutors operating separate and apart from the Justice Department, accountable to no executive ‘official; Walsh may have exacerbated his lot, but he didn’t create it. If that’s true, then his mistakes of the last six years are certainly pardonable.
