Postscript Why They Mattered: Lawrence E. Walsh 1912-2014

Philip Shenon, a former Washington and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is author, most recently, of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. This essay is drawn from the afterword to the new paperback edition of the book, scheduled for publication by Picador on Feb. 3.

Lawrence E. Walsh, the special prosecutor who spent six long years trying to bring Reagan administration officials to justice in the Iran-Contra affair, liked to compare himself to the grizzled fisherman in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, struggling to reel in the giant marlin of his dreams. But Walsh’s legion of Republican critics might argue that the better literary allusion is to another fisherman: Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, whose obsession with the great white whale ended in calamity, including for Ahab himself.

Walsh did win a battle with the actuarial tables, remaining active into his 90s and dying in March at the age of 102, and most of his career glittered with accomplishments, both as a New York superlawyer and as a senior government official under Republican presidents. A lifelong Republican, Walsh served as a federal judge in Manhattan in the 1950s, appointed to the bench by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, before joining Eisenhower’s Justice Department as deputy attorney general. Under President Nixon, he was a negotiator to the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam.


Walsh’s white whale came late in his career. In 1986, at the age of 74, he was plucked from semi-retirement to take on the work that he will be remembered for, as the court-appointed “independent counsel” in the investigation of the Iran-Contra affair: the Reagan administration’s illegal, often hare-brained scheme to sell arms to the mullahs in Iran, supposedly in hopes of winning the release of American hostages held by Tehran-backed extremists in Lebanon, and then to funnel the proceeds to anti-Marxist “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua. Walsh was given the assignment by a special three-judge panel that had been established as part of the Watergate-era independent counsel law. The judges said privately that they thought Walsh’s reputation throughout his career for a doggedness that bordered on relentlessness would overcome any concern by Democrats that his GOP ties posed a conflict of interest. And Walsh proved them right. He hired a staff of prosecutors and investigators from around the country who were told to spare no expense in pursuing evidence of crimes by the Reagan White House.

When the Iran-Contra affair erupted publicly in November 1986, it was routinely described as the worst White House scandal since Watergate; it seemed that Reagan might face impeachment on charges that he allowed, and possibly ordered, his deputies to pursue his foreign policy goals—in freeing the hostages and in arming the Contras—even if that meant breaking the law. Walsh said later that it did not take him long to determine that Reagan’s aides “skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover-up the President’s willful activities.”

As a reporter covering the first year of Walsh’s investigation for the New York Times, I found Judge Walsh, as he preferred to be known, to be surprisingly approachable and down to earth, a legacy of a lower-middle-class childhood in Queens, New York. But in public appearances, he came across as stiffly formal. Certainly, he looked the part of an austere, intimidating Wall Street lawyer, a man who could have been born in a dark three-piece suit and who carried himself like a character in a Louis Auchincloss novel about high-born Manhattan attorneys. Aides in the independent counsel’s office said they would deliver papers to his hotel room in Washington near midnight, only to discover him at his desk, still in a suit, his tie still knotted tightly around his neck. He had none of the telegenic appeal of some of his targets, especially the jut-jawed Colonel Oliver North, the Reagan National Security Council member who became an instant celebrity with riveting congressional testimony in which he insisted his actions were motivated by patriotism and a desire to save the hostages’ lives.

Walsh’s investigation succeeded in exposing criminality among powerful officials—the perjury and evidence destruction were especially blatant. But in an investigation that cost more than $37 million and would not end until four years after Ronald Reagan left office, no one went to jail; none of the investigation’s key targets was left with a criminal record. Walsh’s job was repeatedly complicated by Congress, which was so eager to investigate the scandal itself that it granted limited immunity to witnesses for testimony, making it much harder to prosecute them later.

Walsh did obtain 11 convictions, including those of North and National Security Adviser John Poindexter, but all were overturned. North and Poindexter went free after appeals courts found that their congressional testimony might have been used indirectly to convict them. Six people, among them Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, were pardoned by Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush, who described Walsh’s investigation as the “criminalization of policy differences.”

Opinion polls showed that the public wearied of the investigation over time. The scandal may have dented Reagan’s legacy, suggesting that the aging president was befuddled and easily misled by his aides. But Walsh admitted he found no “credible evidence” that Reagan himself had committed a crime. And a visitor to Washington today, arriving at the capital’s Reagan National Airport and attending meetings at the sprawling, marble-draped Ronald Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, might be forgiven for thinking that Iran-Contra was a small footnote in the president’s legacy.

In his 1997 memoir, Walsh bemoaned how the engineers of the Iran-Contra “cover-up” (his word) in both the Reagan and Bush administrations had ultimately succeeded in preventing “the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimensions.” He condemned Bush’s pardons, saying that the president had proved “that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office.”

I had a feeling it might end like this, ever since I interviewed Walsh for the first time at his home in Oklahoma City, his wife’s hometown, where he had settled after stepping down from full-time partnership at the powerhouse Manhattan law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. I sensed that day that this was a man from a different era of law and politics, whose determination to ferret out wrongdoing wherever he found it, no matter how long it took and whatever the cost, would allow his opponents, both in the courtroom and at the White House, to portray him as an obsessive—as a prosecutor who lacked discretion in an investigation laden with politics.

After it was all over, Walsh said he believed his investigation would serve as a deterrent to future administrations from breaking the law—and, in this case, he believed, violating the Constitution—in order to advance policy goals. His critics, including some Democrats and others without an obvious partisan bent, came to disagree. Because of its exhausting length and cost, they say, Walsh’s investigation will be remembered for having sparked the debate that ended with Congress in the 1990s allowing the lapse of the Watergate-era law that had required independent counsels to investigate alleged high-level government crimes.

The criticism of later independent counsels, notably Kenneth Starr’s investigations of President Bill Clinton that began with the so-called Whitewater affair, only added to a bipartisan view that the law had outlived its usefulness and that the inquiries could too easily turn into witch hunts in which political differences were treated as crimes. The result today is that executive branch actions that once might have prompted an independent counsel—the disclosure that President George W. Bush had authorized waterboarding against terrorist suspects after the September 11 attacks, for example, or the allegation in the Obama administration that the IRS targeted right-wing Tea Party groups for audits—are left mostly to the executive branch itself to investigate for possible crimes, if they are investigated at all.

I am certain that Judge Walsh would be pained at the idea that, as a legacy of his investigation, so much wrongdoing at the highest levels of the government, whether committed by Republicans or Democrats, might now go unpunished.