Edwin Meese | |
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In office February 25, 1985 – August 12, 1988 | |
President | Ronald Reagan |
Preceded by | William French Smith |
Succeeded by | Dick Thornburgh |
Jan 25, 2008 · Edwin Meese III served as the seventy-fifth Attorney General of the United States, 1985-1988, under President Ronald Reagan .
Perhaps best known as U.S. attorney general during Reagan’s second term, Meese’s service to the conservative icon stretched from the California governor’s mansion in 1966 to the White House ...
Oct 08, 2019 · Meese served as the 75th attorney general under Reagan from February 1985 to August 1988.
Oct 08, 2019 · Meese was attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and has since been a longtime conservative legal and thought leader at the Heritage Foundation.
Oct 08, 2019 · Meese was on hand for the successes of Reagan's first term, then prepared to leave the White House in 1984 to be attorney general.
You will receive a response within 48 hours. Edwin Meese III, the prominent conservative leader, thinker and elder statesman, continues a quarter-century formal association with The Heritage Foundation as the leading think tank’s Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow Emeritus. In that capacity, Meese oversees special projects ...
As both attorney general and counsellor to Reagan, Meese was a member of the Cabinet and the National Security Council. He served as chairman of the Domestic Policy Council and the National Drug Policy Board. After Reagan won the White House in the 1980 election, Meese headed the transition team.
In 2006, for example, Meese was named to the Iraq Study Group, a special presidential commission dedicated to examining the best resolutions for America's involvement in Iraq.
The legal center now bears his name, in recognition of Meese’s contributions to the rule of law and the nation’s understanding of constitutional law. Its mission is to educate government officials, the media and the public about the Constitution and legal principles -- and how they affect public policy.
Getty Ed Meese. Edwin Meese was the 75th US Attorney General, serving under President Ronald Reagan. After retiring from politics, Meese joined the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington DC. Meese has written a number of books about conservative philosophy and the Reagan legacy, and is considered a leading conservative voice.
Meese married his high school sweetheart, Ursula Herrick. Ursula’s father was Oakland’s postmaster. Ursula won the “outstanding woman” award at the College of the Pacific in 1954. She went to graduate school at Radcliffe and then went to work as a deputy probation officer.
Meese was accused of unethical conduct in office at the time, and a report by the onetime Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox cited him for "blindness to the abuse of position.". Further allegations followed. He was investigated for his role in helping the Bechtel Corp. build a pipeline from Iraq to Jordan.
Meese was part of Reagan's conservative surge in the Republican Party of the mid-1960s "movement conservatives" who strove to rebuild the party after its disastrous defeat in the presidential election of 1964. Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966 signaled the party's comeback and pointed the way toward its rightward shift.
He also was in the middle of the Iran-Contra affair, a scandal involving weapons sales to Iran and then the money from those sales was used to fund anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.