Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up.

• Author: Kornbluh, Peter

By Lawrence E. Walsh W.W. Norton and Co. 544 pages. $29.95.

On his last day as independent counsel in the Iran-contra investigation, I had the occasion to meet the Honorable Lawrence Walsh. The setting was a small going-away party, held in the spartan Watergate hotel room that had become his Washington home for seven years. Only a few veteran reporters of the scandal and a handful of friends attended. It was an inauspicious sendoff for a man who, quite alone, had overcome the viciousness of establishment Washington to expose, document, and prosecute one of the most important constitutional scandals of modern times.

Walsh came to Washington, D.C., in January 1987 to be the Perry Mason of the Iran-contra scandal. In January 1994--after four major prosecutions, four major convictions, seven plea bargains and publication of his massive three-volume final report--he left as the scandal's Lone Ranger, excoriated by his enemies, abandoned by would-be allies, and maligned by the media.

In a journalistic effort to shoot the messenger, a disparaging front-page story in the January 19, 1994, issue of The New York Times suggested that of all the people associated with the scandal, the independent counsel "himself may turn out to be the most widely scorned figure in the whole affair."

The Times was wrong. Lawrence Walsh's legacy of breaking through the Reagan administration's "firewall" of conspiracy and cover-up now stands against the stark backdrop of a criminal government, a complacent Congress, and a petulant press. Robert Parry, the first reporter to expose Oliver North's illicit contra operations, predicts "Walsh will be remembered as one man who told the people the truth."

Lawrence E. Walsh, Esquire, would have seemed an unlikely candidate for this role. A life-long establishment Republican, he had served as a deputy attorney general during the Eisenhower administration. At seventy-five years of age when the Iran-contra scandal broke, he was a well-respected attorney at the cushy Oklahoma firm of Crowe and Dunlevy, living the good life in semi-retirement with his wife, Mary.

Moreover, he was an unabashed sympathizer with Ronald Reagan's contra war. "I saw the cause the administration supported in Nicaragua as necessary," he writes in his memoir. In early December 1986, after the scandal hit the press and Oliver North was fired, Walsh shared with his wife an admiration for Ollie's "patriotism and initiative" and even "thought briefly of the...