Mutually assured corruption; the Justice Department and Anne Burford's EPA.

• Author: Benjamin, Daniel
• Position: Includes articles on Anne Burford and Rita Lavelle

MUTUALLY ASSURED CORRUPTION

During Ronald Reagan's first administration, few developments attracted as much attention as the scandal over the management of the environment. At the center of the controversy were the goings on at EPA in 1982-83, when allegations of sweetheart deals with industry, political manipulation of funds, and gutted regulatory procedures flew wildly. A strange but dramatic constitutional confrontation over a pile of documents and the doctrine of executive privilege brought the affair to its climax, and a rapid denouement followed. Or so it seemed.

It all ended with nearly surgical neatness. On March 9, 1983, the documents were turned over by the executive branch to the congressional committees that wanted them, and Anne Gorsuch Burford, administrator of EPA, resigned from office. In the popular mind, the two events were linked. Burford, like her fellow Coloradan, James Watt, had antagonized many with her undeviating adherence to the Reaganite program of easing the regulatory burden on industry and getting government out of the business of protecting the environment. Her tough, unsympathetic character did not win her many friends, either. In the course of the crisis, she became the subject of the first contempt citation ever issued by Congress to a presidential appointee at that level of government. It was easy to imagine her the culprit, and the bad odor of a Watergate-like cover-up surrounding the affair was widely ascribed to her. Given the stream of bad press she brought cascading down upon the administration, few inside the government or out were sorry to see her go. And, with the subsequent resurrection of William Ruckelshaus, first administrator of EPA and shining martyr of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, the White House turned a debacle into a modest public relations victory.

The story, however, is far from over. The House Judiciary Committee has just released a 1,300-page report that promises to upset the common understanding of what actually happened during the EPA scandal. It details the fascinating but hitherto unknown machinations of the Department of Justice in the executive privilege confrontation. The evidence presented implicates many top Reagan law enforcement officials and White House staff members in a conspiracy to deceive Congress and obstruct justice. Complementing this summa is Anne Burford's recently released memoir of her years in the administration, Are You Tough Enough?*, which intimates and conjectures about many of the topics of the House Judiciary report. The appearance of these two publications has renewed press interest in the EPA scandal; the Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, has recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor.

* Are You Tough Enough? An Insider's View of Washington Politics. Anne Burford with John Greenya. McGraw-Hill, $16.95.

To be sure, the wrongdoing that's been uncovered deserves plenty of attention. But because of the complexity of the scandal, because there are too many villains pursuing their own plots, and because the final picture largely contradicts our notions of how government is corrupted, it may end up earning less than its fill of coverage. For these reasons, it's worth reviewing the affair and presenting, however inconclusive it must now be, a guide for the perplexed.

Fall of the Dragon Lady

First, some history. In the fall of 1982, several House committees began investigating the Superfund program for toxic waste cleanups in response to charges that EPA was not implementing the program in accordance with the law. In October the investigations came to a halt after EPA refused to turn over certain documents that it claimed were "enforcement-sensitive'--that is, their release would have upset legal cases EPA was pressing against polluters. Congressional appeals for the documents were rejected, and acting on the advice of Justice Department attorneys, the president asserted the right of executive privilege over the documents on November 30.

Few things guarantee the suspicion of Congress as much as a claim of executive privilege. With Watergate looming in the background as the paradigmatic battle over the ill-defined doctrine, many legislators and journalists immediately sensed a cover-up. Since Congress routinely examines far more sensitive materials than anti-pollution enforcement documents, lines were quickly drawn, and the hostilities began. On December 16, in the dying days of the 97th Congress, the House voted 259-105 to hold Burford in contempt of Congress. (At the time her last name was Gorsuch. She married Robert Burford, director of the Bureau of Land Management, several months later.)

Burford, however, was as true a believer as Ronald Reagan could find--a fact that determined the great irony of her fall--and she continued to withhold the documents despite the threat of prosecution. The clamor grew. Congressional ire was further aroused by irregularities in the accounting of the documents that were being held; the total seemed to vary each time the executive branch communicated with the legislative. What's more, apparently everyone but Congress had access to the documents, including EPA office help and, strikingly, some companies that were the subjects of enforcement proceedings. It was also unclear who at EPA actually knew what was in the...