In a criminal investigation of the labyrinth that became known as the Iran-Contra affair, chief prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh stood out to his team of lawyers as a fiercely independent old-school Republican.
At the White House, he was feared by two successive Republican administrations haunted by the biggest scandal since Watergate.
Walsh, 102, who died Wednesday at his home in Oklahoma City after a brief illness, had a distinguished legal career as a Wall Street lawyer, a federal judge, president of the American Bar Association and as the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in the Eisenhower administration.
When the call came asking him to take on one last big assignment, the then-74-year-old Walsh said yes, embarking on a six-year journey digging into the crimes of Iran-Contra.
His detractors — and there were many — said his seemingly unending investigation was a clear case of prosecutorial abuse.
Iran-Contra paled in comparison to the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon. But both were Washington spectacles: a collision of the executive and legislative branches of government, televised congressional hearings, a presidency in peril, an alleged criminal cover-up and criminal prosecutions that were, in Iran-Contra, all overseen by Walsh.
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