Ex-Envoy’s Remains To Be Removed Widow’s Decision May Cut Short Controversy Over His War Record

The remains of M. Larry Lawrence will be removed from Arlington National Cemetery, the White House confirmed Monday, amid a rising outcry over evidence that the late ambassador and friend of President Clinton had invented his story of heroic service in World War II.

Shelia D. Lawrence, Lawrence’s widow, released a letter saying that she has decided to bring his remains “home to San Diego” because the month-old controversy over his disputed burial “precludes his resting there in peace.”

While White House officials insisted the decision was hers alone, the move may cut short what threatened to become a lingering embarrassment to a president for whom military issues have always been a matter of special sensitivity.

Lawrence, a longtime Democratic donor and former owner of the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, had won special permission to be buried in the military’s most hallowed burial ground because of a January 1996 official request that stressed his supposed merchant marine service, and injury, on a ship that was torpedoed bringing emergency wartime supplies to the Russians.

The official request came from the State Department, after Lawrence died of a blood disease while serving as ambassador to Switzerland.

But as GOP lawmakers pointed out last week, searches of government archives turned up no documents substantiating his claim.

And in the past several days, officials of Wilbur Wright Community College in Chicago said their records show he was enrolled there in March 1945, at the time he had claimed to have been serving on the S.S. Horace Bushnell, which was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Arctic Ocean.

In the past three days, there have been rising demands that Lawrence be removed from a sought-after spot at Arlington, which because of tight rules declines burial requests from thousands of veterans who fought for the country.