Inquiry Shows War Exploits Were Fake State Department Admits It Missed Lawrence Evidence

The State Department on Friday officially acknowledged that it missed conclusive evidence in its own files four years ago that the late M. Larry Lawrence, then a nominee to be ambassador to Switzerland, had fabricated his story of heroic World War II service in the Merchant Marine.

After a weeklong investigation, senior officials declared there was no doubt that the longtime Democratic Party donor and former owner of the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego concocted the story, and conceded that the falsehood was clear in 1993 from junior college transcripts showing Lawrence was at school when he claimed to be running supplies to Russia.

While no one will be disciplined for the oversight, officials said they intend to tighten the system of running background checks on diplomats.

“We did not connect Ambassador Lawrence’s attendance at a junior college with his claimed voluntary association with the Merchant Marine,” acknowledged one senior State Department security official, who declined to be identified. “They simply did not make the connection.”

The definitive document was a transcript showing that Lawrence was at Wilbur Wright Junior College in Chicago in March 1945, when he claimed to have been on the liberty ship S.S. Horace Bushnell in the Arctic Ocean. Lawrence claimed he suffered a serious head injury when the ship was torpedoed by a German submarine.

Lawrence has been the most publicized figure in a monthlong brouhaha over the Clinton administration’s grants of special waivers to permit burial in the overcrowded Arlington National Cemetery. After his death in January 1996 while serving his ambassadorship, Lawrence received one of the waivers, even though he did not meet the cemetery’s criteria. Administration officials stoutly defended the waiver, pointing to his wartime record.

But as it became clear that record was false - and in the face of protests from veteran groups and others - Lawrence’s remains were removed early Thursday at his widow’s request from a plot near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and shipped to a San Diego-area cemetery for reburial.

One official acknowledged that the Lawrence case suggests that in the future, government investigators should “look at all documentation when they are unable to corroborate” some fact. In the future, “We’ll do that,” this official said.

Even so, the official said, “I don’t see anything in this particular case that professionally would argue that people should be disciplined for lack of attention, or anything else.”

The FBI, which handles most background checks, has been faulted for failing to come up with damaging and widely known information about several candidates for top jobs. It failed to report, for example, the history of marijuana smoking that forced U.S. District Court Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court in 1988.