A Commendable Woman in Unenviable Job

When Herbert Brownell, President Eisenhower’s attorney general, moved his family to Washington in 1953, they lived temporarily in a small house with a primitive kitchen. Living nearby was another administration official who took pity on the Brownells and invited them for a sumptuous dinner prepared by the neighbor’s chef, whose culinary skills the attorney general praised lavishly. Shortly after Brownell got down to business at the Justice Department, however, he received an irate call from his neighbor complaining that the chef who had prepared the feast had been indicted by Brownell’s own Justice Department as the ringleader of a gang smuggling illegal aliens into the United States. The incident caused Brownell to recall the words of a British jurist who observed that, “The attorney general who becomes popular will not be doing responsibly that which his office demands.”

Right now, Janet Reno is not popular in many quarters for her decision not to invoke the independent counsel statute in the investigation of alleged abuses of campaign finance laws. She has been the object of partisan tongue-lashing, and even such normally levelheaded congressional Republicans as judiciary chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois have given her a dressing-down for not putting the probe in the hands of special counsel.

In a series of lengthy recent articles in national publications, moreover, Reno has been depicted as a pettifogging detail freak who not only overlooks the forest for the trees, but denies that a forest even exists. A dreary and ponderous workaholic who shuns the good fellowship of the Washington social scene, according to these accounts, her image is enlivened only by her reported yearning to toss her sleeping bag in the back of a pickup truck and go camping.

Reno is the very antithesis of what the conventional wisdom decrees about the choice of attorneys general; they have to be personally close to the president. The model to be emulated, presumably, is that of President Kennedy and his brother Robert or of Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese, a member of Reagan’s team from his days as governor of California. This was the argument being made by Clinton advisor Harold Ickes when Clinton was assembling his Cabinet late in 1992.

Clinton’s choice of attorney general, however, was influenced more profoundly by his need for a woman in the job than by considerations of personal chemistry or prosecutorial experience. His first choice was a Washington attorney, E. Brooksley Born, whose rumored selection caused so much elation among women’s groups that Clinton dumped her out of fear that he would be seen as knuckling under to feminists. Attention then shifted to Zoe Baird, an insurance company lawyer whose only contact with Clinton had been as a participant in Renaissance Weekend activities, but that nomination was scuttled because of her hiring of an illegal alien as a nanny. The short and unhappy consideration of Judge Kimba Wood followed the Baird debacle, so by the time Dade County (Florida) Attorney Janet Reno’s name popped up and appeared eminently confirmable, White House elation knew no bounds.

Nonetheless, Reno was kept at arm’s length. Even when she bravely took the fall for Clinton in the aftermath of the Branch Davidian incident in 1993, she fell further out of favor for confessing publicly that the president had been unavailable to give her guidance before the siege began.

Reno has demonstrated pretty convincingly that she is no fawning courtier who hovers nearby eagerly waiting to clean up the messes that the president leaves behind. And although she is no bureaucratic virtuoso, she possesses the quality that is indispensable in the nation’s premier law enforcement officer: integrity. And if her critics attempt to paint her as a pliant tuft-hunter trying to ingratiate herself with the man who appointed her, they will disgrace themselves.

Regrettably, some commentators have begun concluding, in light of recent events, that only a lawyer totally unknown to the president will have any credibility as a future attorney general. What matters, however, is not the intimacy or personal distance between the president and the attorney general but the ability of that person to be a straight-shooter.

Alone among all Cabinet level officials, the attorney general still has the potential to retain a measure of autonomy, both from the White House and from interest groups. Janet Reno’s demonstration of that independence over five years should immunize her from being slurred by lesser people as a patsy and sycophant.