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Ashcroft's Place in History
Part Two of NPR Washington Editor Ron Elving's Analysis
The office of attorney general has been around as long as the presidency itself. George Washington included his first AG, Edmund Jennings Randolph, in meetings with his first secretaries of state, war and the treasury, creating the first cabinet. The number of cabinet-level offices has since quadrupled, but a special cachet has always attached to the original Big Four.
The Ashcroft File
• Born May 9, 1942, in Chicago
• Graduated from Hillcrest High School in Springfield, Mo., 1960.
• Received his B.A. with honors from Yale University, 1964.
• Received his law degree from the University of Chicago, 1967.
• Married his wife Janet, 1967.
• Missouri Auditor, 1973 - 1974.
• Assistant Missouri Attorney General, 1975 - 1976
• Two terms as Missouri Attorney General, 1976 - 1985; chaired National Association of Attorneys General,
• Two terms as Governor of Missouri, 1985 - 1993; chaired National Governors Association, 1991.
• Elected U.S. Senator from Missouri, 1994.
• Defeated for re-election to the Senate, 2000.
• Confirmed as U.S. Attorney General Feb. 1, 2001.
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Secretaries of state have often been major officeholders or presidential candidates who enjoyed wide name recognition when they took the oath. Six of the early secretaries of state went on to serve as president (as have three secretaries of war and one of commerce.) But attorneys general have more often been relative unknowns in Washington before their appointment, men who made reputations in the law, in their home states or in critical backstage roles in presidential politics. Loyalty and discretion have been considered their hallmark attributes.
Many have preserved their relative anonymity while serving a few years and moving on. Ronald Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, served a four-year term and returned to private practice almost without being noticed in Washington. George Bush's first AG, Richard Thornburgh, made news primarily by resigning in 1991 to run for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania (he lost).
Thornburgh's unhappy experience adheres to the general rule that attorneys general do not go on to grander things, at least not in the political realm. An exception was Robert F. Kennedy, the brash young lawyer who became attorney general at 35 when his older brother, John, became president in 1961.
RFK resigned as AG in 1964, roughly nine months after his brother's assassination, and won election to the U.S. Senate from New York that same fall. In 1968, he sought the Democratic nomination for president and had just won the California primary in June when he was assassinated.
In less than four years as attorney general, RFK used the office aggressively to pursue organized crime and, later, to assist the civil rights movement in the South. Largely because he was perceived as his brother's closest confidant, his role in the administration transcended his office.
Perhaps no other attorney general has mattered as much since then -- at least not until Ashcroft.
Lyndon Johnson had trouble trusting any of his three AGs. Richard Nixon was personally close to his first attorney general, John Mitchell; but Mitchell was about politics, not policy. Nixon turned to Richard Kleindienst, who failed to forestall the Watergate tidal wave, then to Elliott Richardson, who was fired in Nixon's notorious "Saturday Night Massacre" after he resisted the administration's cover-up. (Mitchell eventually went to jail for his role in the scandal.)
Gerald Ford's choice of Ed Levi was all about getting the AG's office back to business as usual. Jimmy Carter thought the world of Griffin Bell, but the Georgian stuck around just two years and never settled into the capital. Edwin Meese, Reagan's AG after Smith, stood tall at the White House but was then diminished by a swirl of ethics questions.
In 1993, Bill Clinton's first two choices for attorney general both withdrew in controversy over their employ of illegal immigrants. He settled on Janet Reno, the first female to hold the job. Reno may have been on the tube nearly as much as Ashcoft, but her fame was mostly unbidden. She showed up most often at the witness table before congressional inquiries, defending the FBI debacle at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, or her decisions to appoint or not appoint special prosecutors through two turbulent Clinton terms. Her own regular news conferences were low-key affairs where she strove not to make news, and regularly succeeded.
Ashcroft is another kind of political animal entirely. He came to the office after nearly 30 years in politics that included 22 years as an elected statewide official (eight as governor, eight as state attorney general and six as U.S. senator). While a senator, he had been part of the chamber's conservative hard core and the first senator to call for Clinton's resignation. He was doctrinaire on economic and social issues alike, but he was best known for his anti-abortion zeal and his opposition to a federal judgeship for the lone black member of the Missouri Supreme Court.
Ashcroft has also disquieted some by wearing his personal religious faith on his sleeve. The son and grandson of ministers in the Assemblies of God, a fast-growing branch of Pentecostalism, he is notably abstemious in his personal habits and devoted to his avocation of gospel singing and songwriting. After a February speech in Charlotte, N.C., the baritone attorney general surprised his audience by belting out his latest composition, "Let the Eagle Soar."
But if Ashcroft's reputation for uncompromising conservatism has sometimes cost him in career terms, it has also been his source of resilience. And he has had opportunities to bounce back thanks to a politician's supreme blessing -- good timing. He won his governorship in the GOP landslide of 1984. When he lost a bid to be national party chairman in 1993, he was available to run for a surprise Senate vacancy the following year, in the GOP landslide of 1994. And when he lost that Senate seat in 2000, he was available for his current assignment.
Up until then, Ashcroft had not been close to Bush or his Texas inner circle, and he was apparently not their first choice for attorney general. But Bush and company wanted to please social conservatives -- particularly religious activists -- with the overall tenor of their cabinet selections. Putting Ashcroft at Justice closed that sale.
It only confirmed Ashcroft’s appeal to the party's conservative base that his nomination provoked a fight in the Senate. After contentious hearings and weeks of heavy lobbying, 42 Democrats voted against Ashcroft's confirmation.
It was by far the most negative reaction to any of Bush's appointments, and also the most votes ever cast against an attorney general's nomination. The heavy opposition was especially surprising given Ashcroft's status as a former senator, and a very recent one at that. Some Democrats suggested the vote demonstrated they had the numbers to filibuster and kill a truly distasteful nomination -- perhaps one to the Supreme Court.
Ashcroft began his term attempting to lessen this resistance. He appointed an African American as his deputy attorney general. He met with the Log Cabin Republicans, the party's best-known gay organization. He tried to mend fences within the party and beyond.
But all this was eclipsed when the hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11. Ashcroft saw his mission in sweeping terms. As he later told a Senate hearing, that mission is "to mobilize the resources of the Department of Justice toward one single overarching and overriding objective: to save innocent lives from further acts of terrorism."
The legislation Ashcroft and others fashioned and brought to Congress sought extraordinary executive powers, many invested in the attorney general's office. At one time or another, Ashcroft has sought the authority to wiretap attorney-client consultations and to hold non-citizens indefinitely without an evidentiary hearing or even an arraignment.
Testifying before a Senate committee on the Patriot Act, Ashcroft warned all "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty... My message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends."
This kind of single-minded determination has occasionally brought disapproval for the attorney general from the right as well as from the left. Libertarians and conservative privacy activists worry that the expanded powers of the current administration will remain in place and empower another, less friendly one down the road.
But Ashcroft remains, as ever, committed to what he calls "the overarching and overriding objective." For now, the goal is defeating the terrorist threat to America. Later, there may be time for other goals.
Return to Part One.
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