From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
The Anti-Reno
John Ashcroft is a man of integrity. He couldn't be more unlike his predecessor.
The
abiding image of Bill Clinton's administration is not one of Monica Lewinsky,
nor any one of several vignettes from the impeachment, nor even that snapshot
from less degraded times of the president perched on a dais between Yitzhak Rabin
and Yasser Arafat. It is, instead, the image of a dread-stricken little boy, mouth
in midscream, face turned ashen from an onrush of terror, eyes fixed wide on the
barrel of a federal agent's gun.
The boy was Elian Gonzalez, and the image--can there be an American who does not know it?--is from the night when Janet Reno, Mr. Clinton's attorney general, dispatched an armed posse to seize the boy from the home of his relatives in Miami.
The Clinton years will be remembered almost as much for Ms. Reno as for the president himself. In a modern administration, the attorney general can erect the moral guardrails, as well as set a moral course, by deciding both what the Justice Department will pursue and what it will not. Under Ms. Reno, there were no guardrails and no compass. She was both rudderless and partisan, the administration's guardian angel as well as its biggest liability. She knew no nuance, nor subtlety, and her modus operandi oscillated between total inaction and astonishing overreaction.
On her watch, there was the Waco disaster, after which she should have resigned. There followed an unwavering refusal to appoint an independent counsel to probe Al Gore's fund-raising activities, a refusal that brought her into conflict with Louis Freeh, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Almost equally inglorious was the Justice Department's hounding and humiliation of Microsoft.
Most culpably of all, Ms. Reno was the brains behind the abduction of Elian Gonzalez, resorting to force in order to short-circuit a legal process that was not yielding the results that the administration hoped for. That abduction was, surely, the lowest moment in American civilization in the last decade, a terrifying episode in which our government appeared to take on, however briefly, the tyrannical nature ascribed to it by the most lurid, separatist militias.
Mercifully, Ms. Reno has but a few more days left in office. Of all the cabinet choices made so far by George W. Bush, the most instructive--indeed, in many respects the most noteworthy--is that of the man selected to do her job. There could not be a greater contrast of character than that between John Ashcroft, Mr. Bush's choice, and Ms. Reno.
Mr. Ashcroft is guided entirely, even if severely, by objective principle. He is a man of adamant moralism, with an oldfangled faith in the rule of law. He may not drink or smoke or dance, but he does have a sense of grace, not to mention a refreshing lack of hubris--witness his ceding of his Senate seat to the widow of Mel Carnahan, the Missouri governor, when he could have challenged an election in which a dead man emerged victorious.
Predictably, liberal critics are lining up to pillory him. The New York Times, in an editorial on Saturday, described his selection as "Mr. Bush's rightward lurch." The Times' choice of verb is revealing: In the liberal vocabulary, it is only to the right that people "lurch," in a movement that suggests a lack of control or judgment. When Mr. Gore started bashing big corporations during his election campaign, that was a neutral "shift" to the left.
Far from being a lurch, Mr. Bush's choice of Mr. Ashcroft is deliberate and controlled. It is designed to send out a simple message: My attorney general will be as unlike Ms. Reno as it is possible to be. He will, in fact, be the "anti-Reno," and it is no exaggeration to say that this country needs an anti-Reno as badly as it needs a new first lady.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays.
