How To Pick An Attorney General

By Charles Bierbauer/CNN

WASHINGTON (Oct. 20) -- Two 12-foot tall statues -- one female, one male -- stand as symbols of justice at the Department of Justice.

"They pretty much reflect the ideals of justice," a department guide explains. "The woman is standing on a cloud. She has the Ten Commandments, and she thinks it's a pretty easy job. He's standing upon a hard rock with his arrows and his hand up saying: It's not quite that easy."

Tell that to Janet Reno, the nation's first female attorney general.

Reno is investigating alleged wrongdoings of the president who appointed her. She's been interrogated by Republicans in Congress about how she's conducting that investigation. And she's subjected to repeated public opinion polls telling her Americans want her to seek an independent counsel, though polls don't impress her.

Pretty easy job?

"I get a good night's sleep and get three square meals a day," Reno told a reporter who asked how she's bearing up. "I try to do the best job I can."

It may be a job where she can satisfy no one. It may be that doesn't bother Reno.

The attorney general's critics charge she's been protecting President Bill Clinton from a full-scale fund-raising investigation.

"This is something you might have expected from John Mitchell in 1973," House Speaker Newt Gingrich groused earlier this year.

Whatever else she is, including both thorn in Clinton's political side and shield from his political enemies, Reno is no John Mitchell. Mitchell was Richard Nixon's first attorney general. He went to prison for 19 months because he knew about the Watergate break-in plan and did nothing about it.

Attorneys general have had their own troubles with the law.

George Washington persuaded his personal lawyer Edmund Randolph to become the nation's first attorney general. Washington purportedly told Randolph it wouldn't hurt his private practice. Randolph was later charged with bribery.

Yet most, like Reno, have had to wrestle with the inherent conflict which makes the office both chief lawyer for the administration and chief law enforcement officer for the nation.

"It's not a job for the faint of heart because most of the serious problems in Washington generally end up at the Department of Justice," says former attorney general Dick Thornburgh.

Those problems are especially vexing when the president's involved, as Clinton is now. That's why Clinton has to have his own personal legal defense team. That's why after Nixon fired one attorney general -- Elliot Richardson -- who refused to do his bidding during Watergate, the rules governing independent counsels were rewritten to insulate them from presidential abuse.

Choosing an attorney general may be a president's most critical personnel decision. Independent or intimate? Counselor or crony?

Thornburgh did mop-up work in the Reagan Administration and then stayed on in the Bush Administration.

"One of the things George Bush was comfortable with in asking me to stay on as attorney general, he told me, was that I was a friend, but not a crony," says Thornburgh.

Clinton got neither friend nor crony by naming Reno. The distance of the relationship shows. Reno forced the president's hand by publicly declaring her desire to continue to serve in his second term when Clinton clearly would have preferred she go back to Florida.

Reno, a Miami prosecutor, was a third choice in the first place. The president wanted to name a woman. But his first two choices -- Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood -- could not pass Senate confirmation. They failed the nanny tax test.

With neither children nor spouse, Reno cleared that hurdle. She was even the star of the early Clinton White House -- a "10" in an administration of fours and fives. In part, that was because she was seen as someone who could walk away from Washington and had no political obligation to Clinton.

The irony in Reno's present situation is that she is accused of protecting Clinton even as she is proceeding toward prosecuting him. She has been maddeningly deliberate in her pace, but the White House has been purposefully plodding. When videotapes of the president's coffees with contributors finally materialized, Reno was unusually public in declaring she was "mad" at the White House.

So is a president better off with his closest friend in the job? If Clinton wanted a woman he felt he could trust, he might have picked his wife. After all, Jack Kennedy chose his 36-year-old brother Bobby. Of course, there are now anti-nepotism laws against that.

If a president can be frustrated by an attorney general who is too independent, he can also be embarrassed by one who is too close.

Ronald Reagan picked his old California chum Ed Meese, but Meese wound up the target of an independent counsel.

Even with Reno as attorney general, Clinton had Arkansas ally Webster Hubbell in the number two job at Justice. Hubbell went to jail for 21 months for bilking his law partners and clients.

The office is among the most demanding in Washington because of these built-in conflicts. Still, most of the nation's 67 attorneys general have neither tarred the office with scandal nor feathered it with cronyism.