The Fight for Justice

His opponents call John Ashcroft an extremist. So why did George W. Bush think he was picking an Attorney General who'd be a cinch to confirm?

So you fought a long and painful battle to become President of the U.S., and it will soon, at last, be Inauguration Day. The Bible your dad used is back for the swearing in, 16,000 yellow roses, 500 lbs. of peach cobbler, tons of fireworks and Ricky Martin are all being readied for the gala celebrations, and you have only yourself to blame if all people remember from this historic week is the historically ugly struggle you ignited in the halls of the U.S. Senate. George W. Bush says he picked John Ashcroft, his nominee to become Attorney General, because Ashcroft is "a good man...a good attorney." Both in public and in private the Bush team is confident he will be confirmed. But the team can only begin to calculate the cost. Ashcroft's nomination has become the latest battle in America's Forty Years' War, a fight over race and culture and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to the Clarence Thomas hearings to the showdown in Tallahassee that gave Bush his presidency in a way that left many black Americans feeling that their voices and their votes did not count. Now the President who promised to be a uniter, not a divider, faces opposition to Ashcroft from virtually every liberal interest group: feminists, greens, gay-rights and gun-control advocates and, above all, civil rights organizations that charge Ashcroft with exploiting race for political gain throughout his career.

And that means that the President-elect, who told TIME several weeks ago that the greatest misconception about him is that he is racially insensitive, is now defending a key nominee in a fight so fierce it may once again be hard to tell the difference between winning and losing. There are Democrats publicly denouncing Ashcroft and privately praying he survives, so they can raise money and inflame partisans for years to come. There are Republicans publicly pledging their support and privately wondering why Bush chose a man who all but guaranteed that the era of good feeling would be over before his presidency even begins.

Is it possible that Bush did not see this coming? He told friends he thought Ashcroft would sail through because the Senate protects its own, the Republicans would support whatever a new President wanted, and Ashcroft believed he had the Democrats under control. It is true that Bush spent many days and nights of the Florida war down at his ranch with the TV off and the radio turned down. Was that cool detachment, as his aides claimed, or does he perhaps not see the depth of the wounds he is so confident he can heal?

Bush said last week he had talked at length with Ashcroft, especially about civil rights, and was convinced of his integrity and his fairness. They are in some ways kindred spirits, though Bush came late to the values Ashcroft has always held. Sources tell TIME that Bush was thinking about Ashcroft as a possible Attorney General as early as March 1998--a full year before Bush admitted he was running for President. (Bush didn't know him well, but Bush's father did--and had even considered him for Attorney General in 1991.) Bush has mentioned Ashcroft in sentences that also include the words Supreme Court. "I like him not only because he's a born-again Christian," Bush told a friend, "but because he's a Governor. He knows how to compromise."

But does he? Ashcroft is also a man who said there are two things you find in the middle of the road: "a moderate and a dead skunk. And I don't want to be either one of those." To his conservative allies, he is St. John the Divine; to opponents, all the talk of his integrity and personal grace masks a record from deep right field. But Ashcroft is also more complicated than the cartoons suggest. If he is so polarizing, how was he elected five times in a swing state? Is he the libertarian who fought alongside liberals to keep the government from prying into encrypted computer files or the bedroom policeman who opposed an ambassadorial candidate on the grounds that he was openly gay? Personally abstemious, he banned alcohol from the Governor's mansion during his eight years in office and vetoed a bill allowing Sunday alcohol sales, and yet his fifth largest campaign contributor was Anheuser-Busch. He has worked fervently to outlaw all abortions unless the mother's life is at risk, and yet his website touts his record and priorities as Governor and Senator and makes no mention whatsoever of abortion. What do you make of a man who is caricatured as Cotton Mather but who is known among his friends for his gospel singing, piano playing, his love of dirt bikes and his ability to spear a carp on a 12-ft. pole? What do you make of a man who has in his barn a 7-ft. statue he crafted of the Statue of Liberty? He made it of barbed wire.

Ashcroft grew up in rural Springfield, Mo., a green and rolling part of the state that has voted Republican since the Civil War. Back when Missouri sent 10 Democrats to Congress, Springfield was the lone Republican holdout. It was free-labor, antiunion territory, with antislave, Bible-belt, mountain people. Young John was the middle son of a renowned Pentecostal educator and minister. His was a strict and loving household, childhood friends say, where smoking, drinking and dancing were forbidden, and Sundays were for prayer and study, not work or play. When John was a teenager, he and his brother Wesley used to spend weekends at their family's cabin on the Lake of the Ozarks. John would always say to his brother, "Wes, what is our objective for the weekend?" It had to be something they had never done before, like water-ski on one ski or barefoot or on canoe paddles. "John was never satisfied until he got it perfected," says his old baby-sitter Norma Champion.

Ashcroft was a big man at his high school; he aimed higher than the average Springfield kid, went East to college and arrived at Yale just a few years before Bush. A childhood friend says Ashcroft's father had given him the name of an Assemblies of God church in New Haven, and Ashcroft duly showed up his first Sunday and announced his presence to the minister, who was not accustomed to seeing many Yalies in his congregation. He saw Ashcroft every week for four years.

After law school at the University of Chicago, where Ashcroft met his wife Janet, he taught law for five years in Springfield. Without a whole lot of plotting--he noticed the Republican congressional candidate was unopposed in the primary--Ashcroft ran for Congress in 1972. "It is not logical," his father recalled his son saying, "to criticize the government if you aren't willing to do your part to improve it."

Ashcroft lost that race but got a break in 1975, when he was named an assistant state attorney general under John Danforth. Ashcroft found himself working in a 16-ft. by 16-ft. office in Jefferson City alongside another Danforth protege whose career was on the rise: Clarence Thomas. The two men could not have been more different. Thomas was more liberal then, with an easygoing manner and appetite for night life. Ashcroft was "prim and proper," a colleague recalled, and Thomas loved to make sport with him, get under Ashcroft's skin. At times Ashcroft would leave a room when his colleagues joked around or waxed profane. Ashcroft and Thomas did share a deep knowledge of the Bible, but it didn't always bind them. Ashcroft often quoted Scripture to make a point, only to have Thomas cite a verse making precisely the opposite point.

Ashcroft became attorney general in 1977 and proceeded to build his reputation and power base opposing court-ordered school desegregation in St. Louis and Kansas City. He fought a 1983 voluntary-busing scheme for St. Louis, even though the 22 school districts in the surrounding white suburbs--where 12,000 inner-city kids would be transported every year--approved it. Among other things, he inveighed against the financial burden that the desegregation order imposed on the state--upwards of $100 million, he said, doubling the true cost, critics charged. Ashcroft appealed the federal-court ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. "The 22 school districts' agreeing to take this step was extraordinary," says William L. Taylor, who represented the N.A.A.C.P. and a class of black schoolchildren as plaintiffs. "You'd think a state leader like Mr. Ashcroft would recognize that and support it as an act of racial reconciliation."

More incendiary, given the current climate, are charges that Ashcroft worked to suppress black voter turnout by twice vetoing laws that would have promoted voter-registration efforts in the City of St. Louis, which is half black and heavily Democratic. Voter registration there was the lowest in the state, Democrats charge, largely because the Ashcroft-appointed St. Louis election board, unlike boards in other counties, failed to deputize groups like the League of Women Voters to help increase voter registration. Ashcroft vetoed bills that would have ordered the board to do so.

But Ashcroft was a popular Governor; he balanced eight straight budgets, kept taxes down and poured money into education. The closest thing to scandal to touch him as Governor came in 1990, when his wife ordered library officials to open the Missouri State Library on a Sunday night so that one of the Ashcrofts' sons could research a homework assignment on the Elizabethans.

When Ashcroft arrived in the Senate in 1995, he suffered from a condition common to Governors who make their way to the Capitol. "He had a difficult time being a legislator," says a Republican Senate source. As Governor, Ashcroft could make policy by signing an Executive Order, casting his veto or using his bully pulpit. But to make policy in the Senate, he had to cajole and flatter fellow Senators--skills Ashcroft had never mastered. He could also be hard to pin down ideologically: he fought for flex time for workers and cutting regressive payroll taxes. Ashcroft's greatest liability, says a Republican warrior working on his defense, "is the rigidity. There are issues on which there is no other hand. That is what may catch some people up short."

Ashcroft's signature legislative victory came during the 1996 welfare-reform effort, when he crafted the charitable-choice provision, which made it easier for religious groups to receive government money to provide social services like drug-treatment and job-training programs. Ashcroft defenders point to charitable choice as evidence of his ability to weave his private religious convictions into creative public policy. "You don't want government to turn religious groups into government agencies," says Joe Loconte, a specialist in church-state relations at the Heritage Foundation. "Figuring out how to get public money to religious groups--that was the lawyer part; doing it in a way that respects the integrity and spiritual mission of the groups--that was the Christian part."

Ashcroft spent much of 1998 pondering a run for the G.O.P. presidential nomination but dropped out before the year was over. Asked afterward if he was glad not to have people "poking and prodding" him to campaign everywhere, Ashcroft said, "The only person poking and prodding me, was me."

The strength of Ashcroft's personal beliefs is what scares so many people and thrills so many others. That issue was revived last week as the newscasts replayed his remarks at Bob Jones University, an ode to a country that has "no king but Jesus," which sent a shudder through the ranks of First Amendment watchdogs. Being Attorney General is not just about enforcing the law, it is also about changing it, deciding which laws to challenge, how aggressively to prosecute and where to throw your best lawyers. Women's groups question his willingness to enforce laws protecting access to abortion clinics; consumer groups wonder how aggressive he will be on antitrust matters. When religious as well as legal principles are at stake, which ones prevail? In a nationally known right-to-die case, Pete Busalacchi battled Ashcroft for years over the right of a parent to end the life of a comatose child with no hope of recovery. The long fight left Busalacchi bitter. "It was a matter of one person in a high position inflicting his religious beliefs onto a family," Busalacchi told TIME. "Is John Ashcroft's religion better than mine?"

But Ashcroft's defenders can point to the times when he enforced laws to which he was personally opposed, and vice versa. As state attorney general he once argued against the dissemination of religious material on public school grounds, even though he personally favored it. As Governor he was elected at the same time the state approved a lottery, and it was his job to create and administer it. Ashcroft calls gambling a "cancer" and thinks lotteries take money from poor people; but he duly named a commission, crafted the rules and worked to make sure that there was no corruption.

It may seem surprising that a deeply religious Pentecostal would choose to make his career in politics, a profession in which the deal very often buries the ideal under a pile of cheap excuses. But to someone like Ashcroft, if you believe it is your duty to serve others, then the ultimate service is politics. He believes it so deeply that when he lost his Senate race in November, he had a party for his staff and another for his fund raisers and personally served the coffee and the ice cream. There were no cameras there to record it; it was all very private and very symbolic of how he sees his role.

Friends say Ashcroft's defeat did not leave him bitter; his loss, after all, was nothing compared with his opponent's. He had been battling Mel Carnahan, the man who had succeeded him as Governor. It was a fierce and unfriendly contest right up until the day three weeks before the election when Carnahan and his son died in a plane crash. Ashcroft's graceful handling of the tragedy and his narrow defeat at the polls ensured that among other things, it would be Carnahan's widow Jean--who was sworn in to the Senate in her late husband's place--who will be introducing Ashcroft to the Judiciary Committee this week.

At Bush's transition headquarters in Washington last week, where everyone was distracted by the spectacular self-destruction of Labor nominee Linda Chavez, aides were slow to notice that the Ashcroft nomination was taking on water. Republican Senators began to grumble about sloppy Bush teamwork; some friendly Democrats had praised Ashcroft initially, but then Bush aides sat on their lead. Senators like New Jersey's Robert Torricelli went from lauding Ashcroft as "a good choice" to setting conditions for his support. "Now these Democrats have the opportunity to back away," gripes a senior G.O.P. Senate aide.

Bush's political advisers decided to keep Ashcroft under wraps, away from the press. "They hope that if they don't have John talk," says an Ashcroft partisan, "the conversation will cease." But it had already become clear that Ashcroft's vote count had fallen from 70 to around 60 as the interest groups on the left were able to concentrate their fire on him. G.O.P. leader Trent Lott announced last week that all 50 Senate Republicans were lined up to confirm--it takes only a simple majority--but that was as much a brave hope as a real prediction. Just one Republican defection could unify the opposition and sink Ashcroft's nomination.

So Lott administered daily medicine to wobbly G.O.P. moderates; the main concern was Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, an experienced renegade who is sensitive to his state's powerful labor groups. Late last week, Republican sources tell TIME, Ashcroft was quietly advising allies that he had secured private promises of support from 11 Senate Democrats--which, if they held tight, would be more than enough to earn him the job. Just in case, the Ashcroft Defense League rolled out its counterattack last week. Grass-roots campaigns and phone banks were slapped together. Pat Robertson, head of the Christian Coalition, promised to deliver pro-Ashcroft phone messages to half a million of his supporters.

It has been clear since the day Bush announced the nomination that the flash point would be Ashcroft's opposition to Ronnie White, the first black Missouri Supreme Court justice, whom Ashcroft almost single-handedly shredded when Clinton nominated him for the federal bench. First, Ashcroft held up the nomination for nearly two years, as he had many other Clinton appointments. Then, as the vote neared, Ashcroft homed in on a single dissent in a death-penalty case to argue that White was "pro-criminal." White's defenders said this amounted to pure character assassination; White had voted to uphold the death penalty in 41 out of 59 cases. Four of Ashcroft's judicial nominees, they pointed out, voted to overturn the death penalty more often than White had. But that didn't stop the Senate from voting White down along party lines, the first judicial nominee to be defeated on the Senate floor since Robert Bork 12 years earlier.

As so often happens, the White case was more complicated than it looked. Civil rights groups point out that Ashcroft also opposed Clinton's nomination of David Satcher, a black physician, for Surgeon General. But Ashcroft cited Satcher's support of partial-birth abortion as the basis for his opposition, and it is possible--many in Missouri think it probable--that White too ran afoul of Ashcroft because of abortion. White helped block a strong antiabortion measure when Ashcroft was Governor, and White was a committee chair in the state assembly in the early 1990s. Ashcroft may have viewed that bill as his last chance of getting a test case before the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Ashcroft brought White down but hurt himself and some in his party in the process. Republican moderates recall a G.O.P. lunch just before the White vote, when Ashcroft and fellow Missouri Senator Christopher ("Kit") Bond stood up to galvanize the caucus to vote en bloc against White. Senators usually defer to the home-state lawmaker on nominations and rarely investigate a nominee's background. But neither Ashcroft nor Bond ever mentioned during the meeting that White is African American. This may have been an example of color-blind politics, but for the moderates, voting against a black judge was always politically dangerous, and many might not have done so if they had known White was black. Some even felt that Ashcroft had deliberately deceived them.

And yet this episode, which they all cite today, has since had a strange way of uniting moderate Republicans behind Ashcroft. They became equally angry over what they considered a mudslinging campaign from the White House, civil rights groups and the Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, Patrick Leahy, in the aftermath of the vote. "Every Republican who voted against White was branded a racist," says Republican Committee member Michael DeWine, who is proud of his civil rights record. However painful it will be to relive the White vote, it would be hard for any Republican to change his mind now.

If White hopes for any kind of vindication when he is finally able to face his accuser in the ring, it may mean he does not know what the Republicans are prepared to do to win this. They threatened to call Kenny Jones, the Moniteau County, Mo., sheriff whose wife and three deputies were killed in 1991 by James Johnson, the convicted killer whom White wanted to be granted a retrial. Even beyond that case, the Republicans are prepared to argue that White was unfit for the federal bench; they are threatening to dredge up his law-school grades, his bar exam, his record as a lawyer and even details of his family life to prove Ashcroft was right about White. "People who knew about Ronnie White were willing to leave a lot of this alone," says an Ashcroft ally, "but now that's not going to be possible." But Republicans are also lining up counterarguments to the civil rights assault. Ashcroft, they point out as an example, signed Missouri's first hate-crime law and has voted for 26 out of 28 black judges. Besides, they add, he is squeaky clean, smart and a more experienced prosecutor than any of the past five Attorneys General.

It could be that Ashcroft's fate will turn on how many Democratic Senators want to teach the nominee a lesson about fair play and equal justice. White was by no means the only judge Ashcroft tripped up; Ashcroft was notorious for blocking all kinds of appointments, from the openly gay ambassadorial nominee James Hormel to Susan Oki Mollway, the first Asian-American woman to serve on the federal bench in Hawaii. In Hormel's case, Ashcroft's objections had nothing to do with his qualifications and everything to do with his lifestyle. Ashcroft would refuse even to meet with judicial nominees he opposed to hear their side of the story. "I have found him on a personal basis to be very cordial and courteous," says Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who claims he hasn't yet made up his mind on how he will vote. "But when we have run into political differences, I have found him to be very rigid and inflexible."

Only a few Senators will talk about it openly, but the feeling runs strong among Democrats that what was good for their nominees may now be good for Ashcroft--even if he is ultimately confirmed. Senators traditionally respect a President's right to pick people who share his views; but, Democrats charge, that was one tradition Ashcroft did not honor himself. "Many of the pleas for fairness that will be made at his hearing were the same pleas that we made of him during the past few years when it came to judicial nominees," Durbin says. "You can understand why a lot of us are listening to these pleas for fairness with mixed feelings."

--Reported by Ann Blackman, James Carney, Massimo Calabresi, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/Washington

To talk with TIME correspondent Michael Weisskopf about the Ashcroft story, go to AOL live on Wednesday at 7 p.m. E.T.