Truth, Justice and the Reno Way

By NANCY GIBBS

Janet Reno does not rush to judgment. She says she is as concerned with protecting the rights of the guilty as with punishing them. This has never been an especially popular position. But Reno had never been tested quite as she was last week.

Day after day, the question flew at her: Why haven't you arrested the sheik? As federal agents continued to round up suspects in the plot to blow up New York City, spiritual leader Omar Abdel Rahman was left untouched. Senator Alfonse D'Amato, an assassination target, was holding angry press conferences. President Clinton was getting frustrated.

Still, Reno wouldn't be pushed by political considerations. She weighed the evidence against Rahman, including tapes of his followers accused in the bomb plot, and decided it wasn't enough. Besides, agents might learn more by keeping the militant cleric under surveillance. But then, on Thursday morning, Reno got a phone call.

U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who was tracking the case in New York, told Reno that the sheik seemed to be trying to wriggle out of the net. He and his followers had left his apartment the night before and sped away in their car, nearly losing the FBI agents following behind. The effort to flee finally provided Reno with a legal justification. She gave the O.K. for immigration agents to apprehend the sheik and told her top aides Webb Hubbell and Phil Heymann to work out the legal details.

On Friday night, after 20 tense hours of negotiations, the sheik emerged from a Brooklyn mosque with his followers, chanting "God is great," and turned himself in.

The White House has its Situation Room, the Pentagon its walls full of maps, but America's command center for fighting unconventional wars these days is Janet Reno's inner office. First it was the showdown with David Koresh in Waco, Texas, a biblical battle over lost souls; two weeks ago, it was terrorism, when she laid out for President Clinton the case against Iraq for plotting to kill former President Bush and tracked the serial bomber who wounded professors in Connecticut and California. Last week it was Sheik Rahman, when once again Reno's agents from the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were on the front lines. The Attorney General is the people's lawyer, America's Chief of Police. When she became the first woman to hold the job, Reno didn't know she was going to war.

As one 16-hour day gives way to the next, Reno can't afford to wait for the fires to die down so she can do the job she dreams of. Still fresh to her office, she is already plotting a revolution in law enforcement, in how America thinks about crime and punishment and how to have less of both. She wants the Justice Department to be clean and bold and free of expedient compromise. She wants government agencies to start talking to each other about how to address the root causes of crime. Above all, she wants to talk about children, about their pain and their needs and what makes the difference between growing up strong and growing up dangerous.

If Clinton and his soldiers have learned anything, it is that change comes in droplets, squeezed out like lifeblood. Reno came late to Washington, a third-choice candidate without a long-standing friendship with the President or his wife, without national stature, but with natural allies. She came alone, moved into an apartment furnished right down to the ironing board and the coffeepot, and set to work on an experiment in alchemy. But will it work? Will the most celebrated Cabinet member to storm the capital in years be able to turn raw personal popularity into hard political power?

There is one person in Washington, at least, who seems to think so. On the 100th day of his presidency, as his star was flickering and hers ablaze, Bill Clinton came to the Justice Department for the first time since the Waco debacle and addressed the ranks in the courtyard about his vision for a just society. Afterward he went up to Reno's small inner office and gazed at the picture near her desk of a windblown Bobby Kennedy walking alone on the beach. "One day," Clinton told his Attorney General, "people will look at your portrait this way."

Reno is pure oxygen in a city with thin air, and she has gone to its head. Senators say she is Clinton's most impressive Cabinet member by far; the New York Times called her "a prized asset." When fans surround the table where she's eating dinner with Barbra Streisand, it is Reno's autograph they want. Jay Leno called personally, hoping to get her on the show. He offered to move the taping to any time convenient for her.

No one could have predicted a few months ago that the most popular member of an Administration saturated with lawyers would be a lawyer herself; that she would surface from a process that barbecued two other prominent female attorneys. But if Clinton had had the luck and prescience to pick Reno first, he wouldn't have got her; back in November, when the President's staff was shuffling resumes, she was at the bedside of her mother Jane, an indestructible force in her life, who was dying of cancer. Had the President called, Reno wouldn't have come.

From the day three months later when Clinton and Reno first met and he offered her the job, their styles were, to put it politely, complementary. Where Clinton was twice shy, having been charred by his earlier nominations, Reno was blunt, irrepressible. White House officials tried to coach this daughter and sister of journalists on how to dodge reporters' questions gracefully. Abortion, for one, she was urged to avoid. "What the President of the United States told me as we started into the Rose Garden on February 11, 1993," she recalls, was, "Don't blow it."

So the question on abortion came. And Reno, being Reno, hedged as much as she was capable. "I'm pro-choice," she said flatly. End of coaching.

SWAMP THING

Reno's popularity has taken her by surprise, but she had not spent any length of time in the capital before. It is a city that loves a character, and the early profiles of her Florida upbringing invited an instant mythology. Here she came, trailing swamp stories and reptiles, a self-described awkward old maid with a sensible name and big, sensible shoes, a bracing contrast to the precious professionals that the city seasonally absorbs. "I can be impatient," she told reporters last week, preferring to skewer herself rather than let them do it for her. "I do have a temper. My mother accused me of mumbling. I am not a good housekeeper. My fifth-grade teacher said I was bossy. My family thinks I'm opinionated and sometimes arrogant, and they would be happy to supply you with other words."

Reno comes from a long line of memorable women. "Mother's mother and Father's mother were absolutely indomitable," says Janet's brother Robert Reno, a New York Newsday columnist. "All the women in the family were. The men were strong too. They just had no talent for marrying spineless women." Janet's maternal grandmother Daisy Sloan Hunter Wood was a genteel Southern lady who lost her own mother and two sisters to tuberculosis and instilled in her children and grandchildren a passionate commitment to duty and family. In World War II, daughter Daisy became a nurse, landing with General Patton's army in North Africa and marching on Italy. Another, Janet's Aunt Winnie, joined the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, an elite corps of civilian flyers who tested combat aircraft, towed targets for ground artillery practice and trained male pilots.

Toward the end of the war, when the WASPS were disbanded, Winnie came back to Miami with some fellow pilots, a glamorous, tanned, confident crowd who lived in a group house and gave flying lessons. "I thought, 'I can do that, I can do anything I put my mind to,' " Janet recalled, "because those ladies went out and flew planes."

Janet's mother Jane, coming of age during the Depression, took a bachelor's degree in physics and at 24 was about to go to graduate school at Columbia when she met and married Henry Reno, a 36-year-old police reporter for the Miami Herald. Tired of having his Danish surname, Rasmussen, mispronounced, he had picked his last name off a map of Nevada. The couple built a house out of cypress logs in the woods of rural Dade County; 43 years later, it survived Hurricane Andrew without losing more than a couple of shingles. In addition to the now legendary alligators, there were cows, beagles, macaws, raccoons, goats, geese, ponies, pigs and skunks (not descented), all welcome members of the famously unorthodox Reno household. "Daddy would come out of the bathroom and say, 'Would somebody get this' -- and you can interject pelican, otter, & boa constrictor -- 'out of here so I can take a bath,' " explains Maggy Reno Hurchalla, Janet's sister, a county commissioner in central Florida.

Henry Reno spent 43 years on the crime beat in a town soaked with ugly crimes, without ever becoming a cynic. He would tell his children stories of the cops and judges and officials who were most wise and compassionate and honorable. When Janet Reno grew up, she was shocked to learn that Henry had a reputation as a man who could fix parking tickets. But then she found out that her father had frequently been approached with ticket problems by people of limited means. Not wanting to humiliate them, Henry Reno had kept the tickets and paid the fines out of his own pocket.

STORMING THE CAPITAL

Such a colorful personal history guaranteed that Janet Reno would arrive in Washington and become, instantly, a cartoon. "She's so hard for this town to understand," says her law-school classmate Representative Pat Schroeder. Friends who have known Reno since her days as a chemistry major at Cornell, or as one of 16 women in a class of 500 at Harvard law, or as a powerhouse prosecutor in Miami, are amused at the caricature. "Everybody thought she was this li'l gal from the swamp," says longtime Miami friend Sara Smith. "They were patronizing her. Miami is a tremendously sophisticated city, and she had to do a remarkable balancing job in office. You don't go to Harvard and not take on some sophistication. I chuckle because they underestimated Janet."

Not anymore. Such is the power of her personal geometry that Reno towers above the countless new arrivals to the city. The last time such a crop of eager young technocrats arrived to take over the capital, Sam Rayburn surveyed the bushy-tailed crowd and told Lyndon Johnson, "Well, Lyndon, they may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff."

Reno ran five times, and kept winning by vast margins. That she managed to do so running as a liberal-minded, pro-choice Democrat in a deeply conservative county without hiding her principles, carries a lot of weight in the city of perpetual pandering.

Even her fiercest critics acknowledge her ethical hygiene. Here is a public servant who pays list price for a new car to avoid any charge of getting a sweet deal. In a department under fire for being deeply politicized and ethically challenged, drifting past successive scandals from B.C.C.I. to Iraqgate, employees consider her their best chance at redemption. Reno has, says an observer from Capitol Hill, "established a certain air of integrity that is emanating from that department. You cannot diminish the value of having the head of the Justice Department being recognized nationally for strength, integrity and honesty. That is certainly something that has not happened at Justice for the past 12 years. It's real corny, but it's real important."

If her popularity has a bleeding edge, it may be that it dates to one of the worst days of her life. On that now famous April afternoon when Reno went before the cameras to explain the disastrous finale in Waco, the peculiar laws of politics ensured that she would get all the credit for taking all the blame. The first image Americans held of their brand-new Attorney General was of a stern, sad, certain woman describing a terrible tragedy and using none of the greasy legal language that would have shielded her from blame.

Her performance won her the lasting loyalty of her own department. "She stood up and took a bullet for us," a veteran FBI agent says. But Reno may pay a political price. Much was made at the time of the contrast between her mea culpa and that of President Clinton, who vanished for hours before surfacing to claim responsibility. That contrast, which owes as much to Clinton's instincts as to hers, could strain the relationship between Reno and her boss. As supportive as he has been, and as grateful for having at least one folk hero in his Cabinet, Clinton may have got a lot more than he bargained for. She may be more than he wanted. And that makes for a complicated relationship.

THE POLITICS OF POPULARITY

"The White House likes her," says an Administration official, "but they have to like her. There would be no greater loss to our integrity than to have her leave or express dissatisfaction, so we can't cross her. She is simply too popular. It just so happens that she's very, very good and responsible. She's not personally ambitious. I don't think it's particularly important to her that the President like her. If she were power-mad, it would be dangerous."

If there is one criticism of Reno it is that she has a knack for what one White House official acidly described as "acquiring her popularity at the expense of the President." Though Waco was the first and most public incident, that dynamic surfaced again the next time Reno streaked across the % capital heavens. When the White House fired its entire travel department, charging seven workers with corruption, she slapped the White House publicly for using her FBI to justify the decision. White House aides grumble that Reno would have known about the FBI investigation had she bothered to read her In box before telling the Washington Post she had not been informed.

Next it was her loyalty to Lani Guinier, whose nomination as Assistant Attorney General Reno continued to support long after the rest of the Administration had decided to cut her loose. Reno, of course, had nothing to do with nominating Guinier in the first place. Like other picks for top jobs at Justice, Guinier had a long-standing connection with her Yale Law School classmates Bill and Hillary. But Reno came to genuinely like Guinier, and hoped to work with her. Once the President decided otherwise, White House officials complain, Reno still gave Guinier a room at the Justice Department to hold a press conference and blast the President for abandoning her.

From the first, White House aides have made it known to Reno's aides that they consider it important that top Justice appointees should be loyal to the President, not to the Attorney General. Of 13 principal aides, including Guinier, only four so far can be clearly identified as Reno's picks. Many were in the pipeline before Reno was selected. Webb Hubbell, the Associate Attorney General, is Hillary Clinton's former law partner and President Clinton's frequent golf partner. But Hubbell swears loyalty to Reno, and they have become fast friends in a very short time. Hubbell says he is certain about her loyalty to Clinton, and that loyalty has been rewarded, he says, with a profound respect for her by the President. "The President is very interested in her opinion," Hubbell says, "and one of the first questions out of his mouth is likely to be 'What does Janet think?' "

Reno did win the battle to name her own pick for the crucial Criminal Division, pulling in Jo Ann Harris, 60, a distinguished former prosecutor from New York, and Doris Meissner, an immigration-reform specialist, to head the INS. And, says a close adviser, "Janet has had total veto power over everyone. But she's not going to keep score. She doesn't think in those terms, and you couldn't get her to talk in those terms." Friends say Reno has no regrets about not being part of Clinton's inner circle. As a White House aide remarked, "The inner circle has shrunk to the size of a Cheerio, anyway."

THE FIGHT FOR THE CHILDREN

Lacking her own power base, Reno is spending much of her time campaigning for the issues she cares most about. Wedged into her busy days are speeches to government, law-enforcement and community groups whose help will be crucial to building the consensus she needs. She is fighting hardest on two fronts: children's issues and cooperation among government agencies. "We spend more money trying to determine whether people are eligible for services than we do in serving them," Reno says. "We've got to figure out how to take the federal bureaucracy and weave it together as a whole, so that we can reweave the fabric of society around our children."

In her years as a prosecutor, Reno saw firsthand the link between a miserable child and a vicious adult. She fought for better children's services, from health care to day care to preschool education, all on the grounds of crime prevention. She set up a one-stop child-support center, with everything from counselors and law-enforcement officials to medical personnel for drawing blood to confirm paternity. She was one of the first prosecutors around to come down hard on scofflaw spouses who skipped out on child support, prompting a disgruntled father to scrawl threatening graffiti on a sign near her home. Some critics charge that in her zeal she went too far; in 1984 her office came under fire for forcing confessions and railroading defendants in a high-profile child-abuse case.

Reno's prescriptions go well beyond the legal realm. She has advocated workdays that end at 3 p.m. so that parents can be home when their children get out of school. "There are children who, after school and in the evenings, are unsupervised and adrift and alone and fearful," she said last May in a speech to the Women's Bar Association. "And they are getting into trouble, and they are being hurt." Reno draws freely on the lessons of her own family. "It was my mother, who worked in the home, who taught us to bake cakes, to play baseball, to appreciate Beethoven's symphonies," she says. "She spanked us hard, and she loved us with all her heart. And there is no child care in the world that will ever be a substitute for what that lady was in our life."

Reno has no children and has never married. And yet her life is full of them; she is everyone's favorite honorary aunt. Over the years, she has been named in the wills of many friends as legal guardian for their children. That is how she ended up as guardian for the children of Al and Fran Webb, longtime friends who both died of cirrhosis of the liver less than a decade ago, leaving their 15-year-old twins in Reno's care. "Janet would have loved to have a relationship with a man and have children," says her friend Sara Smith. "But she's a very smart woman, and it was difficult to find a man who had both a sophisticated city mind and was an outdoor person -- and was not threatened by a successful woman."

Children seem to sense a powerful friend in Reno. This spring, when the Washington neighborhood of Mount Pleasant was being terrorized by a drive-by killer, she went to visit the local school. Standing before a roomful of children, she told them a story. "Less than a year ago," she began, "a great hurricane hit Miami, hit the area where I lived. And for three hours one morning, the winds blew very, very strong; roofs flew off, children hid under mattresses, they hid in the bathrooms. But the children were so brave and so wonderful."

Her story, aimed to inspire courage in the midst of fear, was well received. But then a little girl asked the question that Reno will never forget. "We want to go outside without no shooting, no killing," the little girl said. "We just want to go around having fun." Since the shooting, she explained, they had to travel in groups and stay inside. "When am I going to be able to go out and play?"

Reno still talks about that girl. "That child, and each of us, expects us to find the answer," she says, "and we can find the answer if we again approach the problem of crime, not with shrill political rhetoric, not of Republicans vs. Democrats, but of all Americans fed up with violence and willing to sit down and say, Let's approach it in the most commonsense, hardheaded way we can, and come up with answers that make punishment mean what it says."

HOLISTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT

It is on this subject that Reno seems willing to take the greatest risks. She has vowed to develop a crime policy that goes beyond what she skewers as the "demagogic promises to build more jails and put all the criminals away." For the past decade, she watched the prison population keep rising, right along with the crime rate, to the point that America passed South Africa as having the highest number of people in jail per capita. Reno shows remarkable interest in preventing crime rather than just punishing it, a shift in priority that, if she succeeds, could leave a lasting mark on law enforcement.

She argues that the worst, most violent criminals need to be locked up, permanently. But she knows that the states cannot build jails fast enough, particularly since the passage of mandatory sentencing laws requiring real jail time even for nonviolent drug offenders. By 1990, American jails were at 122% of capacity; nearly one-quarter of them were under court order or a judicial consent decree for overcrowding. That forced open the doors, as violent criminals won early release to make room for the flood of drug offenders.

Reno's alternative is a carrot and a stick: offer nonviolent addicts treatment and rehabilitation, and save the jails for the most unsalvageable thugs. The laboratory for her experiments in crime and punishment was Miami's long, hot "crack summer" in 1986, when police were bringing in hundreds of pushers and addicts a night. She later fought to get the local judges, police and public defenders to agree to special drug courts that would "sentence" nonviolent offenders to a yearlong drug-rehab and -education program. After the first year, 9 out of 10 graduates were still clean, and cities around the country began copying the idea.

"The idea of treating drug addicts in hopes they wouldn't come back to court was pretty radical -- especially for a prosecutor," notes John Goldkamp, a Temple University criminal-justice professor who has been studying the drug court. "She has launched a mini-movement in the courts across the United States." But Reno is no dewy-eyed optimist about such tactics. Goldkamp recalls an early meeting: "Reno said she was skeptical of fairy tales about the miraculous efficacy of the program on public safety, but she said if it delayed seeing drug addicts again in court, that was a real contribution."

None of this makes her sound much like a bleeding heart, but it was enough to raise alarms at the White House, which plans to ask Congress for 100,000 new cops. Reno's priorities, they complain, are too liberal and social-service oriented -- particularly at a time when the President is trying to restore his centrist reputation. Her assault on mandatory-sentencing laws horrified White House aides, who may agree that the laws don't work very well but are more concerned about what message they send. "There is some question about how ideologically in synch she is with the Clinton Administration," says one % official, though others privately note that staying in synch with so elastic a President means not believing in much.

And Reno, say those who know her best, believes in plenty. "Southern liberals are that way because they believe," says her sister. "You weren't a liberal because it was a fad or because you were supposed to. You weren't supposed to. So you did it from profound conviction." The real irony here is that Reno may be the New Democrat that Clinton both avoids and aspires to be. Her heart is big but her solutions are sound; she cares more for results than for labels, for ideas over ideology. If the White House is worried about taking the country in a new direction, perhaps it should send Reno on ahead as a scout. If she fails, she'll say so. And if she continues to get it right, she may be the one to lead the revolution.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami and Julie Johnson and Elaine Shannon/Washington