The U.S. Attorney General -- Janet Reno -- Despite Her Turbulent Tenure, She Has Maintained High Profile

THIS WEEK, after a gunman hurt five people for being Jewish, then killed a postal worker for being a minority, Janet Reno stressed the issue of mandatory licensing of handguns.

WASHINGTON - Even before Attorney General Janet Reno arrived in Washington, her aides hung on her office wall a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, her dashing predecessor. A photo mounted nearby shows Reno and President Clinton admiring the portrait, with a note from Clinton that says in part, "Someday people will look at your picture like this."

"He's my favorite attorney general," Reno said recently. "He spoke for all America, and I think he spoke eloquently, and he saw what can be done if you give people an opportunity to do their best."

Six years later, Reno is this century's longest-serving attorney general, with a presence matched by few of her 77 predecessors. Against the backdrop of the idealistic aspirations expressed by the Kennedy portrait, her tenure as the first woman to run the Justice Department has been traumatic, turbulent and infused with raucous politics.

Crises from the start

A month after Reno was sworn in, the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, erupted in flames when she sent in federal agents to end a siege of the compound, and the crises never abated after that. The FBI laboratory was in scandal. Reno and Microsoft faced off in a massive antitrust case. An investigation of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta became a major embarrassment.

Reno had to name an unprecedented seven independent counsels to investigate the administration of which she is a part. She faced furious attacks for her handling of the campaign-finance controversy. She endured calls for her resignation over suspected Chinese espionage at U.S. nuclear laboratories.

Through it all, Reno, 61, has become one of the best-known, most popular and controversial Cabinet figures since Kennedy himself.

With her 6-foot-1 frame, her over-the-spectacles glare and her hands trembling from Parkinson's disease, Reno has not only been at the center of government action, but also has become the nation's unlikeliest cultural icon, gracing tabloids, sitcoms - even New Yorker short stories.

When a published report surfaced recently saying that Reno is moving closer to taking a job as a law-school dean, she vehemently denied it, insisting she plans to serve out her term. "I always take it a day at a time, but I know of no reason why I would change," Reno said.

Even if she stays, Reno will be heading into the final stretch as attorney general. Few major initiatives can be launched at this stage, and staffers will begin leaving soon.

Will history in fact view Reno in the same light as some people view Robert Kennedy? Has she succeeded in matching not only Kennedy's impact, but also the aspiration for justice that he rightly or wrongly came to symbolize?

Peter Edelman, who worked for Kennedy and was co-chairman of Clinton's Justice Department transition team, gave a mixed answer.

`Cut from the same cloth'

"At the level of a commitment to justice, being a principled person, someone who really believes the Department of Justice ought to be a Department of Justice with a capital `J,' Janet Reno and Robert Kennedy are cut from the same cloth," Edelman said.

But Clinton's centrist, careful politics have sharply curtailed Reno's agenda, added Edelman, who resigned a post at the Department of Health and Human Services to protest Clinton's welfare policies.

"It is too bad the rest of the administration has not been of a piece with the kind of performance she could have delivered," Edelman said. "She has to espouse or live with policies with which she doesn't agree."

Reno opposes capital punishment, for example, but has presided over an expansion of the death penalty and a cutback on death row appeals. She questions the effectiveness of harsh mandatory sentences but has seen the federal prisons fill to bursting. She feels that crack cocaine possession is punished too harshly compared with possession of powder cocaine, but has been unable to change that. She has been unable to implement the array of alternative punishment programs she deeply believes in.

On a recent morning, Reno sat on a beige couch in her Justice Department office and reflected on her turbulent tenure. She spoke softly, seeming much more relaxed than in her public appearances. Her modest wood-paneled office shows few of the trappings of her enormous power, though a huge, forbidding-looking telephone with a White House seal sits behind her desk. Shelves of law books reach to the ceiling.

"I'm reminded of what (Eisenhower-era) Attorney General Herbert Brownell is supposed to have said - and I'll leave the language out - `This job is just one blank-blank thing after another,' " Reno said. "I don't feel quite that way. After 15 years as state attorney in Miami, what others call turbulence, you expect that to be part of your job."

Really loves going to work

"This job has been the most wonderful a lawyer can have - trying to use the law the right way to help the American people," she continued. "That, inevitably - and public service, inevitably - has its frustrations. But there hasn't been a morning yet that I haven't looked forward to going to work." Then she laughed, as though realizing that sounded a bit rosy given the recent past. "There are some days I could change," she conceded.

Reno has undeniably stamped her style on the Justice Department.

She gave her congressional liaison, Andrew Fois, the name of "Eeyore," for example, because of his perpetually gloomy reports. Fois began bringing a puppet of the Winnie-the-Pooh character to staff meetings, sometimes having the puppet deliver his reports.

Reno is relentlessly informal. When she travels to small communities, local police often want to form a motorcade and roar through town; she will not let them. She does not fly first class, and she insists on going through metal detectors at airports.

Once, during a security alert in Madison, Wis., airport guards were randomly searching every 10th passenger, and by chance that included Reno. "The security guy was mortified, but she had her purse dumped upside down before he could say not to," recalled aide Nicholas Gess, who was traveling with her.

Reno is constantly approached, and sometimes she turns the tables. When she was hiking in California recently, a forest ranger approached and asked for her permit, and upon looking at it seemed to realize who she was. "I asked him, `If you were attorney general of the United States, what would you do to increase support for the U.S. Forest Service?' " Reno chuckled. "He gulped. We had a good talk."

Yet something more than popularity lurks here. The public's fascination with Reno includes an interest in the sexuality of this large, bespectacled single woman. "Saturday Night Live," in addition to its regular "Janet Reno Dance Party" segment, has aired a skit featuring Reno fantasizing about Clinton.

The Weekly World News tabloid once portrayed Reno in a bathing suit with a story asserting that Japanese men were "ga-ga" over the attorney general. The TV show "Ally McBeal" portrayed Reno in a bar being pursued by a lawyer desperate to caress the folds of her throat.

If the sometimes-unkind satires hurt Reno, she does not show it. "I stayed up late one night talking with friends and they said, `Let's turn on `Saturday Night Live' and see if you're on it,' and I was on it, and I hooted," she said. "I think it's important for people to be able to laugh."

Reno's popularity might be expected to translate into clout within the administration. But while she insisted that her disagreements with the White House are insignificant, it is clear that Reno has failed to persuade Clinton to champion some of her top goals.

Reno was Clinton's third choice, and he picked her only after his first two nominees ran into political trouble. He did not know Reno before choosing her; he based his choice on her reputation as Miami's popular, tough, innovative state attorney.

Clinton's and Reno's personalities are dissimilar - he is garrulous, she no-nonsense - and one event after another has made their relationship frostier. After all, Reno has spent much of her tenure investigating his administration.

Many believe that this very distance has protected Clinton, reassuring the public that a non-Clintonite is keeping an eye on the administration. Yet the aloofness cannot have helped Reno's policy agenda.

Reno took office seemingly prepared to completely rethink a national crime policy that had been marked for 12 years by ever-harsher prison sentences. Clinton was headed the opposite way, dead-set on shedding the Democrats' soft-on-crime image. He seized on initiatives like school uniforms and teen curfews, which were politically appealing but considered pointless by many criminologists.

Feelings of frustration

In private meetings, Reno expressed her frustration.

"If we were discussing school uniforms, she would kind of roll her eyes," said Kent Markus, a former Reno aide. At one meeting she vented her dismay at having to support curfews, he added. "She turns to me and says, `Oh, God, do I have to?' " Markus recounted. "She says, `When I was growing up, I would've been the one bringing the lawsuit challenging the curfews.' "

Another former department official said such disagreements affected her view of the White House. "She doesn't come to her positions by figuring out what's politically popular, and she doesn't respect it when others come to their positions that way," he said.

Reno compromised in many areas. For example, she worked hard for Clinton's signature 1994 crime bill, which aimed to put 100,000 police on the street, set aside millions for prisons, and expand the death penalty - not because she believed in the bill, aides said, but as a team player and because it included money for prevention.

"It's a damned shame," said Miami attorney Jeffrey Weiner, a longtime Reno fan. "A lot of people around the nation were ecstatic when she was appointed. Many of those people have been saddened - saddened for the nation and saddened for Janet as well, because a lot of her visions were not effectuated and will not be. She may not acknowledge that, but it is accurate."

Reno's defenders insist she has accomplished a tremendous amount by running the Justice Department in an enlightened way, working behind the scenes and speaking tirelessly around the country.

Reno has vastly improved relations between federal agents and local police, these supporters say. Drug courts and similar programs have proliferated with her encouragement. She successfully pushed the Brady gun-control law and the assault-weapons ban. She has pushed relentlessly for better lawyers for poor defendants.

Reno herself said she believes she has helped change the national conversation on crime, making it more bipartisan and refocusing it on children and communities. "I think the message is getting out," she said.

Reno's staffers are intensely loyal, yet complaints about her management style are easy to come by. The attorney general is notorious for asking four or five different aides to research the same question, without telling any of them that the others are also working on it, a tactic staffers have dubbed "quadrophonics."

Subordinates are virtually unanimous that Reno is a micromanager. She makes long lists of fairly trivial matters, they say, and assigns them to top officials who have far more critical issues to contend with.

Reno disputed this. "I don't think I micromanage," she said. "If I came back and said, `You shall do this,' that's micromanaging. But I come back and say, `So-and-so said they have a problem here. Is there anything we can do about it?' "

Whatever her success in controlling her department, Reno has been buffeted severely by outside forces. Few could have foreseen just how much the independent-counsel system would come to dominate her time in power, as scandal after scandal forced her to decide whether to appoint one of the freewheeling prosecutors.

The independent counsels will be remembered as a shadow on her tenure, as a sort of alternate Justice Department that functioned at the same time. At least 10 times Reno confronted allegations against top Clinton officials and had to decide whether to seek an independent counsel. Each occasion generated enormous pressure and a torrent of news stories, hampering her ability to focus on other subjects.

"She came in with a very big affirmative agenda, and spent easily half her time on one fire drill after another," said Reno's former deputy, Jamie Gorelick.

The system also affected Reno in a more personal way. Her steady refusal to appoint a counsel to investigate the political fund-raising of Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, despite many allegations of impropriety, prompted more questions about her integrity than any other episode.

Reno's response is simply that no charges have been made against Clinton or Gore that would merit an independent counsel. "She made the decision on the merits," insisted a former Justice Department official. "She has no great love for Bill Clinton. It wasn't a political decision. It was her understanding of the law, as well as the understanding of a lot of others at the department."

Reno's supporters cite her straight-arrow quality as one of her biggest contributions, saying that in private meetings just as in public settings she emphasizes doing the right thing.

"I don't think you can appropriately measure the relief for the department of having someone so honest, so fair, so almost entirely apolitical," Gorelick said.

Other, more concrete indicators also reflect well on Reno's tenure. The department's budget has grown from $14 billion to $20 billion on her watch. And crime has fallen every year that Reno has been the nation's chief law-enforcement officer.

Escaping with an old hat

As Reno's tenure nears its conclusion, some are inevitably wondering whether she will serve out her full term. The shaking from the Parkinson's disease that has afflicted her for several years began as a tremor in one hand but has become far more pronounced, and can be jarring to those who are not prepared for it.

Reno makes little effort to hide it. She once told Carl Stern, her former spokesman, that she had cut down on her anti-shaking medication because it was interfering with her sleep. "I said, `The shaking is quite visible,' " Stern recalled. "She said, `So I'll be an old lady who shakes.' "

The ailment is not impeding her work, Reno said. "It doesn't bother me any more than a stutter would bother somebody else," she said. "I feel good, and I just take it one day at a time."

Reno would surely be a top candidate for a university presidency or lucrative law-firm partnership after she leaves government, but said she has no long-term plans.

"What I would like to do is sail away and skin-dive and such on my brother's boat for a while, and let people forget what I look like, then put on my old hat and get in my truck and go across the country and see the places I've always wanted to stay in," Reno said.

The real Bobby Kennedy

Which brings one back to Robert Kennedy, who after leaving the Justice Department served in the Senate and ran for president. Despite her admiration for him, Reno hinted at being deeply aware of the gritty politics that lay beneath his idealistic sheen.

"That looks like such a visionary picture, the kind and gentle Bobby," she mused, referring to the portrait in her office. Then she walked to a bookcase and removed the photograph on which the painting was based, showing a much tougher-looking Kennedy.

"This is what it's taken from," she said. "The skeptical, shrewd eye. . . ."