Ashcroft's Way
America's top cop has been demonized and lionized. He's a complex guy all right, just not the guy everyone thinks he is
The small Cessna Citation was just over Grand Rapids, Mich., when the secure phone rang. Attorney General John Ashcroft listened intently, interrupting the caller repeatedly. After hanging up, he turned to his small staff. "The world," he said, "has changed forever."
The change wreaked by the September 11 terrorist attacks was greater for Ashcroft than for any other member of President Bush's cabinet. Donald Rumsfeld would have to torque the Pentagon bureaucracy in radically different ways to fight a radically different enemy. Colin Powell would have to recalibrate American diplomacy to deal with the starkly changed realities of the post-9/11 world. But Ashcroft, as the nation's top law enforcement officer, would have to turn more than a century's worth of jurisprudence on its head and begin enforcing the nation's laws in a fundamentally new way. Traditionally, the Justice Department's role was to punish miscreants after the fact. That, as President Bush told Ashcroft bluntly after the attacks, was no longer good enough. "John," Bush said, "don't let this happen again."
The attorney general, in a wide-ranging interview with U.S. News, said he has taken the president's message to heart. "I may be the person more responsible for trying to shape the national consciousness in saying that prosecution is not enough for the Justice Department anymore," he said. "It has to be actively involved in prevention. And in order to move an institution and its mentality, sometimes you have to draw very clear lines."
Clarity, however, has hardly been achieved. Ashcroft today is easily the most polarizing member of the Bush cabinet, and his policies are sure to emerge as an important area of contention between President Bush and whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Ashcroft's name alone is a guaranteed applause line for the Democratic hopefuls. Politics aside, the legal initiatives with which he is most closely associated have become increasingly controversial. Several federal judges and an appeals court in New York have challenged key Ashcroft policies, and the Supreme Court is set to review the issues later this year. Among the more than 9,000 career lawyers at Justice, for whom Ashcroft professes deep admiration, the attorney general is a divisive figure. "He's become so radioactive," says a Justice Department veteran who likes and respects Ashcroft, "that he couldn't announce a free school lunch initiative without people questioning it."
Jekyll and Hyde. For all of the controversy he manages to attract, John Ashcroft is one of the least understood men in Washington. Derided as a religious zealot by some, Ashcroft has never invoked religion in policy or procedural discussions, say colleagues, who add that they have never even seen him pray. Challenged during his confirmation hearings as insensitive to minorities, Ashcroft worships regularly at a mostly black church. An ardent opponent of abortion, Ashcroft is praised by pro-abortion-rights groups for prosecuting violence against abortion clinics. A longtime gun-control foe, Ashcroft has increased prosecutions of certain gun crimes nearly 70 percent over three years. "One of the things that's frustrating about watching from the outside is he's a very charming, intelligent guy," says James Comey, who was confirmed as Ashcroft's deputy a month ago and served as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan before that. "He's shockingly smart, but most people wouldn't think that. The guy is ferociously honest, but there are people who would not believe that. To some in the public, he is Darth Vader, but it's unfair because he's really not that way."
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