The Attorney General Job? Ensuring Justice Is Done : Law: The Justice Department is not just a large-scale version of a big-city district attorney. The person in charge has a major policy role.

The Washington hysteria about the child-care arrangements of Zoe Baird and Judge Kimba M. Wood--and now apparently everyone under consideration for any Clinton Ad ministration job--has stifled discus sion about the real qualifications for the office of U.S. attorney general. It is a big job, and a tough one. The disdain for lawyers and the rule of law that has crept into the public discourse in the last two decades has increased the difficulties of the position--creating low morale and policy confusion in the Department of Justice.

There has not been an effective attorney general since the Carter Administration, and the Justice Department was then recovering its reputation after the work of the Nixon appointees--the only two attorneys general ever convicted of crimes connected with office. Janet Reno, the newest nominee for the post, has her work cut out for her.

If confirmed, Reno will be the 78th attorney general of the United States, and the 47th to head the Department of Justice. It seems that public perception, and perhaps President Bill Clinton’s perception, of the experience necessary to run the department is that it be in criminal-law enforcement--preferably at the local level. This is based on a massive misunderstanding of what the job entails.

The Department of Justice is not a large-scale replica of a district attorney’s office--even one in a major metropolitan area. It is instead an important federal bureaucracy with a multibillion-dollar budget. The attorney general is largely responsible for its policy direction, under the President. This means setting priorities, energizing career lawyers, identifying and implementing the legislative agenda and caring for the department’s image. By and large, however, the attorney general also has to be conscious of and responsive to her relations with Congress and the laws and directives it establishes.

The Office of Attorney General did not start out that way. It started as the lawyer to the President, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, with the added responsibility “to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned,” of which there were few at the time. The first attorney general, Edmund Jennings Randolph of Virginia, had a salary of $1,500, significantly below those of the secretaries of state, Treasury and war, and had no office or staff.

The Department of Justice was not put together until 1870. Before then, the attorney general had no power to supervise the work of the local federal district attorneys, or the legal staffs in the Cabinet departments. The attorneys general themselves, however, were invariably men of high professional and political achievement; nine in the first 150 years subsequently took seats on the Supreme Court, two as chief justice (Roger Brooks Taney and Harlan Fiske Stone).

Now the attorney general sits on top of four large institutions: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Each is growing fast and is, for the most part, out of the attorney general’s direct control. She can influence their direction to some degree, by having some say in who runs them--as is true now in the case of the FBI.

But Reno’s responsibility will be far larger than her authority. Every person convicted of a federal offense and sentenced to prison, for example, is committed “to the custody of the attorney general,” as if that were a personal matter. For years, the FBI carried out “black box” surveillance through electronic bugs installed by stealth, without the knowledge of the attorneys general supposedly supervising the bureau--every attorney general from Robert H. Jackson, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, to Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, under Lyndon B. Johnson, at least. And the DEA appears frequently to act out of control, violating its own rules.

The attorney general’s people have frequent and continuing contact with the courts. The Executive Office for the U.S. Attorneys has, at least in Washington, a loose supervisory function over the 90 or so U.S. attorney offices scattered throughout the United States and its territories, but actual supervision of the day-to-day work in those offices is impossible. The Criminal Division, one of the department’s important litigating services, cooperates with and advises on the criminal docket work in the local districts, but, by and large, does not control it. Contrary to the impression given in many political campaigns, including presidential races, the federal government--and accordingly the attorney general and the Justice Department--has little to do with the kinds of crime--ordinary street crime, murder, rape and assaults--that concern the average citizen.

Where the attorney general does have important power is in policy direction over areas of ambiguity. She can influence the direction of the Civil Rights Division in controversial matters, such as its litigating position on issues of affirmative action, school desegregation and minority voting-rights enforcement. There is an example of the latter now before the Supreme Court that was the subject of disagreement between the division head and the solicitor general, with the solicitor’s more conservative position prevailing. Were there an attorney general in place, she could decide between the contending positions.

The Office of the Solicitor General is indeed a powerful one, at least in tone and to some degree in influencing the direction of the Supreme Court. In 1981, William French Smith committed the department to present in the Supreme Court, as the position of the United States, the Reagan Administration’s social agenda on such issues as abortion, school prayer, access to the federal courts and the criminal-justice process and the like. It is doubtful that this heavy and predictable participation in Supreme Court litigation had much impact on outcome, but it did become a defining mark of both the Reagan and the Bush terms.

There are other less obvious areas where a forceful attorney general, with control of her agenda, can make a difference. Clinton will make many judicial appointments in the coming years--including probably one or more on the Supreme Court. It is to be hoped that the function of recommendations for these appointments will be moved back from ideological to professional criteria.

Finally, the attorney general can and should make sure that justice done by the department is nonpartisan, evenhanded and confined by the Constitution and rules of law, so that the department’s motto is fulfilled--”The United States wins its case whenever justice is done one of its citizens.”

The attorney general needs no special experience for this job. What Reno needs is a full commitment to the rule of law, an ability to command professional respect, wide-ranging administrative skills, a constitutional regard for an independent judiciary, a political habit of deference to Congress on matters that are its business and a continuous awareness that her client is the people of the United States.