MS. RENO OBJECTS : CAN THE POPULAR ATTORNEY GENERAL MUSTER THE POLITICAL SAVVY TO SELL HER ‘TOUGH LOVE’ VISION OF JUSTICE?

JANET RENO’S VISION OF JUSTICE BEGINS IN A DINGY, OVERCROWDed Miami courtroom swarming with junkies. Anxiety and cynicism hover over the addicts filling the public viewing seats, the former emanating from those sincerely trying to kick their habit, the latter from a savvy few adept at playing the system. The new arrestees, handcuffed and sitting in the jury box, are a sorrier lot, dirt on their elbows, eyes glazed over, smelling of a night in the pen, smelling of failure.

Human failure is a familiar odor to a veteran prosecutor like Reno. It’s just that she’s less willing to cop to it than most of her peers. “Janet,” declares her longtime mentor Sandy D’Alemberte, “still thinks people can be saved. She still believes in redemption.” Evidence of that abounds in this drug court. The county-funded pet project begun during her 15-year tenure as Dade County state attorney gives drug users a chance to wipe clean their records if they complete an outpatient treatment program. Similar signs of Reno’s unwavering faith in human redemption are visible throughout southern Florida: in the domestic-violence intervention program she started, in the community policing team she helped form to clean up a crime-ridden Miami housing project, even in court programs with such flaky-sounding names as “Anger Control.”

Yet redemption is a tricky course. America has tried it before--in Great Society programs meant to lift potential criminals away from the roots of hatred, in rehabilitation programs designed to turn hardened criminals into productive citizens. But the expensive and often failed experiments of the ‘60s and ‘70s left a sour taste in the public’s mouth. By the Republican-dominated 1980s, fearful Americans were saying they wanted tougher law enforcement--more cops, more jails, longer sentences, more murderers sent to Death Row.

Into that political environment steps a blunt-talking attorney general with little patience for the usual back-scratching or even social graces that grease Washington politics. Echoing rarely noted comments by Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, Reno breaks with more recent predecessors by calling for “comprehensive programs that provide a balance between punishment and prevention.” In other words, lock up the hardened criminals and throw away the key, even if they are juveniles. But give those with a conscience, those who can still be turned around, a chance at a productive life. In these cases, Reno says, “certainty of punishment”--even in non-prison treatment programs--is more important than “length of punishment.” To her growing numbers of supporters, Reno’s message is common sense in the raw; to conservatives, it smacks of repackaged liberalism.

Which brings us back to Miami’s drug court because, let’s face it, what goes on in this motley hall of justice is Ed Meese’s worst nightmare: compassion for crooks. The presiding judge, former cop and former prosecutor Stanley Goldstein, doesn’t give up on many. Except for a handful of repeat offenders each day--to whom he bids a hearty “ hasta luego “ as they’re carted off to jail--Goldstein refuses to concede to failure, refuses because he knows the junkies who come before him are already programmed to fail.

The fragile excuses some of the arrestees give during their periodic check-ins with Goldstein--earnestly explaining why they missed treatment sessions or why they showed up for treatment with drug-tainted urine--elicit snickers even from the other addicts. But Goldstein listens, admonishes and sends them right back to the 18-month program. When they do graduate, the barely controlled chaos of his courtroom suddenly sounds like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “Was it worth it?” he asks one young man who is applauded by the crowd. “Don’t tell me. Turn around and tell them.”

“It was worth it,” the young man shyly mumbles to his fellow drug abusers. More applause.

“Now listen up,” the judge booms at his audience. “I want you to do something real corny, real square. When you go home today, I want you to pick up each one of your kids, I want you to hug ‘em, to kiss ‘em, to tell ‘em you love ‘em.”

“This ain’t like no court I’ve ever seen,” murmurs one scruffy young woman who’s clearly seen her share.

IF RENO SUCCEEDS IN CLEARING HER WAY THROUGH THE THICKET OF Washington politics, Americans will be seeing more and more of her brand of justice. Sitting in her Washington, D.C., office, far removed from the grit of a criminal court, Reno says she hopes to replicate programs like drug courts throughout the nation. “It’s one of the ways the Department of Justice can be instrumental in saying to (local communities), ‘Look, this works, this doesn’t work, this is what you should watch out for.’ ”

Reno is an attorney general who talks as much about rehabilitation as enforcement, who spends more time telling us how to prevent crime by reshaping the lives of children than proposing initiatives to battle crime. In contrast, when President Clinton talks about crime, his focus is on more cops, fewer guns and boot camps for young offenders. Those differences have led to some tension between the White House and Justice. Now, though, both sides are trying to portray a cozy relationship, particularly as Reno becomes an avid campaigner for the Clintons’ cherished health-care reform plan, which fits comfortably into her own agenda.

When Reno does talk about putting more cops on the beat, she concentrates on the need to join police with teams of social and health workers within the community, rather than operating alone from fortress-like substations. When she talks about sentencing criminals, she worries that tough, mandatory minimum sentences have filled limited jail space with two-bit crooks, enabling more dangerous criminals to get out early because of prison overcrowding.

After seven months on the job, Reno has become a folk hero in the media and on her nonstop speaking rounds. But inside Washington, she has been criticized for doing little besides talking about revolutionizing criminal justice. The Democratic crime bill that was two years in the making and is coming before Congress this fall would fund 50,000 new cops, shorten and limit Death Row appeals and make nearly 50 more federal crimes subject to the death penalty. Yet it contains few of Reno’s initiatives. And close observers don’t see any dramatic shift yet in the Justice Department’s criminal-justice priorities.

Moreover, Reno’s biggest battles are still to come. Some leading Democrats on Capitol Hill still feel compelled to adopt a tougher-than-thou stance. “Watch the debate on the crime bill this fall,” says one Administration official. “There will be plenty of machismo on both sides.”

On the other side of the aisle, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole generously calls Reno’s focus on root causes of crime, such as fatherless families, “a big plus because she has a lot of credibility everywhere she goes, and maybe we’ll start to listen.” But right now, key Republicans would rather build new prisons than start rehabilitation programs. “The attorney general is the chief law-enforcement official and her basic charge is protecting society against violent criminals,” says Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, who intends to brand Reno and the Administration as soft on crime during the crime-bill debate. “That kind of talk doesn’t substitute for getting violent criminals off the streets.”

Reno is also likely to take some hits from the right as she expands civil-rights enforcement. Already she’s filed two unprecedented cases against dental offices that allegedly discriminated against HIV-positive patients, and she’s indicated that protecting the civil rights of gays and lesbians will be on the agenda.

Still, Reno’s enormous influence on the criminal-justice debate outside Washington cuts across the political spectrum. She has, for example, persuaded the American Bar Assn. to broaden its criminal studies by examining the needs of children. “A lot of the agenda of the ABA is is being driven by Janet,” says former ABA president D’Alemberte. Meanwhile, William C. O’Malley, president of the more conservative National District Attorneys Assn., says Reno brings credibility to a debate that was already moving toward crime prevention.

“At the same time,” O’Malley pointedly warns, “there is a concern that traditional, trusted, tried-and-true law enforcement not be sacrificed. I do not see people going to jail who, in society’s interest, shouldn’t be there. I do see people not going to jail who should.”

And that could become Reno’s Achilles’ heel in pushing her agenda. In an era of limited resources, in a country where nearly 24,000 murders occur every year, are Americans willing to shift enforcement resources to longer-term efforts like prevention, rehabilitation and treatment? Reno supporters note that crime continues to rise, even though the U.S. prison population nearly tripled during the 1980s. And they cite public-opinion polls showing increased support for early childhood measures to prevent crime. Nevertheless, in a Los Angeles Times poll last month, 61% of respondents said the government should try more to punish criminals; only 25% thought more should be done to rehabilitate them.

Reno is adroit at using the public persuasion needed to shift those numbers. Before crowds, she’s expansive and warm, an accomplished politician and indefatigable hand-shaker whose passionate prose can move rooms full of power-players to the brink of tears. Whenever and wherever she speaks, the murmuring starts about how attractive she would look on a national ticket. It started after the Waco crisis, when a federal assault on a Texas cult compound led to the deaths of 81, including 25 children. Within days of that tragedy, Reno was applauded for her directness, her sincerity and her willingness to shoulder any blame. She emerged as the most popular member of the Administration.

But before supporters get too carried away by her political prospects, they should consider this: Reno is a lone wolf who isn’t always adept at playing ball inside the beltway. Though give and take in policy-making is nothing new to her--last summer, she helped negotiate the crime bill’s politically tricky Death Row appeals provision--in Cabinet meetings she has a reputation for firmly staking out a position. If compromises are to be made, they will be made later and through one of her underlings. And Reno can’t always be counted on as a loyal team player--as evidenced by her noncommittal reception to a proposal in Vice President Al Gore’s “reinventing government” report to merge the FBI with the Drug Enforcement Administration, an idea she was receptive to initially. “The President of the United States didn’t hire me to be a loyal soldier,” she has said about similar incidents. “He hired me to be a lawyer for the people.”

Her obsessiveness with doing what’s “right” can get in the way of doing business. “You never get any chits with Janet,” says Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber, who knew Reno when he was a juvenile court judge. “You always have to start from scratch.” Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, praises her “no malarkey, no waffling” style, but he adds that she resists accepting the political realities of getting legislation passed. Reno was so fixated on fashioning the right crime bill that Biden had to explain repeatedly to her why he had to omit the explosive issue of gun control to get enough votes. “Good political judgment,” he says, “is not her strong point.”

HE 6-FOOT-2 WOMAN WHO’S RATTLING THE WALLS OF JUSTICE IS A self-described “awkward old maid” who routinely compares her job to that of raising children. “It takes common sense, hard work, intelligence and an awful lot of love,” she said in a speech. “You’ve got to punish but punish fairly. You’ve got to make sure the punishment is carried out. But as you punish, you’ve got to provide a nurturing environment where that child can grow as a strong, constructive human being.” She delivers her sermons in what she calls “small, old words,” in a deep, flat voice softened by a Southern lilt. When you listen to her, only one other politician comes quickly to mind: Harry S. Truman, her longtime hero.

The 55-year-old has no qualms about playing the part of the nation’s hall monitor on social values, peppering her speeches with words such as “respect,” “civility” and “courtesy.” If she’s talking to a group of high-level professionals, the workaholic attorney general chides them for spending too much time pursuing their careers and not enough with their children. If she’s speaking before lawyers, she suggests that they put down their legal briefs and volunteer as advocates for a neighborhood block. She wants TV producers to favor education over violence in children’s programming; she wants the media to curb its negativity and spin.

That kind of talk infuses even the politically thorny issue of immigration, which is controlled by Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service. Reno runs against the tide of anti-immigrant sentiment by frequently referring to the strength and diversity that migrating Latinos brought to her hometown of Miami. Even illegal immigrants, she says, deserve to be treated with dignity. At the same time, though, she is increasing the size of the Border Patrol and plans to develop more effective means of deploying personnel and technology along the border to keep illegal immigrants out. Reno is well-liked within the Justice Department for her openness and accessibility, soliciting complaints through a new hot line and sending personalized scribbles to employees who’ve suffered tragedies. She says she intends to implement parent-friendly policies, such as flex-time. In the meantime, though, she keeps employees on their toes. In Miami, “she’d ask about an investigation,” recalls John Hogan, her chief assistant there and now a top Justice aide. “If you said there was a development coming in three days, she would leaf ahead three pages in her little black book and make a notation. Three days later she’d be back, asking what had happened.”

But Reno’s reviews inside Justice aren’t always glowing. For example, questions remain about her decision last April to approve the FBI’s plan to use tear gas to end the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, a decision that turned into a fiery tragedy. Afterward, Reno said a major factor behind her decision were reports of continuing child abuse; the day after the raid, President Clinton recalled that Reno had personally confirmed her thinking on this and had noted that immediate action was necessary “because of the children.” But a Justice Department report this month concluded that there was no evidence of child abuse during the 51-day siege of the compound, and Reno said she had mistakenly construed an FBI official’s statement that the abuse was continuing. “There is no one fact that ultimately compelled me,” Reno said after the report was issued.

Justice prosecutors grumbled over Reno’s decision to break with standard practice--and potentially let politics seep into the courtroom--by allowing congressional investigators to question department attorneys about their cases. She again touched some nerves by breaking a tradition of attorney generals avoiding partisan politics when she joined Democratic Gov. James J. Florio on a tour of New Jersey, just six weeks before voters were to decide whether to reelect him. The event was billed as strictly business, a chance for both Florio and Reno to call for a national ban on assault weapons. But Florio’s opponent, Republican Christine Todd Whitman, accused Reno of engaging in “partisan campaigning.”

Away from the crowds, Reno can be terse and brutally blunt, particularly with those trying to hide their ignorance behind bureaucratic prattle. “It’s not always pleasant being with Janet,” says D’Alemberte. “She can be so direct.” One assistant at Justice recalls Reno’s first session last spring with 20 new political appointees, which took place against the backdrop of some staff bickering. “Right at the 4 p.m. starting time she walked in, didn’t say hello, but just started telling us we’re going to work together as a team, with no back-biting. She finished her spiel, walked out and took no questions.”

Reno doesn’t seem to care who it is she’s taking on. Last year, during an ABA task-force session on urban crime, former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler airily tried to dismiss her proposal to include a study pinpointing the needs of children. Reno turned to Cutler, a pillar of the legal community, and bluntly responded, “Lloyd, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” More recently, she told the powerful National Rifle Assn., an ardent foe of her gun-control efforts, to “get lost.”

When provoked, she has a temper the size of Biscayne Bay. Subordinates know to watch out when the “double veiners” appear in her neck and she starts to enunciate her words, often dropping first-name friendliness to a cooler Mr. or Ms. so-and-so. The objects of her wrath generally concede that the fury is warranted. But sometimes, they claim, she can go overboard, like the time in Miami when her former law firm mistakenly allowed a young associate to argue a routine drunken-driving case before her office. Apparently assuming this was a conscious ethical breach on the part of the firm, Reno abruptly threatened to call the governor to request a special prosecutor on the case.

Ethical appearances are about the only looks Reno has ever cared about. She objected when a network TV station tried to put makeup on her; friends say she doesn’t have a fashion gene in her body. Her niece Karin Hunter Reno, a top fashion model, got so fed up with her aunt’s wardrobe that she makes it a point to drag the attorney general through Saks whenever she’s in Miami.

Reno is more at home in a Florida swamp than a Georgetown dinner party. (Though even she has succumbed to the lure of the D.C. social circuit; initially complaining these events were shallow, she now calls them “exciting.”) She treks the Florida Everglades, sails the Atlantic and canoes wild rivers. Last July, when she joined Justice’s civil-rights division in a three-hour canoe trip down the Potomac, her boat tipped over during some grueling rapids--prompting a nervous FBI security detail to jump in after her. No need, recalls Justice Department attorney Pete McCloskey. “She came up smiling.”

THE FIRST THING TO UNderstand about Janet Reno’s approach to law enforcement is that she didn’t apply to Harvard Law School hoping to become the nation’s top cop. In the past, she has said she never meant to be a prosecutor. Even today, when asked about her most difficult decisions, she responds: “Trying to decide whether to charge or not, trying to decide how to discipline somebody. You have three people who say charge, and two people who say don’t. You grapple back and forth.”

Reno was weaned on a hefty dose of social justice by two reporter parents who viewed their life’s work as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Reno went into law to raise the dignity of humans, not to put them in jail. Her lessons began as a young child sitting in the back of her mother’s swamp buggy, which was stuck in the middle of the Everglades. A truck full of local Indians happened along and pleaded for her assistance in getting treatment for 14 sick children. Jane Reno, Janet’s mother, responded to this and similar incidents with a flurry of news stories championing the plight of both the Miccosukees and Seminole tribes.

Janet Reno comes from a strong matriarchy whose monarchs range from her Aunt Winnie, a member of the elite World War II Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, to Jane Wood Reno, an eccentric and salty-tongued woman routinely described by her daughter as “my-mother-the-lady-who-wrestled-alligators.” “The women of the family are like steel,” says Donna Reno, Janet’s former sister-in-law. “The men are not. The men are much softer.” Despite all that, the word feminist , with its contemporary image of networking and protest, doesn’t apply to the Reno women; individualist is a better fit. When she was 32, Janet Reno told the Miami News, “I’d like to get married and have four children. I wouldn’t mind at all trading a political career for that.” Seven years later, after her appointment as state attorney, she told a reporter that she had yet to find a man she wanted to live with.

Janet Reno is heir to the family throne left vacant last December, when her mother died at 79 after two years of failing health. Unlike her three siblings, Janet didn’t marry, move away and raise a family. Except for college, law school and 1 1/2 years working in Tallahassee, Reno lived with her mother.

The attorney general shared with her mother a genuine comfort with children. “There must be six families around here who’ve named Janet as guardian in their wills,” says her close friend Sara Smith. In the mid-1970s, Janet informally assumed the role of a stern co-parent to her niece and nephew, Karin and Doug Reno, whose parents had divorced. Later, she was named legal guardian to 15-year-old twins whose parents, friends of the Reno family, had died.

While Janet built a career scrupulously playing by the rules, her mother didn’t have much use for rules--social, legal, or otherwise. Jane Reno, a onetime Miami News reporter, refused to tolerate “yack artists,” organized religion, racism, makeup, bras (she hadn’t been seen in one since 1941) and--when her teeth fell out--dentures. “Everything Jane did was in rebellion against what her mother told her nice Southern ladies didn’t do,” Smith recalls of the Georgian-born woman. Controlled and cool, Janet Reno rejected much of what made her mother one of Miami’s most colorful characters.

Probably the starkest contrast between Reno and her mother occurred midway through Janet’s tenure as state attorney, when the elderly woman was arrested for drunken driving in a neighboring county. It wasn’t the first time Jane had been picked up for imbibing a few too many. “I asked the governor to appoint a special prosecutor,” she recalls of her mother’s last drunken-driving arrest. “I sent my sister down with her so I wouldn’t be perceived as intervening.” Did this put Dade County’s state attorney in a bind? “It was a really tough position,” Reno responds, “to have to drive down to the Keys and get your mother out of jail while she was calling the trooper a pipsqueak.” She adds that her mother served the required sentence.

Janet’s father, Danish immigrant Henry Reno, was quieter than his brusque and wily wife, a bow-tied Miami Herald cop reporter with a love of the tales he covered. “It sounds too effete to say he had a fascination with human behavior,” says Janet’s sister, Maggy Hurchalla. “Rather it was an appreciation for the bizarreness and the strangeness and the wonderfulness.” He regaled the family with crime stories: “Just keep your nose clean, Al,” he reportedly told Al Capone when the mobster paused on the courthouse steps one day to solicit his advice. Or he would recount biographies he had just read, of Churchill or Roosevelt or Disraeli. He was known as a romantic who, alone at home, would pump up the volume on “La Boheme” until it pounded through his ribs. When his children were grown, he moved out to a cabin in the Everglades and there he lived alone, dying at his desk in 1968.

Jane and Henry had four children in as many years. Janet is the oldest, followed by Bobby, a financial columnist with Newsday; Maggy, an environmental tiger who sits on Florida’s Martin County commission, and Mark, an outdoorsman whose eclectic list of jobs has included game warden, ranch hand and tugboat captain. From the huge, screened porch of the bare-bones family home Jane built far removed from the neighborhoods of Miami with help from friends and family, Jane would hold court. “These are the most no-b.s. people on the planet,” says family friend Barry Massin. Parties filled with hard-drinking reporters in the ‘50s and ‘60s later evolved into more political affairs.

The famed peacocks in the Reno yard, all named Horace, were just the beginning of a menagerie that grew as the kids “adopted” alligators and Henry Reno routinely came home from local bars with stray animals. Hurchalla describes her childhood like this:

“There was an alligator under the bed, and Mark and I would be trying to catch it and it would be hissing at us. There was a macaw on the porch that had a terrible laugh, like Simon Legree. There was an egret with one wing that lived out in the pasture and a boa constrictor six feet long. There was a raccoon named Minnie, who was supposed to have a very large, airy cage outside, but decided she owned the house. There were a variety of dogs. There were cows, there were calves, there were horses. Janny was most noted for the time she got thrown from her horse when she was 11 and had to stay in bed and said she wanted her horse in bed with her.”

Janet and her siblings grew up isolated in a house without air conditioning or heating. But her family’s love of books, poetry and world affairs linked her to the outside world and paved the way for her entrance into Cornell University, where she studied chemistry. But the law tugged, and as graduation approached, she was accepted to Harvard Law School. She graduated in 1963, at a time when no welcome mat was rolled out for women. At Miami’s prominent Steel Hector & Davis, where she became the first woman partner, her first application was turned down because of her sex.

Reno began to make her mark in the state as staff director of the Florida House Judiciary Committee, where her first project was to revise an antiquated judicial system. Later, she helped update the state criminal code. D’Alemberte recalls that Dade County State Atty. Richard Gerstein asked Reno to come work for him in the mid-1970s, after she’d run unsuccessfully for a state legislative seat. As he tells the story, Reno replied, “I’m not sure. My father says you’re a crook.” Actually, says D’Alemberte, the late Gerstein was less a crook than a political animal. But Reno took the job, and her first assignment, to restructure the juvenile court system, helped shape her views today about rehabilitating delinquent youths. From there, she moved to Steel, Hector, where she proved to be a killer lawyer. D’Alemberte recalls a major tax-assessment case in which Reno’s cross-examination left an expert witness looking like a gibbering idiot. “She uses sheer physical intimidation,” he says of the towering attorney. “She’ll get quite close to a witness. She can get downright mean; she left no wiggle room.”

WHEN GERSTEIN RETIRED in 1977 and the governor appointed Reno to take his place, she was thrown into a job that didn’t entirely mesh with her social-worker sensibilities. Miami, the town once renowned for the “Jackie Gleason Show,” was already priming the sets for “Miami Vice.” The 1980 influx of approximately 10,000 violent criminals as part of the Mariel boat lift from Cuba helped turn Miami into the nation’s murder capital within 12 months. Five years later, the city was hit with a crack epidemic. Today, Dade County is a place where streets are officially named after drug dealers and robbers hunt down tourists on major highways.

It was a race riot that first pushed the state attorney off-balance--and became one of the defining events of Reno’s life. In 1980, her office secured the conviction of a black school superintendent accused of misusing public funds. Shortly after, her office failed to win the convictions of four white police officers charged in the beating death of a black insurance salesman, Arthur McDuffie. The court cases touched off widespread rioting in Miami’s black neighborhoods. Reno’s performance during this year’s Waco crisis could have been predicted with a look at the McDuffie riots. In both cases, she accepted responsibility without apologies or regrets. Instead, she gave the public a glimpse of the emotional turmoil she underwent over the ensuing tragedies. After Waco, Reno became an overnight hero. But it took years for her reputation to recover from the McDuffie fiasco.

First, there were the threats on her life, and those of her friends’ and her family’s. Then there were the professional blows: A citizens’ commission criticized her for being overly protective of guilty police officers and running her office “in such a way as to support the black community’s perception of the office as racist.” Friends say Reno was most hurt by the black community’s calls for her resignation and insistence that she was a racist. One prominent black publisher said Reno was “to the black community what Hitler was to the Jews.”

The criticisms didn’t begin, or end, with the McDuffie riots. Early on, one Miami columnist called her “plodding, unsure, dawdling.” Prominent private investigator Martin Dardis, a veteran of the state attorney’s office, says that in the mid-1980s, “I thought her office was atrocious” because of its win-loss record. Pursuit of public-corruption cases slowed when she took over. “There were no sacred cows. But there were complaints that she wasn’t ferreting it out,” he says.

Not long after the riots, Reno seemed to launch a campaign to show people another side of herself. “She’s a totally different person than she was 10 years ago,” says attorney Irwin Block, an early critic who chaired the post-McDuffie commission. “I didn’t think much of her when she started. Rather than getting out in the community, she was sitting in an ivory tower. She was reactive versus proactive.”

Reno began, first, in the black community. “She listened to the anger. She listened through the vulgarity,” recalls H.T. Smith, an attorney and leader in Miami’s black community. “She consistently made efforts to communicate directly before she made a decision and to explain (that decision) afterward. She was everywhere. And people started saying, ‘This is the devil? She doesn’t seem like the devil to me.’ ”

Another reason for her improved standing in the black community was Reno’s aggressive child-support collection. Her enforcement efforts prompted a rap band to pen a song about her, and when she marched in the Martin Luther King Day parade five years after the McDuffie riots, she received a standing ovation. “She went from the most vilified figure (in the black community) to the most embraced. The turnaround has been amazing,” says Smith.

During the ‘80s, as Reno racked up headlines as a tough prosecutor, she was able to focus on rehabilitation and prevention efforts while avoiding a soft-on-crime label. She shaped innovations like the drug court, where two-thirds of the clients finish the program without being rearrested. Longer-term numbers aren’t available, but lawyers around town--reeling off anecdotes about clients whose lives were saved--swear by it. Reno’s domestic-violence intervention program, relying heavily on counseling for victims and abusers, is also widely hailed. And residents of a public-housing project that had been terrorized by an armed youth gang laud her pilot community police project, which sent a policeman, a nurse and three social workers into their community every day. Crime has since plummeted, and residents rely on the year-old team for everything from law enforcement to prenatal care.

She is respected by the FBI’s rank-and-file for her willingness to shoulder the blame after Waco. Politically, Reno was aided by Dade County’s solidly Democratic vote. She won election five times, often with weak or nonexistent opposition.

Though there remain com plaints about Reno’s tenure as state attorney, at a couple of points during the 1980s a seat on the state Supreme Court was Reno’s for the asking. And sometimes, as she and close friends sailed on the Atlantic late into the night, the talk turned to a possible race for governor. But always, Reno’s reaction was the same: She couldn’t leave Miami, she couldn’t leave her mother. She answered the President’s call only after her mother died.

WE’VE PASSED THE EMOTION-charged Depression-era murals outside the attorney general’s anteroom, walked the length ofthe imposing conference room Bobby Kennedy used as his office and are sitting in Janet Reno’s small office, with piles of files on her desk. It wasn’t easy getting here: Since Waco, her office has been besieged by press calls. By October, 101 interview requests were pending. Earlier this summer she told the Miami Herald, “I feel like Katharine Hepburn. I look forward to death. There will be no more interviews.”

There is no opening small talk. Reno sits down in a chair, and our eyes are drawn to her huge hands: They are as elegant as a piano player’s, yet as workmanlike as a farmer’s. Later, as the questions get more pointed, she unconsciously starts picking at them. But for now they are clasped softly in front of her face while she answers questions quietly, professionally in a voice that at times is barely audible.

A few minutes into the interview comes the “where’s the beef?” question. For all the talk about revolutionizing criminal justice, critics note the strikingly small number of new initiatives coming out of her Justice Department. Earlier, we had visited the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which doles out about $423 million in grants each year to state and local communities for creative criminal-justice programs. But many of the programs Reno talks about were already in place, though operating in a more hostile Republican environment, when she took office.

With all this in mind, we ask the attorney general: What are the most innovative programs we can expect to come out of the Justice Department? “I don’t know,” she answers with a cold and steady gaze, as silence, like a creeping fog, fills the room.

After this uncomfortable quiet, Reno finally begins to speak, about a painfully slow appointment process that has left her with a skeletal staff, about the need for computerizing information within the department. She describes overlapping and conflicting programs throughout the federal government. Most of America’s successful crime programs, she notes, sprout from local communities, not the federal government. As she talks, it becomes clear that in her few months managing a department of 95,000 employees, Reno has reached a difficult conclusion: Reinventing government must precede reinventing criminal justice.

“I don’t expect to do it overnight,” she says. “It is a slow process and you always want to move faster than you can. In that sense, it is frustrating. But I recognize that it’s a matter of building trust with the Congress, letting them come to know me and how we operate the department.” Confirmed in March, Reno came late to the job, after two previous candidates were dropped in the “nannygate” controversy. She missed the Cabinet-level Camp David retreat and was thrown right into Waco. “It wasn’t like I could work with transition teams or anything else,” she says. “It was confirmation and then, bang.”

The political questions that will come hurtling at her are difficult ones. Is she willing to cut into the 70% the federal government spends on drug enforcement to increase the 30% it spends on rehabilitation? “It’s going to have to take some money from somewhere,” she says cautiously. “One of the most difficult areas I’ve been grappling with, both in Miami and here, is that this nation tends to wait for a crisis to happen. It prefers to wait to build jails, to provide extensive drug treatment or foster care or tertiary medical treatment that could have been avoided by proper prevention up front. The issue is how we shift from crisis to intervention and prevention, because (that) will be much less costly.” In Reno’s view, Americans must stop letting sensational crime cases like the Miami tourist shootings “skew the best and most rational approach to how we avoid putting dangerous people on our streets.”

Aside from health care and welfare reform, Reno offers few specifics on federal programs that might direct children away from a life of crime. “I don’t have all the answers,” she says. “I just know that one of my responsibilities is to keep talking about it.”

Reno observers like Sen. Biden don’t fault her for her lack of specifics. “There’s a need to raise the consciousness of people, to set out a vision,” he says. “She appreciates that more than any attorney general I’ve known. You’ve got to change attitudes. And you can’t just do it through legislation.”

In our interview, as in speeches, Reno repeatedly talks about issues that cut across the government, from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services. Still, she must address her own department’s issues first. Her plate is full--not only with crime, but with immigration reform, stepped-up antitrust enforcement, abortion-clinic bombings and civil rights, to name a few. She acknowledges that some officials in the Clinton Administration probably suspect she’s grabbing turf.

“I don’t want to be pushy,” she says, adding that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and Education Secretary Richard W. Riley are “very comfortable” with her big-picture approach to criminal justice. “People think it may not be a politically smart role, but I think it’s the right role.”

Already, Justice is combining forces with other departments in the development of “empowerment zones” to boost economically depressed inner-city areas, particularly in Los Angeles; Justice’s law-enforcement effort is expected to help investors and customers feel safe doing business in these zones. The department is also part of a pilot program in Denver and three other cities still to be named to steer youngsters away from violence, an effort that brings together such departments as education, health, housing, agriculture, the Pentagon and Justice.

As she builds her ambitious agenda amid Washington doubters, Reno’s thoughts must turn often to the political figures she admires most, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson. She regularly quotes Truman, but it is Stevenson who lights up her eyes during our conversation. At heart the daughter of writers, she’s always been enthralled by Stevenson’s literary elegance. She walks over to her wall, picks off a homey-looking cross-stitch needlework, and begins to read the Stevenson words that keep her going through the tough times: “The burdens of office stagger the imagination and convert vanity into prayer.”

Those are words that she’ll need to hark back to as she struggles with the mind-boggling problem of crime in America.