Besieged Rights Nominee Optimistic About Chances

After spending a quiet weekend in Los Angeles teaching one son to ride a two-wheel bicycle and watching “Return of the Jedi” for the eighth time with another, Bill Lann Lee, the besieged nominee to be the nation’s chief civil rights enforcer, plunged back into a belligerent ideological struggle Monday.

Lee, who would be the first Asian American to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, was escorted by President Clinton onto the podium at a White House hate-crimes conference. He was enthusiastically applauded in an auditorium filled with civil rights activists and bear-hugged by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of his most ardent supporters.

Clinton took the opportunity to praise Lee, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, for dedicating his career “to fighting for equal rights without regard to ideology or political party.” The president also needled the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that it should give the Senate a chance to vote on the nomination so that all 100 senators have a chance “to stand up and be counted in the full view of the American people.”

That possibility appears doubtful. Last Thursday, seeing that Lee did not have the 10 votes needed to clear the committee, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) secured a one-week delay in the vote. Then, on Sunday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a vocal opponent of Lee, pronounced the nomination dead. That declaration was apparently heard by Lee’s 5-year-old-son, Nicholas, who surprised his father by asking him Sunday: “Are you dead in committee?”

“No, I’m not dead,” Lee told his son, using the same measured tone he employed to answer questions last month from the committee led by Hatch, who has called him a “civil rights ombudsman for the left.”

In an interview Monday in the Executive Office Building, Lee, who lives in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, told The Times he remains optimistic he will be confirmed as assistant attorney general in charge of the 250-lawyer Civil Rights Division and that he had been urged by the president to “hang in there.”

Lee got some good news Monday. Albany, N.Y., attorney John R. Dunne, who headed the division in the George Bush administration, sent Hatch a letter urging that Lee be approved.

“By everyone’s acknowledgment, Mr. Lee is superbly qualified on the basis of experience, training and character to fulfill a very difficult and demanding job,” Dunne wrote. The attorney stressed that Lee’s “position in support of affirmative action should not disqualify him from service, particularly since it has been the proud tradition of your committee to support qualified candidates to carry out an administration’s policies.”

Lee has received support from sometimes-surprising quarters, including Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), Los Angeles Republican Mayor Richard Riordan and several attorneys who were Lee’s adversaries in employment discrimination and sexual harassment cases.

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The odds of confirmation, however, still appear dim. Hatch spokeswoman Jeanne Lopatto said Monday that nothing has changed.

Nonetheless, Lee, 48, appeared untroubled by the divisiveness surrounding his nomination, which has stirred fierce enmity from conservatives, who see him as embodying everything wrong with affirmative action programs and as out of step with the ballot box.

“I don’t believe that I’ve been through anything bad,” Lee said. “I believe that democracy is sometimes a rocky kind of thing. [But] it’s a system that has served this nation well.”

Lee said he would not resist court decisions narrowing affirmative action programs.

“The Supreme Court has spoken on a lot of these issues,” he said. “I, as an officer of the court and of the Department of Justice, am obliged to support the law.”

In his confirmation hearing, Lee said “quotas are illegal and wrong.”

But several Republican senators, including Hatch, remain skeptical. They also questioned Lee at the hearing Oct. 22 about a brief he wrote for the Legal Defense Fund in opposition to Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action measure passed by California voters in 1996 that the U.S. Supreme Court recently let stand.

Hatch has said several times that he is troubled by Lee’s responses and that he fears Lee would use his Justice Department post to push for racial preference programs.

Lee reiterated earlier statements that he would have no trouble enforcing laws enacted by Congress as they have been interpreted by the Supreme Court.

“If I’m confirmed, I will take an oath to defend the Constitution and laws of the United States,” Lee said. “My parents took an oath when they became citizens and, as a child when I witnessed it, it meant a lot in my family. I know what taking an oath means.”

Lee also stressed that much of the job he seeks has “nothing to do with affirmative action. It is day-in, day-out enforcement of the law with respect to discrimination of persons with disabilities, with respect to denial of jobs to women, with respect to denial of educational opportunities for minority kids. . . . There’s no controversy about that. That’s work I have shown that I can do.”

Indeed, Lee has been a civil rights lawyer his entire career. After graduating with honors from Yale University and Columbia Law School in 1974, Lee joined the National Assn. for the Advancement of Color People Legal Defense Fund, the organization that has won many landmark civil rights lawsuits, including the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case that outlawed segregated public schools in the nation.

Lee has worked on a broad array of cases, including employment and housing discrimination, school desegregation and environmental lawsuits.

In the interview, Lee said he always has worked to settle cases by finding as much common ground as possible. “My approach to difficult problems is to try to lower the decibel level, lower the temperature and try to get people to sit down. That’s what I stand for. That’s what my work shows.”

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Los Angeles lawyer C. Andrew Peterson, who represented three supermarket chains that had been sued by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund for alleged hiring and promotion discrimination, said he supports Lee’s nomination because of his own experience defending the grocery chains. Peterson said the cases led to negotiated settlements that “provided for goals and timetables” but “specifically provided that the employer was not required to grant a preference to any particular individual black or Hispanic.”

Peterson said that, even though not all the goals were met, Lee decided against taking the companies back to court for noncompliance because he was convinced that the firms had made a good-faith effort. “Mr. Lee is a unique individual,” who “conducted himself with the utmost civility and candor,” he said.

Throughout the nomination process, Lee has spoken about how his career in civil rights has been an effort to redress the slurs and discrimination endured by his poor, but proud, father, who worked endless days in “Lee’s Hand Laundry” on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Yet, life in his old neighborhood, a mix of Jewish, Chinese, Puerto Rican and black families, was not all bad, Lee said. While it was like “West Side Story”--with gang wars and tough talk--Lee said he benefited from being exposed to people from different backgrounds.

Whatever happens to his nomination, Lee said, one of the best parts of the process is that it led him to think again about his life and more specifically about why he became a civil rights lawyer.

“I don’t believe it’s an accident that I’m where I am. I believe it’s what I learned from my parents at a very early age [that] has brought me to this point. So I don’t have any regrets. I’m proud to have done what my father would have wanted me to do, which is to stand up and say what I believe.”

Lee’s father was neither the only nor the largest influence on his life, the nominee said. His mother--the more practical parent--shaped his conciliatory litigation style and approach. And, in recent days, she has offered support and advice to her very serious son.

“No matter how it turns out, she says she’s very proud of me,” Lee said, lowering his eyes as if to hide a rare moment of open emotion.

But then, perking up, he added almost mischievously: “She also said I should smile more.”

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Weinstein reported from Los Angeles and Baum from Washington.