‘Cussed at, Fussed at,’ Reno Shrugs, Survives

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s holiday party had barely started last month when word came from the Florida Supreme Court of Al Gore’s startling--though short-lived--legal win in the presidential recount battle.

Shouts of glee erupted throughout the building; a top aide approached Reno excitedly at the party to tell her the news. Without saying a word or betraying a hint of emotion, Reno grabbed a grape from the buffet table, popped it in her mouth and walked away.

The moment was classic Reno: Despite nearly eight years in the national spotlight, she remains as impenetrable as she is controversial. Indeed, she leaves Washington still as much of an enigma to many people as when she first took office, an obscure Florida prosecutor who went on to become the longest-serving U.S. attorney general in 172 years.

Skewered by Republicans and “Saturday Night Live” comics alike, the stoic and ever-polite Reno has often appeared impervious to the relentless criticism. She has weathered one crisis after another, from the tragedies at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, and the Oklahoma City federal building, through the dramas of Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation of President Clinton and the Wen Ho Lee and Elian Gonzalez cases.

Reflecting on her tumultuous tenure in an interview with The Times on Monday, Reno said she leaves office with no great regrets and an even stronger faith in public service as “the most rewarding thing anyone can do.”

And she brushed aside both the criticism and the praise.

“George Washington said that if he were to write his memoirs, it might reduce him to tears. . . . He’d rather drift on down the stream of life and let posterity judge,” she said.

That, Reno said, is her attitude.

Reno said determining her legacy will be left to others, and there is no shortage of observers--friends and foes--to help write it as she leaves the Justice Department this week to return to her home in Florida and prepare for a cross-country road trip in her new red pickup truck.

Among her accomplishments, Reno presided over an eight-year decline in national crime rates, the most prolonged drop in the seven decades that such records have been kept.

She and her antitrust chief, Joel Klein, stepped up the department’s watchdog role over big business, securing a record $1.8 billion in price-fixing fines and initiating a historic, still-pending antitrust lawsuit seeking to break up Microsoft Corp.

And as the Justice Department grew to an unprecedented 130,000 employees, she expanded its reach in crime prevention efforts through programs in youth intervention, domestic abuse, victim assistance and other areas often ignored by previous administrations.

But even those efforts drew sneers from her foes, who labeled her more a “social worker” than the nation’s top law enforcement official. And the criticism didn’t stop there.

Served as GOP Target

Republicans blasted the way Reno handled the Elian Gonzalez custody dispute, especially her decision to end the protracted controversy by using armed federal agents to retrieve the Cuban boy from his Miami relatives.

Her handling of the Lee case provoked similar scorn. Critics first charged that her inept oversight of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation allowed a suspected Chinese spy access to secret nuclear data for years. Once the case collapsed, her critics reversed course, saying she and the Justice Department had focused on the wrong man.

But perhaps no issue so infuriated and mobilized the opposition as Reno’s refusal to seek independent counsels to investigate campaign finance abuses by the Clinton-Gore team in the 1996 campaign.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that the attorney general has acted politically to benefit the president, the vice president and her own political party,” a House panel chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), one of Reno’s harshest critics, charged in a recent report.

Reno, however, concluded that the facts did not merit the appointment of an independent counsel. But she noted Monday that she had cleared the way in early 1998 for Starr, who was investigating the Whitewater affair, to broaden his probe to include new allegations involving Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky. That ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Reno said the idea that she insulated Clinton “doesn’t square with the facts. You don’t expand Ken Starr’s jurisdiction and be considered protective of the White House.”

The independent counsel law also sparked the wrath of some Democrats, who were upset with Reno early in her administration for seeking the appointment of outside counsels to investigate a slew of officials in Clinton’s Cabinet.

As Reno acknowledged, she was “cussed at, fussed at and figuratively beaten around the ears.”

Many thought she would never last because of the intensity of the criticism and what at times appeared to be an icy relationship with the White House. The discovery in 1995 that Reno was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative condition that makes her hands shake noticeably, only fueled the speculation.

Reno credits her survival to a no-nonsense approach to the job.

“I try to do the best I can. I try to be as prepared as I can. I try to make the best decision I can. And then I think I have an obligation to try to respond to questions” from the public and the press about her decisions, she said.

“I really am guided frankly by Lincoln’s quote that sits across from my desk,” she said. It reads, in part, “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.”

At times, Reno had to enforce laws with which she disagrees.

On the death penalty, for instance, Reno said she sees no evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent to crime, and she ordered the department to study whether racial bias factors into death penalty prosecutions. No final conclusions were reached.

“The only reason for the death penalty is vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is a luxury that government should engage in,” Reno said. “My personal view on it: Just abolish it.”

Nonetheless, Reno has approved federal death penalty prosecutions 176 times out of 743 potential cases, a duty she says she was obligated to carry out.

The question of how an attorney general views the law has become a critical one surrounding John Ashcroft’s nomination as Reno’s successor because of the former senator’s strong views on abortion and other issues at odds with current law. His confirmation hearing starts today.

Although Reno refused to comment on Ashcroft’s nomination, she said she looks forward to a “smooth transition” and is hopeful the next administration will continue progress made in civil rights, crime prevention and other areas.

One priority, she said, should be to maintain the Justice Department’s oversight of patterns of abuse at local police departments, which led to an unprecedented monitoring agreement with the Los Angeles Police Department last year.

Reno will be returning to her home in the Miami area just nine months after she ordered the controversial raid taking custody of Elian, which made her the target of protests and hostility from the Cuban American community. She said she wants to heal relations.

“I go back [to Florida] with no hesitation, but I think it’s important to do everything I can to bridge misunderstandings,” she said.

But Reno may not be staying put for long. Though her exact plans are unclear, she has long talked about driving across the country and up to Alaska to reconnect with the people she has served, a sort of “Thelma and Louise” road trip with “no Louise,” she quips.

“I don’t want an itinerary. I don’t want any schedule,” she said.

Her new pickup truck awaits her arrival in Florida. She already has one stop in mind: the home of a 12-year-old New Mexico girl who wrote her during the Gonzalez controversy and invited her to her bat mitzvah this June.

“I wrote her and said I was delighted to come if I was going that way and could get there,” Reno said. “If she would accept me at the last minute or as soon as my plans firmed up, that would be wonderful. She and her mother said they would love to have me.”