Ashcroft Deals With Daunting Responsibilities

John Ashcroft won the bitter confirmation battle to become America’s attorney general eight months ago, but doubts remained about whether he was the right person to lead the U.S. Department of Justice.

As a politician, he had been a man of the right, rigidly partisan and a crusader for old-fashioned morality.

There were no shades of gray with Ashcroft. During his years as a governor of Missouri and a U.S. senator, he injected moral fervor into issues ranging from abortion and affirmative action to the death penalty and gun control. On one side was good and right, the other evil and wrong.

His stern stands and unwillingness to compromise won him admirers in conservative circles. His detractors saw him as a zealot, too unyielding and single-minded to be the chief law enforcement officer in a diverse nation where matters of law and morality are always subject to debate and dispute.

But then came Sept. 11, the day that redefined not just the mission of the Bush administration but the role and responsibilities of its attorney general.

Ashcroft, who had expected to be immersed in legal quandaries such as the Microsoft antitrust case, racial profiling and vouchers for parochial schools, was transformed overnight into the commander of law enforcement’s war against terrorism. It was a battle of good versus evil, a righteous cause unlike anything in modern-day American politics.

And the very qualities that once had made Ashcroft a dubious choice--his hard-charging style and his single-minded intensity--suddenly made him seem like just the right leader for the Justice Department at this moment in history.

In the hours after the attacks, Ashcroft moved quickly and decisively to take charge of what would become the largest criminal investigation in the government’s history.

He and FBI Director Robert Mueller put 7,000 agents and employees on the case. The attorney general set up an office for himself in the FBI’s Special Operation Center, determined to stay on the top of the facts.

“He’s certainly very hands-on,” an FBI source said of Ashcroft. “He learns all he can and then gets the message out to the public as quickly as possible.”

Unlike other administration officials, Ashcroft did not blurt information in the aftermath of the attacks that had to be retracted as misleading or wrong.

Using his experience as a former senator, the attorney general drafted broad new anti-terrorism legislation and then lobbied his former colleagues on Capitol Hill to pass the bill with a minimum of delay. While it took longer and he didn’t get everything that he wanted, Congress did pass a strong anti-terrorism bill, which President Bush signed into law Friday.

Former Critics Giving Credit

At key moments, Ashcroft paused to stress that Muslims and Arab Americans were not the targets of the new war against terrorism. Like President Bush, Ashcroft said the government would vigorously prosecute hate crimes perpetrated against them.

Even some of his former critics have complimented Ashcroft on his adept handling of the crisis. “He’s doing a good job in very difficult times,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a former Judiciary Committee colleague who opposed his confirmation as attorney general.

In his first months in the department, some officials complained that the attorney general seemed disengaged, bored even, if a particular topic did not spark his interest.

But since Sept. 11, aides say he has been fiercely focused on the issue of how to prevent and punish terrorism. That morning, Ashcroft had been in the air over the Midwest, traveling with a few aides in a small government jet.

Susan Dryden, a department spokeswoman, saw the first signs of trouble when Ashcroft, with a phone to his ear, began scribbling notes. “2nd plane hit WTC,” one said.

The plane turned in midair and headed back to Washington, D.C. “He knew right away he was at the helm. I just saw him become very focused,” Dryden recalled.

That evening, before Bush had returned to the capital, Ashcroft spoke at the White House and gave voice to the moral demand for justice.

“A free American people will not be intimidated nor will we be defeated,” Ashcroft said. “We will find the people responsible for these cowardly acts, and justice will be done.”

From the start, Ashcroft enjoyed several advantages over his predecessor, Janet Reno. He was on good terms with the president, and he enjoyed an unusually close working relationship with his FBI director.

Reno suffered at first from not knowing her FBI director, William S. Sessions. Weeks after she arrived, the FBI recommended an ill-conceived plan to end the stand-off at the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas. Reno gave the go-ahead and then watched in horror as the compound went up in flames.

Shortly after the fiasco, Sessions was dismissed, and he was succeeded by a Republican-appointed judge from New York, Louis J. Freeh, who then feuded with Reno and her top aides through the rest of her term.

By contrast, Mueller, a highly respected federal prosecutor, served as an interim deputy to Ashcroft in the first months of this year, and the attorney general pressed for his appointment to head the FBI.

The two seemed inseparable in the weeks following the terrorist attacks.

“When I talk to my old colleagues [at the FBI], they say he’s doing a darn good job,” Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former assistant director of intelligence at the FBI, said of Ashcroft. “He’s walking a fine line. He’s on the top of investigation, but he’s not meddling. You can tell he has confidence in Bob Mueller.”

Since Sept. 11, criticism of Ashcroft has been muted, but his no-holds-barred style continues to alarm civil libertarians.

Many Democratic lawmakers, and even a few Republicans, were put off by Ashcroft’s insistence that Congress pass his anti-terrorism bill with little or no debate. On several occasions, the attorney general went before the cameras to say the sweeping legislation must be passed “by the end of this week,” a demand that did not sit well with his former colleagues.

Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, the liberal activist group that led the opposition to Ashcroft’s nomination, said Ashcroft looked to be taking advantage of the crisis to “rush to push through draconian legislation. It underscored the concerns we had about him.”

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) was upset when Ashcroft appeared to renege on compromises that he had agreed to during negotiations. When the attorney general’s imposed deadline passed, Ashcroft suggested that if a second terrorist attack occurred, the recalcitrant lawmakers would deserve the blame.

“We’ve seen the old John Ashcroft,” said a Senate Democratic aide.

Arrests, Detentions Raising Concerns

Many immigration and defense lawyers are irked at Ashcroft’s refusal to give specific information about the nearly 1,000 people who have been arrested and detained in the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks. Some have accused the government of stretching its power to detain so-called “material witnesses.”

“I think most Americans would be shocked to learn you can be arrested and put in jail because you may have witnessed a crime,” said James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Unfazed, Ashcroft declared that the government is following the law and respecting constitutional rights.

With the prime suspects in the suicide attacks dead, Ashcroft and Mueller had decided early on to shift their focus toward preventing another terrorist attack.

The huge roundup has not yielded true suspects as yet, government officials admit, but they say it may have played a role in heading off further attacks.

“Taking suspected terrorists off the streets and keeping them locked up” works as a strategy to prevent terrorism, Ashcroft said Thursday.

In the end, Ashcroft and Mueller know that ultimately they will be judged not on how they responded to the first wave of terror attacks, but instead on whether there is a second wave.

For his part, Ashcroft made clear he will stop at nothing to prevent such an attack.

“A new era in America’s fight against terrorism is about to begin,” he said Thursday after the Senate passed his anti-terrorism bill. “We will use all our weapons within the law. . . . We will use every available statute. And we will seek every prosecutorial advantage.”

The nation faces “a conspiracy of evil,” he added, “and history’s judgment will be harsh if we fail to use every available resource” to defeat it.

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Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this report.