When William Weld became head of the criminal division of the Justice Department in 1986, one of the first things he did was hang a photograph of Kennedy in his office. For Weld (a Republican), RFK was the model A.G.-committed to law, animated in temperament and able to manage the mammoth bureaucracy. Soon afterward, Attorney General Ed Meese stopped by to welcome his new assistant. He noticed the portrait, then asked Weld: “Can’t you get rid of that thing?”
It figures. Meese ran a Justice Department that was the Land of Hackdom-little more than an agency to service the needs of President Reagan and, occasionally, of the A.G. himself. His four-year reign was the archetype of politics over conscience, ideology over law. Meese drove out people like Weld, who resigned in disgust. Meese gutted the department’s bipartisan tradition of independence, bringing it to its lowest point since the days of John Mitchell, in the Nixon era; instead of being the linchpin of the government’s investigation of Iran-contra, Meese’s department perfected the arts of obfuscation and foot-dragging. Mitchell was convicted in 1975 for his role in Watergate. Meese was merely chastised over and over for personal ethical lapses surrounding his finances and his connection to the Wedtech scandal.
When Bill Clinton looks over the department, he won’t simply be able to write off such transgressions as ancient history. The current caretakers of Justice have hardly been paragons. Attorney General William Barr, like Richard Thornburgh before him, has stonewalled Congress and the courts in the case of Brett Kimberlin, the federal inmate who days before the 1988 election was supposed to give a press conference on his unproven claim that he sold marijuana to Dan Quayle in the 1970s. The Justice Department canceled the conference and threw Kimberlin into a detention cell.
Worse has been the department’s wretched handling of Iraqgate and the Atlanta office of Rome’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which stands indicted for funneling $4 billion in loans to Saddam Hussein. Just last week the department finally acknowledged that a special prosecutor may be appropriate. At the barest minimum, why didn’t Justice object when the White House interfered in the initial investigation by prosecutors in Atlanta? That kind of tolerance corrodes not only public confidence in neutral law enforcement, but that of the career bureaucracy critical to the department.
If Meese and Mitchell were aberrations, if Thornburgh and Barr had otherwise stellar records, there would be little reason to worry about whom Clinton might pick as attorney general. But the politicization of the Justice Department has become part of the ethical culture. That’s why special prosecutors are now a growth industry: we just don’t trust the A.G. anymore to police the government. Clinton, though a lawyer by training, may feel little compunction to change the status quo. He ought to. In fact, notwithstanding the importance of the economy, the president-elect should make the A.G. selection his highest priority. Far more than deficit reduction or infrastructure spending, that choice will signal what kind of presidency Clinton intends. “The department needs a thorough fumigation,” says Elliot Richardson, the short-lived A.G. in 1973 who quit rather than fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. The choice should be inspired, even courageous.
Clinton can’t do that simply by picking a person of legal prominence, public spirit and uncontestable integrity. He should find someone with whom he has no close ties, who owes him no political allegiance. That means eliminating the campaign manager, the family lawyer, the confidant, the crony. (If he really needs their counsel, get them an office in the West Wing.) That means no Ron Brown, no Mickey Kantor, no Vernon Jordan-and no Hillary. Won’t that mean denying the new A.G. the special access he needs to the boss, the bond that energized Kennedy Justice? Not at all: it’s rather uncomplicated for the president to guarantee access to anyone he wants.
Justice is different from the other cabinet cupboards. We speak of the rule of law, not the primacy of agriculture policy or even of diplomacy, which we know to be thoroughly political. While running the Justice Department and divvying up prosecutorial resources obviously requires political judgment, the choices are narrowly constrained by both the Constitution and Congress. The model for Clinton should be Edward Levi, appointed by President Ford in 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate. Ford didn’t even know Levi, the widely respected president of the University of Chicago. “Donald Rumsfeld brought him to me as well qualified and nonpolitical,” Ford recalls. “It was a masterstroke, one of the appointments I’m proudest of.” Very quickly, the department erased the taint of the Nixon years.
Such a policy, of course, would have barred Kennedy from being A.G. for his brother. But the fact that he turned out so well doesn’t mean it was a wise idea, nor does it mean that Kennedy might not have been effective in a half-dozen other executive capacities. “You don’t usually have brothers like the Kennedys,” says Victor Navasky, the biographer of RFK’s Justice Department. Exceptions don’t obviate the need for good rules. Admire the legacy and by all means keep the portraits up-but keep the cronies out.
