Bad attorneys general some presidents have chosen

Every so often, a president messes with the justice system by naming a very bad attorney general. Woodrow Wilson’s A. Mitchell Palmer, who launched the first Red Scare and sacrificed civil liberties to suppress anarchy, and Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell, the first, and so far, the only attorney general sent to prison for his part in the Watergate scandals, come to mind.

Usually, a president was not unfortunate enough or around long enough to name more than one really awful attorney general until George W. Bush came along and named two in a row and, absent a watchful Congress,  positioned himself to name three.

John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, the Bush attorneys general, are the ideological soulmates of  Wilson’s Palmer, although Gonzales may ultimately find himself compared to Nixon’s man as well if, like Mitchell, he faces a perjury rap. But otherwise, the two are more like Palmer, whose terrorists were then known as anarchists and who, in his defense, found them to be a menace only after one of them blew himself up while planting a bomb under the attorney general’s front porch. In his zeal to suppress subversion, Palmer, as would Ashcroft and Gonzales, didn’t let niceties like civil liberties get in the way.

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Our most recent image of Ashcroft is in his hospital bed, “feeble, barely articulate and clearly stressed,†in FBI director Robert Mueller’s account, as Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card tried to get him to sign a reauthorization of the administration’s secret surveillance program. Ashcroft’s refusal to go along was surely his one shining moment, but it didn’t undo his earlier assaults on privacy rights in particular and civil liberties in general.  

Ashcroft was named attorney general after Missouri voters ended his Senate career by electing a dead man, Mel Carnhan, whose name couldn’t be removed from the ballot after his death in an airplane crash. To be fair,  Ashcroft lost by only a narrow margin. His time as attorney general is best remembered for not only his enthusiastic application of the more dubious provisions of the Patriot Act, like the warrantless seizure of patrons’ records from libraries and bookstores, but also for having the Justice Department buy an $8,000 drape to cover a semi-nude statue, the Spirit of Justice, so that reporters wouldn’t be distracted by lustful fantasies during his very important press conferences.  

Nothing said more about Ashcroft’s eccentric service as attorney general than his leavetaking when, in a handwritten letter of resignation to the president, he modestly summed up his service by asserting, “The objective of securing the safety of America from crime and terror has been achieved.â€

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But despite Ashcroft’s fine work, Gonzales still found plenty to do and now that he’s finally out of office, there will be continuing investigations of those frequently forgetful appearances before Congress when he could shed little light on the firings of U.S. attorneys, allegations of improper hiring practices, the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance activities and little things like asking career professionals, “Who is your favorite Supreme Court justice, Scalia or Thomas?† And not even Palmer, Mitchell or Ashcroft wrote legal positions in defense of torture.

Presidents rarely admit their regrets over major appointments gone wrong and Bush is certainly in that tradition.  An exception was Harry Truman, who left history a rather harsh assessment of one of his two attorneys general when he told a biographer, “Tom Clark was my biggest mistake.â€

Then, perhaps to soften the blow or perhaps not, Truman added, “It isn’t so much that he’s a bad man.  It’s just that he’s such a dumb son of a bitch.â€

 Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com