Speaking of Ascroft:
Ashcroft Inspires Trust
By Paul Greenberg
Courthouses depress me. Especially if they have mottos engraved around their sides - uplifting sentiments like "Equal Justice Under Law."
Someday somebody's going to engrave a legend around a courthouse that says: "O Justice, What Crimes Are Committed In Thy Name!"
Law is to justice as attorneys general are to real ones.
This bright Wednesday afternoon in Little Rock, the Spanish-tiled, neo-classical federal courthouse looks bubble-wrapped. There are cops on every corner. They smile and nod as they check out the occasional pedestrian. No parking is allowed around the building today. The attorney general of the United States is passing through, and the now-usual precautions are being taken.
Welcome to the new, post-Timothy McVeigh, post-Sept. 11 America. Six months into the war on terror, a strange mix of heightened vigilance and lowered awareness has set in. How describe it? Call it a sense of routine emergency.
To read his press clips, you'd think John Ashcroft was the danger that needed watching.
This administration has its critics, and all administrations need them, but the criticism directed at this one member of the Cabinet has a special quality about it: visceral, instinctive, at times surreal.
Before and after Sept. 11, from his confirmation hearing right through this strange period of abnormal normalcy, he's the one who really sets 'em off.
Think I exaggerate? According to The New York Times' William Safire, George W. Bush was attempting to seize "what amounts to dictatorial power" at the behest of his "frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general." And Bill Safire is a conservative.
The spirit of liberty, Learned Hand said, is the spirit that is not too sure it is right. But his more fervid critics sound as cocksure as they accuse John Ashcroft of being.
This attorney general has been the subject of more urban myths than the crocodiles in New York's sewers.
Besides the remarkable powers of imagination these stories demonstrate, there is something else at work here - an eager willingness to believe anything nasty about the man. I have my own theory about why Ashcroft inspires such enmity. I think a good part of it is religious prejudice.
The man is likely to break out in a hymn in the middle of a speech, he doesn't hide his convictions, and he presides over morning prayers in his office (they're strictly voluntary).
His critics can never know when he's going to have the bad taste to mention God, and the suspense puts them on edge.
There's something else his critics can't stand about Ashcroft. He's smart. And he's a good lawyer. Nothing angers those accustomed to thinking of their politics as the only intelligent kind like finding an antagonist who thinks.
They'd rather dismiss Ashcroft as some kind of country bumpkin from Missouri (like Harry Truman?) rather than actually wrestle with
his ideas. It's so much easier to
condescend to him, to make up
stories about his Puritanism, his
general scariness.
Much like Truman, Ashcroft has found the job he signed on for in Washington completely changed by a single event, and all his expectations confounded. Yet he continues to grow in the job without changing his character or moderating his beliefs.
If you can catch him when he
doesn't sound like a press release (he was actually in town to say the usual things about staying on guard against terrorism) you can have a stimulating conversation, including a disagreement or two.
For example, I brought up something the attorney general had said in the aftermath of Sept. 11 that still rankles: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty," he warned, "my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists."
Which comes dangerously close to accusing anyone who criticizes his policies of aiding the enemy.
That sounds less like Harry Truman than Joe McCarthy. He actually seemed to enjoy wandering off-message for a few minutes and thinking aloud.
But then he had to hurry off, having some other things to attend to. Whatever our differences, this was one time I left a courthouse with more confidence in the law than when I'd arrived.
* Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. |
