Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 14, 1993 TAG: 9311110118
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CAROL HORNER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
A strikingly tall woman - 6 feet, 1 inches - casually dressed in slacks, a jacket and a khaki-colored canvas hat with its floppy brim pulled down to partially obscure her face, is striding the streets of the nation's capital, gazing at architecture, reading historical markers, looking at landmarks. She's accompanied by two clean-cut men whose eyes pierce every shadowy corner and examine every passer-by's face.
It's a rare day off, and Attorney General Janet Reno, chief law enforcement officer of the country, acknowledged superstar of the Clinton Cabinet, is out exploring her new hometown. The men accompanying her are what she refers to as "the detail," FBI agents assigned to guard her every move.
"[Yesterday] was a wonderful time to walk because there was a mist and a rain, and it was as if Washington was kind of just a magical place."
It's the day after, and Reno, interviewed as she sits on a loveseat in her office at the Justice Department, has been asked if she finds time for any life outside her job.
She talks about friends and family who have visited "to make sure that they spoiled me rotten." She talks about her habit of walking to explore, about how she enjoys reading articles and books to enlighten her on her new surroundings.
But she says she spends most of her time on her job - traveling around the country to hold town meetings on crime, addressing gatherings of lawyers and others, administering a department of 92,000 employees, submitting to interviews, testifying before Congress, supervising investigations, advising the president, helping him sell his programs.
Still, the day before - on Halloween - she found time to go out in public disguised only by what she called "my old boat hat," and nobody recognized her.
That was fun, she says, smiling.
It has been a while since Janet Reno, 55, could count on an uninterrupted walk around town or a peaceful wait in an airport lounge.
Named by President Clinton to be attorney general in February - following two nominations that failed because of embarrassing controversies about illegal or improper hiring of domestic help - Reno fast became something of a media darling.
The public warmed to her plain-speaking style right away. But the citizenry really embraced her five weeks after she took office, when the government standoff with Branch Davidian cultists near Waco, Texas, ended in fiery tragedy.
That day, April 19, Reno, who had given the go-ahead for the FBI's tear-gas attack on the cult compound, stepped forward, appearing all evening on radio and television, to say repeatedly, "I made the decision. ... I'm accountable."
Reno makes an unlikely hero. She is a self-described "awkward old maid," a plain-talking, unadorned woman. She has been called blunt, crusty and, on occasion, moody. She has been known to answer interviewers' questions in terse monosyllables accompanied by unflinching, chilly stares.
But she has also been called compassionate, indefatigable and bright. A graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School, she served for 15 years as elected state attorney in Dade County, Fla., where she developed a reputation as a hard-working prosecutor with a social conscience. She is universally described as unpretentious and genuine.
In recent months, Reno has been the subject of glowing profiles in numerous national publications. "Reno - The Real Thing," proclaimed the cover of Time in July. "Janet Reno - How She Got Her Grit," said Lear's that same month. "Janet Reno: Clinton's Conscience," headlined Vogue in August.
No one is more surprised by the adulation than Reno herself.
"I've been astounded," she said. "I don't sound any different, I don't act any different, I don't look any different, I don't say anything different than I did in Miami, and people liked me but they didn't gush about me."
She doesn't seem swept away by all the praise.
"I know that tomorrow I can be cussed out regularly and all the editorial boards can dump on me."
In fact, some have started to. Not everyone liked her recent congressional testimony, in which she warned television executives that if they didn't do something about on-screen violence, the government would. "I'm watching," headlined the New York Daily News with a stern, chin-jutting close-up of Reno. Some editorialists and columnists said her pronouncements smacked of government censorship.
Also, The New York Times published a long front-page article recently under the ominous headline: "Doubts on Reno's Competence Rise in Justice Dept." The article reported that Reno's critics inside Justice and in some Democratic legal circles found her management style tentative and her personality prickly. Her new initiatives in criminal justice were lacking, detractors said, and further, her department's report on Waco was superficial and self-exonerating.
Even her personal style at some inside-the-Beltway parties came in for criticism as "blustery."
Reno remembers being in her office the morning the story appeared.
"Everybody called me and said, `Are you OK?'
"I hadn't read it yet, so I took it and I looked at the front page of the Times up the top, and then I turned it over and I started reading it veeerrrry carefully, and I braced myself and I opened it up and I read it more carefully. ...
"I got to the end, and I called [Deputy Attorney General] Phil Heymann - he'd been worried - and I said, `The Miami Herald was 15 times worse to me for 15 years. ...'
"I expect much worse."
Reno calls the critical piece her "banana peel." Back in the summer, she said, when she was the subject of so much adoring press, "my brother-in-law called me, and he said, `I'm sending you a banana peel. ... and I want you to go out in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, put the banana peel down and very carefully and gracefully execute your own descent from all this gush so that you can control it.' "
Well, said Reno, "I couldn't ask for a better banana peel."
She doesn't dismiss the criticisms in the article, but she has some responses. She told the Times she took issue with any suggestion that the department's Waco report was a whitewash: "I don't care whether anybody is hard on the department. ... If there's something critical to be said, I want it to be said."
Asked in the interview earlier this month if she was satisfied with her own performance during the Waco tragedy, in which an estimated 80 cult members, including 17 children, died after Davidians set fire to their compound, Reno responded in characteristically measured tones.
"One of the things that I want to look at is, should I have had a civilian person - by civilian, I mean non-law enforcement person - on the scene from the beginning to make sure that negotiators and behavioral scientists and law enforcement were all coordinated.
"I want to do everything I can to Monday-morning-quarterback me."
On a somewhat lighter note, Reno was asked about the comment that her dinner-party style was "blustery."
"Oh I talk a lot. ... I was probably talking too much," she said, unapologetically.
In a speech last month at Penn Law School's dedication of its new library, Janet Reno said that when she graduated from Harvard Law 30 years ago, she made herself two promises:
"I vowed not to do anything I didn't enjoy, and my second promise was that I would never let the law drown me."
There were books to read, she said, "that had nothing to do with the law, and a family to cherish and to spend time with, so that the law would not consume me."
Recently in her cozy office, sitting opposite an evocative painting of Robert Kennedy walking on the beach, Reno said she had pretty much been able to live by those principles, thanks to the example set by her parents, Jane and Henry Reno. Henry, a Danish immigrant who was a crime reporter at the Miami Herald for 42 years, died in 1967. Reno described him as a man of great common sense from whom she learned "to get along with all sorts of different people, to empathize with them." After his four children were grown, Henry Reno moved to a cabin in the Everglades and lived alone, but Reno says he visited and remained involved with his wife and family.
Her iconoclastic mother, Jane Wood Reno, was, variously, a crusading journalist, a carpenter, a peacock raiser, a skunk trapper and an honorary Indian princess. She died last December at 79.
Reno, the oldest child and the only one not to marry, lived most of her adult life with her mother in the simple but sturdy house Jane Reno built 45 years ago, largely with her own hands, on the edge of the Everglades outside Miami.
"She taught us how to live life and enjoy it," Reno said of her mother, who banned television from the household on the ground that it caused mind-rot, and who stirred her children's imagination by encouraging adventurous travel and a multitude of outdoor exploits, including wrestling alligators (small variety).
In a eulogy, Reno said her mother "could say `I love you' better than anyone I know." But, she said, her mother was "no saint."
"One comfort I have this afternoon is that she will not insult or embarrass anyone," Reno said at her mother's memorial service. "... But as I look back over all the years, almost all of her outrageous foolishness was directed at puncturing the pomp and arrogance of this world."
by CNB