Ashcroft's ascent; how far will the Attorney General go?(John Ashcroft)

There had never been a congressional hearing quite like the one that was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee last December 6th. In the weeks leading up to it, Attorney General John Ashcroft had overseen a series of increasingly controversial steps as part of the domestic war on terrorism -- including the detention of more than a thousand people on secret charges, the establishment of a new system for monitoring certain attorney-client conversations, and, most notably, a plan to create military tribunals for alleged war criminals. Reflecting the concerns of a broad array of political observers, some of the Democrats on the committee -- including the chairman, Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, Dianne Feinstein, of California, Charles Schumer, of New York, and Russell Feingold, of Wisconsin -- had cautioned that the measures infringed on civil liberties. The hearing was their chance to raise the issue with the Attorney General.

When the senators filed in, Ashcroft was already in his seat. ("My father was never on time -- he was always early!" Ashcroft wrote in a brief memoir he published in 1998, "Lessons from a Father to His Son.") Ashcroft projects solidity; at fifty-nine, he is fit, with the broad shoulders of the high-school football player he used to be. His expression was fixed and impassive. The hearing had a special resonance because less than a year earlier the Attorney General had himself served as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, during his one term as a Republican senator from Missouri. Then, in January of 2001, after President Bush nominated him as Attorney General, Ashcroft had testified in his own contentious confirmation hearing -- and won committee approval by a margin of ten to eight. (Fifty-eight senators later voted for Ashcroft, but the forty-two negative votes were the most ever cast against the confirmation of an Attorney General.) Ashcroft had been deeply offended by that vote, so when he began his prepared remarks it was noticeable that he omitted the customary fulsome praise for committee members. "On the morning of September 11th, as the United States came under attack, I was in an airplane with several members of the Justice Department en route to Milwaukee, in the skies over the Great Lakes," he said. "From that moment, at the command of the President of the United States, I began to mobilize the resources of the Department of Justice toward one single overarching and overriding objective: to save innocent lives from further acts of terrorism."

There was a consistent theme in Ashcroft's explanations of his actions. Over the previous three months, the options before him had been binary -- action or inaction, speed or delay, engagement or surrender. "Since those first terrible hours of September the eleventh, America has faced a choice that is as stark as the images that linger of that morning," he said. "One option is to call September 11th a fluke, to believe it could never happen again, and to live in a dream world that requires us to do nothing differently. The other option is to fight back, to summon all our strength and all of our resources, and devote ourselves to better ways to identify, disrupt, and dismantle terrorist networks."

Ashcroft had a simple directive for his critics. "We need honest, reasoned debate, and not fear-mongering," he said. "To those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."

After a dramatic pause, an aide handed Ashcroft a plastic bag of the type used to protect courtroom evidence; it contained a book bound in red leather. "This is a seized Al Qaeda training manual -- a how-to guide for terrorists that instructs enemy operatives in the art of killing in a free society," he said, as news photographers scrambled in front of him. "In this manual, Al Qaeda terrorists are now told how to use America's freedom as a weapon against us."

By the time the Democrats had the chance to ask questions, they looked almost physically diminished by Ashcroft's performance. In a most direct way, the Attorney General had said that his critics were helping America's enemy; any questions the senators might have about his proposals had been preemptively labelled unpatriotic, even subversive. And in response to this charge Leahy, Kennedy, Feinstein, and Schumer said nothing, although they did broach some tentative doubts about military tribunals and a few other initiatives. Finally, about ninety minutes into the hearing, Senator Feingold said, "I would just like your assurance that you do not consider . . . the hearing today . . . somehow aiding the terrorists by eroding national unity." No, Ashcroft replied, the hearing was going just fine.

The magnitude of the events of September 11th would have focussed attention on whoever happened to be Attorney General, but John Ashcroft has seized his moment with a special intensity. He currently enjoys wide support -- a seventy-six-per-cent approval rating, according to the most recent Gallup poll. He is held in similarly high regard at the White House. "The A.G.'s job is one that really entails managing controversy, and he has managed it very well," one adviser to President Bush told me. "If you are a Cabinet secretary in one of the big jobs, the best you can do is not having the White House thinking about you every day. Ashcroft is more than doing a good job. He is a star." In a political era of poll-driven caution, Ashcroft has also been an anomaly. As a two-term state attorney general, a two-term governor, a senator, and now Attorney General of the United States, he has rarely shied from taking clear stands on issues. He is the most socially conservative figure to become Attorney General in many years -- far more so than, say, Edwin Meese III, who was President Reagan's Attorney General -- and, not surprisingly, he has become the most polarizing figure in the Bush Cabinet. Senator Leahy believes that Ashcroft is using his popularity from the anti-terrorism campaign to push his agenda on social issues, particularly abortion and gun control. "In many ways, Ashcroft has created a far more political department than any Justice Department since I've been here," Leahy told me. "I think it's beneath the dignity of the Justice Department." Ashcroft's allies, on the other hand, see the Attorney General's work as an effort to restore the reputation of his department after what they regard as the politically compromised reign of Janet Reno. Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told me, "Ashcroft's people have a lot more professional approach toward the work of the Justice Department."