As he comes before the Senate Judiciary Committee Jan. 16 for confirmation hearings on his nomination to be Attorney General, Ashcroft, 58, may get a refresher course in that maxim. At least two more of President-elect Bush's Cabinet nominees have already drawn critics' fire, including Linda Chavez (see page 60), who withdrew her nomination for Secretary of Labor on Jan. 9 after it was revealed that she had once housed and occasionally given money to an illegal immigrant, and Gale Norton, who was nominated for Interior despite a record environmental groups have characterized as excessively pro-business. But none has provoked Democratic opposition like Ashcroft, Missouri's onetime governor and, until his loss last November to the late Mel Carnahan, a U.S. senator. Liberal interest groups have portrayed him as a conservative extremist and questioned whether he can be counted on to vigorously uphold laws with which he disagrees. They seem determined, at the very least, to make his confirmation as difficult as possible.
One point of contention concerns a 1999 episode involving Ronnie White, a respected black justice on the Missouri supreme court. When President Clinton named White to the U.S. district court, Ashcroft, then gearing up his reelection bid for the Senate, led a ferocious campaign to block the nomination, claiming that White was "pro-criminal" for voting to overturn the death penalty conviction of a man who had murdered four people. In fact, White believed that the killer had received an incompetent defense; overall, he had upheld the death penalty at nearly the same rate as Ashcroft's own appointees to the state bench. But Ashcroft's blistering attacks led to White's defeat in the Senate and left many liberals bitter. "He played the race card on Ronnie White," says the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "Ashcroft smeared him and used him for political gain." Ashcroft denies the charges. In a 1999 editorial he wrote, "I will promise no one that I will consider race in the appointment process. I only promise that I will not consider it." Still, less than two years ago Ashcroft also accepted an honorary degree from South Carolina's Bob Jones University, claiming later he hadn't known at the time that the school banned interracial dating. Given such ammunition, opponents believe they can make a strong case challenging Ashcroft's sensitivity on racial issues.
His record on abortion rights also makes him a target. As a senator Ashcroft drafted a highly restrictive Constitutional amendment that would have allowed for terminating a pregnancy only to save the life of the mother, leaving out the exceptions for rape and incest that even the President-elect supports. What's more, Ashcroft's amendment proposed defining life as starting at fertilization, an interpretation that abortion rights advocates argue would, in effect, outlaw birth control measures such as the pill, which can rely on blocking the development of a fertilized egg. "He's dead set against reproductive rights," says Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, who calls his nomination "payback to the conservatives who kept their heads down and voices low during the election."
Ashcroft forcefully rebuts the criticism and insists he will enforce all existing laws, regardless of his personal views. As evidence, he points to his handling of the state lottery in Missouri when he was governor. Ashcroft was strongly opposed to the lottery, which he regarded largely as a way of fleecing the poor. But when Missouri voters approved it in 1984, Ashcroft dutifully set up the machinery to ensure it would be efficiently run. "I would never seek to impose my views over the law of the land," says Ashcroft. "We are a culture of law. That's what reinforces our freedom."
And indeed, for all Ashcroft's hard-line views, many Democrats don't see him as a polarizing figure. Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, one of the upper chamber's most liberal members, praised Ashcroft as "invariably polite and flexible" when it came to handling legislation and indicated that he was leaning in favor of confirmation. Though some might attribute that sentiment to the Senate's self-protective clubbiness, it is echoed by a wide range of people who have known Ashcroft over the years, including those who are hardly his ideological soulmates. "I'm about as irreligious as you can get, but the two of us got along great," says Jim Broderick, a retired lawyer in Madison, Wis., who went to the University of Chicago Law School with Ashcroft and recalls that he and his buddy would regularly go out drinking with friends. A lifelong teetotaler, Ashcroft never touched anything but ginger ale, but had no problem buying pitchers of beer for his classmates when it was his turn. "It was clear that he was religious, but he was not out proselytizing," says Broderick. "That's one of the reasons I'm not concerned about John in that post."
Ashcroft's religion is deeply ingrained. He grew up in Springfield as the second of three brothers. His mother, Grace, was a homemaker, while his father, J. Robert Ashcroft, was an influential preacher in the Assembly of God church. In high school Ashcroft was captain and quarterback of the football team as well as president of his class. His father, who introduced him to literature and bribed his three sons with a dollar for each poem they memorized, traveled around the world on missions for the church and was frequently away from home, but John remained extremely close to him. During his first year at Yale, John wrote to him every day and received a reply to each letter. When John graduated from law school, his father put down $500 for him for a farm near Springfield, where Ashcroft still lives in a large restored farmhouse.
More important, John inherited his father's fundamentalist convictions. In law school classmates recall that Ashcroft would often pass up services on campus and go off to worship at black churches, where the evangelical zeal closely matched that of his own upbringing. "He felt a kindred spirit," says former classmate Bruce Johnson, now an attorney in Portland, Maine. "John's worship style is a lot more expressive than a lot of folks'."
Ashcroft worked his way through college at a pizza parlor and by answering campus phones, while in the summer he took construction jobs in Alaska. He also sold his own blood to make extra money and, ever the competitor, would race his friends to see who could fill blood bags the fastest. A basketball lover, Ashcroft was a regular visitor to some of Chicago's tougher inner-city playgrounds when looking for a game—hardly the behavior, friends note, that one would expect of a bigot. "The allegation of racism is outrageous," says Lester Munson, a classmate at Chicago and now a writer for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. "I am as left-wing a bleeding-heart liberal as you can get. I have no concern about him as Attorney General following the letter of the law."
By the same token Ashcroft has never shown any inclination to stray from his core religious principles. He declined to dance at his two inaugurations as governor of Missouri but did play accompaniment on the piano instead. He and his wife, Janet, 56, whom he met in law school (and who teaches business at predominantly black Howard University), live near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in a modest row house adorned with pictures of the couple's three grown children, Martha, 31, a lawyer, Jay, 27, an engineer, and Andy, 23, who recently joined the Navy. Despite his reputation for rectitude, Ashcroft has retained some of the friskiness of his youth. He has been known to water-ski while balancing on a chair and he delights in practical jokes—on occasion bringing home a tarantula for his wife on the farm.
But his good humor was sorely tested by November's Senate election, when he lost by just two percentage points to Democrat Mel Carnahan, who had been killed a few weeks earlier in a plane crash. (Carnahan's widow, Jean, was appointed to serve in his place.) Though clearly disappointed, he issued a gracious concession. Law school classmate Jerry Barr, now a superior court judge in Indiana, recalls getting a cheery call a few days after the election from Ashcroft, who was on a cell phone in a grocery store. " 'Here I just lost to a dead man and I'm talking to the soup cans,' " Barr says Ashcroft cracked. " ' They may just carry me out of here.' "
Assuming things get heated at his hearings—and there is no reason to think they won't—Ashcroft may need all the good humor he can muster. Even the most partisan Democrats, however, concede that he is likely to win confirmation, which is not to say he won't strike some sparks along the way and thereafter. "If you start focusing on the doable, you give away too much," he said in an interview two years ago, delivering a broadside to compromise that could only thrill true-believing conservatives. "If you focus on the noble, you change the definition of the doable."
Bill Hewitt
Rose Ellen O'Connor in Washington, D.C.
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
