Savannah News-Press • Sunday, November 21,1993 - 5F
Janet Reno, Star Of Clinton Cabinet, Makes An Unlikely Hero
By CAROL HORNER
Knight-Bidder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - It's a dark and
drizzly Sunday afternoon, approaching dusk.
A strikingly tall woman - 6 feet,
l'/4 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 passerby'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
home town. 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 it
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 plainspeaking 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.
AP Photo
STRONG WILLED: Attorney General Janet Reno is an individualist
That day, April 19,Reno, who had as unpretentious and genuine.
In recent months, Reno has been
given the go-ahead for the FBI's
tear-gas attack on the cult com- the subject of glowing profiles in nupound, stepped forward, appearing merous national publications. "Reno
all evening on radio and television, - The Real Thing," proclaimed the
to say repeatedly, "I made the deci- cover of Time in July. "Janet Reno
- How She Got Her Grit," said
sion .... I'm accountable."
Reno makes an unlikely hero. Lear's that same month. "Janet
She is a self-described "awkward Reno: Clinton's Conscience," headold maid," a plain-talking, un- lined Vogue in August.
No one is more surprised by the
adorned woman. She has been called
blunt, crusty and, on occasion, adulation than Reno herself.
Tve been astounded,'1 she said.
moody. She has been known to answer interviewers' questions in terse "I don't sound any different, I don't
monosyllables accompanied by un- act any different, I don't look any
different, I don't say anything differflinching, chilly stares.
But she has also been called com- ent than I did in Miami, and people
passionate, indefatigable and bright. liked me but they didn't gush about
A graduate of Cornell University me."
She doesn't seem swept away by
and Harvard Law School, she served
for 15 years as elected state attorney all the praise.
"I know that tomorrow I can be
in Dade County, Fla., where she developed a reputation as a hard-work- cussed out regularly and all the ediing prosecutor with a social con- torial boards can dump on me."
In fact, some have started to. Not
science. She is universally described
everyone liked her recent congressional testimony, in which she
warned television executives that if
they didn't do something about onscreen 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, two weeks ago The New
York Times published a long frontpage article 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.
"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 1 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."
Asked in the interview last week
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.'1
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.
Last week 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
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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."
Last week in Washington, Reno
chuckled as she told how her mother
once ran away from home for a few
weeks: "She got mad at me because
I was bossy."
On another occasion, while Reno
was state's attorney, her mother
was picked up for drunken driving in
a neighboring county - not her first
offense of that kind. Concerned
about the integrity of her office. Janet Reno asked the governor to appoint a special prosecutor for her
mother, and Jane Reno, who rejected not only organized religion and
racism but also makeup, dentures
and bras, served the required sentence.
"It was really a tough position to
have to drive down to the Keys and
get your mother out of jail while she
was calling the trooper a pipsqueak," Reno told the Los Angeles
Times.
Reno's sister, Maggie Hurchalla,
is a commissioner in Florida's Martin County. Her brother, Robert, is
an economics writer for New York
Newsday, and her brother. Mark, an
outdoorsman who has been a game
warden, a ranch hand and now a
'tugboat captain.
Hurchalla proclaims her sister
"clearly the noblest, the oldest and
the wisest of us all."
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