http://www.msnbc.com/news/504080.asp
Dec. 18 — With the passing of the Clinton administration comes another milestone — the departure of the 20th Century’s longest-serving U.S. attorney general and the first woman ever to hold that job. It hasn’t been an easy job to hang on to. But Janet Reno came uniquely equipped. Jane Pauley reports in this exclusive interview.
general Jane Pauley: “What is the secret to wrestling an alligator?”
Janet Reno: “You just make sure that you turn them over and let them go to sleep. The bigger ones take a lot more energy. I’m just good with the little ones.”
A woman who’s not afraid of alligators can surely take a little criticism. She’s endured a lot of it in eight years, from snapping critics on the right, on the left and in between.
Janet Reno: “Harry Truman said ‘Doing the right thing [is] easy. Knowing what it is [is] much more difficult.’ And I think that’s the greatest task — not to withstand the criticism, but to figure out the right thing.”
While Republican critics like Sen. Orrin Hatch have accused her of “blocking” for President Clinton, Reno is rarely invited to the White House either. Attorney General Reno, after all, appointed eight special prosecutors to investigate the president, the first lady or members of his administration.
Janet Reno: “I’m sure that the president of the United States has not always been happy with things that I’ve done but he has been a gentleman and a scholar and pleasure to work with on issues.”
In fact Reno wasn’t Clinton’s first choice, or even his second. Remember Nannygate?
Janet Reno: “I’ve never hired an illegal alien and I think I’ve paid all my Social Security taxes.”
Jane Pauley: “You were not a ‘Friend of Bill,’ one of those famous FOBs.”
Janet Reno: “No. I met him for the first time when I came to Washington to be vetted.”
A BAD CALL ON WACO
The biggest crisis of Janet Reno’s term was already three weeks old when she took the oath of office eight years ago. Forty days later, on her orders, the long siege of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians ended in a blaze of fire.
Janet Reno: “Waco is, of course, the bitterest disappointment for me. I prepared as best I could. I asked all the questions I could think of. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it. I made a mistake.”
Informed that child abuse was going on inside, Reno had not weighed the prospect of mass suicide. Eight-six people died, many of gunshot wounds. Twenty-five were children.
Jane Pauley: “Do you feel they died in spite of you, or because of you?”
Janet Reno: “At that moment, they died because of a decision that I made. They obviously died because of the decision that David Koresh made. But I have to deal with that, and I deal with it by saying I made the best judgment I could based on all the circumstances.”
Facing a withering barrage of congressional criticism, Reno didn’t duck.
Janet Reno (appearing before congressional committee) : “...it will live with me for the rest of my life. I am accountable for it and I’m happy to answer your questions.”
Only last month, an independent investigation completed cleared the attorney general a second time of charges that federal assault teams started the fire.
If Waco is her deepest regret, her proudest accomplishment is the conviction of Timothy McVeigh. She got a standing ovation last spring at the dedication of the memorial to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. And this fall in Chicago, it was the American Academy of Pediatrics giving her a standing ovation.
Jane Pauley: “This morning I saw 3,000, give or take, pediatricians on their feet for the attorney general. Is her contribution that well-known among your profession?”
AAP President Steve Berman: “It is. She’s recognized nationally as a champion for children. The standing ovation at this meeting was a recognition of sincerity. That people really believe that she cares about kids.”
At first, not many understood why the nation’s top cop was talking more like a social worker. But Reno has been a longtime proponent of fighting crime through early intervention.
Janet Reno: “You pick up the presentencing report on an 18-year-old that you’ve just convicted of armed robbery. And you see five points along the way where we could’ve intervened in that child’s life, to have made a difference.”
Jane Pauley: “What were the first one or two points where intervention might’ve prevented it?”
Janet Reno: “When he started dozing off in class. His grades started to fall, his mother was having difficulty and left him with his grandmother. If there’d been some stability in the household, it could’ve made a difference.”
Jane Pauley: “You’re wearing that very gentle expression on your face, but I wonder what it looks like if I were someone you were out to get?”
Janet Reno: “I’m never out to get a person. I’m out to convict some people. But not out to get people. Up until I was about 45, I sometimes let my temper get the better of me. Now, I just wiggle a little bit, and shake, and loosen up a little bit and go at it from another angle.”
FIGHTING PARKINSON’S DISEASE
Reno is 62 now. Five years ago she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.
Jane Pauley: “Is it life threatening?”
Janet Reno: “I’m told that at the end of your life, you may die of the Parkinson’s complications. But at the end of your life, you’re gonna die of some complication.”
Parkinson’s is the disease that Michael J. Fox has too. While he fights for funds to find a cure, Reno battles the disease in her own way.
Janet Reno: “I was a victim’s service center last week, and one elderly gentleman had a walker. And he was telling me he had some money stolen and he said, ‘I have the same thing you do.’ I said, ‘Does yours shake like this too?’ And he just burst into the widest smile. And he says, ‘It sure does.’ I said, ‘But I see you’re not letting it get you down.’”
Rarely seen out socially, when Reno is out and about its usually in a kayak on the Potomac River.
Jane Pauley: “You and your security detail?”
Janet Reno: “Yes.”
Jane Pauley: “No kidding?”
Janet Reno: “Yes. They’re so good about that.”
Jane Pauley: “How many of them go kayaking with you?”
Janet Reno: “A fair number.”
Jane Pauley: “Do they ever turn back? Try to persuade you otherwise?”
Janet Reno: “Once they had to turn back and I had gone on, so I went on and they turned back and we went and finally met at the car.”
Janet Reno has often gone on alone — against enormous pressure: not calling for a special prosecutor to investigate fundraising irregularities. Being too lenient in the Wen Ho Lee espionage case; then being too harsh. And waiting too long to reunite a little boy with his father, and then not waiting a little longer. When we look back at the year 2000, the picture of Elian face-to-face with an armed U.S. marshall will surely be among the most memorable.
Jane Pauley: “Now can you look at the Elian Gonzalez story and know what you should have done to have— in the best interest of that child?
Janet Reno: “We could’ve possibly taken the child earlier. I don’t do ‘what if.’ I think that that has turned out
appropriately. The child is back with his father. People saw that the — it was one of the golden opportunities that America has had to see a case go from state court, to federal court, to the court of appeals, to the Supreme
Court. And they had an opportunity to see that justice was done.”
And the majority was with her. At the height of the Elian Gonzalez episode she had a 56 percent approval rating.
TEARS FOR A REMARKABLE MOTHER
Jane Pauley: “How often have you found yourself in tears over issues, Elian Gonzalez, Waco, your own integrity under attack, a moment when you realized you might have called it wrong?”
Janet Reno: “When I was in my 20s and 30s, my family said I could cry better than anybody else around. And I cried, I think just sometimes — I don’t know why I’d cry. The time I really cry now is when I call my sister and we start telling each other stories about mother (tears up.) She was a wonderful person. She was a mess. She could cause me more embarrassment but she was really something.”
Jane Reno was Janet’s best friend and inspiration. Both Reno’s parents were newspaper reporters.
Janet Reno: “My mother forbid me to be a lawyer.”
Jane Pauley: “And so you told her...”
Janet Reno: “So I told her I was going to be a lawyer.”
Her mother Jane was, by all accounts — and there are many — a remarkable woman. She taught her kids how to wrestle those alligators in the yard of the house near the Everglades which she built — from the foundation to the roof — by herself. And there Jane raised her four kids, and raised a little hell too.
Janet Reno: “I think my mother is probably one of the best raisers of children that I’ve ever seen. She taught us to play baseball, to fight fair. She punished us and she loved us with all her heart. And there is no child care, no nothing in the world that could ever be a substitute for what she was.”
In Janet Reno’s office, amidst her mementos and the portrait of Robert Kennedy who among her predecessors is the one she admires most, is a toy truck, a red toy truck, like the one she’s going to buy soon. And take off to see the country she’s visited so much of but never had time to really see.
Jane Pauley: “In just looking at it — is it calming for you?”
Janet Reno: “No, what I see in it is nieces and nephews piling in and ‘I want to stop here! I have to go to the bathroom!’”
Mostly, she’s looking forward to going back to Miami. But will memories of Elian chill her homecoming?
Janet Reno: “No. You don’t know how much home means to me. If you’ve been born and raised in a place, lived in the same house since 1952 — a house your mother built, a house whose yard you helped cut out, trees that you helped to plant that have survived hurricanes — old books that you love, people that you love. It’s a great place to go to have your spirit soothed and to take stock of yourself and say ‘OK, what do I do next?’”
So what will she do next? Having turned her daughter into a lawyer by forbidding it, Jane Reno also told her she couldn’t write. In keeping with her “I’ll show you philosophy,” Janet Reno has hinted that she might write a book when she heads back to South Flrorida. And when she’s not touring the country in her red pickup.
Dec. 18 — With the passing of the Clinton administration comes another milestone — the departure of the 20th Century’s longest-serving U.S. attorney general and the first woman ever to hold that job. It hasn’t been an easy job to hang on to. But Janet Reno came uniquely equipped. Jane Pauley reports in this exclusive interview.
general Jane Pauley: “What is the secret to wrestling an alligator?”
Janet Reno: “You just make sure that you turn them over and let them go to sleep. The bigger ones take a lot more energy. I’m just good with the little ones.”
A woman who’s not afraid of alligators can surely take a little criticism. She’s endured a lot of it in eight years, from snapping critics on the right, on the left and in between.
Janet Reno: “Harry Truman said ‘Doing the right thing [is] easy. Knowing what it is [is] much more difficult.’ And I think that’s the greatest task — not to withstand the criticism, but to figure out the right thing.”
While Republican critics like Sen. Orrin Hatch have accused her of “blocking” for President Clinton, Reno is rarely invited to the White House either. Attorney General Reno, after all, appointed eight special prosecutors to investigate the president, the first lady or members of his administration.
Janet Reno: “I’m sure that the president of the United States has not always been happy with things that I’ve done but he has been a gentleman and a scholar and pleasure to work with on issues.”
In fact Reno wasn’t Clinton’s first choice, or even his second. Remember Nannygate?
Janet Reno: “I’ve never hired an illegal alien and I think I’ve paid all my Social Security taxes.”
Jane Pauley: “You were not a ‘Friend of Bill,’ one of those famous FOBs.”
Janet Reno: “No. I met him for the first time when I came to Washington to be vetted.”
A BAD CALL ON WACO
The biggest crisis of Janet Reno’s term was already three weeks old when she took the oath of office eight years ago. Forty days later, on her orders, the long siege of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians ended in a blaze of fire.
Janet Reno: “Waco is, of course, the bitterest disappointment for me. I prepared as best I could. I asked all the questions I could think of. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it. I made a mistake.”
Informed that child abuse was going on inside, Reno had not weighed the prospect of mass suicide. Eight-six people died, many of gunshot wounds. Twenty-five were children.
Jane Pauley: “Do you feel they died in spite of you, or because of you?”
Janet Reno: “At that moment, they died because of a decision that I made. They obviously died because of the decision that David Koresh made. But I have to deal with that, and I deal with it by saying I made the best judgment I could based on all the circumstances.”
Facing a withering barrage of congressional criticism, Reno didn’t duck.
Janet Reno (appearing before congressional committee) : “...it will live with me for the rest of my life. I am accountable for it and I’m happy to answer your questions.”
Only last month, an independent investigation completed cleared the attorney general a second time of charges that federal assault teams started the fire.
If Waco is her deepest regret, her proudest accomplishment is the conviction of Timothy McVeigh. She got a standing ovation last spring at the dedication of the memorial to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. And this fall in Chicago, it was the American Academy of Pediatrics giving her a standing ovation.
Jane Pauley: “This morning I saw 3,000, give or take, pediatricians on their feet for the attorney general. Is her contribution that well-known among your profession?”
AAP President Steve Berman: “It is. She’s recognized nationally as a champion for children. The standing ovation at this meeting was a recognition of sincerity. That people really believe that she cares about kids.”
At first, not many understood why the nation’s top cop was talking more like a social worker. But Reno has been a longtime proponent of fighting crime through early intervention.
Janet Reno: “You pick up the presentencing report on an 18-year-old that you’ve just convicted of armed robbery. And you see five points along the way where we could’ve intervened in that child’s life, to have made a difference.”
Jane Pauley: “What were the first one or two points where intervention might’ve prevented it?”
Janet Reno: “When he started dozing off in class. His grades started to fall, his mother was having difficulty and left him with his grandmother. If there’d been some stability in the household, it could’ve made a difference.”
Jane Pauley: “You’re wearing that very gentle expression on your face, but I wonder what it looks like if I were someone you were out to get?”
Janet Reno: “I’m never out to get a person. I’m out to convict some people. But not out to get people. Up until I was about 45, I sometimes let my temper get the better of me. Now, I just wiggle a little bit, and shake, and loosen up a little bit and go at it from another angle.”
FIGHTING PARKINSON’S DISEASE
Reno is 62 now. Five years ago she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.
Jane Pauley: “Is it life threatening?”
Janet Reno: “I’m told that at the end of your life, you may die of the Parkinson’s complications. But at the end of your life, you’re gonna die of some complication.”
Parkinson’s is the disease that Michael J. Fox has too. While he fights for funds to find a cure, Reno battles the disease in her own way.
Janet Reno: “I was a victim’s service center last week, and one elderly gentleman had a walker. And he was telling me he had some money stolen and he said, ‘I have the same thing you do.’ I said, ‘Does yours shake like this too?’ And he just burst into the widest smile. And he says, ‘It sure does.’ I said, ‘But I see you’re not letting it get you down.’”
Rarely seen out socially, when Reno is out and about its usually in a kayak on the Potomac River.
Jane Pauley: “You and your security detail?”
Janet Reno: “Yes.”
Jane Pauley: “No kidding?”
Janet Reno: “Yes. They’re so good about that.”
Jane Pauley: “How many of them go kayaking with you?”
Janet Reno: “A fair number.”
Jane Pauley: “Do they ever turn back? Try to persuade you otherwise?”
Janet Reno: “Once they had to turn back and I had gone on, so I went on and they turned back and we went and finally met at the car.”
Janet Reno has often gone on alone — against enormous pressure: not calling for a special prosecutor to investigate fundraising irregularities. Being too lenient in the Wen Ho Lee espionage case; then being too harsh. And waiting too long to reunite a little boy with his father, and then not waiting a little longer. When we look back at the year 2000, the picture of Elian face-to-face with an armed U.S. marshall will surely be among the most memorable.
Jane Pauley: “Now can you look at the Elian Gonzalez story and know what you should have done to have— in the best interest of that child?
Janet Reno: “We could’ve possibly taken the child earlier. I don’t do ‘what if.’ I think that that has turned out
appropriately. The child is back with his father. People saw that the — it was one of the golden opportunities that America has had to see a case go from state court, to federal court, to the court of appeals, to the Supreme
Court. And they had an opportunity to see that justice was done.”
And the majority was with her. At the height of the Elian Gonzalez episode she had a 56 percent approval rating.
TEARS FOR A REMARKABLE MOTHER
Jane Pauley: “How often have you found yourself in tears over issues, Elian Gonzalez, Waco, your own integrity under attack, a moment when you realized you might have called it wrong?”
Janet Reno: “When I was in my 20s and 30s, my family said I could cry better than anybody else around. And I cried, I think just sometimes — I don’t know why I’d cry. The time I really cry now is when I call my sister and we start telling each other stories about mother (tears up.) She was a wonderful person. She was a mess. She could cause me more embarrassment but she was really something.”
Jane Reno was Janet’s best friend and inspiration. Both Reno’s parents were newspaper reporters.
Janet Reno: “My mother forbid me to be a lawyer.”
Jane Pauley: “And so you told her...”
Janet Reno: “So I told her I was going to be a lawyer.”
Her mother Jane was, by all accounts — and there are many — a remarkable woman. She taught her kids how to wrestle those alligators in the yard of the house near the Everglades which she built — from the foundation to the roof — by herself. And there Jane raised her four kids, and raised a little hell too.
Janet Reno: “I think my mother is probably one of the best raisers of children that I’ve ever seen. She taught us to play baseball, to fight fair. She punished us and she loved us with all her heart. And there is no child care, no nothing in the world that could ever be a substitute for what she was.”
In Janet Reno’s office, amidst her mementos and the portrait of Robert Kennedy who among her predecessors is the one she admires most, is a toy truck, a red toy truck, like the one she’s going to buy soon. And take off to see the country she’s visited so much of but never had time to really see.
Jane Pauley: “In just looking at it — is it calming for you?”
Janet Reno: “No, what I see in it is nieces and nephews piling in and ‘I want to stop here! I have to go to the bathroom!’”
Mostly, she’s looking forward to going back to Miami. But will memories of Elian chill her homecoming?
Janet Reno: “No. You don’t know how much home means to me. If you’ve been born and raised in a place, lived in the same house since 1952 — a house your mother built, a house whose yard you helped cut out, trees that you helped to plant that have survived hurricanes — old books that you love, people that you love. It’s a great place to go to have your spirit soothed and to take stock of yourself and say ‘OK, what do I do next?’”
So what will she do next? Having turned her daughter into a lawyer by forbidding it, Jane Reno also told her she couldn’t write. In keeping with her “I’ll show you philosophy,” Janet Reno has hinted that she might write a book when she heads back to South Flrorida. And when she’s not touring the country in her red pickup.
:barf: