"Attorney at War"
NMSU professor Nancy V. Baker publishes the first biography of controversial attorney general John Ashcroft.
By Margaret Markham
To NMSU political-science professor Nancy V. Baker, former Attorney General John D. Ashcroft hardly seemed a man for all seasons. On the contrary, Baker told the audience during a recent lecture at the Good Samaritan Village in Las Cruces, over many years as a public figure the Missouri lawyer-turned-politician embraced surprisingly paradoxical positions.
In her new biography, General Ashcroft, Attorney at War (University Press of Kansas, $34.95), Baker depicts a man often listless and bored, long in search of a mission. Only with the crisis of 9/11 did Ashcroft finally fill that void with his ardent war on terror.
Baker's book is the first published biography of the controversial Bush Administration attorney general. Louis Fisher, author of Presidential War Powers, gives kudos to General Ashcroft, Attorney at War for providing "a sweeping and sophisticated review of the legal and constitutional disputes that swirled around his tenure as attorney general."
Over the decades prior to serving as US attorney general, Baker noted, Ashcroft's political career was peppered with surprising actions, at times utterly out of step with his avowed conservative Republican views. As an example, Baker cited his determined stance in upholding existing federal laws protecting the right of access to abortion clinics.
Ashcroft also proved unswerving in his dedicated battle against sex trafficking and slavery. As Missouri's governor, he supported measures to restrict cigarette access by minors and vetoed a bill that would have allowed the sale of liquor on Sunday. He also signed into law a hate-crimes measure.
During his long career Aschcroft sometimes took positions seemingly in conflict with his personal religious views. For instance, Baker said, "He determined that the state education board could not authorize the distribution of religious material on public-school property." He also upheld the defense concept of the "battered-woman syndrome" in homicide cases involving abused women.
On the other hand, it was Ashcroft, as Missouri's attorney general, who used the Sherman Antitrust Act in an unsuccessful attempt to block the National Organization for Women (NOW) in its campaign for all states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Ashcroft also led the fight against carrying out court-ordered school desegregation in St. Louis and Kansas City.
As for Ashcroft's single term in the US Senate, which ended in 2001, Baker writes: "His highest-profile legislative action was promoting the charitable choice provision in the welfare reform law, which enabled religious groups to more easily solicit federal funds to provide social services. Like George W. Bush, he believed that the notion of separation of church and state had been used to justify discrimination against religious organizations."
Though born in Chicago in 1942, it was in Springfield, Mo., that John Ashcroft spent his earliest years. Both his father and grandfather were ministers in the Assemblies of God, regarded in religious circles as among the largest, most influential white Protestant denominations in this country. It was in that environment that the would-be lawyer laid down the roots for his long and often perplexing political career, beginning with a failed run for Congress in 1972.
Eventually, in his bid to become the nation's attorney general, Ashcroft ignited a firestorm. His confirmation hearing was "highly contentious, ending in the closest vote for approval of an attorney general in this country's history," Baker said.
In her book, Baker highlights the myriad ways in which the all-too-eager new attorney general repeatedly stretched his wings. Time and again he used informal as well as the formal authority of his office to broaden both the executive and law-enforcement powers. In so doing, he encroached on heretofore recognized privacy rights and criminal procedural rights, Baker argues. He was equally quick to thwart both the public and the press in exercising their rights with respect to long-established government transparency procedures. She relates how dramatically Ashcroft changed the office of attorney general and the extent his machinations disrupted the checks and balances in power inherent in our form of government.
Based on that record, Baker concludes that Ashcroft was "arguably the most polarizing attorney general in our nation's history."
Baker's research disclosed that among President Bush's original cabinet members only the secretaries of state and defense, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, managed to appear more often on television than Ashcroft. Yet on the other hand, Baker writes, Ashcroft "avoided print reporters entirely, considering them too critical and opinionated." He also refused to engage "in the dialogue between citizen and state so essential in a democracy," Baker maintains.
Ashcroft "browbeat critics," the author contends, and stifled opposition by setting up his opponents as "straw men" and objects of ridicule. For instance, he accused librarians concerned about the Patriot Act of conjuring imaginary FBI agents checking libraries "in raincoats, dark suits, and sporting sunglasses."
Even after his tenure as attorney general, Baker said, Ashcroft's legacy lives on in the unprecedented power assumed by the Oval Office based on his justifications. Ashcroft casts a shadow, too, in the political philosophy inherited by his colleagues and by his successor, Alberto Gonzales, whom he originally hired as his assistant.
Upon completion of his one term as the nation's attorney general, Ashcroft left Washington with surprisingly little fanfare. But that's not to say his departure was entirely unnoticed. As even the Wall Street Journal's conservative columnist Brett Stephens acknowledged, Ashcroft had become "a national embarrassment."
As for the current status of that enigmatic erstwhile politician, in a wry comment at the end of her lecture, Baker hinted that finally in his new career as a lobbyist Ashcroft "may be making real money for the first time in his life."
Longtime Las Cruces resident Margaret Markham is a freelance journalist and author, and a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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