Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States – the first woman to hold the job – and whose eight years in that office placed her in the middle of some of the most divisive episodes of the Bill Clinton presidency, has died aged 78.
The cause was said to be complications from Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in November 1995, while Reno was still in office.
Reno's tenure as attorney general was bracketed by two explosive events: a deadly federal raid on the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993, and, in 2000, the government's seizing of Elián González, a young Cuban refugee who was at the centre of an international custody battle and a political tug of war. In those moments and in others Reno was applauded for displaying integrity and a willingness to accept responsibility, but she was also fiercely criticised.
Republicans accused her of protecting President Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore when, in 1997, she refused to allow an independent counsel to investigate allegations of fundraising improprieties in the White House. After leaving office, she mounted a surprise though unsuccessful bid in Florida in 2002 to unseat Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W Bush, amid the resentment of Cuban-Americans in South Florida over her negotiating for the return of Elián to Cuba.
Reno was never part of the Clinton inner circle, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms, longer than any attorney general in the previous 150 years.
She was a latecomer to the team, and her political and personal style clashed with the president’s, particularly as she sought to maintain some independence from the White House. Her relations with the president were further strained by her decision to let an independent inquiry into a failed Clinton land deal in Arkansas, the so-called Whitewater investigation, expand to encompass Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an episode that led to his impeachment. Clinton and his allies thought that Reno was too quick to refer to special counsels in the Lewinsky matter and other cases of suspect administration behaviour. The president let her dangle in the public eye for weeks before announcing in December 1996, after his resounding re-election, that she would remain for his second term. Reno was never a natural fit in Washington’s backslapping, competitive culture.
At weekly news conferences, held in the barrel-vaulted conference room outside her office in the justice department building on Pennsylvania Avenue, she was fond of telling reporters that she would “do the right thing” on legal issues and judge them according to “the law and the facts.”
Tall, awkward in manner and blunt in her probity, she became a regular foil for late-night comics and a running gag on Saturday Night Live. But she got the joke, proving it by gamely appearing on the show to lampoon her image. The comedy could not obscure her law-enforcement accomplishments. Reno presided over the justice department in a time of economic growth, falling crime rates and mounting security threats to the nation by forces both foreign and domestic. Under Reno, the agency initiated prosecutions in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century. The Reno justice department also prosecuted spies such as CIA mole Aldrich H Ames; it filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, a milestone in the new-technology era; and it sued the tobacco industry to reclaim federal health care dollars spent on treating illnesses caused by smoking.
Reno was a strong advocate of guaranteeing federal protection to women seeking abortions and safeguarding abortion clinics that were under threat. But in some areas she seemed conflicted about the law. She opposed the death penalty, for example, but repeatedly authorised her prosecutors to ask juries to impose it. When she took office, she endorsed the use of independent counsels to investigate administration figures. But she later testified against renewing the law governing their use, saying it did nothing to take politics out of the inquiries.
“I’m just delighted to be here, and I’m going to try my level best,” Reno said at the Rose Garden ceremony at which Clinton announced her nomination in 1993. Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists. The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, and about 75 others dead. A third of the dead were children.
Reno’s candour was viewed as refreshing in a city where blame-shifting is the norm, and it gave her sudden celebrity status in the new administration. The lustre faded quickly. Within weeks, Reno faced tough questions about the raid and her claim that children were being abused at the compound. She was also faulted for failing to influence an important crime bill. By the end of her first year in office, she was facing mounting scrutiny in the media.
With Clinton’s re-election and his decision to keep Reno at her post, Republicans began questioning her independence when she resisted their calls for a special counsel to look into allegations that Clinton and Gore had broken campaign fundraising laws in 1996. The clamour, led by the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, grew when it was disclosed that Louis J Freeh, the head of the FBI, also favoured a special counsel. Reno would not budge, saying her stance had nothing to do with protecting the president. A review of the evidence, she said, convinced her that a special counsel was not warranted. “Let me be absolutely clear,” Reno told hostile Republican questioners during one of several hearings on Capitol Hill about the call for a special counsel. “I’m not going to violate my oath in this matter because of pressure from any quarter, not from the media, not from Congress, nor from anywhere else.”
Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the FBI might have started the fire that destroyed the compound. The revelation further soured her dealings with Freeh, a relationship that had been close early in her tenure but that had grown tortured by 1999. He let it be known that he favoured a special counsel in the fundraising case and a new inquiry into Waco.
She sent marshals to FBI headquarters to seize a tape of communications made the day of the assault.
Her final and perhaps most personal crisis as head of the justice department was the case involving Elián González, the six-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others had drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat. The boy became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in south Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Reno favoured returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.
Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint. Congressional Republicans and many Cuban exiles were outraged.
Some in Miami said Reno would be in danger if she returned there after her service in Washington.
Early in 2001, however, she did go home, her service finished.
Janet Reno was born in Miami, on the edge of the Everglades, to Henry Olaf Reno and the former Jane Wood. Her father, born Henry Rasmussen in Denmark, came to the United States in 1913 with his own mother and father, who chose the name Reno off a map, believing it sounded more American.
Janet Reno, the eldest of four siblings, was about eight when her parents bought 21 acres bordering the Everglades and moved there. Her mother, who had no construction experience, built the family home. “She dug the foundation with her own hands, with a pick and shovel,” Reno told senators at her confirmation hearing in 1993. It was a rustic life; peacocks and other creatures roamed the property. But she also glimpsed a more sophisticated world: After junior high school, she travelled to Europe to stay with an uncle, a military judge, as he presided over a spy trial.
After finishing high school in Miami, Reno attended Cornell University, graduating in 1960 with a degree in chemistry. She won admission to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1963, one of a handful of women in her class of more than 500.
Seeking to practise law in south Florida, Reno was turned down by one of the state’s best known law firms, and went to work for a smaller firm instead. She became active in local Democratic politics and met a fellow Harvard graduate, Gerald Lewis, a lawyer with electoral aspirations. Reno helped him win a state House seat in 1966, and the two opened a general practice law firm together. Reno entered government service in 1971 as general counsel to the judiciary committee of the Florida House of Representatives, where she worked on a difficult overhaul of Florida’s courts.
Her work in Tallahassee, the capital, whetted her appetite for public office, and she campaigned for a state legislative seat of her own the next year. She lost in an upset to a Republican candidate helped by the landslide re-election victory of president Richard M Nixon. Reno did not wait long for her next opportunity. The day after her defeat, Richard Gerstein, the state attorney for Dade County, offered her a job on his staff. As she told the Miami Herald, she expressed reservations in her characteristically straightforward manner. "My father was always convinced you were a crook," she said she told Gerstein. "And I've always been a critic of yours." Gerstein replied that those were the reasons he wanted to hire her. Within a few years, she was Gerstein's chief assistant.
Reno left the prosecutor’s office in May 1976 to join Steel, Hector & Davis, the firm that had rejected her out of law school. But her tenure there was short. After Gerstein announced that he would resign in early 1978, after 21 years in the office, governor Reubin Askew appointed Reno interim state attorney, choosing her from about 50 candidates. She was the first woman to hold the title of state attorney in Florida and one of the few in the nation’s history to be responsible for such a large jurisdiction.
Reno retained the post through a thicket of drug, murder and corruption cases. In one, she was accused of being anti-police when she prosecuted five Miami officers in the beating death of a black insurance executive after a traffic stop; the officers, she said, had tried to make it look like an accident. The officers were acquitted – one by the presiding judge in the trial, held in Tampa, and the others by an all-white jury – provoking criticism of her legal strategy and four days of deadly riots in Miami's predominantly black Liberty City neighbourhood.
To quell the furore, Reno undertook an outreach effort that restored some support among Miami’s black citizens. She remained state attorney through five election campaigns – until February 1993, when the White House called.
Reno was formally nominated to be attorney general that same month, just a few weeks after the death of her mother, Jane, the guiding influence in her life. She invoked her mother’s memory in her remarks that day at the Rose Garden ceremony with Clinton. “My mother always told me to do my best,” she said, “to think my best and to do right.”
She is survived by her sister, Margaret. Her two brothers, Robert and Mark, predeceased her.
– New York Times service