Remembering Janet Reno

With a click of his camera in 1993, photographer David Burnett captured a sense of the complexity of Janet Reno, who had just made history as the first woman to become U.S. attorney general. The photograph, now in the National Portrait Gallery, suggests the internal contradictions of an introvert exposed to the public eye. Reno holds herself defensively, folding her arms tightly across her chest and angling her body away from the camera. And yet this is clearly not a woman who avoids confrontation. Turning her head toward us, Reno locks our eyes with an unblinking gaze whose appraisal seems unlikely to miss much.

Reno shattered the glass ceiling of the attorney general’s office while simultaneously breaking the mold of Washington’s political elite. She brought an unvarnished sense of authenticity, independence, and integrity to her work and to her public persona. As President Obama recently remarked, she was an “American original,” more committed to public service than politics, more comfortable navigating Washington’s treacherous waters in a kayak than at a cocktail party of high-powered schmoozers.

Growing up on the edge of the Florida Everglades in a house her mother built with her own hands, Reno learned to herd peacocks and wrangle alligators—not bad preparation for political life in Washington. Although she was President Clinton’s third choice for attorney general, she was unanimously confirmed by the Senate and remained in office longer than any other attorney general of the twentieth century.

During the eight years that Reno served as attorney general, from 1993 to 2001, she stood out for plain speaking in a town famous for double-talk. “I don’t do spin,” she once informed reporters. Following the botched federal raid on the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians shortly after Reno took office, she refused to sidestep responsibility by spreading around the blame. “I made the decision,” she announced immediately. “I’m accountable. The buck stops with me.”

Reno combined wonkish attention to detail with fearlessness in the pursuit of justice, keeping her head down while building cases and then winning successful prosecutions against spies (such as Aldrich Ames) and terrorists (such as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski). She filed a landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft, and intervened in the Solomonic dilemma posed by Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old boy who was sent back to Cuba after his mother died while attempting to bring him to the United States. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1995, Reno faced illness with the same courage and confidence that she brought to every other challenge, promising that the condition would not interfere with her work.

In the end, commitment to service got the better of Reno’s natural reticence. “I made the decision long ago that to be afraid would be to diminish my life,” she once remarked. As attorney general, Reno blazed a trail for women, but as a government official who valued justice and integrity over party politics or personal popularity, she set an example for all those in public life.