ALREADY Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is making some liberals pine for John Ashcroft. Gonzales has stonewalled Congress on the extent of electronic surveillance, raided a congressional office and, for good measure, raised the possibility of prosecuting journalists, including some at The New York Times, for publishing classified information. Far from blunting his impulses for overreaching, his post at the Justice Department seems to have whetted them.
In “The President’s Counselor,” Bill Minutaglio shows that Gonzales has taken an elastic view of the law ever since he began working for George W. Bush in Texas. Minutaglio, the author of a biography of Bush and a former reporter for The Dallas Morning News, has conducted hundreds of interviews and mined the state archives. His prose is sometimes repetitive and can veer between melodrama and Bush-like folksiness. But he has carefully amassed a wealth of information that suggests Gonzales is less a conservative ideologue than a diligent subordinate whose only principle is abject fealty to Bush.
Minutaglio explains how Gonzales worked to suppress the slightest hint of emotion in order to fit into Houston’s Anglo world. Growing up in Humble, Tex., in the 1960’s with seven siblings, and ashamed of his alcoholic father, he never let friends visit his home. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1973 after graduating from high school, opting for an assignment in Fort Yukon, Alaska — “somewhere that could have been on the dark side of the moon compared to Humble.”
Never a brilliant student but always a dogged worker, Gonzales attended Rice University and then earned a law degree from Harvard. He soon won a reputation as a quietly effective corporate lawyer in Houston, who was utterly loyal to his clients and shunned press attention — qualities Bush would prize. Indeed, Gonzales was a hot property for the Texas Republican Party, which had begun wooing Hispanic voters. Harriet Miers, Bush’s personal lawyer and a close friend, tapped him to become general counsel to Bush. Miers and Gonzales, Minutaglio says, both were “highly paid worker ants” who “would sycophantically say that they owed so much to Bush and that he was among the most brilliant and influential people they had ever met.”
The Bush clan became Gonzales’s new family. Like Miers, he molded himself into the perfect retainer. Entrusted with family secrets like Bush’s drunken driving conviction in 1976 in Maine, he would show up in 1996 at the Travis County Courthouse to shield Bush from having to serve on a jury considering a drunken driving case, which might have exposed Bush to embarrassing questioning about his own arrest. Then there were the 57 cursory death penalty memos that Gonzales cranked out, which skated over mitigating circumstances. Bush and Karl Rove, in turn, orchestrated Gonzales’s rise, making him state secretary, then a Texas State Supreme Court justice, even though he had no judicial experience. This taught Bush, Minutaglio says, that he could appoint anyone he pleased to the bench. The appointment also appealed to his anti-intellectual streak.
Minutaglio shrewdly observes that Bush and Rove became emboldened by the lack of any Democratic opposition in Austin, and were determined to exercise the same kind of power in Washington. As White House counsel, Gonzales sought to supply them with the means, whether it was to justify military tribunals or torture. Minutaglio’s fascinating book will surely not be the last word on this sorry tale, but it goes a long way toward removing the veil Gonzales has tried to drape over his career.
