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THE NEW YORKER
September 13, 1999
The Talk of the Town
Comment
Reno redux
By Peter J. Boyer
Ted Koppel, whose on-air calm is his professional signature, seemed
just a bit cross when opening his ABC "Nightline" program the other night.
He was speaking of Attorney General Janet Reno, and recollecting her long—ago
"Nightline" appearance on the evening of her first crisis on the job-the
April 19, 1993, conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco,
Texas. On that occasion, Koppel had suggested that Reno might follow the
model of some other nations in dealing with policy disasters and resign
her position. "It struck me then, as it does now," Koppel said the other
night, "that accepting responsibility without consequences is essentially
meaningless."
Reno did not resign, of course, but went on to become one of the most
significant members of President Clinton's Cabinet. The argument could
be made that she owes it all to that original "Nightline" appearance.
At the time, Reno represented something new, and, in truth, a bit strange,
to the Beltway culture. She was a gangly Floridian who arrived in Washington
without allies or experience in that city. Her first important decision,
barely a month after her her swearing-in, was to approve -an F.B.I.
plan to storm the Branch Davidian complex.
Janet Reno made an epic mistake--as many as twenty-five children inside
the complex died—but the tragedy somehow gained her a kind of folk-hero
stains. In a city already growing accustomed to the artful ways of a
dodgy new President, Reno's performance on "Nightline" and other TV
shows immediately after the fire ("the responsibility lies with me")
seemed like raw honesty her inelegance a token of rare character—she
even got points for addressing Koppel as Mr. Koppel. There followed
a period of remarkably good press, and Reno built an enormous reservoir
of personal credibility that became her shield against intramural sniping
from the White House and, later, deflected criticism from angry congressional
Republicans who had come to regard her Justice Department as the most
politicized in memory.
Now, with the admission by the FBI. that it fired pyrotechnic tear-gas
grenades at a Davidian bunker near the main compound a few hours before
the lire broke out, Reno has acknowledged that her credibility has been
seriously damaged. For years, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department
had forcefully denied that such potentially inflammatory devices were
used, and, more important, Reno herself testified before Congress that
they were not. Her best defense may be that she allowed herself to be
lied to by her subordinates at the F.B.I., a damning admission for any
manager. And she is said to be furious about the situation. She announced
that there would be an independent investigation of the matter and,
toward the end of last week, displayed her pique by dispatching United
States Marshals to the F.B.I.‘s J. Edgar Hoover Building to fetch yet
another unwelcome surprise—a recently unearthed audio recording of F.B.I.
agents, on the morning of the fire, asking for and receiving permission
to use the pyrotechnic grenades.
In the course of unraveling the Waco mess, Reno will also need to
address an untidy spat between two of her lawyers that surfaced after
(he existence of the grenades became known. One of the parties is Bill
Johnston, the Assistant United States Attorney in Waco, who has been
on the case since the beginning, and was a key figure in the revelation
of the use of the once disavowed grenades.
Since 1993, the Waco operation has been the subject of litigation
involving the Justice Department. first in the prosecution of Davidians
who -survived the fire, and now in a mammoth wrongful-death suit against
the government filed by Davidians and their families. The tragedy has
also been an abiding source of public speculation and fascination, embodied
most emphatically by -a documentary film producer named Michael McNulty.
His 1997 Oscar— nominated film, "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," is
the authority for conspiratorialists who believe the the fire at the
Davidian compound was started by the government (The governments position,
unchanged by recent developments, is that Davidians set the fire themselves.
McNulty has persistently sought to review the evidence from the scene,
which has been held by the Texas Rangers on behalf of the Justice Department,
and until recently he was consistently denied the opportunity, apparently
because of pending litigation. Last year, McNulty began to lobby Johnston,
the Waco prosecutor, and his persistence finally paid off Johnston told
me that he got a call from the Justice Department's top public-affairs
officer, who had also been subject to McNulty prodding. The public-affairs
officer, he said, had reluctantly decided that McNulty could be given
limited access if Johnston acted as a point of contact. Johnston agreed.,
and McNulty made four visits to the evidence room, where he discovered
the evidence of the pyrotechnic rounds that have caused all the fuss.
After McNulty's last visit, Johnston says, he received a telephone
call from Marie Hagen, a trial lawyer in the department's torts branch
in Washington, which is defending the government against the Davidians'
wrongful-death suit. Hagen was angry and, Johnston says, "growled" at
him on the phone, asking, "Did you let McNulty see the evidence?" When
he told her that he had, he says, she was very disturbed." Then, last
week, Johnston received a communication from his superior, Bill Blagg,
the United States Attorney in San Antonio, that he viewed as a thinly
veiled threat. He was sent a three-page facsimile of 1993 documents
indicating that he might have been present at an interview in which
an F.B.I. agent said that "military gas rounds" were used at Waco. Johnston
was surprised that the memo was being circulated by the department,
and to him the implication was clear: he was being auditioned for the
role of scapegoat. His fears were confirmed last week, he says, when
Blagg told the Dallas Morning News, "I cannot think of a worse thing
to be accused of as a U.S. attorney than knowing of favorable evidence
and failing to disclose it, and I can't think of a worse thing than
the Attorney General not knowing for six years what really happened."
Johnston says he doesn't remember the meeting; he doesn't dispute
having attended it, but he says he would have had no idea at the time
that the term "military gas" meant an incendiary grenade. In any case,
Johnston has gone public with his concerns, and says that Representative
Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, called him to say that he didn't
want to see anyone harassing him. Johnston isn't worried. "What are
they going to do Send us fewer paper clips?"
Hagen would not comment on the matter. A Justice Department official
complained that "no litigator would want a third party given access
to evidence during the course of litigation without being consulted.
And it is not unusual for such a litigator to sometimes get upset over
such a thing." And so yet another unwanted controversy presents itself
to Janet Reno, whose eventful career as Attorney General has come full
circle. We now know what she meant back in 1993 when she said that she
accepted "responsibility" for the Waco disaster—or, at least, we know
what she did not mean. She did not mean that accepting responsibility
implies paying the price for failure. That may explain how she became
the longest-serving Attorney General of this century.
Copyright © THE NEW YORKER
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