Newsweek
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales: "beating himself up"
Wed Jul 7, 2004 19:01
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Homesick for Texas
Alberto Gonzales left a good life to become White House counsel.

Amid a series of legal setbacks, he's wondering why.By Daniel Klaidman
Newsweek
Updated: 10:04 p.m. ET July 03, 2004July 12 issue - White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales loved his old life in Texas. He had a
coveted appointment to the state Supreme Court and a nice house in a
pretty Austin neighborhood. When George W. Bush went to Washington,
Gonzales traded in his robes to be the new president's top lawyer.
But now, people close to Gonzales say he wishes he were back home.
"He's down, very down," says a close confidant. "He's tired, and
longs for his life in Texas."

It's easy to see why. Nearly three and a half years after 9/11,
Gonzales is at the center of the legal and political fallout over the
administration's handling of the war on terrorism. As the president's
legal gatekeeper, Gonzales was responsible for vetting some of the
most controversial decisions: the treatment of prisoners, the line
between aggressive but legal interrogation and torture, and the
rights of "enemy combatants."

The White House, and Gonzales in particular, are now left to explain
those decisions in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the steady drip of
leaked memos. Last week the Supreme Court delivered another blow. In
cases that dealt with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and suspected
terrorists held as enemy combatants, the justices rejected the
administration's argument that the president has virtually unlimited
power to hold people indefinitely without access to the courts. It
was an unwelcome moment for a man who had once been on Bush's
shortlist for the high court (a post Gonzales's intimates say he
never wanted).

Friends say the White House counsel is "beating himself up" over the
mess. Gonzales, they say, fears he may not have served the president
as well as he would have liked. Though he stands by the legal
reasoning, he wishes he had been more attuned to the possible
political consequences and had reined in some of the administration's
more extreme voices. Friends say he was particularly stung by press
accounts of a draft memo signed by Gonzales that called some of the
requirements of the Geneva Conventions "quaint." The memo, first
reported in NEWSWEEK, caused an uproar among the administration's
critics. Gonzales, who declined a request for an interview, has told
aides he thought the stories were taken out of context—he says the
memo didn't say the Geneva Conventions themselves were outdated, just
a few old provisions requiring commissary privileges and athletic
uniforms for prisoners. What's more, the memo was actually penned not
by Gonzales but by Dick Cheney's top lawyer, David Addington, a
hard-charging hawk.

Bush hired Gonzales—who was once his legal adviser in Texas—in part
because he isn't a grandstander. Courtly and low-key, he passed the
president's all-important "good man" test. But after 9/11, Gonzales's
soft-spoken approach sometimes put him at a disadvantage. In heated
arguments, Gonzales would often keep his counsel rather than
contradict forceful officials like John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld.
"He's not passive, but when he is in an area where he hasn't mastered
the subject matter, he'll be quiet," says a close associate.

In predictable Washington fashion, everyone in the administration is
looking for someone to blame. There is especially bad blood between
the White House and the Justice Department about which bears most
responsibility for a now infamous August 2002 memo that condoned the
use of torture on suspected Qaeda detainees. The memo was drafted by
a Justice lawyer who consulted White House lawyers extensively. "The
White House got exactly what it wanted," says a Justice official. But
the White House insists that the memo was approved at the highest
levels of the Justice Department. "The attorney general and his staff
were in the intestines of this memo," says a source close to
Gonzales. Some of Gonzales's aides pressed him to fight back and say
that top Justice officials had signed off on the memo. But he
refused. He didn't think it would serve the president, he told them.
And besides, the genteel Gonzales told them, it isn't his style.

With Tamara Lipper

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.