Adios, Gonzales

On August 27 Alberto Gonzales announced that he was resigning from his post as U.S. Attorney General, a position he held since February 2005. He is a true American success story, whatever his faults.

The son of immigrant farm workers (the second of eight children), he joined the Air Force in 1973 and then worked his way through Rice University in Houston, where he impressed his professors with his intellect. From there he went on to Harvard Law. From Harvard he returned to Texas in 1982 and went into private practice in Houston. He eventually became a partner at the prestigious law firm, Vinson and Elkins, where he worked until 1994.

It was in 1994 that he caught eye of Governor George Bush, who made Gonzales general counsel to the governor. Later on he also served as Texas Secretary of State, Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, and then White House Counsel. By all accounts he was a good judge--smart and reasoned in his opinions. He was also a reasonably good administrator as Texas Secretary of State. All that seems to have changed when he hit the rarefied air of Washington as the replacement for Bush's first Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who left after Bush's first term.

Gonzales may be best remembered for his work as the legal mind behind much of the anti-terror policy of the Bush administration, including the position that the Geneva Convention does not apply to Al-Qaeda terrorists. He was also an early advocate of the Patriot Act. As a strong advocate of national security, it is somewhat ironic that his inability to articulate before congress the legal and factual underpinnings of the NSA warantless surveillance program contributed to his fall from grace.

For Bush's part, Gonzales probably kept the special prosecutor monster at bay. The Democrats would have loved to unleash a series of special prosecutors on every issue from the justifications for the Iraq war to the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Whatever the merits of the need for such investigations, his actions did minimize the distractions faced by the Bush Whitehouse in the post-9/11 period.

It is the firing of the U.S. Attorneys that really ultimately brought Gonzales to this point. Since January 2007 his testimony before Congress has been increasingly . . . dumb. The reviews of his testimony were resoundingly bad. Awful even. His testimony was, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, dissembling, obfuscating and possibly even perjurous, by some accounts. By spring there was no one left to defend him, except the Boss. Had his testimony reflected the man's true intellectual ability, no one should have been able to lay a glove on him.

One tragedy is that Gonzales's pet projects, which included stamping out child pornography and combating gang violence, fell by the wayside. Gonzales cared deeply about these issues and found that his ability to focus the Department on these worthy causes was increasingly impeded by the controversy surrounding him. Thus ends the tenure of the first Hispanic Attorney General.

His departure will no doubt be good for the Justice Department which is demoralized and distracted. It is a bad end for the first Hispanic to hold the post. He was mild-mannered, genial, professional and awed by the amazing success he was able to achieve. We should be awed too.