Janet Reno

American attorney general (1993–2001)

• Date of birth: July 21, 1938
• Place of birth: Miami, Florida
• Date of death: November 7, 2016
• Place of death: Miami, Florida

As the first female US attorney general, Janet Reno faced a series of highly public and controversial cases, among them the standoff with the Branch Davidians, the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympic Park bombing, the custody case of Elián González, the Unabomber, the Lewinsky scandal, and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. With intense media and public scrutiny, she remained steadfast, consistently fair, and even-handed in discharging her duties as the nation’s top law enforcer.

Early Life

Janet Reno was born the eldest of the four children of Henry and Jane Wood Reno. Henry Reno, an immigrant from Denmark, spent forty-three years working for the Miami Herald as a police reporter. Jane Reno worked for the Miami News as an investigative reporter after her children were grown. Reno had a valuable role model in her mother, a resourceful woman who built the family residence bordering the Everglades in south Florida. Her mother dug the foundation herself and installed both the plumbing and electrical systems. Although Henry pitched in to help with the heavy work when he returned every day from his job, it was Jane who did the bulk of the construction. The house withstood the rampaging Hurricane Andrew in 1992, a storm that leveled almost everything around the Reno home.

Reno attended the public schools of Miami-Dade County, graduating from Coral Gables High School as valedictorian of her class in 1956. In high school, Reno, who was nearly six feet two inches tall and was remarkably quick-witted and articulate, was a formidable opponent on the school’s debating team.

Reno entered Cornell University in 1956, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1960. While at Cornell, she held several jobs to pay her living expenses. She was president of the Women’s Self-Government Association. Following her graduation, she entered Harvard University’s School of Law as one of sixteen female students in a class of about five hundred students.

After completing her law degree in 1963, Reno, who had impeccable credentials, faced gender discrimination as she searched for work. Finally she got a job with the law firm of Brigham and Brigham, where she was an associate from 1963 until 1967. In 1967, she became a partner in the law firm of Lewis and Reno.

Life’s Work

Reno’s entry into politics began in 1971 when she spent a year as staff director for the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. In 1973, she became a consultant helping to revise Florida’s criminal code and worked in the state’s attorney’s office. A Republican opponent, Jack Thompson, campaigned against her and demanded that she reveal her sexual orientation, which he suspected was, as he termed it, “deviant.”

In 1976, Reno joined a private law firm as a partner and, the following year, was appointed state attorney for Dade County. In November, she was elected to serve in this office and was subsequently reelected four times. In this post, she focused on three important areas: fixing the juvenile justice system, establishing a drug court aimed at rehabilitation, and pursuing fathers who failed to pay child support.

Reno first came to the attention of future US president Bill Clinton in the 1980s, when his brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, extolled the virtues of her drug courts. These courts were designed to permit first-time, nonviolent drug offenders to avoid imprisonment if they agreed to enter treatment programs and abide by the mandates set by the court. Clinton attended two sessions of Reno’s drug court, and he was impressed by what he saw.

Clinton was inaugurated as president of the United States in 1993. Shortly thereafter, he asked his aide, Vince Foster, to interview Reno for the position of US attorney general. Foster recommended that Reno be appointed the seventy-eighth attorney general. Clinton’s earlier nominees, Zoë Baird and Kimbra Wood, withdrew from consideration because of the public controversy that erupted after it was revealed that they had, before their nominations, hired undocumented workers for domestic help.

On February 11, 1993, Clinton officially nominated Reno; one month later, on March 11, she was confirmed by a unanimous vote of the US Senate. Despite a stormy beginning and several tense situations during her tenure, Reno served as attorney general through Clinton’s two terms, the longest tenure of any attorney general since William Wirt, who served under Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams in the early nineteenth century (1817–29).

The first crisis Reno faced was the standoff between federal law enforcement and the Branch Davidians, a fundamentalist religious sect and offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had been investigating the sect for its suspected stockpiling of guns and other weapons. On February 28, 1993, agents moved in to take control of the Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. However, the charismatic leader of the sect, David Koresh, and many of his followers barricaded themselves in the compound and, armed with an arsenal of powerful weapons, began a gunfight in which four agents and six Davidians were killed. The standoff with agents would last for fifty-one days.

On April 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought administrative consent to attack the compound, capture Koresh, and release his followers, many of them innocent children. Reno asked President Clinton for his approval of the assault. With Clinton’s reluctant consent, the FBI attacked the compound on April 19. The building in which the Davidians were gathered went up in flames—how it did so remains unknown—killing more than eighty people, including twenty-five children.

This tragedy weighed heavily on Reno throughout her term as attorney general, and she took full responsibility for the tragedy. Many argued that her decision to storm the compound had been a tactical error. The situation was especially tricky and sensitive because it involved a group who was exercising its constitutional right to freedom of religion. Many opponents of the Clinton administration cited these First Amendment guarantees to discredit the decisions of Reno and Clinton in this case.

Another difficult situation for Reno occurred late in her tenure as attorney general. In November 1999, a Cuban boy who had been fleeing Cuba by boat with other refugees was rescued after their boat capsized. Most of the passengers, which included his mother, drowned. After the incident, the boy, Elián González, was cared for by relatives in Miami, but his father, still in Cuba, sought the boy’s return. The public controversy that surrounded this case showed a greater sympathy for Elián’s relatives in Miami than for his father in Cuba.

After prolonged negotiation, a US court ruled that Elián’s father was legally entitled to custody of his son. To gain custody of the boy so that he could be reunited with his father in Cuba, Reno sent armed federal agents to the home of his relatives. In a less-than-stealth action, agents stormed the home and retrieved Elián from a bedroom closet, where he had been hiding in fear. Much of the action after the raid was recorded by the media. However, one photographer was able to enter the house during the ensuing confusion. His photograph showing Elián and a family friend emerging from the closet and facing an agent pointing a rifle at them won a Pulitzer Prize. In this sensational case, Reno did what the law required, although her actions were widely unpopular and criticized by many.

Reno dealt with other cases that were in the public eye. Among these were the Unabomber; the case of Timothy McVeigh, who perpetrated the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in which 168 people died; and the case of Eric Rudolph, who was identified as the Centennial Olympic Park bomber during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. Reno also presided over the capture and prosecution of twenty-one Montana Freemen following an eighty-one-day standoff at Ruby Ridge. In this case, there were no fatalities. She also apprehended and obtained convictions against five illegal immigrants who carried out a bombing inside a parking garage at the World Trade Center in 1993.

Significance

Reno became a lightning rod for those who sought to discredit the administration of Bill Clinton. From the earliest days of her tenure, she was forced to make incredibly difficult decisions that attracted considerable press coverage. Throughout her term, however, Reno was stalwart in pursuing ends that she was convinced were in the best interests of the United States and that were consistent with constitutional guarantees.

Among the thorniest issues facing Reno was the Whitewater controversy involving the Clintons. This case, however, could not compare with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which set the stage for Clinton’s impeachment hearing. As she did in her other cases, Reno demonstrated during the impeachment the detachment and impartiality that characterized her legal approach.

Upon leaving office, Reno lectured extensively on constitutional law and criminology. In 2002, she sought the Democratic nomination for the governorship of Florida but lost the primary to Bill McBride in a close race. The Republican candidate, Jeb Bush, brother of then president George W. Bush, prevailed in the election. In April 2004, Reno appeared before the federal 9/11 commission to provide testimony on the Clinton-era counterterrorism and border control efforts. Two years later, she and other former Justice Department officials filed an amicus brief in protest of the indefinite detention of suspected enemy combatants in the War on Terror.

In the years following her position as US attorney general, Reno served on the board of directors for the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to using DNA testing to help free and exonerate those unjustly imprisoned. She was also an honorary board member for the nonprofit Street Law, a program that educates high school students and community members about legal issues.

In addition, Reno compiled and released Song of America, a three-CD set of fifty American folk songs, in 2007, and made a voiceover appearance in an episode of the animated sitcom The Simpsons, along with her sister Maggy Hurchalla, in March 2013.

Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in the mid-1990s, not long after she took office as attorney general, Reno was an inspiration for others with the disease and she raised awareness of the condition. She attended the April 2011 opening of the University of Florida's Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration as well as the October 2013 National Parkinson Foundation Miami Moving Day walk, for which two teams raised funds in her honor.

Reno received several awards and honors for her work. She was granted the Herbert Harley Award from the American Judicature Society in 1981, the Florida Bar Association's Medal of Honor Award in 1990, the Women's International Center's Living Legacy Award in 1997, and the Professionalism Award from the Council on Litigation in 2008.

Reno died at her home in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on November 7, 2016, from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

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