Bush's Man From Humble

Whe

n George W. Bush returned to the White House on the afternoon of Election Day, chief of staff Andrew Card presented him with a five-page handwritten letter of resignation from Attorney General John Ashcroft. The letter, written a few days earlier and sent quietly to the White House, was in stark contrast to Ashcroft's often brash style as the nation's top cop. The President, distracted by exit polls suggesting that he might be heading for defeat, absorbed the thrust of Ashcroft's missive, then put it aside and said he would deal with it later.

Last week he did. The President nominated Alberto Gonzales, his longtime White House counsel and a former Texas supreme court judge, to replace Ashcroft as head of the more than 100,000-person Justice Department. Gonzales, 49, who for a decade has been at Bush's side in a variety of top jobs, would be the first Hispanic American to take the helm at Justice. He was chosen to change the tone, if not necessarily the shape, of legal policy in the second half of the Bush presidency. "This is the fifth time I have asked Judge Gonzales to serve his fellow citizens," Bush said. "He is a calm and steady voice in times of crisis."

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Gonzales' appointment is a vintage Bush move — controversial, virtually impossible to stop and bristling with tactical advantage. Social conservatives don't love Gonzales the way they adored Ashcroft, chiefly because the Texan is more moderate on abortion (he sided with a 17-year-old in a parental-notification case in 2000) and on affirmative action (he pushed the White House to take a softer position against college-admissions quotas). On civil liberties and national security, liberals say he is, if anything, more hard-line than Ashcroft.

But on both flanks, there is a growing suspicion that Gonzales' sojourn at Justice, however long it may be, is just the first half of a Texas two-step and that he is being sent through the Senate confirmation process now in part as preparation for a spot on the Supreme Court later.

In any case, Bush gains in Gonzales not only a trusted legal sword but a nifty political shield as well. Bush won re-election with 44% of the Hispanic vote, a new high for the G.O.P. and yet another worry for the Democrats. Said a Republican: "If the Democrats want to attack the first Hispanic Attorney General, well, good luck to them. We'll be happy to take our share of that vote up to 50% next time."

Washington took the nomination in stride because Gonzales has in some ways been functioning as Attorney General for months. Though his title for the past four years has been White House counsel — the official term for every President's in-house lawyer — his role has been larger than that of any other counsel in memory. That's partly because the White House began to lose patience with Ashcroft not long after he was confirmed. The Attorney General had a political tin ear and a weakness for the spotlight. He drew fire for saying critics of the Patriot Act were giving comfort to the enemy. He operated with a tight cabal of longtime aides who prayed together and had an unrivaled distrust of the Justice bureaucracy. After 9/11, Ashcroft had a way of letting his bloodhounds run off the leash. Under Ashcroft, federal prosecutors won 194 convictions in cases involving terrorism. But those successes were often overshadowed by a handful of too hastily conceived cases against suspected terrorists that were tossed out.

Ashcroft's methods strengthened Gonzales' hand at the White House, where he performed as a kind of Administration superlawyer, overseeing a wide variety of legal policies across the government, as well as the vetting and selection of judicial nominations. But in his wider policymaking role, Gonzales made his own mistakes. After 9/11, his office became the crossroads of much of the Administration's legal thinking in the war on terrorism — thinking that has not always stood up under scrutiny.