Bush's Man From Humble

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For example, Gonzales put his name on the January 2002 draft of a legal memo intended for Bush that argued that al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan were not prisoners of war but enemy combatants who had no legal rights under the Geneva Convention, parts of which the memo derided as "quaint." Gonzales contended that "the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners."

The Administration boldly argued that in war the President not only has the power to hold enemy combatants indefinitely but also that the courts have very little authority to review the cases of individual detainees. Theirs was a proposal for a dramatic expansion of Executive power. And when detainees fought their cases up to the Supreme Court, the White House continued to insist that the judiciary did not have much oversight in the matter. The White House lost.

Gonzales later requested a legal opinion from a Justice Department agency that ultimately argued that subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in captivity to extreme stress "may be justified." When abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison came to light last spring, some Administration critics cited that memo as the legal backbone for the harsher treatment of prisoners, which is now the subject of court-martial proceedings.

"I think, in some ways, Gonzales is more dangerous than Ashcroft," declared Michael Ratner, head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the Administration to grant due-process hearings to any foreigners at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay. "The person who really took the U.S. outside the law was Gonzales. He opened the door to inhumane treatment and military commissions."

In a rare interview in May, Gonzales told TIME that the word "quaint" in the January memo referred not to his attitude about the Geneva Convention itself but to a handful of ancillary guarantees, such as rules requiring captors to provide prisoners with scientific instruments, athletic uniforms and commissary privileges. The draft memo, he added, was not his work alone and in any case "does not reflect what ultimately went to the President." He would not discuss what did.

That kind of discretion probably comes naturally to a man who hails — in more ways than one — from Humble, Texas. Alberto Gonzales is the son of Mexican-American migrant workers who raised eight children in a two-bedroom house, set amid tall pines, that his mother still occupies. As a child, he would rise at dawn just to spend some time with his father, a construction worker with only a second-grade education. "Sometimes when I get tired and discouraged," Gonzales has said in speeches, "I think about my father and the burdens he had to carry."

Competitive and athletic, Gonzales played football and baseball in high school and on weekends sold cold drinks at sports events at nearby Rice University in Houston. He joined the Air Force after graduation, and was shipped north of the Arctic Circle as an enlisted Airman. There some officers recognized his potential and encouraged Gonzales to apply to the U.S. Air Force Academy. He enrolled in 1975, hoping to become a pilot, but poor eyesight ruled that out. He transferred two years later to Rice, closer to home. Next came Harvard Law School, and then it was back to Houston and a partner track at the prestigious firm Vinson & Elkins. He caught the eye of Bush-family scouts in the early 1990s, when he was helping out at political events in Texas.