Standing Tall

By STANLEY W. CLOUD WASHINGTON

When U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno was a young woman, so the story goes, she arrived one day at the family home near Florida's Everglades to find blood on the steps and a note on the door. "Don't go in," the note warned. "Dangerous alligator inside." No big deal, Reno's brother Bob told her: their mother, an alligator wrestler from way back, had been bitten while trying to cram a four-footer into a crate for shipment to the London Zoo. Mom was at the hospital having her hand sewn up. Janet and Bob found the offending alligator in the fireplace and, with the help of some local Indians, managed to send the beast at last on its way to England.

Washington, a city that pulses with conformity, loves exotic visitors with colorful pasts, which helps explain the reception Reno has received in her two months on the job. But it is her performance under pressure that has sealed her stature in the capital. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Waco disaster last week, Reno found herself under fire from Congressman John Conyers Jr. The outcome at Waco, Conyers declaimed, was "a profound disgrace to law enforcement in the United States of America." As for Reno, he continued, "You did the right thing by offering to resign. And now I'd like you to know that there is at least one member of Congress that isn't going to rationalize the death of two dozen children."

Listening to Conyers' attack, the 54-year-old, 6-ft. 2-in. Reno thrust out her jaw and glared. Then, her voice quavering, she replied, "I haven't tried to rationalize the death of children, Congressman. I feel more strongly about it than you will ever know. But I have neither tried to rationalize the death of four ((Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms)) agents, and I will not walk away from a compound where ATF agents had been killed by people who knew they were agents and leave them unsurrounded." Then she added, "Most of all, Congressman, I will not engage in recrimination."

In that instant, Reno, who had already pretty much captivated Washington with one gutsy performance after another, achieved full-fledged folk-hero status. She was cheered by people throughout official Washington who had endured similar assaults by Conyers and other posturing lawmakers. She was cheered in the Clinton White House, where a welter of bad news had soured what was supposed to have been a celebration of the President's first 100 days in office. She was cheered on both sides of the aisle in Congress and in her own Justice Department, where a succession of 25-watt, responsibility-ducking Attorneys General had left morale lower than -- well, lower than an alligator's belly.

After the hearing, when Reno arrived back at the Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue, she received a standing ovation from the employees in her office. The next day Clinton paid a call on her at the department to announce his nomination of seven people to her senior staff and to bathe in a little of her reflected political glory.

It is a measure of Washington's leadership drought that Reno -- who has, after all, only stood her ground in defense of a decision that led to a disaster, said what she believes, and taken responsibility for her actions -- is the toast of the town. Moreover, says a senior White House official, "the great thing about liberal lawyers who have been elected from southern Florida is that they know how to talk about political goals in ways that Americans find acceptable." In her new job, the anti-capital-punishment, pro- choice Reno will doubtless test that notion. But at present, the praise is all but unanimous.

Reno, her sister and two brothers grew up on the family's acreage near the Everglades in a sprawling, un-air-conditioned, wood-and-stone house that her parents built by hand from the ground up. (Today the Reno spread is also home to about 35 peacocks and peahens, all named Horace after the original pair that Jane Wood Reno hatched from a couple of eggs in 1946.) Janet's father Henry, a Danish immigrant who moved to Florida and worked as a reporter for 26 years at the Miami Herald, died in 1966. Jane Wood Reno was also a hard- drinking, chain-smoking reporter. When she died in December at 79, one local obituary described her as an "honorary Indian princess, prize-winning journalist, gator wrestler, peacock raiser, certified genius, carpenter ((and)) skunk trapper."

The obit did not note that Jane Wood, like her mother before her, could also don white gloves and sip tea with the best of them. As Janet Reno, who likes to throw parties where her guests drink wine and read Shakespeare, commented to TIME last week, "The prime focus of my life has not been in watching my mother wrestle alligators." In any case, she comes from a wonderfully unorthodox family. Her sister Maggy is a county commissioner in central Florida, while her brother Bob is a columnist for New York Newsday, and brother Mark is a tugboat captain.

Contradictions don't seem to bother the Attorney General at all. She opposes capital punishment, but as state attorney in Miami sought the death penalty in 80 cases. She is known as a tough crime fighter, yet she supports programs aimed at eradicating the social causes of crime. Even defense attorneys admire her. Says Jeffrey S. Weiner, immediate past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: "I predict she'll be such a good Attorney General that she'll end up on the Supreme Court."

The Waco aftermath is only one of Reno's concerns. She wants to re-establish the Justice Department as a defender of civil rights and to lift the morale of that vast, 90,000-employee department, with an annual budget of $10 billion. She still has a number of unfilled positions among her senior staff, including chief of the all-important criminal division. Moreover, a preponderance of the top political appointments that have been filled have gone not to people whom Reno selected but to Friends of Bill's -- or Hillary's. Said Reno tactfully last week: "I have had continuing discussion with the White House to develop a team that represented agreements between us both."

The choice of candidates suggested that the White House has yet to draw many lessons from the process that gave them -- belatedly -- their most popular Cabinet member. Clinton chose Reno only after two other candidates, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, went down in flames. Reno's background, like Clinton's, is far more multifaceted than those of many of the liberal, highbrow, public- interest-minded Yale Law School crowd who are the core of this Administration. "Reno's success is a condemnation of the process by which the original choices were made," said a senior White House official. "It turns out that their buddies don't have a monopoly on all the legal talent in America."

In the months ahead, Reno is going to have to wage major political offensives on behalf of legislation that she and Clinton support, notably the so-called Brady gun-control bill and the omnibus anti-crime package that would, among other things, place 100,000 more police officers on the nation's streets. She will play a role in filling retiring Justice Byron White's seat on the Supreme Court as well as 100 other federal-court vacancies, and she will have to advise Clinton on whether or not to retain the embattled William Sessions as director of the FBI. It is an agenda that will sorely test the staying power of her current popularity.

At the end of the long, terrible day on which Ranch Apocalypse was reduced to ashes along with those in it, Janet Reno went home to the furnished apartment she is currently renting near her office. "I don't think I've ever been so -- I guess lonely is the word," she said. Then she received two phone calls. The first message, from her sister: "That-a girl." The second, from the President: "That-a girl." By the end of last week's bravura performance, it was a sentiment that even John Conyers admitted sharing.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami and Michael Duffy, Julie Johnson and Elaine Shannon/Washington