THERE ARE few sights sadder than that of a powerful person incapable of admitting a mistake. The Bush administration has treated us to that sorry spectacle many times over the past six years, but the Senate testimony of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez last week was perhaps the worst case yet.
Gonzalez, who has been under fire for his role in the recent firings of eight United States Attorneys, was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday to explain exactly what that role was. The picture that has emerged from recent news reports is that of a political purge targeting prosecutors perceived as insufficiently loyal to the White House. In several cases, it appears that prosecutors were fired for failing to pursue voter fraud cases of the sort that would justify restrictive new laws depressing turnout among poor and minority voters. But Gonzalez was unable or unwilling to recall many details, admitting to various communication problems but defending the dismissals themselves.
Gonzalez found himself in the same tough spot as every high official asked to account for some scandal occurring on his watch. To admit orchestrating the firings would place the full weight of that miserable decision on his shoulders, but to deny a central role would leave Americans wondering who exactly is in charge of the Justice Department if not the attorney general. In a country with well developed notions of shame, honor and responsibility, an official such as Gonzalez would have resigned whatever his actual role in the scandal, in recognition of a failure of the public trust. But in America, and especially in the Bush administration, one must fight on even after dignity and credibility are lost.
One might ask why Gonzalez would subject himself to such public humiliation in the mere hope of staying on as a weakened official in a lame duck administration. In the past ten years, Gonzalez has never held a job that Bush didn't give him, so this may be a simple case of career inertia. But the Bush administration has a long history of defending the indefensible and the show put on by Gonzalez last week was little different. One might recall that Donald Rumsfeld resigned as secretary of defense only after three years of blunders in Iraq, while the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers was withdrawn only after conservatives rose in full throated rebellion against the appointment of such an underwhelming figure to the highest court in the land.
It has become fashionable of late to remark that loyalty is the currency of the Bush administration and that the president, whatever his faults, stands by those who stand by him. Such is undoubtedly true, but it may be more accurate to say that personality is the currency of the Bush administration, with the president viewing government less as a set of institutions than as a collection of individuals whose value to the nation is measured by his own comfort in dealing with them.
This would explain why Bush has the juvenile habit of assigning nicknames to people he meets regularly and why, after speaking with foreign leaders, he is just as likely to remark upon their personality as upon the substance of the conversation. It would also explain how Bush ever got the idea that Miers, a White House attorney with no judicial experience, was qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. In every circumstance where Bush is called upon to evaluate a colleague, personality comes first and performance second.
The result of this backwards approach to management is the persistence in office of amiable mediocrities like Gonzalez whose judgment and professional independence are deeply impaired by their fealty to Bush. To fire federal prosecutors for defects in political loyalty is nothing short of outrageous, as Gonzalez must have known. But there is no indication that he objected to the plan, which appears to have originated in the White House, or that he ever regarded his office as anything more than a device for putting the whims of the president into action.
The attorney general may serve at the pleasure of the president, but he also owes a duty to his conscience. And when it becomes impossible to serve employer and conscience at once the honorable act is simply to resign.
But honor and conscience have never been quite so prominent in this administration as politics and personality, so it would not have occurred to Gonzalez that his appointment was anything less than permanent, given his close personal friendship with Bush. This isn't the first time the administration has suffered a serious failure of accountability and it probably won't be the last.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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