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Article Excerpt
General Ashcroft: Attorney at War. By Nancy V. Baker. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. ix, 322 pp.
In her first effort at studying the U.S. Attorney General's Office 16 years ago, political scientist Nancy V. Baker framed the "conflicting loyalties" of that office by using a typology depicting the attorney general as fulfilling one of two roles: "advocate of the president" or "neutral arbiter of the law." Baker's more recent examination of the office, which focuses exclusively on the four-year term of Attorney General John Ashcroft, now appears to render that earlier typology outdated, if not obsolete. Fortunately, in General Ashcroft: Attorney at War, the author offers a persuasive explanation as to why so many past frameworks (including her own) may no longer apply to our understanding of the federal government's chief law enforcement officer.
According to Baker, the 9/11 attacks had a profound impact on the Justice Department as a whole, and on the Attorney General's Office in particular. Specifically, the event transformed Ashcroft from a listless, somewhat bored bureaucrat into a "chief warrior in the domestic war on terror" (p. 49), acting from a position of unquestioned strength and authority. In past...
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