George Bush was a jogger. So is Bill Clinton.
Janet Reno walks.
The attorney general of the United States-the nation’s first female top cop, whose days are filled with Waco and Whitewater, bureaucrats and backbiters-cuts quite the predawn figure in her white sneakers and socks, shapeless burgundy dirndl skirt, a jacket zipped up to her chin, and yellow rawhide gloves.
On this particular morning, she has agreed to walk and talk with a short-gaited companion, halving her speed with an indulgent, “Yes, you’re slowing me down, but that’s OK.”
Two minutes into the walk, her breath condensing in little white puffs against the black sky, it is clear Reno easily could cover the roughly two miles from her office to the Lincoln Memorial in 20 to 25 minutes, with plenty of time out for contemplation and rubbernecking.
She is, after all, nearly 6 foot 2, and possessed of what appear to be seven-league legs. She is also cursed with what she airily calls “old-lady knees,” meaning they can’t take a high-speed pounding.
But that is really only part of the reason Reno prefers striding to sprinting.
She walks because she loves to see and hear and smell and savor her new city as closely as if she were canoeing in her beloved Everglades or scuba diving in the Gulf Stream.
“It’s a chance to have quiet time,” she muses.
Reno recalls the morning she spied a blue heron and a flock of migratory geese at the Tidal Basin, and concedes that she is still a bit spooked by the sight of leafless trees even as she moves into her second Washington winter.
“I wonder if it’s my reaction to Hurricane Andrew, when there were no leaves left,” she says, passing a stand of naked elms that triggers memories of the killer storm in the summer of ’92. It leveled parts of Miami but spared the Reno homestead.
The weather flashbacks continue, jumping from frigid collegiate winters in upstate New York to her first days in Washington 11 months ago.
“I remember when I came up here last February to get ready for my confirmation hearing and I was sitting inside the Old Executive Office Building going over briefing books. I looked out the window and saw a Marine guard standing at attention at the (White House) West Wing in the middle of this storm.”
There is nothing florid or poetic about her language, nothing compelling about her almost-atonal inflection. And yet her economy of words instantly conjures the visual jolt of a red and blue and gold military uniform against a glistening white building on the grayest of days.
It is for the heron sightings and rainshowers and other small urban wonders that Reno allows no Walkman, no beeper, no portable phone to interrupt the constitutionals that have become part nature hike, part architectural tour and part reverie for one of the most visible members of the Cabinet.
She arrived in Washington as President Clinton’s third choice for attorney general, neither a Friend of Bill nor a Friend of Hill(ary). But her deprecating self-description as an “awkward old maid”-translate childless-meant she could neatly sidestep the hired-help problems of Clinton’s first two choices: corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and federal Judge Kimba Wood.
Within weeks of her nomination, Reno, 55, was transformed from a local prosecutor of Miami vice to a wildly popular symbol of national virtue.
Her Senate confirmation in March was a treacly love-fest. By April she was alternately revered and reviled, and assuming all the blame, for ordering the FBI to tear-gas the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, where 25 children and 56 adults died.
She has also been criticized by White House aides for being too independent, and by Republicans for not naming a special investigator in the Whitewater case, which involves Arkansas real estate and bank dealings of the Clintons’. (Last week, at Clinton’s request, she agreed to name an investigator.)
And still the fan mail pours in from around the country.
On this frigid morning, Reno passes the eastern side of the Justice Department but not the main entrance, where a hapless, homeless threesome have set up camp on a steam grate and even trimmed their makeshift tent with a gold Christmas garland.
Reno’s route does, however, take her to the Reflecting Pool and past a park bench occupied by a sleeping lump of rags. While one accompanying FBI agent seems to flinch-there’s no telling what sort of weapon might be concealed under all that detritus-Reno appears oblivious to potential danger.
The homeless are a common enough sight in Washington: One woman recently died of diabetic complications inside a frigid bus shelter outside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But there is something altogether disquieting about the sight of this powerful woman towering over so pitiable a figure.
Who is he? Or she? What can anyone do to help?
Reno casts a sideways glance and says:
“So many people think that solving the problem of the homeless means you find them a shelter. For so many it’s not just a matter of shelter, it’s almost like setting a clock again. You have to look at case histories and look at the many ways we could have prevented the clock from running down. We have to give people the ability to cope themselves. We do less of that than other civilized nations.”
It is the same holistic approach she takes toward the very old and the very young, a call for womb-to-tomb physical, emotional, financial, vocational, spiritual and educational services for society’s most vulnerable.
Among the vulnerable are the nation’s students, she says, like the ones at Raymond Elementary School in Mt. Pleasant, a neighborhood of whites, blacks and Hispanics two miles north of her office that a shotgun killer terrorized last spring.
Every two weeks, Reno, who has a chemistry degree from Cornell University and a law degree from Harvard (she was one of 16 women in a class of 541), works at the elementary school as a teacher’s aide.
As often as possible, she visits other schools to tell youngsters they can be whatever they want to be, of how she had dreamed of being a lawyer since she was 11, got turned down for her first legal job because she was a woman only to become a partner in the firm years later.
Some of the children’s questions reflect the brutality of their daily lives, she says, stopping for a red light near the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History.
Those from inner-city projects racked by gunfire, gangs and drugs “express more of a concern with, `How can I go out and play or run from the car to the house?’ “
The youngest pupils at Raymond Elementary “are asking, `How do I become a ballerina or a fireman or a police officer?’ The hopes and dreams of children around the world are the same.”
Only as they get older do many of those dreams get smashed.
One 6th grader told Reno that he wanted to be a marine biologist. “I asked where he had heard about being a marine biologist and it turns out that the U.S. Marshal Service has a mentoring program at his school,” says Reno, passing the Washington Monument and two hardy souls who’ve come out for a predawn run.
There have been other pleasant moments in her year here, not the least of which is how welcome she has been made to feel.
“Washington has been a very friendly city to me; the natives, the Republicans and others have been so very gracious,” Reno says, still unrecognized by passing joggers.
When it is suggested she try to meet some old-time Washingtonians who could give her a sense of the sleepy, segregated capital city after World War II, she mentions her recent lunch with Alice Stanley Acheson, the artist and widow of President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson.
“She had done this wonderful painting of the National Zoo on the day it opened in 1933,” Reno recalls of the little get-together arranged by Acheson’s granddaughter Eleanor, a Justice Department official.
As she approaches the Lincoln Memorial, Reno notes she has neither the time nor the inclination to become a party animal, preferring the solitude at day’s end for reading or listening to the collected tapes of historic speeches someone recently sent her.
“Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address was so prescient. As he left office he predicted the creation of a military-industrial complex that continued through the Cold War,” Reno says.
Ike’s oratory leads her to an observation borne of many morning jaunts around town: that among all the statues of heroes and martyrs in Washington, nowhere is there a monument to Eisenhower or Truman.
There is, however, the dramatic shrine to Lincoln, beautifully floodlit in the last few minutes before daybreak. It seems the perfect place to say farewell.
Now, alone at last as the sun begins to rise and the sky brightens, Janet Reno is free to hit her stride.
