The trick for Janet Reno is to learn the “eskimo roll.”
The stone-faced retired attorney general, candidate for governor of Florida and noted kayaker has flown her rapid-running kayak over a six-foot drop in the Chattooga River of North Carolina and has trumpeted her plans to kayak 120 miles through the Everglades.
But, she says, “I haven’t yet perfected the eskimo roll,” explaining a maneuver that enables a kayaker to right an overturned boat without ever getting out of it. “I get almost all the way over. One should perfect it.”
At 63, Reno has run almost every political rapid there is. She seldom has spilled.
Americans know her as the unbending one who ordered little Elian Gonzalez removed at gunpoint from his relatives’ home in Miami, Reno insisting on returning the shipwreck survivor to his father in Cuba. Americans know her as the fearless fed who stared down David Koresh after federal agents were killed at a Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. A 51-day standoff ended with self-inflicted shootings and a firestorm killing Koresh and 74 others.
And Americans know Reno as the longest-serving attorney general of the 20th Century. A solitary and unshakable fixture of the Clinton administration, she kept her own counsel but never kept a Washington diary. She balked at demands for full-scaledinvestigations into her own Democratic Party’s fundraising fiascoes.
But they don’t know the self-sufficient, single woman who kept a book-filled, somewhat untidy Washington apartment. The outwardly stoic leader sometimes sought solace in the midst of her worst professional controversies with late-night telephone calls to her sister in South Florida, so they could share old stories and laugh a little.
“There is no guile or spin about her,” says longtime friend Janet McAliley.
When Reno returned home to Florida last year, it took only a hint that she might run for governor to make her the instant front-runner in the Democratic field of potential challengers to Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s younger brother. This comes, in part, from her universal name-recognition amid a field of little-known candidates.
Reno plans a statewide tour in her red 1999 Ford Ranger pickup truck with a camper top, says Bob Butterworth, the Florida attorney general who ran Al Gore’s campaign there. When the pickup arrives this spring in the little hamlet of Palatka, Butterworth says, television news cameras will be awaiting her. When she drops her camping kayak in a river for summer campaigning, she will draw national coverage.
“Reno has lifted this race to a new dimension,” says Mitchell Berger, a major fundraiser in Florida for the Democratic National Committee. “She has convinced Democrats that there is a real possibility of victory against an incumbent who is the president’s brother.”
Yet some Democratic leaders worry that Reno is unelectable.
Widely popular among Democrats, Reno should easily claim her party’s nomination. But in a state where independents and moderates with little allegiance to parties decide elections, Reno trails Bush in most early opinion polling by at least 15 percentage points. And battle lines have hardened early. Polls show large numbers of voters dislike Reno, probably because of the many controversies with which she has been associated — and due, in some parts of Florida, to her association with Clinton.
Florida’s governor also is popular, his fundraising prowess unrivaled and the Republican National Committee intent on ensuring that the re-election of the president’s brother in 2002 serves as a positive litmus test for the presidential race of 2004.
“It is the No. 1 race in all of America,” says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, of the Florida governor’s race.
Having immediate influence
Reno already has reshaped the race, her entry after Labor Day blocking a young congressman from Tampa from entering the contest. U.S. Rep. Jim Davis of Tampa complained that Reno cast too wide “a shadow over the race.” The favorite of Democratic Party leaders — Pete Peterson, an ex-fighter pilot, former ambassador to Vietnam and onetime prisoner of war in Hanoi — abruptly abandoned his campaign soon afterward, citing the terrorism of Sept. 11 for spoiling his appetite for a political contest.
The truth was, Reno’s campaign ran the ambassador’s fundraising aground. Only three, far lesser-known Democrats remain in the running for a party nomination that will be decided Sept. 10.
Democrats outnumber Republicans in Florida, though neither claims a majority because of the growing ranks of independent voters. The state votes Democratic sometimes, but has leaned Republican recently. The Democratic Party itself is weak, its leaders — the two Democratic U.S. senators from Florida — were backing Peterson and privately lament Reno’s insistence on running. Yet they lack the enforcers’ power to push her out. Reno, for that matter, is not the enforceable type.
Much of the state’s Democratic vote resides in the liberal precincts of Southeast Florida, providing Reno a sure base for clinching her party’s nomination on Sept. 10. She already has proven herself a tireless campaigner there, filling condo halls with ready supporters. But statewide, her own personal opposition to the death penalty — which she has enforced both as a state prosecutor and attorney general — is only one of the stances that positions her somewhat to the left of a conservative-voting state.
She also is older, grayer and duller than Florida’s governor in a far-flung state where TV ads often turn a statewide race.
“As a Republican resident of Florida, I hope Ms. Reno does run for governor,” says Maureen Waite, a voter in the Central Florida town of Lake Mary. “She has about as much chance of winning as an ice cube in hell.”
One of the Democratic Party’s leading fundraisers, convinced that Reno cannot beat Bush, privately allows: “This Reno thing has got me really upset.” Publicly agreeing, another party activist from South Florida, Joe Garcia, has promoted rumors that Reno is running simply to hear herself speak, that eventually she will drop out. Reno, building a campaign drawing professional staffers and a manager from the winning Virginia campaign of Gov. Mark Warner, adamantly insists she is running for real.
Bush already has started questioning the vagueness of Reno’s utterances that Florida deserves better public schools than it has, a protected environment and a stronger economy. Yet Republican leaders say they will be careful to avoid personal assaults, the GOP quietly worried that the first female candidate for governor in Florida might have a more powerful persona on the campaign trail than polls now portray.
“I don’t listen to an inner voice,” Reno says. “When my heart and my gut and my head all agree, that’s when I usually do things. I don’t think the polls are taking into account people who haven’t voted before. . . . People who more often than not do not vote but who occasionally vote. I think there is an undercurrent of those who are turned off by politics. I’d like to encourage them back in.”
Reno also is undaunted by the Parkinson’s disease that has afflicted her since 1995, its effects limited to a slow flutter of her hand if unanchored by a book, purse or podium. She relies on more than intuition in this case, however. Friend Hugh Westbrook, a hospice executive and fundraiser, commissioned a focus group of voters before Reno entered the governor’s race to gauge Parkinson’s as a political handicap. The consensus: It wasn’t.
“Before I even considered running for governor, I asked my doctors whether they thought it would have any impact,” Reno says. “And they said no.”
Janet (“Janny” to her younger sister and two brothers) was born July 21, 1938, and has lived in the home that her mother raised her in since 1949. Her only concession to comfort in the subtropics is the recent addition of air-conditioning of one room to accommodate a personal computer.
“Bound up in her view of life and character is the idea that we don’t have very many pioneers of Florida around,”says Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte, longtime friend, former American Bar Association president, now president of Florida State University and co-owner of a canoe with Reno. “Janet really comes from pioneer stock.”
Her paternal grandfather, Robert Rasmussen, was a Danish immigrant. Arriving in Wisconsin in 1913 with wife Louise and son Henry, he wanted an American name.
He looked at a map.
He found Reno.
He moved his family in the 1920s to remote South Florida, a land of swamps and occasional hurricanes that claimed thousands of lives.
Fishy taste of lime
Reno remembers the old man, a photographer who died at 93, for the taste of the fish he smoked, a flavor infused with lime-branches in the fire. She remembers his going-away gift when she left for college: “sunrise on the bay,” a predawn outing aboard his boat on a silvery and shallow expanse of Biscayne Bay where Miami meets the sea.
“Both her parents were reporters. Reporters were paid then even worse than they are paid today” D’Alemberte says. ” So they went out very far west of town, an area where they did not have paved roads. . . . Her mother took some time off . . . to build a house.”
Her mother, Jane Wood, was an obituary writer at the Miami Herald in the late 1930s. She met a seasoned police reporter 12 years her senior who fearlessly had ventured out into a killer-hurricane.
Henry Olaf and Jane Reno had four children. After Janny — all within four years — came Bobby, a columnist today with Long Island’s Newsday. Then Maggy, who long served as a county commissioner up the coast. Then Marky, part-time tugboat captain, carpenter and bailiff at the Miami-Dade County courthouse who has served as a game warden in the Everglades and occasional campaign chauffeur for sister Janny in her pickup.
Before they settled on 21 acres far outside of town, the Reno homestead was an animal menagerie — cows, goats, ducks and hundreds of chickens.
As post-war Miami rapidly expanded and the once-remote Reno homestead grew more valuable, the Renos sold off piecemeal some of the 21 acres they had purchased for $500 an acre to pay for college tuition. Reno’s mother wanted her to become a doctor.
“Her mother was a wonderful character,” D’Alemberte says. “She was a wonderful lady who could be coarse as hell. . . . She wasn’t afraid of the devil herself.”
Henry Reno died in 1967. Janet Reno later lived with her mother for two decades, until her mother passed away in 1992.
“I was just thinking about Jane’s funeral,” McAliley says. “Not that they went to church much — they weren’t religious. But they had it at the Riviera Presbyterian.
“The minister spoke, and Janet spoke, and near the end, Janet had us all stand up and sing, `The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'”
She first returned in the summer of 1963 to her home state as a young woman schooled at Cornell and Harvard Law School. She could not get a job in Miami’s pre-eminent law firm, because she was a woman.
Early draw to politics
She lighted to politics early. She helped a friend campaign for the legislature in the 1960s, worked in Tallahassee as a committee lawyer and ran for a seat in the legislature in 1972. She won the Democratic primary, but lost the general election.
Later she took a job in the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office. When the chief prosecutor retired early, then-Gov. Reubin Askew appointed Reno in 1978, making Reno the first female state’s attorney in Florida.
“Reubin the Good,” as the stalwart Christian governor from Florida’s “Bible Belt” Panhandle was known, added an unwitting edge to his announcement of Reno.
“Reubin Askew said he didn’t appoint me because I’m a woman,” Reno says. “He said he’d appointed me because I stacked up better than the others. He didn’t realize what he’d said. The rest of us did. He was blushing because he didn’t know.”
Winning five elections, some easily, some unopposed, Reno served 15 years, through some of modern Miami’s most tumultuous times. In 1980, Miami’s mostly black inner city erupted in riot when a jury acquitted white police officers who bludgeoned a black motorcyclist to death. Black community leaders demanded the chief prosecutor’s resignation. Reno’s response: She demanded meetings with leaders.
“The best way to deal with division is to confront it,” Reno says. “I don’t think you run from controversy.”
Reno’s solitude has inspired rumors that she readily confronts. In 1988, she faced her nastiest re-election contest with an opponent trying to cast her as a lesbian.
“He has nothing to worry about,” Reno told The Miami Herald. “I am attracted to strong, brave, rational and intelligent men.” Years later, returning to Miami as attorney general, she faced a similar question. She called herself “an old maid who prefers men.”
As Clinton was leaving the White House, Reno traveled to New York City to appear on “Saturday Night Live,” where cast member Will Ferrell in a blue dress was making another unflattering impression of the outgoing attorney general who stands 6-feet-1 1/2 inches tall barefoot. Reno burst through a fake wall on the set wearing the same blue dress and proclaimed: “It’s Reno time! . . . Let’s dance.”
“Afterward,” Reno says, “I thought, not only was I stupid, but I’m a failure as a comic.” She says this with a wry smile, the only kind she generally allows in public.
Her tenure in Washington marked a national milestone — the nation’s first female attorney general — but also a personal one for a woman once denied a lawyer’s job.
“I clearly became attorney general because I’m a woman,” Reno says with some satisfaction about it all. “So times have changed.”
She was hardly Clinton’s first choice. The first, Zoe Baird, was blocked over her hiring of a Peruvian couple as nanny and driver, illegal immigrants. And Kimba Wood, a federal judge in New York, hired a baby-sitter, an undocumented worker, from Trinidad.
“There never was any question about Janet hiring anyone. . . . . She did her own housework,” McAliley says. “I stayed with her once in her apartment” in Washington. “While it wasn’t a terrible mess, there were books all over the place, and it was clear it hadn’t been straightened up in a while.”
Her Washington watch was momentous from the start.
The standoff between Koresh and an army of agents outside Waco already was underway when Reno was sworn in, on March 12, 1993. On April 19, Reno ordered an assault with tear gas. Fire erupted inside the compound. Only nine people survived, 75 bodies found in the ashes, including 13 adults and three children who were shot.
Koresh was found with a gunshot to his forehead.
Assessing the blame for Waco
Former Sen. John Danforth, who conducted a 10-month investigation, concluded “with 100 percent certainty” that federal agents did not start the fire or shoot. “The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of David Koresh,” Danforth concluded.
“Delay would not have made any difference,” Reno says. “Because I think David Koresh was out to start his own Armageddon.”
Today, she calls Waco a sign of her ability to “make the hard decisions.”
She left office with another one.
Six-year-old Elian Gonzalez lost his mother at sea, drowned in an attempted crossing from Cuba. Found adrift by fishermen on Thanksgiving 1999, Elian became an instant personification of the Miami Cuban-American community’s exile anguish.
Elian had relatives in Miami. But for Reno, the clincher was his father, in Cuba.
After months of failed negotiation, Reno finally ordered a predawn raid at the relatives’ home in Miami, removing Elian and swiftly reuniting him with his father.
For this, Reno has earned the enmity of Miami’s dominant Cuban-American community. Yet, she has confronted that anger in typical style: Going on overheated, Spanish-language radio shows in Miami and defiantly defending her handling of Elian: “I care a great deal about the Cuban community. I will never write it off.”
Reno suspects most voters approve of her handling of Elian, and polls agree.
“Waco is a different issue,” she allows. “But I think in many respects there is a sold block against me that would be against me anyway.”
She first was diagnosed with a mild form of Parkinson’s, a slowly progressive neurological disorder, in late 1995. But this didn’t prevent Reno from fulfilling her nearly eight-year term as attorney general, a modern-day record. And it didn’t preclude her from getting into a kayak the first time in 1995. She ran the Potomac River mostly, but was lured by white-water. She has a 12-foot poke boat for camping, a shorter one for rapids.
The six-foot ledge on the Chattooga is her record drop. Reno last kayaked there in April, with sister Maggy, before publicly hinting about a governor’s race.
“My personal preference,” Maggy says, “would be for her to go kayaking with me, but if she wants to run for governor that’s what I want her to do. . . .
“We don’t tell her what to do.”
Reno speaks of an unsatiated calling to public life.
“Young people would like to be involved, but they see the slings and arrows,” she explains. “I’d like to show them that you can come out unscathed after eight years of slings and arrows and still say it was the best experience.”
At a crowded breakfast for young businesswomen in downtown Orlando one recent morning, Reno quietly encourages another generation.
“You can’t be afraid to lose,” says Reno, adding another piece of advice: “You will wake up proud of yourself in the morning if you always speak the truth.”
