Open to Interpretation

By Mitch Kaplan

The story goes like this. The migrant worker’s son grows up in a small Houston house with seven siblings. A diligent student, he becomes the family’s first college graduate and attends the country’s top law school. He comes home, makes partner in a prestigious law firm, and befriended by the governor, is appointed governor’s counsel. Within a short time, he becomes Texas secretary of state and then a Texas Supreme Court judge. When the governor moves to the White House, he appoints his loyal advisor as presidential counsel and, later, the country’s first Hispanic attorney general.

Alberto Gonzales with U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts.

Depending on who’s interpreting it, Alberto Gonzales’s story encompasses any number of themes. Some see the vital ethnic role model—the Hispanic who has risen the highest in the U.S. government. Some see a loyal, sincere force behind a governor-turned-president. Others see a zealous subordinate who has put loyalty ahead of responsibility and whose legal positions have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum.

Not in dispute is the fact that a beginning to Gonzales’s story can be found at Rice Stadium, where, as a 12-year-old, he hawked soda at Owls football games. “The Rice campus and the beautiful neighborhoods that surround it really seemed like a different world from the neighborhood where I grew up,” Gonzales says. “Rice seemed so full of opportunity. I was only a small boy, but it was something that I knew I wanted to be a part of.” In 1979, Gonzales completed that dream, graduating from Rice with a BA in political science.

Gonzales’s subsequent rise through the legal and political ranks has not always been smooth. Amid even the most turbulent political storms, though, he has maintained a calm, intent, reserved demeanor.

“What you get is what you see—someone who is serious, intellectual, cautious, and tries to do the right thing,” explains Sofia Adrogue ’88, of the Houston law firm Epstein Becker Green Wickliff & Hall, who nominated Gonzales for Rice’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which he won in 2002.

Indeed, meeting Attorney General Gonzales in his Department of Justice offices last July, I found him to be a quiet, serious man who, at the same time, is personable, cordial, and warm, with an understated sense of humor. Reserved? Certainly. Intense? Undoubtedly. And firmly focused on his job.

He’s long been that way, recalls political science professor Gilbert Cuthbertson. “He wasn’t just a good student, he was a superb student—one of best that I have taught in 40 years at Rice,” Doc C says. “He was outstanding not only because of his depth of intellectual ability, but also because of his diligence, organization, and ability to express himself effectively in both exam and written work.”

When Doc C taught constitutional law to the young Gonzales, the future attorney general made more than a lasting impression. “Alberto was one of these students who really was a student,” recalls Cuthbertson, who also was Gonzales’s academic advisor. “He spent a tremendous amount of time in his research and did things in that respect that many students don’t do. I sometimes use the analogy of ‘Coronado’s children’—newly arrived individuals in search of new opportunities and better lives in Texas. That’s the thing that was so appealing about Judge Gonzales—he not only was bright, but eager. You just don’t have that many students who realize what an opportunity getting an education is.”

Higher education wasn’t easily attainable for Gonzales, however.

“When I graduated from high school, I didn’t apply to college,” he says. “Even though I was an honor student in high school, well, there wasn’t much talk about going to college.”

In a student body primarily composed, in Gonzales’s words, of “blue-collar kids, where only the top few kids went to school,” the focus was on “what kind of job we were going to have when we graduated from high school.”

His answer? The U.S. Air Force.

A good friend’s father had been a career air force man, Gonzales explains. “He kept encouraging us to look at going into the air force. We thought that would be an opportunity to learn something and maybe to see part of the world. I’d never been out of Texas. I’d never been on an airplane before.”

In his address at Rice’s 2004 commencement, Gonzales said that he would have applied to Rice right out of high school—had he known it was possible. But life’s path is not always clear-cut. Instead, after working two years in a remote Alaskan military base and with the support of his commanding officers, Gonzales earned an appointment to the Air Force Academy. There, he made the dean’s list each semester and was elected freshman class council president.

Gaining acceptance into a military academy isn’t easy. Deciding to leave is even harder. “It wasn’t the fact that the academy had shortcomings,” Gonzales relates. “I had a wonderful experience at the academy. Quite frankly, I’d been in the service when I left for almost four years. I’d been away from home. I was ready to go back. I thought that pursuing a career in law made more sense. And I took a shot at applying to Rice University.”

Alberto Gonzales in a cabinet meeting with President Bush and other top administration officials.

Gonzales’s interest in the legal profession increased when he took Hank Hudspeth’s introductory business law class, and it grew stronger under Doc C. After graduation, he headed east for Harvard Law School. “It was a great school,” he recalls. “But I knew that I was going to come back to Texas.”

That he did, to the Houston office of Vinson & Elkins, where the intellectual challenge of business law enticed the serious-minded attorney. “You get to work on some very complicated cases and issues,” he notes. “You’re not persuading a jury of uninformed—and sometimes uneducated—jurors. You’re negotiating very complicated issues with people who are just as educated as you are. I enjoyed that. My wife likes to tell me that she thinks I have a talent for dealing with people and negotiating complicated issues.”

Those abilities saw Gonzales rise to partner. “I think one of the factors contributing to his success was his ability to work with multiple parties to reach a common goal,” remembers Vinson & Elkins managing partner Joe Dilg, whom Gonzales reported to when Dilg headed one of the firm’s business transaction practice groups. “In a business transaction, while an attorney is representing a particular client, all the parties want to get to the same place—a satisfactory business transaction. It’s a matter of working through, in negotiations, the various points that arise between the parties to find the best possible solution for your client, yet ending up with a transaction that makes sense for all parties. He instilled a confidence in the clients that he would reach a good result for them. At the same time, he has extremely high integrity and is very easy to work with because you know he will be good to his word.”

Was Dilg surprised when Gonzales moved from corporate practice into the public arena? “In a way, I was somewhat surprised in that leaving the partnership in the firm was a financial sacrifice,” Dilg recounts. “On the other hand, I knew Al had a great desire to give back to society through public service. When he found the right opportunity, the fact that he pursued it wasn’t surprising.”

“I always have believed that, as a lawyer, you have an obligation to give back to your community,” Gonzales says. “Working in public service makes you a better lawyer because you always have an opportunity to work on really complicated, very important issues that, as a young associate, you often don’t get. I think that it makes you a better person. It expands your horizons. You learn more about the needs and the problems that exist in our society, and it gets you to thinking about what can be done to address those issues.”

It also exposes a person to public scrutiny.

As governor’s counsel, for example, Gonzales says the most notable issues were those relating to the death penalty. “Part of my job as counsel was to advise the governor, along with my team in the counsel’s office, on issues relating to clemency—not issues relating to guilt or innocence, but whether or not this person was an appropriate candidate for clemency. Those were memorable.”

The author of an article in the July/August 2003 Atlantic Monthly found those cases memorable for other reasons, stating that Gonzales gave insufficient counsel, failed to take into consideration an array of factors, and instead actively worked against clemency in a number of borderline cases. That criticism—that he, in effect, gave his boss the legal justification he wanted—would be levied against Gonzales later on a much larger scale.

Reflecting on his challenges as a Texas Supreme Court judge, Gonzales observes, “In Texas, judges are elected, and there are consequences to the decisions you make, particularly when you have to stand for election in a partisan race. I hope those circumstances didn’t affect any of my decisions. I don’t think that they did. But it requires, I think, special discipline and special courage in making decisions about what you think is best and in applying the law. That may have been the hardest thing for me—operating in that kind of an environment.”

His court incumbency elicited the ire of abortion opponents when Gonzales joined a majority ruling that allowed teenage girls to obtain a legal abortion without parental notification. In reversing a lower court decision, Gonzales wrote, “Legislative intent is the polestar of statutory construction. Our role as judges requires that we put aside our own personal views of what we might like to see enacted and, instead, do our best to discern what the legislature actually intended.” His court colleague, Priscilla Owen, dissented on that case. Later, when she was nominated for a federal judgeship, her opinion became a sticking point that long delayed the nomination.
“I wish that I’d been able to stay longer on the court,” Gonzales says. “It would have been an opportunity to develop as a judge.”

Asked to work again with George W. Bush as presidential counsel, however, he answered the call. “It’s a much larger scale,” he observes about working in Washington, D.C. “Everything you say or do is scrutinized, and if you make a mistake, everybody knows about it. The stakes are higher. It’s very, very political. It’s meaner here. It’s tougher.”

Alberto Gonzales is sworn in as U.S. attorney general by then U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. With him are President Bush, Gonzales’s mother, Maria, and one of his three sons.

Public attention to Gonzales increased due to a January 2002 draft memo that explored whether Article III of the Geneva Convention—which protects enemy prisoners of war from torture—applied to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan. The memo made arguments for and against providing Article III protection. In the end, Gonzales concluded that Article III was outdated and not suited for dealing with such fighters.

The draft memo’s most frequently quoted section said that the value of intelligence that could be obtained during interrogation “renders obsolete [the] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring . . . such things as commissary privileges . . . athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.”

At the confirmation hearings for Gonzales’s appointment to attorney general, that memo was cited as helping to create a climate leading to abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. “How can the Senate possibly approve the nomination . . . when Mr. Gonzales is the official in the Bush administration who, as White House counsel, advised the president that torture was an acceptable method of interrogation in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq?” asked Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy.
“The memo that was published was a draft,” Gonzales states sharply when asked about the subject. “It was not the actual document that went to the president. People lose sight of the fact that they’re all focused on a draft. The draft was circulated to cabinet secretaries to get their comments, so that we could add it to the document to present it to the president. It was leaked and published the day after it was circulated to the cabinet secretaries. So for two—almost three—years, this memo was out there. People knew about it. No one said a thing. And then, in connection with the confirmation proceedings, it suddenly becomes a big issue. And I’m asked whether or not I stand by the memo?

“Well, the memo changed. That wasn’t the memo that went to the president. But I do stand by the advice that I gave the president. If people don’t abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention, they should not be afforded its protections. It’s a perversion of the Geneva Convention if you provide its protections irrespective of a person’s conduct. What incentive do people have to abide by the Geneva Convention? We believe very strongly in the Geneva Convention and what it stands for and in its principles and values. And even though members of Al Qaeda are not covered by Geneva, according to the president—that was his determination—the president made it clear that they were going to be treated humanely, consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

For many, however, the memo was an example of Gonzales putting his boss’s desires ahead of the higher duty of a White House counsel. “The most important role that a lawyer has at this level in government is to say no when policy makers are determined to do something that crosses legal boundaries,” says Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, which opposed Gonzales’s attorney general nomination—an unprecedented stance by that organization for such a high-level nomination. “Even if it’s the president, Gonzales’s job is to say, ‘No, Mr. President, you cannot.’ He would have served the president far better if he had. The fundamental failing of Alberto Gonzales is that he did not say no when no was morally and legally required.

“He was not, I think, the architect of any of these policies,” Malinowski continues. “But there were many strong-minded people around him in the Justice Department, the White House, and the vice president’s office, who were pushing radical new interpretations of what the U.S. was permitted to do in the law—the view that the president could theoretically authorize torture. Gonzales did not say no.”

A wide variety of critics of all political stripes have disagreed with Gonzales on other issues as well: his support for all facets of the Patriot Act, his backing of military tribunals for the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and his absence of total opposition to abortion and affirmative action. They also criticize his personal loyalty to George W. Bush, which, they say, skews his role as legal advisor to the president.

“He’s not without controversy,” says Adrogue. “But you can look at his opinions and think he’s not conservative enough or he’s not liberal enough. That’s a part of his beauty—he’s in the middle.”

“I don’t agree with him on everything he does—certainly some I do agree with,” says Lynne Liberato, an attorney at Haynes and Boone in Houston. Liberato, a Democrat who worked with Gonzales at the Texas State Bar Association and endorsed his nomination in a Houston Chronicle op-ed piece, adds, “I just have a lot of respect for him, his fundamental intelligence, and his desire to do the right thing.”

Gonzales has earned the respect of such supporters, they emphasize, through his commitment to his ethnic community and the greater public.

“When people in his community have reached out to him and sought his advice and leadership, he’s been there,” says Adrogue. She recalls asking Gonzales to address the graduating class at the Chinquapin School for intellectually talented but economically challenged children. “Before he went on to become counsel to President Bush, he had committed to being the keynote speaker. He flew back from D.C.—made it a real point. With the same humility, the same openness and enthusiasm, he spoke to those 25 kids. He didn’t have to do that. He could have easily said, ‘I’m now counsel to President Bush. I can’t.’”

For Hispanic Americans, says Alan Varela, president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, Gonzales’s example “makes all the difference in the world when we tell our children that, in America, you can grow up to be whatever it is that you set your goals to be—that you can achieve high office and the highest leadership positions.”
Concludes Adrogue, “I nominated him for recognition as a Rice alumnus because he displays a sincere and unique dedication and commitment, not only to the welfare of his profession, but to our community. You can read ‘our’ however you choose—Houston, Texas, Hispanic, and now nationally. I think he has an innate sense of service and community and of giving back.”

Alberto Gonzales’s story indeed may encourage many interpretations. That’s not surprising. Its lead character is multifaceted and complex. Reserved, attentive, dedicated, loyal, intelligent—all those attributes apply. But perhaps most importantly, says Doc C, “Gonzales is forceful, tough, in his way. He’s very polite, but I don’t think he would give an inch on his beliefs and convictions politically.”

When asked about unflattering attention he receives from across the political sphere, Gonzales displays both the emphatic loyalty that has generated criticism and the grit that has engendered praise, saying: “The question is whether or not I’m doing a good job as attorney general. Is the president pleased with my performance? That’s all I really should worry about, or can worry about.

“When you’re in government, you’re going to do things that people aren’t going to like, and you’re going to be criticized,” Gonzales continues. “And if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be in government. That’s just the way it is. No one likes to be criticized—particularly when it might be unfair or based on misinformation or disinformation. But that comes with the territory. It always has and always will.”