![]() She saw public employees as a Brahmin class: In 1995, she told federal law enforcement officers, "You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom…than any other government in the history of the world." Thank you, Masters! In a 1996 speech to government prosecutors, she declared, "All of you public lawyers are but little lower than the angels, and I salute you." ![]() ![]() This is a Mount Sinai biography, treating whatever Janet Reno said as the word of God.įor Reno, government was always the avenging savior. Stiehm endlessly reminds readers that "Reno's first commitment was to truth" (italics in original). Such pandering will be the death of civil liberties. Her biography is the last place to seek the truth on one of America's most blood-stained attorneys general.įor Stiehm and much of the media, the fact that Janet Reno was a progressive and the first female attorney general absolved all her failures and abuses of power. What is the point of sending a 200-page love letter to a dead politician? That is just one of many questions that Stiehm, a retired professor of political science, fails to answer in a book whose style sometimes resembles Fun with Dick and Jane. You'll find almost nothing about Reno's failures and frauds in Judith Hicks Stiehm's new biography, Janet Reno: A Life. The Washington Post praised her for ensuring that not all journalists would be beaten during the raid, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a piece headlined " Reno for President," declared that the machine-gun photo "warmed my heart." But Cuban Americans never forgot Reno's lies, and their fierce opposition torpedoed her 2002 Florida gubernatorial campaign. The aftermath of the González raid epitomized Janet Reno's career. But that Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun sprays 800 rounds a minute, and the agent didn't even have both hands on the weapon. She brushed off the photo: "If you look at it carefully, it shows that the gun was pointed to the side and that the finger was not on the trigger." Admittedly, the muzzle of the gun was not in the boy's mouth. Reno counted on maximum media deference for her "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" shtick. Her attempt to portray the federal assault as the equivalent of a Girl Scout cookie delivery was debunked by an Associated Press photo of a Border Patrol agent pointing his submachine gun toward the terrified boy being held by the fisherman who had rescued him from the Atlantic Ocean. Reno had authorized a massive no-knock raid to seize 6-year-old Elián González and send him back to Cuba, even though the court battles regarding his fate were ongoing. This was news to the people who had been brutalized by federal agents, including two NBC cameramen left writhing in pain from a stomach kick or a rifle butt to the head. ![]() It was a show of force that prevented people from getting hurt." "One of the things that is so very important," Reno declared, "is that the force was not used. In April 24, 2000, a day after Easter and two days after she sent 130 federal agents to storm Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, Attorney General Janet Reno received reverential treatment on NBC's Today show. Janet Reno: A Life, by Judith Hicks Stiehm, University Press of Florida, 224 pages, $35
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