John Ashcroft's Power Grab

The saga of a troubled -- and troubling -- attorney general.

Brian Doherty from the June 2002 issue

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Yet he is, in his own straight-laced and traditional way, a radical cultural rebel. Despite his outsider status and the opprobrium it generates, he won't give in. Like a caring though peculiar dad advising against peer-group conformity, he stands against the crowd and is publicly (and by all accounts privately) true to the values of a serious religious conservative with one-and-only-one wife (Janet, a law professor with whom he's collaborated on legal textbooks) and three kids.

He's also hopelessly corny, creating waves of contemptuous mirth all across the Internet, where clips of him singing one of his self-composed gospel songs abound. While a member of the Senate, he and three colleagues formed a vocal quartet, the Singing Senators, to record and perform patriotic and devotional ditties. The group even trekked to that capital of American cornpone hokum, Branson -- tellingly located in Ashcroft's home state -- to croon with the Oak Ridge Boys.

Ashcroft's squeaky-clean Christian image is built on more than personal habits. People have reported that while being interviewed for jobs by Ashcroft, they were asked if they had ever committed adultery. (One applicant reports being asked if he were gay, a story Ashcroft denies.) He was the first senator to publicly call upon President Clinton to resign over his affair with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. As Missouri governor, he vetoed a Sunday liquor sales bill, signed into law the first Missouri restrictions on underage smoking, restricted rentals of violent movies to minors, and cracked down on casual drug use (even as one of his top aides was exposed by a squealing college buddy as a pothead and coke-sniffer and quietly resigned). As federal attorney general, he has revived the sort of porn prosecutions that languished in the Bill Clinton-Janet Reno era.

Still, Ashcroft is not some backwoods, Holy Roller hick. He is part of a generation of Pentecostals who have engaged the larger world rather than staying within their own separatist institutions. Hence, Ashcroft attended college at Yale and law school at the University of Chicago. "Ashcroft," notes Edith Blumhofer, a historian at Wheaton College who has written several books on the Assemblies, "was brought up in what was in some ways a conservative Assemblies of God home. His father was very pietist and devoted to prayer. Yet Ashcroft was not told to go to Yale and fight the battle -- he went there simply as a student, with no agenda to convert the place." For a devout member of the Assemblies, says Blumhofer, Ashcroft was exceptional in combining the secular and the religious.

The religious historian Grant Wacker once described Pentecostals as having a "jut-jawed stress on personal autonomy," and Ashcroft is the first Assemblies worshipper to be elected either governor or senator. In that context, Ashcroft's political career can be read as an experiment in the assimilation of a peculiarly independent religious tradition into the mainstream.

The experiment can only be described as an awkward semi-success so far. Certainly, John Ashcroft is the attorney general of the United States -- a position of considerable power and influence. But by following the dictates of his faith and upbringing, he has crafted a public image that media sophisticates on both coasts see as charmingly goofy at best and dangerously retrograde at worst. Though many Americans agree with him (at least generally) about such matters as God, family, and abortion, Ashcroft has surely noticed that it just isn't OK to the opinion makers to be who he is.

One reason the very Pentecostal Ashcroft has been able to make the headway he has in national politics is because, despite his demonization as a zealot, he's always been more Ned Flanders than Cotton Mather. He's never fought back at his critics with fire and brimstone. Instead, he's more likely to appear in friendly surroundings, such as Orange County, California's famous Crystal Cathedral, and quip, "I always thought that if I was accused of being a strong Christian there was enough evidence to convict me."

As he shifted his political ambitions from Missouri, where serious Pentecostalism is less outré than elsewhere, to the national stage, Ashcroft has insisted again and again that "it's against my religion to impose religion on people." At least once, though, while speaking to the Christian magazine Charisma, he let slip that "I think all we should legislate is morality."

Yet it's safe to say that Ashcroft is a gentler kind of modern religious man, a compassionate conservative before it was cool. As senator he worked to allow religious groups to administer federal aid of various sorts. He made new flextime requirements one of his major concerns -- so parents can attend Little League games (as, he notes glumly in his memoirs, his traveling preacher father didn't) and take care of scraped knees.

It's worth noting about Assemblies members that, as historian Blumhofer says, "When they look at the world, the divine is quite immanent to them." Practices such as morning prayer meetings in the office are as natural as breathing to Ashcroft, even if they are anathema to a large segment of the populace he is supposed to serve. His strong and oft-expressed religiosity makes for an awkward relationship between Ashcroft the cop and the beat he walks.

Born to Lose

Take a quick look at his résumé, and you'd conclude that John Ashcroft has had a stunningly successful political career. A deeper read, however, suggests something more complicated, a pattern of embarrassing defeats and hollow victories.

After graduating from Yale in 1964 and the University of Chicago Law School three years later, Ashcroft taught law at Southwest Missouri State University -- a position of such vital national importance that he used it to get an occupational deferment during the Vietnam War. His political career began poorly with two defeats, the first in a GOP primary while running for Congress in 1972. His respectable 45 percent showing in the primary brought him to the attention of Republican Gov. Kit Bond, who appointed Ashcroft to a midterm vacancy for state auditor. But Ashcroft lost the job when he actually had to face the voters in '74.

It was all uphill from there -- at least in Missouri, and at least on paper. In 1975 he was appointed to assistant attorney general of the state. In 1976, he squeaked through a tight election and became Missouri's attorney general. He went on to serve eight years in that post, followed by eight years as governor and then six as U.S. senator.

But Ashcroft's political tenure in Missouri seems more comic-gothic than inspiring or statesmanlike. Events just didn't give him many occasions to rise to. Instead, we see Ashcroft signing the papers to disincorporate the city of Times Beach, victim of a notorious dioxin scare; urging tourists to avoid his state lest they interfere with an ongoing FBI manhunt for neo-Nazis; petulantly refusing for a time to return a commemorative silver dinner set to its rightful owner, the U.S.S. Missouri; commuting a death sentence because the condemned man's attorney told the jury, "Why sully your hands with this piece of flotsam?"; being sued on behalf of a fetus whose lawyers claimed was illegitimately imprisoned inside a ne'er-do-well mom; legalizing rape due to a clerical error; begging constantly for federal aid as his hapless state was battered by floods and crop failures; and unsuccessfully bowing and scraping on Donahue to General Motors execs in the hopes that they would site new auto plants in his state. Colorful, sad, besieged place, Ashcroft's Missouri.