It’s easy to see why. Nearly three and a half years after 9/11, Gonzales is at the center of the legal and political fallout over the administration’s handling of the war on terrorism. As the president’s legal gatekeeper, Gonzales was responsible for vetting some of the most controversial decisions: the treatment of prisoners, the line between aggressive but legal interrogation and torture, and the rights of “enemy combatants.”
The White House, and Gonzales in particular, are now left to explain those decisions in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the steady drip of leaked memos. Last week the Supreme Court delivered another blow. In cases that dealt with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and suspected terrorists held as enemy combatants, the justices rejected the administration’s argument that the president has virtually unlimited power to hold people indefinitely without access to the courts. It was an unwelcome moment for a man who had once been on Bush’s shortlist for the high court (a post Gonzales’s intimates say he never wanted).
Friends say the White House counsel is “beating himself up” over the mess. Gonzales, they say, fears he may not have served the president as well as he would have liked. Though he stands by the legal reasoning, he wishes he had been more attuned to the possible political consequences and had reined in some of the administration’s more extreme voices. Friends say he was particularly stung by press accounts of a draft memo signed by Gonzales that called some of the requirements of the Geneva Conventions “quaint.” The memo, first reported in NEWSWEEK, caused an uproar among the administration’s critics. Gonzales, who declined a request for an interview, has told aides he thought the stories were taken out of context–he says the memo didn’t say the Geneva Conventions themselves were outdated, just a few old provisions requiring commissary privileges and athletic uniforms for prisoners. What’s more, the memo was actually penned not by Gonzales but by Dick Cheney’s top lawyer, David Addington, a hard-charging hawk.
Bush hired Gonzales–who was once his legal adviser in Texas–in part because he isn’t a grandstander. Courtly and low-key, he passed the president’s all-important “good man” test. But after 9/11, Gonzales’s soft-spoken approach sometimes put him at a disadvantage. In heated arguments, Gonzales would often keep his counsel rather than contradict forceful officials like John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld. “He’s not passive, but when he is in an area where he hasn’t mastered the subject matter, he’ll be quiet,” says a close associate.
In predictable Washington fashion, everyone in the administration is looking for someone to blame. There is especially bad blood between the White House and the Justice Department about which bears most responsibility for a now infamous August 2002 memo that condoned the use of torture on suspected Qaeda detainees. The memo was drafted by a Justice lawyer who consulted White House lawyers extensively. “The White House got exactly what it wanted,” says a Justice official. But the White House insists that the memo was approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department. “The attorney general and his staff were in the intestines of this memo,” says a source close to Gonzales. Some of Gonzales’s aides pressed him to fight back and say that top Justice officials had signed off on the memo. But he refused. He didn’t think it would serve the president, he told them. And besides, the genteel Gonzales told them, it isn’t his style.
