Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States — the first woman to hold the job — and whose eight years in that office placed her
Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States — the first woman to hold the job — and whose eight years in that office placed her in the middle of some of the most divisive episodes of the Clinton presidency, died on Monday at her home in Miami-Dade County, Florida. She was 78.
Her sister, Margaret Hurchalla, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in November 1995, while Reno was still in office.
Reno’s tenure as attorney general was bracketed by two explosive events: a deadly federal raid on the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993, and, in 2000, the government’s seizing of Elián González, a young Cuban refugee who was at the center of an international custody battle and a political tug of war.
In those moments and in others Reno was applauded for displaying integrity and a willingness to accept responsibility, but she was also fiercely criticized. Republicans accused her of protecting President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when, in 1997, she refused to allow an independent counsel to investigate allegations of fundraising improprieties in the White House.
Reno was never part of the Clinton inner circle, even though she served in the Clinton Cabinet for two terms, longer than any attorney general in the previous 150 years. Her political and personal style clashed with the president’s, particularly as she sought to maintain some independence from the White House.
Her relations with the president were further strained by her decision to let an independent inquiry into a failed Clinton land deal in Arkansas, the so-called Whitewater investigation, expand to encompass Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an episode that led to his impeachment.
Imposing at 6-foot-1, awkward in manner and blunt in her probity, Reno became a regular foil for late-night comics and a running gag on “Saturday Night Live.” But she got the joke, proving it by gamely appearing on the show to lampoon her image.
“I’m just delighted to be here, and I’m going to try my level best,” Reno said at the Rose Garden ceremony at which Clinton announced her nomination on Feb. 11, 1993.
Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists.
The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, and about 75 others dead. A third of the dead were children.
Her final and perhaps most personal crisis as head of the Justice Department was the case involving Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others had drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat.
The boy became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.
Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.
Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint.
© 2016 The New York Times Company
