On the basic issue of fighting crime, Reno is sharply at odds with her boss. In the crime package Clinton unveiled in August, he proposed expanding the death penalty to 50 more offenses, putting more cops on the street and cutting back on the number of times convicted killers can appeal their sentences. It was a politically pleasing offering that most lawmen heartily endorsed. The only problem is that Reno, the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, doesn’t think it will work.
Reno believes that simply hiring more cops is usually a waste of money. An opponent of the death penalty, she has said that expanding it creates a “moral dilemma.” Reno is what criminologists call a root causer. She feels that crime prevention must start with helping small children find their way out of poverty and neglect, and that society’s resources should go toward better education and housing, not more jails. She notes, correctly, that mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenders serve merely to take up jail cells that should be occupied by more dangerous criminals.
While Reno sounds like a Great Society liberal, Clinton is trying to position himself as a get-tough New Democrat. His crime bill emphasizes punishment, not rehabilitation or prevention. The president’s advisers want Clinton to respond to a public mood conditioned by last week’s videotape of a gang calmly shooting a Washington, D.C., shopkeeper and roughing up a pregnant woman (page 33). “Politically, nobody wants to hear touchy-feely, ‘Let’s be sensitive’,” says Andrew Cuomo, an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “They want to hear, ‘Lock’em up, and lock’em up cheap’.” Reno does agree with Clinton on some criminal-justice issues. She is a supporter of community policing, the new trend toward getting cops out of their squad cars and into the neighborhood. But earlier this year she exasperated the White House by refusing, during an appearance on a Sunday talk show, to endorse Clinton’s campaign promise of 100,000 new police officers on the street. Instead she wants to talk about reforming welfare and improving child-nutrition programs. Those tasks usually fall to other cabinet heads. “She should stick to crime, and stop tromping on other people’s turf,” complains a White House aide.
Reno has never been shy about second-guessing the president. In June, the day after Clinton dropped Lani Guinier as his choice to run the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, Reno told reporters that Guinier was still “the best possible choice.” She even gave Guinier a Justice Department conference room in which to make her case to the press. Last month Reno picked a fight with Vice President Al Gore when she failed to endorse his “reinventing government” recommendation to merge the Drug Enforcement Administration with the FBI. “I have not made up my mind,” she told The Washington Post. It might be counterproductive to “reorganize something just because it sounds good.”
Although Reno’s popularity insulates her from any public rebuke, there has been considerable off-the-record sniping between justice and the White House. Relations grew so bad that both sides recently met to declare a truce. The negotiators included senior advisers like David Gergen and domestic-policy adviser Carol Rasco from the White House, and Associate A.G. Webb Hubbell (an old Clinton friend) from Justice. The terms: no more backbiting, no more press leaks. “Everybody now realizes it’s important to keep disagreements in-house,” says a White House official. So will Janet Reno learn to keep her mouth shut? Not likely. “I wondered what it would be like to come to Washington, whether I could continue to be myself,” she told NEWSWEEK last week. “I feel very comfortable with that now. When I disagree with something, people will know.”
