Is "Al Gonzales" Spanish For "Stealth Liberal"?
Is "Al Gonzales" Spanish for "stealth liberal?" Conservative activists think so, but their campaign against the likely Supreme Court nominee is a waste of time. In George W. Bush's world, loyalty trumps ideology—and no one has been more loyal than his San Antonio-born consigliere.
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When he graduated, in 1973, he did not go to college. "MacArthur is a fine school," says Gonzales, "but a lot of blue-collar families went there, and there was not the same emphasis from counselors on going to college. My parents were just proud of the fact that I had finished high school." Instead, inspired by the military career of a friend's father, Gonzales joined the Air Force and was stationed for two years at Fort Yukon, in Alaska. There he met two Air Force Academy graduates who motivated him to seek an appointment to the academy. He spent two undergraduate years there, where he became interested in a career in government and politics. He transferred to Rice University, attended Harvard Law, where he graduated in 1982, then got a job in the business, real estate, and energy group at Vinson and Elkins, where he spent the next twelve and a half years.
V&E was a nice place to roost. It got even nicer, financially speaking, when Gonzales was named partner in 1990. "He was the kind of person you wanted to see get ahead," says James W. McCartney, who was on V&E's management committee when Gonzales became the firm's first minority partner. "He worked hard and had good writing and analytical skills." His elevation to partner at such an important law firm was seen as a landmark by the Hispanic community; Texas attorney general-elect Dan Morales and Texas Supreme Court justice Raul Gonzalez both attended the party celebrating the promotion.
But real estate law—"dirt and deals"—held only part of his attention. He became active in politics. "In his mind, the Republican party was where he wanted to be," says longtime friend Roland Garcia, a partner at Locke, Liddell, and Sapp who worked with Gonzales at V&E. "Back before it was popular to be a Hispanic Republican, before Republicans were even courting Hispanics." Gonzales became president of the Hispanic Bar Association of Houston and was active in a number of charities and civic organizations, including the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans and Catholic Charities of Houston. "From very early on, Al lived the life of a compassionate conservative," says Garcia, who encouraged Gonzales to run for the board of directors of the State Bar of Texas. Gonzales ran and won and through Garcia met State Bar president Harriet Miers. As it happened—and this was the turn of fate that would determine the course of Gonzales' life from then onward—Miers was also George W. Bush's personal lawyer. After being elected governor, Bush solicited her opinion of Gonzales as a candidate for general counsel, whose job it is to render opinions on legislation, government ethics, pardons, and clemencies. Miers recommended Gonzales.
Gonzales quickly established himself in the governor's office as a sort of lawyer's lawyer: thorough, cautious, self-effacing, and deeply loyal to Bush. "He was extremely discreet," says former state senator David Sibley. "You'd go by Al's office and say, 'Boy, there was quite a stir in so and so's office yesterday.' This is the way we all gather information around the Capitol. But with Al you'd get nothing back. Maybe an 'Um' or a 'Really?' I never had any idea what he was telling Bush or what he knew." He was, by all accounts, a genuinely nice person: a good listener and a boss who was admired and well liked by his staff, whom he sometimes advised on their career choices.
Bush took an immediate liking to his soft-spoken new counsel. Gonzales also had a talent for presenting information in bite-size nuggets to his boss, a man with a notoriously short attention span. "The two had a warm relationship," says former Bush adviser McMahan. "One of the reasons the governor liked Al was that when he presented something, he was very concise and to the point and at the end he made a recommendation." Gonzales was almost preternaturally calm, say former colleagues, never raising his voice, never showing anger. "When he met with the governor, it was all business," says Stuart Bowen, whom Gonzales hired to both the general counsel's office and to the White House counsel's office. "Unlike the others—Karen, Karl, Joe—he did not give and take a lot of quips. He is not a quipper."
What cemented his closeness with Bush, say associates, were the death penalty cases that made up a significant part of the general counsel's job. Gonzales vetted these cases for Bush, writing opinions if there were evidentiary or other legal problems; as counsel he signed off on 59 executions. In his autobiography, Bush writes that Gonzales' guidance was particularly important to him on the eve of the controversial execution of Karla Faye Tucker, the attractive, born-again-Christian murderer whose death created an international sensation. Of the end of that long night, he writes, somewhat melodramatically: "On the way out the door, I paused and looked back in my office at Al Gonzales. 'Thank you,' I said somberly to the lawyer who had guided us through this difficult capital case. 'You did a good job.'"
Gonzales did a good job on other cases too, including, when he was Secretary of State, Bush's successful intervention in the state's lawsuit against the tobacco companies, which ensured that the companies, not the state, would pay the lawyers' fees. In 1998 Bush's affection for Gonzales led to his appointment as a justice to the Supreme Court of Texas, though he had never tried a single case—civil or criminal. Gonzales was then elected to the position in 2000; friends say he found the electoral process distasteful. "He is well grounded, but he also has a very idealistic view of the world," says media consultant David Weeks, whose company produced Gonzales' lone campaign ad. "Al is the antithesis of a politician."
Indeed, Gonzales is not a conventionally ambitious person. "I don't believe Al had a grand strategy mapped out to carry him to the White House," says his friend Garcia. "A lot of his success is due to skill and hard work, and a lot of it is due to luck—being there at the right place at the right time." After Bush appointed him counsel to the president, in 2001, he moved east with his wife, Rebecca, and their three children (one from her first marriage and two of their own; it is his second marriage too). With a salary of $140,000—a fraction of the $500,000 or more he would be pulling down as a partner with Vinson and Elkins—he lives quietly in the middle-class Virginia suburb of Vienna, socializes with a small group of friends, never drinks, attends Falls Church Episcopal Church, plays golf occasionally, and drives to work each day before dawn across the Potomac River.
THE SHORT LIST FOR THE United States Supreme Court is indeed short: Six names crop up in most discussions of who the next justice will be. In addition to Gonzales, they are: J. Harvie Wilkinson III and J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Samuel Alito of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Emilio Garza of the Fifth Circuit Court, and Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman who is a justice on the California Supreme Court. All are conservative enough to annoy most mainstream liberals; none have anything like Gonzales' compelling credentials as a confidant of Bush.
For now, the game in Washington is to try to decode the tight-lipped Gonzales. What sort of Supreme Court justice would he be? On a court tilted ever so slightly in favor of conservatives, Gonzales' lone vote could have cataclysmic effects. An inveterate Republican with such close ties to Bush, he is clearly no David Souter. He should instead inspire liberal fears that he will be carrying water for the Bush administration. Still, the problem court-watchers have is that the sphinxlike Gonzales has left virtually no trail for anyone to follow. His thirteen years as a real estate lawyer offer no clue. He has published nothing in any legal journal. His work as counsel for both Governor Bush and President Bush is largely behind the scenes. The one exception to this ideological blackout is his brief term on the Texas Supreme Court, where he participated in several hundred, mostly non-earthshaking, decisions.
Though judges are supposed to be objective and impartial, they are invariably rated according to their supposed politics: Is he for or against affirmative action? For or against abortion? For or against prayer in public schools? For or against gay rights? During his 23 months on the court, Gonzales kept such opinions to himself. He was widely viewed as a "moderate," meaning someone who was specifically not exercising those sorts of political agendas. "If there is anything Al Gonzales is not, it is a judicial activist," says Gonzales' former colleague Tom Phillips, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. His reference is to judges who, ignoring both judicial precedent and the letter of the law, seek to legislate from the bench. "I never saw him insinuate his personal beliefs into his application of the law."
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