IT WAS THE FIRST SUPREME Court argument by an attorney general since 1980. Dick Thornburgh had chosen the occasion with care. He was defending the constitutionality of mandatory testing for drugs and alcohol in a case that he was sure to win: a challenge to federal regulations requiring extraction of breath, blood, and urine from railroad workers after train accidents.

Thornburgh started his November 2, 1988, presentation well enough, outlining the safety hazards posed by intoxicated railway engineers. But he ran into trouble as soon as the justices started asking questions. Do the railroads’ own rules against working under the influence of alcohol apply to dining car waiters? asked Justice William Brennan, Jr.

Thornburgh: "I’m not sure, Your Honor."

Justice Thurgood Marshall: "I can testify no."

Thornburgh: "You can testify no?"

Marshall: "No."

Thornburgh: "I will accept an expert witness’s testimony on that." There was laughter in the courtroom; Marshall had once been a dining car waiter, like his father before him. "Adopt the statement by Mr. Justice Marshall," Thornburgh added with relief.

But as the questions continued, it became more obvious that Thornburgh had not done his homework. He did not know which railway workers were barred from drinking on or before the job, which employees were subject to the testing rules, or how the coverage of those rules corresponded to the safety concerns he was using to justify them. "I think it’s rather important," Brennan said, as Thornburgh fumbled.

At last the attorney general was reduced to saying, "I am not going to palm myself off on this Court as an expert." Mercifully, none of the justices asked him just what, in that event, he was doing there.

But in a way none of that mattered. The government won the case 7 to 2 (with Brennan and Marshall dissenting), as it would have done if Thornburgh had stood there humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" for his allotted half hour.

The point of the exercise was not to dazzle nine justices with his talents as an oral advocate. It was to raise his profile in the great and popular war on drugs. And it did that very well, winning kudos on the Republican right in particular. After the argument Thornburgh went out on the plaza in front of the Court and uttered some well-crafted sound bytes for the television cameras.

Thornburgh is usually quite good on his feet, with a confident but convivial presence, a solid grasp of the issues, a good sense of humor, and a politician’s knack for impressing an audience. He was a big hit, for example, when he returned to the Court 11 weeks after his argument, to give an impromptu talk at a cocktail reception honoring Charles Fried, the outgoing solicitor general. Tacitly acknowledging that the drug-testing argument had not been his finest hour, Thornburgh joked that he had been lulled by Fried’s suggestion on the way to Court that the justices might be so impressed with his high station that they would not launch into their usual interrogations. He praised Fried warmly and wittily. It was a lovely talk, capped by a boffo imitation of the Czech-born, Oxford-educated Fried’s voice–arch in tone, vaguely British, sauteed for 24 years on Harvard’s law faculty-saying, "They prooobably won’t aaask you any questions at aaall."

In 16 months in office, Thornburgh has impressed many in his department, in Congress, and in the press as the most political attorney general in many years-the most politically attuned, accomplished, and ambitious. This perception persists despite defeats in two major appointment battles and clashes with congressional potentates, the American Bar Association, the civil rights establishment, and the press. It is a perception that rests on speculation about his ambitions, his apparent attentiveness to interest groups, notably those on the Republican right, and the apparent malleability of his policy positions over the years.

On the policy front it seems increasingly doubtful that the differences between Thornburgh and former attorney general Edwin Meese III will prove more than cosmetic, although their styles contrast. While Meese courted confrontation, Thornburgh has more moderate instincts. Like President Bush, he slaloms deftly through a mine field of contentious issues by addressing many of them with studied ambiguity and facile expressions of good will. This may suit the Bush-Thornburgh goal of reaching out to a broad spectrum of interests, but it makes it difficult to tell just where Thornburgh stands.

It is even more difficult to figure out just what makes this man tick. Many admirers credit the portrait painted by Thornburgh himself, of a pragmatic problem-solver motivated by a selfless dedication to public service that he traces to the tragic death of his first wife in a 1960 automobile accident that left their infant son Peter retarded. Critics retort that Thornburgh shapes his every action with his political future in mind, always seeking the path of greatest political acceptability.

Whatever his deepest motivations, several sometimes contradictory themes emerge from a review of this complicated man’s 16 months as attorney general and his previous career:

ï He has impressive capacities for political leadership, with a sharp, energetic mind, an air of command, and a drive to get things done.

ï He is a tough, efficient manager, fiercely determined to control all in his domain, operating through a tight circle of longtime personal aides and demanding competence, rectitude, and loyalty from subordinates. This imperious style has served well in bringing a big bureaucracy to heel, but has compromised his effectiveness in dealing with other Washington power centers.

ï His heavy-handed regime of information control, promoted as a means of protecting the confidentiality of criminal investigations, also bespeaks an antipathy to the notion that Congress and the public are entitled to know anything about the internal workings of the Justice Department except what he chooses to tell them.

ï Where Meese and William French Smith were ideological attorneys general with a mission to change the legal status quo, Thornburgh seems far more pragmatic, more sensitive to currents of opinion among key interest groups than to any strong internal ideological compass. A onetime Rockefeller Republican who entered politics 25 years ago to combat what he called "extremists of the far right," he has drifted rightward with the mood of the electorate and now takes special pains to cater to conservatives.

ï He appears to view the law more as a tool for serving his president’s policy objectives and getting things done than as an independent Constraint on executive action.

"Meese in many respects was more interested in ideas, but he couldn’t bring it off," says former solicitor general Fried. "Thornburgh’s a very tough cookie, a much more authoritative and authoritarian personality than Meese. He will do things that need to be done, and that Meese could see needed to be done, but somehow would flinch from doing. He is a chief executive.

"He taught me something about political leadership," Fried continues. "Political leadership is not all lovey-dovey; it’s not all pretty. He starves people in a way Meese did not, starves them of information, starves them of access, doesn’t tell them anything they don’t need to know, doesn’t give them any more encouragement than he needs to. He knows how to wield power."

A former racket-busting prosecutor and Pennsylvania governor of vaunted integrity, the 57-year-old Thornburgh was greeted by bipartisan hosannas when he arrived in Washington to replace Meese in August 1988. Thornburgh seemed to be just the man to clean up after the genial conservative provocateur who had thrown so many stink bombs at the Supreme Court and been so sullied by ethical slop that he was almost hooted out of office.

Thornburgh has a stunning resume: He won the moniker "Mr. Clean" for his highly successful, highly publicized pursuit of gambling racketeers and corrupt officials as U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh from 1969 to 1975. He headed the Justice Department’s criminal division from 1975 to 1977. He achieved national stature during eight years as governor, then became director of the In-stitute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government while holding down a partnership at Pittsburgh’s Kirk-patrick & Lockhart.

"He can see himself being anything-president, Supreme Court, whatever," says a Pennsylvania associate. Last year, in fact, Thornburgh was touted by some as a possible running mate for George Bush, and he could be on the list of possible replacements if the president dumps Dan Quayle in 1992.

A Justice Department political appointee who has worked under Thornburgh and holds him in high regard adds, "He’s obviously much too ambitious … to be happy with a career-capper as attorney general, and I think a lot of what he was doing was calculated with a larger national Political future in mind"-a view echoed by more than 20 other observers.

Thornburgh brushes aside such talk and dismisses the notion that personal ambition shapes his actions as attorney general. "I don’t want to distract myself from what I’m doing by thinking about what the future might bring," he said in one of two interviews in his fifth-floor office.

He works hard and conscientiously at his job, immersing himself in the details of the biggest issues, devouring memos and draft briefs down to the footnotes, adding marginal notations with a red felt-tipped pen. Getting to the office about 7:30 A.M. most days, Thornburgh often eats lunch at his desk, seldom leaves before 7 P.M., and often works on weekends. He keeps meticulous track of his schedule through a thick daily briefing book, crammed with background information about the people he will be meeting and the issues he will be addressing.

The private Dick Thornburgh is described by acquaintances as an unpretentious, agreeable companion, a good mimic, and an aficionado of baseball trivia from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, a man who has never cared much about accumulating wealth or fancy friends or going to glitzy parties. His favorite leisure activities are spending time with his family-his wife, his four sons, and three grandchildren-and reading books. A recent reading list includes more than a dozen meaty nonfiction works, ranging from Battle for Justice, Ethan Bronner’s account of the 1987 battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, to The Last Lion, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill. He reads books the same way he reads Supreme Court briefs, says his spokesman, David Runkel: with pen in hand.

In public the poised, articulate sixfooter cuts an imposing figure. He is good at talking to television cameras, testifying to congressional committees, fielding-and avoiding-questions, moving through a room of people, and delivering speeches, albeit speeches that are often devoid of interesting ideas.

The most distinctive attribute of Thornburgh’s leadership has been the firmness with which he has grasped command of his sprawling, 80,000-employee department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other constituent agencies that had often operated semiautonomously before his arrival. Now Thornburgh controls everything from the FBI director’s contacts with members of Congress to the timing and content of press releases about extradition of Latin American drug kingpins.

Thornburgh operates through a handful of loyal aides headed by a troika from his Pennsylvania days, with whom he meets most mornings at 8:30. Executive assistant Robert "Robin" Ross, Jr., abuttoned-down, sometimes brusque lawyer, was Thornburgh’s deputy counsel during his first term in Harrisburg before leaving for Philadelphia’s Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz. Ross is now "the first guy [Thornburgh] sees in the morning and the last guy he sees at night and lots in between, the real decision maker on all kinds of things," a former official says.

Murray Dickman, a nonlawyer computer expert and streetwise political operative who started working for Thornburgh during his 1978 gubernatorial campaign, oversees budgetary matters and personnel, including judicial appointments. And Runkel, an affable former newspaper reporter who handles Thornburgh’s extraordinarily testy press relations, has been his spokesman since 1984.

Clustered around his fifth-floor office, these three and other members of Thornburglfs personal staff deliver marching orders and keep an eye on other subordinates. Thornburgh deals with most of the department, including some high-level political appointees, "more or less at arm’s length," in the words of one. One lawyer who was considered early in 1989 for appointment as head of the civil rights division told Legal Times that Ross had told him that "if I really handled the job well and did everything perfectly, I’d never see the attorney general."

Says a former official: "Ed Meese was insistent, some say to a fault, on having everyone involved in the decision sitting at the table. Thornburgh is equally insistent on everyone not sitting at the table, on having things filter up to him through an inner circle of aides."

Thornburgh has made it chillingly clear that he will tolerate neither ethical lapses nor telling the press or Congress things that might "give aid and comfort to our adversaries and ill-wishers"-a phrase he has used more than once. In September 1988 a Thornburgh spokesman publicly rebuked the FBI for independent communications with Congress that were unhelpful to the administration’s line on a gun control bill; a memo also went out to FBI director William Sessions and heads of other Justice De-partment agencies ordering them to hew to the official line and alert the attorney general’s office about their contacts with Congress.

Those who do not measure up to his standards, or do not follow orders, or do not subordinate their own agendas to his agenda, get dressed down or pushed out, usually by members of his palace guard. Friends of former associate attorney general Francis Keating, who had come into the department at Meese’s behest amid the turmoil of his last months, say he began calling Ross "the angel of death" after Ross and Dickman marched into his office last January to tell him his position would cease to exist in a week.

One high-level Meese holdover complains that "everything comes from the top down and nobody has any input anymore," that the people around Thornburgh "are so used to working in state government, with that mentality that the legislature and everyone under them [are] a bunch of hacks." A second former official, who was on balance positive about Thornburgh, faulted him for failing sometimes to get the perspective of the professionals in the department who know the issues best.

Part of the complaining is attributable to the fact that Thornburgh- who often praises the career professionals at Justice-and his team had little use for most of the Meese holdovers. "It was as if you had a red ‘M’ stamped to your forehead," recalls one. Thornburgh stresses that the president-elect told him to get "a new team in there." Now that team is largely in place, and some of the appointments have won wide praise, among them solicitor general Kenneth Starr, deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, and Richard Stewart, head of the lands and natural resources division.

Both the praise and the complaints about Thornburgh’s management at Justice echo reports from his Pennsylvania days. It was as governor that he developed his technique of running a huge bureaucracy through a coterie of personal aides, keeping aloof from legislators, his own cabinet secretaries, party officials, and others; he fired at least three cabinet members who refused to subordinate their agendas to his or to take direction from his close aides.

"[Thornburgh] himself is a very nice guy," says Fred Speaker, a Republican who worked with him on Rockefeller’s 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination and was Pennsylvania’s attorney general until 1971. "When he became governor my impression was that he ended up surrounded with people who worked very hard to isolate him from the Republican party structure… The independence of the various secretaries, the heads of departments was very much done away with… I think many of the decisions were very good… The big problem was the kind of tight, insular nature of the Thornburgh administration; you just didn’t have enough regular people able to express their viewpoints."

"They were very insensitive to people," says another Pennsylvania Republican. "They wouldn’t return phone calls. They were mean and miserable and uncooperative, But they ran a good government."

They also ran a clean government, at least at the top, by most accounts. Although Thornburgh’s hand-picked state Republican chairman was sent to prison in a big corruption scandal, there was no suggestion that Thornburgh or his personal staff were in-volved.

Not that the Thornburgh team was above a little old-fashioned patronage. It doled out millions of dollars in no-bid bond work and other state contracts disproportionately to law firms, financial firms like Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (which later gave ex-governor Thornburgh a $35,000-a-year position on its board), and others whose partners and executives had fattened Thornburgh’s campaign coffers. Democrats assailed him for combining "Mr. Clean" sanctimony with "pinstripe patronage," but none could show any illegality.

Pennsylvania supporters say Thornburgh learned as governor that to get things done he had to step on some toes. In Washington, too, says former solicitor general Fried, "You need to [do] something like that, because otherwise you get walked on."

The imperious style that has helped Thornburgh control bureaucracies in Pennsylvania and at Justice has been less effective in dealing with the contending forces and large egos of Congress. Thornburgh’s political honeymoon with that body came to a definitive close last summer when his personal first choices for two key jobs went down to humiliating defeats.

In early July the proposed nomination of Robert Fiske, Jr., for deputy attorney general fell victim to poorly laid groundwork and the administration’s unwillingness to face down right-wing opposition born of the delusion that Fiske had been part of an ABA conspiracy against conservative judicial candidates. A few weeks later the nomination of William Lucas to head the civil rights division was sunk by liberal opposition-and by the fact that he was grossly unqualified for the job.

The August 1 death of the Lucas nomination in the Senate Judiciary committee, on a7-to-7 vole, has been Thornburgh’s biggest defeat. After the bitter polarization that had characterized the tenure of William Bradford Reynolds as head of the civil rights division, the choice of a successor had tremendous symbolic importance. Thornburgh chose Lucas, the former county executive of Wayne County, Michigan, who was in many ways an inspiring success story. An orphan from the age of 14 who grew up in Harlem, he became a teacher, then a police officer and an FBI agent while working his way through night law school; he was elected Wayne County sheriff and later county executive.

But choosing him to head the civil rights division was a gross mismatch. It is inconceivable that anyone would ever have picked him for this handson litigating job had he not been black, conservative, and Republican. Lucas had never tried a case, never written a brief, and never practiced law full time, and he demonstrated little aptitude for the intricate analytical choices the chief civil rights litigator must make. To make things worse, soon after his selection was made public there came a steady drumbeat of news reports about his chronic resume inflation, including repeated statements that he had once been an "assistant U.S. attorney" when in fact he had been only a legal assistant at Justice, and had lost that job after flunking the D.C. bar exam-a failure that he neglected to disclose in response to a question on his 1981 application to join the New York bar.

Such ammunition helped civil rights leaders mobilize opposition. Still, on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee in July, Lucas was deemed by Thornburgh aides and Senate Democrats alike to be a good bet to be confirmed. He lost mainly because his responses to questions on substantive issues of civil rights law were pathetically uninformed.

At one point Lucas had to admit he did not understand the elementary distinction between de jure and de facto segregation. And he suggested, preposterously, that the Supreme Court’s succession of major civil rights decisions this year had not worked "any significant change" in the law.

Lucas and his supporters harped endlessly on his race during the confirmation hearings, as though a black man succeeding in life were a miracle and all else were irrelevant. This made his selection seem a crass exercise in tokenism.

The Lucas fight did not prevent Thornburgh from working effectively with some civil rights leaders to clear the way for sweeping new legislation to protect the handicapped. But it raised questions about the depth and seriousness of Thornburgh’s (and President Bush’s) commitment to energetic enforcement of the civil rights laws we already have.

So does the aftermath: As this article goes to press in early December, more than four months after the defeat of Lucas and nearly 11 months into the Bush presidency, there is still no nominee to head the civil rights division. The presumptive Thornburgh choice for the job is John Dunne, an old friend of the attorney general’s and a former deputy majority leader of the New York State Senate who practices corporate, real estate, and trusts and estates law in Uniondale, New York. Dunne is viewed as relatively moderate, but he may get a grilling at his confirmation hearing because he has little civil rights experience and only recently resigned a 32-year membership in an all-male Long Island golf club, Thornburgh has told reporters that Dunne "feels it’s inappropriate for the head of the civil rights division to belong to such a club" but that his past membership was no obstacle to his candidacy because "we don’t believe in litmus tests."

The Lucas nomination was not a total loss for Thornburgh. It endeared him to some conservative activists whose approbation he has courted, as did the subsequent appointment of Lucas to head the department’s Office of Liaison Services, a job that does not require Senate confirmation.

"Even though he lost I think it’s going to have a positi…

IT WAS THE FIRST SUPREME Court argument by an attorney general since 1980. Dick Thornburgh had chosen the occasion with care. He was defending the constitutionality of mandatory testing for drugs and alcohol in a case that he was sure to win: a challenge to federal regulations requiring extraction of breath, blood, and urine from railroad workers after train accidents.

Thornburgh started his November 2, 1988, presentation well enough, outlining the safety hazards posed by intoxicated railway engineers. But he ran into trouble as soon as the justices started asking questions. Do the railroads’ own rules against working under the influence of alcohol apply to dining car waiters? asked Justice William Brennan, Jr.

Thornburgh: "I’m not sure, Your Honor."

Justice Thurgood Marshall: "I can testify no."

Thornburgh: "You can testify no?"

Marshall: "No."

Thornburgh: "I will accept an expert witness’s testimony on that." There was laughter in the courtroom; Marshall had once been a dining car waiter, like his father before him. "Adopt the statement by Mr. Justice Marshall," Thornburgh added with relief.

But as the questions continued, it became more obvious that Thornburgh had not done his homework. He did not know which railway workers were barred from drinking on or before the job, which employees were subject to the testing rules, or how the coverage of those rules corresponded to the safety concerns he was using to justify them. "I think it’s rather important," Brennan said, as Thornburgh fumbled.

At last the attorney general was reduced to saying, "I am not going to palm myself off on this Court as an expert." Mercifully, none of the justices asked him just what, in that event, he was doing there.

But in a way none of that mattered. The government won the case 7 to 2 (with Brennan and Marshall dissenting), as it would have done if Thornburgh had stood there humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" for his allotted half hour.

The point of the exercise was not to dazzle nine justices with his talents as an oral advocate. It was to raise his profile in the great and popular war on drugs. And it did that very well, winning kudos on the Republican right in particular. After the argument Thornburgh went out on the plaza in front of the Court and uttered some well-crafted sound bytes for the television cameras.

Thornburgh is usually quite good on his feet, with a confident but convivial presence, a solid grasp of the issues, a good sense of humor, and a politician’s knack for impressing an audience. He was a big hit, for example, when he returned to the Court 11 weeks after his argument, to give an impromptu talk at a cocktail reception honoring Charles Fried, the outgoing solicitor general. Tacitly acknowledging that the drug-testing argument had not been his finest hour, Thornburgh joked that he had been lulled by Fried’s suggestion on the way to Court that the justices might be so impressed with his high station that they would not launch into their usual interrogations. He praised Fried warmly and wittily. It was a lovely talk, capped by a boffo imitation of the Czech-born, Oxford-educated Fried’s voice–arch in tone, vaguely British, sauteed for 24 years on Harvard’s law faculty-saying, "They prooobably won’t aaask you any questions at aaall."

In 16 months in office, Thornburgh has impressed many in his department, in Congress, and in the press as the most political attorney general in many years-the most politically attuned, accomplished, and ambitious. This perception persists despite defeats in two major appointment battles and clashes with congressional potentates, the American Bar Association, the civil rights establishment, and the press. It is a perception that rests on speculation about his ambitions, his apparent attentiveness to interest groups, notably those on the Republican right, and the apparent malleability of his policy positions over the years.

On the policy front it seems increasingly doubtful that the differences between Thornburgh and former attorney general Edwin Meese III will prove more than cosmetic, although their styles contrast. While Meese courted confrontation, Thornburgh has more moderate instincts. Like President Bush, he slaloms deftly through a mine field of contentious issues by addressing many of them with studied ambiguity and facile expressions of good will. This may suit the Bush-Thornburgh goal of reaching out to a broad spectrum of interests, but it makes it difficult to tell just where Thornburgh stands.

It is even more difficult to figure out just what makes this man tick. Many admirers credit the portrait painted by Thornburgh himself, of a pragmatic problem-solver motivated by a selfless dedication to public service that he traces to the tragic death of his first wife in a 1960 automobile accident that left their infant son Peter retarded. Critics retort that Thornburgh shapes his every action with his political future in mind, always seeking the path of greatest political acceptability.

Whatever his deepest motivations, several sometimes contradictory themes emerge from a review of this complicated man’s 16 months as attorney general and his previous career:

ï He has impressive capacities for political leadership, with a sharp, energetic mind, an air of command, and a drive to get things done.

ï He is a tough, efficient manager, fiercely determined to control all in his domain, operating through a tight circle of longtime personal aides and demanding competence, rectitude, and loyalty from subordinates. This imperious style has served well in bringing a big bureaucracy to heel, but has compromised his effectiveness in dealing with other Washington power centers.

ï His heavy-handed regime of information control, promoted as a means of protecting the confidentiality of criminal investigations, also bespeaks an antipathy to the notion that Congress and the public are entitled to know anything about the internal workings of the Justice Department except what he chooses to tell them.

ï Where Meese and William French Smith were ideological attorneys general with a mission to change the legal status quo, Thornburgh seems far more pragmatic, more sensitive to currents of opinion among key interest groups than to any strong internal ideological compass. A onetime Rockefeller Republican who entered politics 25 years ago to combat what he called "extremists of the far right," he has drifted rightward with the mood of the electorate and now takes special pains to cater to conservatives.

ï He appears to view the law more as a tool for serving his president’s policy objectives and getting things done than as an independent Constraint on executive action.

"Meese in many respects was more interested in ideas, but he couldn’t bring it off," says former solicitor general Fried. "Thornburgh’s a very tough cookie, a much more authoritative and authoritarian personality than Meese. He will do things that need to be done, and that Meese could see needed to be done, but somehow would flinch from doing. He is a chief executive.

"He taught me something about political leadership," Fried continues. "Political leadership is not all lovey-dovey; it’s not all pretty. He starves people in a way Meese did not, starves them of information, starves them of access, doesn’t tell them anything they don’t need to know, doesn’t give them any more encouragement than he needs to. He knows how to wield power."

A former racket-busting prosecutor and Pennsylvania governor of vaunted integrity, the 57-year-old Thornburgh was greeted by bipartisan hosannas when he arrived in Washington to replace Meese in August 1988. Thornburgh seemed to be just the man to clean up after the genial conservative provocateur who had thrown so many stink bombs at the Supreme Court and been so sullied by ethical slop that he was almost hooted out of office.

Thornburgh has a stunning resume: He won the moniker "Mr. Clean" for his highly successful, highly publicized pursuit of gambling racketeers and corrupt officials as U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh from 1969 to 1975. He headed the Justice Department’s criminal division from 1975 to 1977. He achieved national stature during eight years as governor, then became director of the In-stitute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government while holding down a partnership at Pittsburgh’s Kirk-patrick & Lockhart.

"He can see himself being anything-president, Supreme Court, whatever," says a Pennsylvania associate. Last year, in fact, Thornburgh was touted by some as a possible running mate for George Bush, and he could be on the list of possible replacements if the president dumps Dan Quayle in 1992.

A Justice Department political appointee who has worked under Thornburgh and holds him in high regard adds, "He’s obviously much too ambitious … to be happy with a career-capper as attorney general, and I think a lot of what he was doing was calculated with a larger national Political future in mind"-a view echoed by more than 20 other observers.

Thornburgh brushes aside such talk and dismisses the notion that personal ambition shapes his actions as attorney general. "I don’t want to distract myself from what I’m doing by thinking about what the future might bring," he said in one of two interviews in his fifth-floor office.

He works hard and conscientiously at his job, immersing himself in the details of the biggest issues, devouring memos and draft briefs down to the footnotes, adding marginal notations with a red felt-tipped pen. Getting to the office about 7:30 A.M. most days, Thornburgh often eats lunch at his desk, seldom leaves before 7 P.M., and often works on weekends. He keeps meticulous track of his schedule through a thick daily briefing book, crammed with background information about the people he will be meeting and the issues he will be addressing.

The private Dick Thornburgh is described by acquaintances as an unpretentious, agreeable companion, a good mimic, and an aficionado of baseball trivia from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, a man who has never cared much about accumulating wealth or fancy friends or going to glitzy parties. His favorite leisure activities are spending time with his family-his wife, his four sons, and three grandchildren-and reading books. A recent reading list includes more than a dozen meaty nonfiction works, ranging from Battle for Justice, Ethan Bronner’s account of the 1987 battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, to The Last Lion, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill. He reads books the same way he reads Supreme Court briefs, says his spokesman, David Runkel: with pen in hand.

In public the poised, articulate sixfooter cuts an imposing figure. He is good at talking to television cameras, testifying to congressional committees, fielding-and avoiding-questions, moving through a room of people, and delivering speeches, albeit speeches that are often devoid of interesting ideas.

The most distinctive attribute of Thornburgh’s leadership has been the firmness with which he has grasped command of his sprawling, 80,000-employee department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other constituent agencies that had often operated semiautonomously before his arrival. Now Thornburgh controls everything from the FBI director’s contacts with members of Congress to the timing and content of press releases about extradition of Latin American drug kingpins.

Thornburgh operates through a handful of loyal aides headed by a troika from his Pennsylvania days, with whom he meets most mornings at 8:30. Executive assistant Robert "Robin" Ross, Jr., abuttoned-down, sometimes brusque lawyer, was Thornburgh’s deputy counsel during his first term in Harrisburg before leaving for Philadelphia’s Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz. Ross is now "the first guy [Thornburgh] sees in the morning and the last guy he sees at night and lots in between, the real decision maker on all kinds of things," a former official says.

Murray Dickman, a nonlawyer computer expert and streetwise political operative who started working for Thornburgh during his 1978 gubernatorial campaign, oversees budgetary matters and personnel, including judicial appointments. And Runkel, an affable former newspaper reporter who handles Thornburgh’s extraordinarily testy press relations, has been his spokesman since 1984.

Clustered around his fifth-floor office, these three and other members of Thornburglfs personal staff deliver marching orders and keep an eye on other subordinates. Thornburgh deals with most of the department, including some high-level political appointees, "more or less at arm’s length," in the words of one. One lawyer who was considered early in 1989 for appointment as head of the civil rights division told Legal Times that Ross had told him that "if I really handled the job well and did everything perfectly, I’d never see the attorney general."

Says a former official: "Ed Meese was insistent, some say to a fault, on having everyone involved in the decision sitting at the table. Thornburgh is equally insistent on everyone not sitting at the table, on having things filter up to him through an inner circle of aides."

Thornburgh has made it chillingly clear that he will tolerate neither ethical lapses nor telling the press or Congress things that might "give aid and comfort to our adversaries and ill-wishers"-a phrase he has used more than once. In September 1988 a Thornburgh spokesman publicly rebuked the FBI for independent communications with Congress that were unhelpful to the administration’s line on a gun control bill; a memo also went out to FBI director William Sessions and heads of other Justice De-partment agencies ordering them to hew to the official line and alert the attorney general’s office about their contacts with Congress.

Those who do not measure up to his standards, or do not follow orders, or do not subordinate their own agendas to his agenda, get dressed down or pushed out, usually by members of his palace guard. Friends of former associate attorney general Francis Keating, who had come into the department at Meese’s behest amid the turmoil of his last months, say he began calling Ross "the angel of death" after Ross and Dickman marched into his office last January to tell him his position would cease to exist in a week.

One high-level Meese holdover complains that "everything comes from the top down and nobody has any input anymore," that the people around Thornburgh "are so used to working in state government, with that mentality that the legislature and everyone under them [are] a bunch of hacks." A second former official, who was on balance positive about Thornburgh, faulted him for failing sometimes to get the perspective of the professionals in the department who know the issues best.

Part of the complaining is attributable to the fact that Thornburgh- who often praises the career professionals at Justice-and his team had little use for most of the Meese holdovers. "It was as if you had a red ‘M’ stamped to your forehead," recalls one. Thornburgh stresses that the president-elect told him to get "a new team in there." Now that team is largely in place, and some of the appointments have won wide praise, among them solicitor general Kenneth Starr, deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, and Richard Stewart, head of the lands and natural resources division.

Both the praise and the complaints about Thornburgh’s management at Justice echo reports from his Pennsylvania days. It was as governor that he developed his technique of running a huge bureaucracy through a coterie of personal aides, keeping aloof from legislators, his own cabinet secretaries, party officials, and others; he fired at least three cabinet members who refused to subordinate their agendas to his or to take direction from his close aides.

"[Thornburgh] himself is a very nice guy," says Fred Speaker, a Republican who worked with him on Rockefeller’s 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination and was Pennsylvania’s attorney general until 1971. "When he became governor my impression was that he ended up surrounded with people who worked very hard to isolate him from the Republican party structure… The independence of the various secretaries, the heads of departments was very much done away with… I think many of the decisions were very good… The big problem was the kind of tight, insular nature of the Thornburgh administration; you just didn’t have enough regular people able to express their viewpoints."

"They were very insensitive to people," says another Pennsylvania Republican. "They wouldn’t return phone calls. They were mean and miserable and uncooperative, But they ran a good government."

They also ran a clean government, at least at the top, by most accounts. Although Thornburgh’s hand-picked state Republican chairman was sent to prison in a big corruption scandal, there was no suggestion that Thornburgh or his personal staff were in-volved.

Not that the Thornburgh team was above a little old-fashioned patronage. It doled out millions of dollars in no-bid bond work and other state contracts disproportionately to law firms, financial firms like Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (which later gave ex-governor Thornburgh a $35,000-a-year position on its board), and others whose partners and executives had fattened Thornburgh’s campaign coffers. Democrats assailed him for combining "Mr. Clean" sanctimony with "pinstripe patronage," but none could show any illegality.

Pennsylvania supporters say Thornburgh learned as governor that to get things done he had to step on some toes. In Washington, too, says former solicitor general Fried, "You need to [do] something like that, because otherwise you get walked on."

The imperious style that has helped Thornburgh control bureaucracies in Pennsylvania and at Justice has been less effective in dealing with the contending forces and large egos of Congress. Thornburgh’s political honeymoon with that body came to a definitive close last summer when his personal first choices for two key jobs went down to humiliating defeats.

In early July the proposed nomination of Robert Fiske, Jr., for deputy attorney general fell victim to poorly laid groundwork and the administration’s unwillingness to face down right-wing opposition born of the delusion that Fiske had been part of an ABA conspiracy against conservative judicial candidates. A few weeks later the nomination of William Lucas to head the civil rights division was sunk by liberal opposition-and by the fact that he was grossly unqualified for the job.

The August 1 death of the Lucas nomination in the Senate Judiciary committee, on a7-to-7 vole, has been Thornburgh’s biggest defeat. After the bitter polarization that had characterized the tenure of William Bradford Reynolds as head of the civil rights division, the choice of a successor had tremendous symbolic importance. Thornburgh chose Lucas, the former county executive of Wayne County, Michigan, who was in many ways an inspiring success story. An orphan from the age of 14 who grew up in Harlem, he became a teacher, then a police officer and an FBI agent while working his way through night law school; he was elected Wayne County sheriff and later county executive.

But choosing him to head the civil rights division was a gross mismatch. It is inconceivable that anyone would ever have picked him for this handson litigating job had he not been black, conservative, and Republican. Lucas had never tried a case, never written a brief, and never practiced law full time, and he demonstrated little aptitude for the intricate analytical choices the chief civil rights litigator must make. To make things worse, soon after his selection was made public there came a steady drumbeat of news reports about his chronic resume inflation, including repeated statements that he had once been an "assistant U.S. attorney" when in fact he had been only a legal assistant at Justice, and had lost that job after flunking the D.C. bar exam-a failure that he neglected to disclose in response to a question on his 1981 application to join the New York bar.

Such ammunition helped civil rights leaders mobilize opposition. Still, on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee in July, Lucas was deemed by Thornburgh aides and Senate Democrats alike to be a good bet to be confirmed. He lost mainly because his responses to questions on substantive issues of civil rights law were pathetically uninformed.

At one point Lucas had to admit he did not understand the elementary distinction between de jure and de facto segregation. And he suggested, preposterously, that the Supreme Court’s succession of major civil rights decisions this year had not worked "any significant change" in the law.

Lucas and his supporters harped endlessly on his race during the confirmation hearings, as though a black man succeeding in life were a miracle and all else were irrelevant. This made his selection seem a crass exercise in tokenism.

The Lucas fight did not prevent Thornburgh from working effectively with some civil rights leaders to clear the way for sweeping new legislation to protect the handicapped. But it raised questions about the depth and seriousness of Thornburgh’s (and President Bush’s) commitment to energetic enforcement of the civil rights laws we already have.

So does the aftermath: As this article goes to press in early December, more than four months after the defeat of Lucas and nearly 11 months into the Bush presidency, there is still no nominee to head the civil rights division. The presumptive Thornburgh choice for the job is John Dunne, an old friend of the attorney general’s and a former deputy majority leader of the New York State Senate who practices corporate, real estate, and trusts and estates law in Uniondale, New York. Dunne is viewed as relatively moderate, but he may get a grilling at his confirmation hearing because he has little civil rights experience and only recently resigned a 32-year membership in an all-male Long Island golf club, Thornburgh has told reporters that Dunne "feels it’s inappropriate for the head of the civil rights division to belong to such a club" but that his past membership was no obstacle to his candidacy because "we don’t believe in litmus tests."

The Lucas nomination was not a total loss for Thornburgh. It endeared him to some conservative activists whose approbation he has courted, as did the subsequent appointment of Lucas to head the department’s Office of Liaison Services, a job that does not require Senate confirmation.

"Even though he lost I think it’s going to have a positive legacy over time," says Patrick McGuigan, a senior scholar with the Free Congress Foundation. McGuigan says Thornburgh’s choice of a black conservative lor the civil rights job was one of the reasons he now warmly supports Thornburgh. "He’s not Ed Meese, not someone who conservatives instinctively feel is one of them," McGuigan says, "but over the last year or so… conservatives have come to feel he’s on our side."

Thornburgh’s recommendation that the president nominate Fiske to be deputy attorney general was a different matter: a’praiseworthy choice that came to a bad end because of the administration’s fealty to the Republican right.

A partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell and former U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Fiske is among the most widely respected corporate litigators in the country and a leader of the legal establishment. But right-wing Republicans focused on him their seething outrage about the defeat of Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in 1987, and about the supposed liberal bias of the ABA’s standing committee on the federal judiciary. During Fiske’s chairmanship, from 1984 to 1987, the 15-mem-ber committee shot down the proposed nominations of a handful of arch-conservative candidates. And shortly after Fiske’s term ended, the committee’s finding that Bork was well qualified was eclipsed by the dissenting votes of four members who thought Bork’s conservative views too extreme.

Fiske, a Republican, had personally supported Bork, as well as most other conservative Reagan judicial selections. At worst he was guilty of imprudence: Until 1985 he and the rest of the committee had given advance notice of some prospective nominations to liberal groups. This practice was motivated by the legitimate goal of tapping into a possible source of information on whether the candidates might be racially or sexually biased, but it had the effect of giving liberals a prenomjnation crack at Reagan judicial selections.

The word that Thornburgh had asked the president to nominate Fiske gave right-wing activists a cause to rally around, and they found a ready audience among conservative Republican senators like Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire and Charles Grassley of Iowa. Heavily lobbied by conservative activists, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the senior Republican on the Judiciary committee, and 13 other Republican senators signed a letter opposing Fiske. Thurmond told the White House pointedly not to send Fiske’s name up.

Fiske would still very probably have been confirmed if nominaited had White House chief of staff John Sununu been willing to proceed. But according to most reports he strongly opposed Fiske himself, Fiske got the message that he had become a political liability and withdrew from consideration on July 6.

Several former Justice officials and some Senate staffers in both parties fault Thornburgh for not having consulted widely enough oir had sensitive enough political antennae to anticipate the ferocity of the opposition to Fiske and take timely steps to derail it. They say some Republican senators, perhaps even Thurmond, might have been persuadable if the administration had gotten to them before the conservative opponents did.

"The way to do it is to come up here in advance, make your contacts, talk to folks, and at least give them the impression that they’re being consulted," says a Senate Democratic aide. "Thornburgh didn’t do that." A Republican aide, making a similar complaint, says, "I don’t think he consults sufficiently at all," adding, "Thornburgh’s a good man and he knows his job and he’s politically astute. Why he does these things, I don’t know."

One leading New York litigator privately pronounces the attorney general "gutless," saying he should have threatened to resign before allowing Sununu to veto his chosen deputy. But no attorney general can afford to throw the gauntlet down to the White House too often, and few Washington insiders think this would have been an appropriate occasion for Thornburgh to do so. "I don’t think it’s fair to say that he didn’t fight hard for old Fiskey" once the battle was joined, says Harold Tyler, Jr., a partner in New York’s Patterson, Bel-knap, Webb & Tyler who was deputy attorney general during the Ford administration. Tyler is a friend of Fiske’s and succeeded him as chair of the ABA committee. Fiske declines to comment.

While Thornburgh was vainly seeking to persuade conservatives that Fiske was okay, he was adding his voice to conservative complaints about the ABA committee Fiske had chaired. On May 2 Thornburgh suggested in congressional testimony that the committee had acknowledged considering "the political and ideological views of the prospective nominees" in the past, and had agreed "to withdraw" from such pursuits; he credited this agreement to "the efforts of Robert Fiske."

This testimony angered members of the standing committee, who told reporters Thornburgh had misstated the committee’s position. Tyler, then the chairman of the committee, and Robert Raven of San Francisco’s Morrison & Foerster, then president of the ABA, said the committee had never improperly taken account of ideology and was considering changing its guidelines-which provided for considering politics and ideology "to the extent they may bear upon" such criteria as "freedom from bias and commitment to equal justice"- solely to correct critics’ misunderstandings. They said the committee had not yet reached any agreement with Thornburgh and had not been negotiating through Fiske.

This prompted the attorney general, through Runkel, to threaten publicly to end the ABA role in screening prospective nominees. Finally, in June, the committee deleted the offending words from its guidelines, while continuing to maintain that this represented only a minor clarification and not a change in approach.

Aside from the Fiske and Lucas episodes, Thornburgh’s problems with Congress have centered on his determination to run his department’s internal affairs without congressional interference. Critics on the Hill, including some House Judiciary committee Democrats, complain that Thornburgh seeks to deny them information by, for example, spurning congressional requests for a copy of an opinion by his Office of Legal Counsel authorizing arrests of criminal suspects abroad without the foreign governments’ consent. They also say he makes abrupt moves without appropriate consultation of their committees, such as his controversial plan to dismantle the 14 semiautonomous organized crime strike forces and merge them into U.S. Attorney’s Offices.

Donald Carr, who was acting head of the lands and natural resources division from January through August 1989 and is now counsel at the D.C. office of New York’s Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, says Thornburgh may raise hackles in Congress because "he is disinclined [to be] or incapable of being a sort of powderpuff stroker; he wants to get things done… but the style of government that we have today tends to reward stroking a great deal."

Carr is one of Thornburgh’s admirers. "On a lot of things where I had personal contact with him," says Carr, "he basically said, ‘Look, if you’re satisfied that this is the correct professional course, then you follow it, whether the politics are good, bad, or indifferent.’

"He is not a guy who rattles," Carr adds. "We had to decide whether to send FBI agents on a large and very intrusive search of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, which is run by the Energy Department and Rockwell International outside Den-ver. …It was one of the hottest things that he had to deal with in, his first six months. He showed consummate poise, steady, seriatim resolution of difficult questions, coming to grips with the whole nut of the issue in a series of meetings. I was exceedingly impressed. He handled it very professionally."

In the face of great concerns not only in the Energy Department but also in the National Security Council and the White House, Carr says, Thornburgh sent in the FBI last June to look for evidence of illegal storage and disposal of nuclear waste at Rocky Flats, evidence that could show criminal conduct by federal officials.

Carr’s favorable view of Thornburgh was echoed by many other current and former subordinates and associates. But more than a dozen other former Justice Department officials who were interviewed-most but not all of them Meese holdovers-are far more critical. Few are willing to be quoted by name. While the harsher critics view him as driven by ambition, ruthlessly self-aggrandizing,- and isolated from his troops, others, including some who think well of him, are puzzled and disappointed that he has not lived up to their initial hopes.

"He’s a very smart man, very able, very decent and honest, but there’s a potential there that’s unachieved," says one former official. "The man came to Washington with the opportunity to be the greatest white knight savior in a long, long time. People wanted him to stand up for the right things, and I think he’s been disappointing. He played to the crowd on abortion. He played to the crowd on drugs. He needed to put somebody in the civil rights division who would have signaled a real commitment to healing wounds, and he hasn’t done it." This former official adds that it is unclear how much freedom the Bush White House has given Thornburgh.

Not surprisingly, a sense of disappointment in Thornburgh can also be found among some of his more liberal former associates in Pennsylvania who are unhappy with the evolution of his political values. This sentiment surfaced in the fall of 1988 when Thornburgh’s membership on the board of the Western Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1967 to 1969 became an issue in the presidential campaign.

With George Bush busily trashing the ACLU as a symbol of "fur left" un-Americanism, Thornburgh explained that he had quit the board in 1969 because the organization was pursuing a "political agenda, many portions of which I strongly disagreed with," such as legalizing drugs, protecting pornography, opposing school prayer, and entering "the political debate over the Vietnam war." Candidate Bush said he "loved" this comment.

Some of those who served with Thornburgh on the ACLU board do not love his comment. They say Thornburgh expressed no disagreement with ACLU activities in 1969- in fact, in 1970 he suggested in a speech that legalizing drugs should be considered-but said he was resigning to avoid a conflict of interest in light of his imminent appointment as U.S. Attorney. They point to a 1982 message to the ACLU on the occasion of an award dinner, in which then-governor Thornburgh said, "You can take great pride in your significant efforts, which have served to uphold the principles of equality and freedom upon which our commonwealth and nation were founded." And they note that Thornburgh offered this new ideological rationale for leaving the ACLU at a time when it was far from clear that Bush, if elected, would ask him to stay on as attorney general.

"Opportunistic" is the verdict of Thomas Kerr, a longtime leader of the ACLU in Pennsylvania. Kerr says he has always considered Thornburgh honest, but that "somewhere along the line he became expedient."

The attorney general has also been engaged in a running conflict with independent counsel Lawrence Walsh over Walsh’s Iran-contra prosecutions. Their relations were sometimes tense but reasonably productive during the Oliver North prosecutions, but they deteriorated badly as the two grappled over Walsh’s prosecution of Joseph Fernandez, the former CIA station chief in Costa Rica. In October Walsh accused Thornburgh of trying "to tie this case in a knot of endless litigation."

Walsh had charged Fernandez with lying to the agency’s inspector general and a presidential commission about his work with the Nicaraguan contras. The conflicts between Thornburgh and Walsh centered on classified-but widely publicized- data about the locations of three CIA outposts in Central America. U.S. district judge Claude Hilton of Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that Fernandez must be allowed to introduce this information at any trial. Walsh wanted to let the information come in so that the trial could proceed.

Instead, on November 22 the attorney general exercised for the first time in history his power to bar disclosure of the information at any trial. Predictably, Judge Hilton dismissed the case. Thornburgh’s order has effectively killed the prosecution unless Walsh wins his pending appeal (which Thornburgh supports) of Hilton’s ruling that Fernandez is entitled to the information.

Walsh complained that Thornburgh’s stance could put intelligence officers who break the law "beyond prosecution." The attorney general’s action in the Fernandez case was unjustified, Walsh said, because the CIA outposts’ locations were "fictional secrets," disclosure of which would at worst ruffle the feathers of some foreign governments by sacrificing an "artificial deniability."

Thornburgh said he acted to avoid "serious damage to the national security" and filed his detailed reasons under seal. His aides privately stress that what Walsh calls "artificial deniability" must be preserved if the U.S. is to honor its assurances of confidentiality to foreign governments cooperating on sensitive matters. And some current and former Justice Department prosecutors consider the Fernandez case inherently weak and the indictment so sloppily drafted as to aggravate the secrecy problems.

"I don’t think anybody was ill-motivated here," says one knowledgeable former official who says he has high regard for both Walsh and Thornburgh. Attributing their conflict to poor communication exacerbated by a measure of arrogance in both camps, he gives Thornburgh the benefit of the doubt that he struck a reasonable balance between the importance of the Fernandez prosecution and the national security problems it posed.

The acid test of Thornburgh’s commitment to holding officials in sensitive jobs legally accountable may come in the case of former national security adviser John Poindexter, set for trial in January. He is a far bigger fish than Fernandez, and his lawyers have said he had then-president Reagan’s authorization for actions at the center of the prosecution. If Thornburgh derails the Poindexter case without a more compelling justification than he has offered in the Fernandez case, it would be hard to resist the inference that he was slighting the need for legal accountability in high office.

Thornburgh shrugs off the criticism he has drawn in recent months, noting with a laugh former attorney general Herbert Brownell, Jr.’s observation that "any attorney general who is popular is not doing his job." But Thornburgh also says he is "saddened" to find on returning to Washington that "the level of contention is much higher than it was a dozen years ago, both be-tween the executive and legislative branches, as is often noted, and, frankly, between the media and people in public life," He says he has had "some nasty experiences" and laments both "the arrogance of congressional staffers" and the willingness of reporters to credit disparaging comments made by sources who insist on anonymity.

Indeed, when he was on a mission to Moscow in October, Thornburgh seemed to feel a certain kinship with his hosts about the bumptiousness of a press rampant. At a joint press conference with the Soviet justice minister, Thornburgh welcomed Soviet as-pirations to improve human rights, including "freedom of the press." But when asked about President Mikhail Gorbachev’s angry threat the previous week to fire the editor of the nation’s most popular liberal journal, he expressed sympathy for Gorbachev’s "This represented a frustration, which frankly we could sympathize with, in terms of some of the reporting that had taken place."

Later, when American journalists expressed amazement at this remark, spokesman Runkel explained it had been "facetious."

There has been nothing facetious about Thornburgh’s running conflict with the press back home. Most or all of the reporters who cover Justice are deeply suspicious and resentful of what they see as his zealous campaign to prevent the press and the Congress from getting any information about the department except that which is spoon-fed through politically cleared press releases.

This complaint seems to amuse Thornburgh. "Sounds good to me," he says with a laugh. "Sounds good to me. I wish that were the case. That’s a consummation devoutly to be wished but never to be obtained."

Thornburgh, who was generous with his time in answering questions for this article, stresses endlessly the need to throttle leaks of sensitive information about criminal investigations, both to avoid compromising their success and to protect the reputations of innocent people. "If that produces what The New Republic calls the most hated member of the Bush administration by the press, so be it," he says. "I think that really is a badge of distinction… The Bill of Rights doesn’t stop with the First Amendment."

In a stormy session with reporters on November 29 Thornburgh disclosed that because of "my concern about leaks… I asked for a review of the entire spectrum of public information policies by all the components of the Department of Justice." Among the fruits of that review are a November directive barring all Immigration and Naturalization Service employees from talking to reporters about any aspect of any investigation-or anything else-without prior approval from Washington of "any remarks to be made, including responses to anticipated questions." A similar directive went out in March to all criminal division employees from Edward Dennis, Jr., the head of the division.

At the November 29 briefing Thornburgh asserted that those who leak information from criminal investigations "are criminals themselves" and must be deterred. There followed this exchange:

Reporter: "By putting on these restrictions… you are systematically reducing every news story to a leak. The only way [we are] going to get any information is if somebody leaks it. to [us]."

Thornburgh: "If you are making the case to me for leaks of criminal investigations, you’re talking to the wrong person."

Reporter: "General, we have trouble getting basic, ordinary information out of the department anymore."

Thornburgh: "You have daily briefings [by Runkel]."

Reporter: "We don’t get information at them… We get: ‘I’ll check on that, I don’t know, I’ll get back to you on that.’"

When a reporter noted that "the ordinary way of doing business and interviewing attorneys… was certainly more open" before Thornburgh, the attorney general replied, "I’m sure it was-yes, it was. It leaked like a sieve when I got here."

Thornburgh says he does not object to "whistle-blower-type leaks" disclosing governmental misconduct. But he disclosed at a press briefing that a drug enforcement officer was chastised for telling The Washington Post how the Justice De-partment had lured a crack dealer to the park across the street from the White House for an undercover buy to provide President Bush with the dramatic prop he used in his September 5, 1989, speech to the nation on drugs.

Thornburgh has threatened leakers with prosecution for theft of government property-in addition to the traditional sanction of discipline or dismissal-and reporters with subpoenas to name their sources. Last summer he reversed a 1978 Justice Department policy that had barred use of the theft statute to prosecute leakers if their intent was to inform the public and the information was legally obtained.

Meanwhile he has decimated the department’s press office, abruptly cutting it from nine to four people last January, removing four of the five career employees. (Most got jobs elsewhere in the department.) Advertised as a way of saving money, this staffing cut came amid far tighter supervision of the three political appointees and the one career press officer who remained. (Several new press officers have been added since.)

"That budgetary argument was phony," says Loye Miller, whom Thornburgh brought in to run the press office in 1988 and who left in frustration in May 1989. He said Thornburgh had complained to him about the press office and felt-unfairly, in Miller’s view-that "there were a bunch of civil servants down there who were not really loyal, who didn’t have the attorney general and his agenda at the top of their list."

Under Meese and his predecessors the office often provided raw public information about cases, policies, and legal background without much partisan spin. Now routine factual information, such as the status of efforts to extradite Colombian drug kingpins, is often released late, if at all, and in the form of prepared statements with headlines like this one: "Thornburgh Seeks Top Colombian Drug Defendants."

For all his emphasis on leaks in criminal investigations, Thornburgh acknowledges that he simply does not want Justice Department lawyers discussing much of anything with the press or Congress outside official channels, particularly internal policy disagreements that might attract political criticism. "That’s simply a matter of self-interest," he maintains. "I said in my first speech to the department that I want this department to speak with one voice, for a very practical reason. We only give aid and comfort to our adversaries and ill-wishers if we’re out there with a cacophony of views that confuse the goals we’re trying to seek… It makes my job a lot easier, if once we adopt a position, a policy, or goal we can pursue it without having to rethink it in public, and that has to do with the Hill and it has to do with reporters and other agencies with whom we deal."

This is the essence of Thornburgh’s approach to public information: starving political adversaries of the facts on which critics feed by forcing the Justice Department’s 80,000 employees to "speak with one voice"-his voice-to the press, the Congress, and the public.

Patrick Korten, a conservative who was Meese’s chief spokesman and remained on the job briefly after Thornburgh arrived, says that Thornburgh’s information-control effort is "working in the short term" because "he has got everyone in the goddamned place scared to death to go near a telephone if a reporter is on the other end of the line." But he adds, "It poisons the relationship of Thornburgh and the people who work for him. He has also poisoned his relationship with the press and in the long run 1 think that hurts him."

Runkel, on the other hand, points to the strained relations between Thornburgh and the press as evidence negating the widespread speculation that he is driven by presidential ambitions: "If he were being political, you’d think he’d be out there currying favor with the press."

Perhaps. On the other hand, Thornburgh’s equally testy relations with many of the reporters who covered him when he was governor never cramped his style much. Although he angered reporters in Harrisburg by a centrally managed information-control policy like the one he has used at Justice, he projected a good public image by getting his message out on television and in local newspapers. He ended his term with a public approval rating of better than 70 percent.

Despite his run-ins with Congress and the press, Thornburgh seems more driven by political pragmatism than his recent predecessors. "The major criticism of the Reagan administration was that we charged ahead with our own agenda without giving much attention to what the press or the people on the Hill were saying," says one former senior official. "Thornburgh is much more attuned to how the political winds are blowing. His political antennae are up all the time… trying desperately not to get pushed into a controversy."

In this regard Thornburgh, who stresses that "my agenda is the president’s agenda," seems very much in tune with his boss. In speeches and other public utterances Thornburgh usually sticks to forceful proclamations of his determination to fight drugs and crime and to enforce civil rights laws, and to other agreeable platitudes, often mixed with flattery of his audience, whether it be the conservative Federalist Society, the Religious Alliance Against Pornography, or Justice Department employees. He doesn’t make much news.

No attorney general could satisfy both the Republican right and the liberal left and civil rights groups. Thornburgh seems to try. "He’ll bow a little to the conservative side and then a little to the liberal side," observes one congressional aide. "It almost seems to be conscious." Like Bush, he has gratified liberals with his work for the disability rights bill. (With a retarded son, Thornburgh and his second wife have long had a special interest in disability rights issues.) He has also shunned the damn-the-torpedoes rhetoric on social issues that made Meese such a lightning rod for criticism.

But Thornburgh’s deepest bows have been to the administration’s conservative political base, the folks who choose Republican presidential nominees.

At his August 1988 confirmation hearing, he pleased conservatives by saying for the first time publicly that he would argue for overruling Roe V. Wade, by endorsing President Reagan’s call for a constitutional amendment to overrule the Supreme Court’s ban on organized school prayer, and by culling his 1979 gubernatorial proclamation of "Gay Pride Week" a "mistake."

In office he broadened the assault on Roe V. Wade in the Supreme Court in two briefs taking a dim view of the whole idea that the Constitution protects a generalized right to privacy. He joined President Bush’s cry for a constitutional amendment to overrule the Court’s decision that the First Amendment protects flag burning and opposed new legislation to overrule any of the 1989 decisions that were denounced by civil rights groups. He has criticized new gun control measures supported by most police chiefs and law enforcement organizations and says fighting "the moral pollution of pornography" is among his priorities.

Thornburgh’s actions on these and other fronts have won him the warm regard of some conservative activists who had initially opposed his selection. One is the Free Congress Foundation’s McGuigan, who notes that he and others, including Dan Casey, executive director of the American Conservative Union, were so impressed by Thornburgh’s first months as attorney general that they actively campaigned for his reappointment. "It was clear to us after three months that this guy was making the right kinds of decisions," McGuigan says. "He is a guy that can be worked with, and he is a Reagan-Bush-Quayle coalition kind of a guy. I have some disagreements, but I’m a Dick Thorn-burgh fan."

Thornburgh has also gratified conservatives by personally arguing the railroad drug-testing case and seeming to give the war on drugs priority over concerns about constitutional rights-excepting the right to bear arms. Proclaiming the drug war his number-one priority, Thornburgh has joined with gusto in the administration’s heavy reliance on more police, more prosecutions, more prisons, more searches and seizures and urine tests and blood tests and fee forfeitures. Justice has also put together a legal analysis to support the constitutionality of President Bush’s proposal to extend the death penalty to drug kingpins who have not been implicated in any murders.

This has not always been Thornburgh’s approach to the problems of drugs and street crime. In a 1970 speech, as U.S. Attorney, he criticized as "disheartening" the reliance on draconian prison sentences rather than education and treatment to deal with drugs. He even suggested that the public consider legalizing "so-called consensual crimes such as gambling, narcotics, and prostitu-tion" to take the profit out of the organized crime monopoly: "Prohibition of liquor spawned the syndicates in the first place," he said then. "It is necessary to reexaminc traffic in these morally unacceptable goods and services and determine whether they, like alcohol, should be legalized under appropriate controls."

And in a January 1971 letter Thornburgh praised Fred Speaker, then the attorney general of Pennsylvania, fof ordering the state’s electric chair dismantled; Speaker had done so on the ground that the death penalty was "a disgusting indecency" amounting to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. "Your action last week in effectively terminating the death penalty in Pennsylvania… was a courageous and well-founded one," Thornburgh wrote Speaker, "and such as I would hope will be vindi-cated as proper upon sober reflection by the entire Pennsylvania community."

You won’t hear such talk from Thornburgh now. He had largely abandoned any liberal leanings on criminal justice issues by the time of his first gubernatorial campaign in 1978. And his hard line on such issues today is in keeping both with the Meese approach and with the public mood.

The most significant distinction between Thornburgh and Meese on policy matters may be that Thornburgh seems to be edging cautiously away from Meese’s implacable attacks on all racial preferences. One sign is what Thornburgh has not done in the wake of the Supreme Court’s January 1989 decision finding unconstitutional Richmond’s law setting aside 30 percent of the subcon-tracting dollars on city projects for minority-owned business enterprises. The Meese-Reynolds Justice Department would have trumpeted arguments that the decision sounded the death knell for hundreds of similar city and state set-aside plans, and perhaps also for Labor Department regulations that require federal contractors to increase representa tion of minority groups in their work forces.

The Thornburgh Justice Department has done nothing like this. Rather, in December it joined the Federal Communications Commission in urging the Supreme Court not to hear a major challenge to the FCC’s racial preferences for minority-owned applicants in comparative licensing proceedings. The preferences were upheld by a liberal D.C. Circuit panel, in square conflict with a conservative D.C. Circuit panel’s decision striking down the FCC’s racial preferences in distress sales. The two cases split the D.C. Circuit along party lines.

Instead of seizing the chance for a Meese-Hke attack on racial preferences, the Thornburgh Justice Department avoided taking any position on the merits, arguing that review of the two cases would be "premature" because the issues were before Con-gress and "further illumination in the courts of appeals" might help.

"It means that Thornburgh is willing to float with the political winds and that he will not aggressively attack racial preferences if he believes that politically it might arouse some criticism from Congress or elsewhere," says Bruce Fein, a conser-vative legal theorist and former FCC general counsel who considers its racial preferences unconstitutional under the Richmond decision. Another possibility is that the department may be concerned that the Court would be reluctant to strike down the FCC preferences because Congress has supported them and may be hesitant to seek Supreme Court review without an FCC request to do so.

In July, in a Fourth Circuit case, the department defended North Carolina’s preferences for minority-owned contractors under a federal statute requiring states to set aside 10 percent of federal highway construction aid for "socially and economically disadvantaged" businesses, a category presumed to include minority-owned businesses.

While this brief was legally plausible-the Court defers more to con-gressionally mandated preferences than those adopted by cities on their own-it substantially softened the antiracial preference position Reynolds had taken in the same case.

"There is a good deal of truth in the notion that the proper goal is a colorblind society, one that neither penalizes nor promotes on the basis of race," Thornburgh says. "But a correlative of that is recognizing that where there has been a demonstrated hardship to an identifiable group through systematic discrimination, the remedy that permits them to compensate for what’s been denied them by that pattern is entirely proper. That’s what the court said [in the Richmond decision]."

Thornburgh says he is comfortable with the Richmond decision but not with the view "that set-asides and quotas and even affirmative action is undesirable per se." Asked repeatedly whether racial preferences should ever be used to benefit individual minority group members who are not proven victims of discrimination, he does not answer directly.

"We’re for affirmative action; we’re against rigid quotas," says a Thornburgh subordinate. "You might find that mush, yeah? But that’s the mush that’s acceptable under current law and to this administration."

Thornburgh has sought to straddle the debate on recent Supreme Court decisions hemming in affirmative action and remedies for racial discrimination. If the administration had wanted to show determination to fight overt racial discrimination, without endorsing statistical presumptions of discrimination or using racial preferences as a remedy, it could have called for new monetary remedies for victims of overt racial harassment on the job after the Patterson V. McLean Credit Union decision made it clear that existing law provides no remedy for even the rawest racist conduct in most such cases. Instead Thornburgh and President Bush hedged their bets, saying they would monitor the impact of the decisions and act if enforcement of antidiscrimination laws is undercut.

In antitrust law, too, a change of emphasis is in the wind, but radical change is unlikely. James Rill, head of the antitrust division, has avowed his intention to take a more skeptical view of big mergers and other business combinations that were blessed by the Reagan administration’s Chicago School antitrust enforcers. But this has been mostly talk so far. Nobody expects the antitrust division, which has some 230 lawyers now compared with 430 in 1980, to return to the aggressive trust-busting of pre Reagan days.

Not a very exciting agenda, compared with Meese’s assault on decades of constitutional law. Even as listed by Runkel, Thornburgh’s main accomplishments as attorney general have more to do with management and getting money out of Congress for the drug war than with policy. They include a record 30 percent increase in the department’s budget, with funding to raise by 50 percent the number of assistant U.S. attorney positions over two years and $1.4 billion for new prisons; the new securities and commodities fraud task forces in eight U.S. Attorney’s Offices; and the approval of various international agreements for cooperation in law enforcement. Runkel also cites Thornburgh’s work chairing the president’s Domestic Policy Council, in which he has helped put together the proposed amendments to the Clean Air Act and the administration’s drug policy as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act.

"What has he done? What are the so-called Thornburgh initiatives?" says conservative legal theorist Fein, who helped write the Meese legal policy agenda. "He doesn’t come with any grand design other than io keep things tranquil. Unlike .Smith and Meese he doesn’t come with any philosophy at all."

"Thornburgh’s walking down the middle of the road, trying to make as few controversial decisions as possible, be a kind of caretaker," says a former subordinate at the Justice Department. "Philosophically I don’t know where he stands, what he believes in."

Such criticisms may be uncharitable. Thornburgh’s freedom of action is limited by the nature of the Bush administration, and his own moderate instincts may not be suited to bold strokes. "He’s not an ideological attorney general; that’s just not Dick Thornburgh," says Runkel. "He’s far more of a moderate and a problem solver and he understands fully that his job is to run the Justice Department and that it’s the president who sets policy."

Eddie Mahe, a Republican political consultant who has done work for Thornburgh, says that "there’s a difference between being noisy and being effective. Management is not high-profile initiatives, it is day after day making the thing work."

When it comes to making the thing work, says a Thornburgh associate from Pennsylvania, the attorney general is "result- and goal-oriented. He is willing to break some china getting from point A to point B." Some people also? "Yeah. You’re damned righ… He’s a guy that is not going to get piled up on the one-yard line. He gets to the goal line."

The instinct for the goal line seemed in evidence last fall with the disclosures that the Office of Legal Counsel, headed by William Barr, had prepared two legal opinions that dodged around international law concerns like a halfback evading a linebacker. The first opinion, overruling a 1980 memorandum by the same office, found that the executive branch can arrest suspected terrorists, drug fugitives, and others in foreign countries without the foreign governments’ consent. (News reports on this prompted Iran to adopt a law authorizing arrest of Americans who damage Iranian interests anywhere in the world to be returned for trial in Islamic courts.)

The second opinion, prepared in the wake of the abortive coup in Panama, found no domestic legal impediment to the executive branch assisting violent coups abroad, even when there is some risk that the rulers to be overthrown may be killed. Although the two opinions consist mainly of legal reasoning and any sensitive facts could easily be expurgated, Thornburgh has refused to make the texts public, saying his legal advice to the president is confidential.

The attorney general, who calls himself "close to the president but no crony of the president’s," has not yet been tested-at least not publicly- in any major conflict between legal integrity and the administration’s or his own political best interests. But so far he seems more inclined to come up with a legal argument, however strained, to help the president do what he wants to do than to exercise a legal check on presidential desires.

A recent example was Thornburgh’s comment in an October 31 interview with this writer that his department would gladly provide the legal backup if President Bush decides to claim constitutional power to exercise a line-item veto.

Early in 1988, before Thornburgh’s arrival, Charles Cooper, then head of the OLC, found that it was absolutely clear that the Constitution gives the president no such power. Cooper- who stresses his positive overall view of Thornburgh–is a supporter of broad presidential powers who would like the president to have the line-item veto. But he says that "1 came reluctantly to the conclusion that the president cannot in good conscience pursue-or at least I could not iti good conscience recommend that the president pursue-that theory; that all of the evidence of the meaning of the two veto clauses led me to the same conclusion that it has led every president who has ever examined the issue… that they have no such authority."

Thornburgh says the department has not rejected Cooper’s legal analysis, but adds, "1 wouldn’t rule out seeking to utilize the present language of the Constitution and recommending a line-item veto in a particular case." He notes that there are "arguments presented on the other side as well" and no court precedents.

"What the president wants to do is a policy matter, not a legal matter," he explains. "Our legal advice is that our assessment is that that inherent power does not exist, but if he as a policy matter chooses to seek to exercise the line-item veto, we’ll make the best case possible for it."

The attorney general is less interested in legal abstractions like the original meaning of the Constitution than in results, whether they be making the world a better place or helping his president achieve policy goals or climbing to the pinnacle of the government.

It was to make the world a better place, Thornburgh says, that he first plunged into Republican politics in the wake of the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign; denouncing the influence of "jingoists and racists" on the campaign, and faulting "the Republican moderates who sat on their duffs and let the extremists from the far right take over," he set out to do something about it.

Aligning himself with the then-dominant moderate-to-liberal wing of the Pennsylvania Republican party, he ran a kamikaze campaign for the House of Representatives in 1966 against a popular Democratic incumbent in a Democratic district. He chaired Western Pennsylvanians for Rockefeller in 1968 and was a director of the Neighborhood Legal Services Association as well as the Pittsburgh ACLU chapter. According to Runkel, it is partly because Thornburgh’s "career always pointed toward public service, not corporate law" that he did not become a partner during his first stint at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, from 1959 to 1969.

When he was appointed by President Nixon as U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh in 1969, he spent six years hunting organized crime figures, corrupt officials, and publicity with equal determination. He tried the best cases himself and kept his name in the news with frequent press releases, speaking engagements, and purple-prose denunciations of the "hydra-headed monster" of crime and the "cornucopia of corruption" with which he was doing battle.

His success attracted attention in Washington, and he was made head of the Justice Department criminal division under President Ford in 1975, staying on until after the Carter administration took office in 1977. In that job he established the public integrity section to go after crooked public officials.

Thornburgh started his campaign for governor in 1978 as a long shot in a large Republican field. But he had strong ties to wealthy Pittsburgh Republicans, and his record as a prosecutor and proclamations of civic virtue-"Nobody buys Dick Thornburgh," and the like-had voter appeal. So did his promises to bring clean, efficient government in the wake of what was widely perceived to be the patronage-ridden and con’uption-prone regime of then-governor Milton Shapp, a Democrat. Thornburgh also benefited from his moderate-to-liberal image, which won him the support of many liberals and civil rights leaders and a remarkable (for a Republican) 57 percent of the black vote.

He also had the backing of abortion rights advocates against Pete Flaherty, the fervently antiabortion Democratic nominee. Thornburgh supported a right to choose abortion only "in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life or health," but he also said government funding should be available to pay for poor women to have abortions in these circumstances. Abortion rights activ-ists in Pennsylvania say his 1978 endorsement of abortion to protect the mother’s health was seen at the time, and was sold by Thornburgh’s campaign staff, as a broad pro-choice position, since most abortions could be rationalized as necessary for the pregnant woman’s emotional health. Thornburgh, without conceding the point, now says that only "severe, demonstrable harm", to a woman’s health can justify an abortion as medically necessary.

To the bitter disappointment of pro-choice activists, in 1980 he signed a ban on Medicaid abortions-including those to protect the health of the mother-except in cases of life endangerment. rape, and incest. He also signed a 1982 abortion control law that, he says, was then "the toughest antiabortion bill in the nation." The Supreme Court struck it down in 1986 by a 5-to-4 vote.

Thornburgh undertook the largest prison expansion in Pennsylvania history and won passage of mandatory prison sentences for repeat offenders and those using guns in violent crimes. He also signed six death warrants, slashed 15,000 state jobs, and pushed through deep cuts in welfare programs.

The Rockefeller Republican of 1968 became quite a conservative Reaganite governor. Some of his original supporters felt betrayed; most of the 23 Pennsylvania political figures, lawyers, and journalists interviewed for this article expressed the opinion that Thornburgh had changed his positions at least in part for reasons of political expediency. Thornburgh insists his basic views have been consistent over the years. His record suggests a gradual drift toward the political light beginning before his race for governor, rather than dramatic reversals of his 1978 campaign positions.

Thornburgh’s rightward evolution cost him liberal and black support in his 1982 reelection bid, which was also hampered by the nationwide recession and the Republican organization’s lack of enthusiasm for him. He had a surprisingly close call against a Democratic candidate widely regarded as weak, Allen Krtel.

Critics of Thornburgh point to that 1982 election as evidence that he "is not a choice candidate for national office," in the words of David Buffington, editor of the political newsletter Pennsylvania Report. Others disagree; the American Conservative Union’s Dan Casey, Republican political consultant Eddie Mahe, and others say Thornburgh could be a viable candidate for the 1996 Republican nomination, although not one of the two or three favorites.

Thornburgh says it would be "presumptuous" to discuss the possibility he might rise to greater heights. But he gives the impression of being prepared should destiny call.

"Twenty-four hours can be a lifetime in politics and public life," he says. "You just never know what’s over the next rise in the road. Do I enjoy public service? Absolutely. Do I hope to continue in public life? Yes. In what capacity? Who knows. Attorney general for the present."