March 9, 2000
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
An Attorney General Who Trusted the Law
Forum
Join a Discussion on Editorials
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
dward Levi, who died on Tuesday, brought the simple gift of integrity to Washington when he became
attorney general in 1975. In the two
brief years that he led the Justice
Department, Mr. Levi set an example of respect for the Constitution
and the rights of Americans that
remains a benchmark for distinguished public service today. Few of
his successors at Justice have come
close to that high standard, and several have fallen abysmally short.
That is good reason to recall Mr.
Levi's principled, fair-minded performance.
The Justice Department and its
most prominent component, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were
reeling from the Watergate scandal
and other abuses of power when
President Ford persuaded Mr. Levi
to give up his job as president of the
University of Chicago to move to
Washington. Richard Nixon's first attorney general, John Mitchell, and his
minions had debased the department
and the F.B.I. by using them to intimidate opponents of the Vietnam
War. Justice aides had shielded the
Nixon campaign apparatus from investigation. The F.B.I., deformed by
J. Edgar Hoover's misrule, operated
with disdain for civil liberties. Eliot
Richardson stood against this tide of
misconduct during his tenure as attorney general, and his resignation in
the face of Mr. Nixon's demand for
the dismissal of Archibald Cox, the
Watergate special prosecutor, was a
courageous and uncompromising act.
But fundamental reform of the department and the F.B.I. was impossible as long as Mr. Nixon remained in
power. Mr. Levi, a mild-mannered
intellectual and legal scholar, was
little known in Washington, though
he had worked for the Justice Department and the House of Representatives in the 1940's. With his signature bow tie and thick glasses, he
hardly looked ready for political
combat. But Mr. Levi, unlike so
many attorneys general, did not
come to Washington with a partisan
political agenda or a desire to protect
the president who appointed him.
He was guided instead by a reverence for the Constitution and a commitment to take politics out of law
enforcement. Mr. Levi insisted that
the Justice Department follow the
law wherever it led prosecutors, and
he established the first clear ethical
guidelines for the operations of the
F.B.I. He would not tolerate mail
theft, burglary, improper wiretaps,
illegal surveillance or harassment of
citizens exercising their right to protest government policies. He forced
the bureau and the department to
investigate wrongdoing within their
own ranks. These reforms largely
remain in place today.
My first assignment for this newspaper when I was hired in 1979 was
to cover the Justice Department. Mr.
Levi had by then returned to Chicago. But his cleansing influence was
still felt in the corridors of the Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Morale, shattered
by Watergate, was slowly coming
back, propelled by Mr. Levi's belief
in the sanctity of the law. Across the
street, the F.B.I. was under the direction of a former federal judge, William Webster, who was trying to
make the bureau live by the Levi
code of conduct. Officials occasionally cursed at the standards, complaining that they were impractical or too
academic. But for most of the career
employees, the legacy of Edward
Levi was a tonic. He had restored
faith in the rule of law.
