Word: ashcroft
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...Ashcroft was a big man at his high school; he aimed higher than the average Springfield kid, went East to college and arrived at Yale just a few years before Bush. A childhood friend says Ashcroft's father had given him the name of an Assemblies of God church in New Haven, and Ashcroft duly showed up his first Sunday and announced his presence to the minister, who was not accustomed to seeing many Yalies in his congregation. He saw Ashcroft every week for four years...
...possible that Bush did not see this coming? He told friends he thought Ashcroft would sail through because the Senate protects its own, the Republicans would support whatever a new President wanted, and Ashcroft believed he had the Democrats under control. It is true that Bush spent many days and nights of the Florida war down at his ranch with the TV off and the radio turned down. Was that cool detachment, as his aides claimed, or does he perhaps not see the depth of the wounds he is so confident he can heal...
Bush said last week he had talked at length with Ashcroft, especially about civil rights, and was convinced of his integrity and his fairness. They are in some ways kindred spirits, though Bush came late to the values Ashcroft has always held. Sources tell TIME that Bush was thinking about Ashcroft as a possible Attorney General as early as March 1998--a full year before Bush admitted he was running for President. (Bush didn't know him well, but Bush's father did--and had even considered him for Attorney General in 1991.) Bush has mentioned Ashcroft in sentences that...
...does he? Ashcroft is also a man who said there are two things you find in the middle of the road: "a moderate and a dead skunk. And I don't want to be either one of those." To his conservative allies, he is St. John the Divine; to opponents, all the talk of his integrity and personal grace masks a record from deep right field. But Ashcroft is also more complicated than the cartoons suggest. If he is so polarizing, how was he elected five times in a swing state? Is he the libertarian who fought alongside liberals...
...Ashcroft grew up in rural Springfield, Mo., a green and rolling part of the state that has voted Republican since the Civil War. Back when Missouri sent 10 Democrats to Congress, Springfield was the lone Republican holdout. It was free-labor, antiunion territory, with antislave, Bible-belt, mountain people. Young John was the middle son of a renowned Pentecostal educator and minister. His was a strict and loving household, childhood friends say, where smoking, drinking and dancing were forbidden, and Sundays were for prayer and study, not work or play. When John was a teenager, he and his brother Wesley...