Word: waco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...White House has its Situation Room, the Pentagon its walls full of maps, but America's command center for fighting unconventional wars these days is Janet Reno's inner office. First it was the showdown with David Koresh in Waco, Texas, a biblical battle over lost souls; two weeks ago, it was terrorism, when she laid out for President Clinton the case against Iraq for plotting to kill former President Bush and tracked the serial bomber who wounded professors in Connecticut and California. Last week it was Sheik Rahman, when once again Reno's agents from...
There is one person in Washington, at least, who seems to think so. On the 100th day of his presidency, as his star was flickering and hers ablaze, Bill Clinton came to the Justice Department for the first time since the Waco debacle and addressed the ranks in the courtyard about his vision for a just society. Afterward he went up to Reno's small inner office and gazed at the picture near her desk of a windblown Bobby Kennedy walking alone on the beach. "One day," Clinton told his Attorney General, "people will look at your portrait this...
...popularity has a bleeding edge, it may be that it dates to one of the worst days of her life. On that now famous April afternoon when Reno went before the cameras to explain the disastrous finale in Waco, the peculiar laws of politics ensured that she would get all the credit for taking all the blame. The first image Americans held of their brand-new Attorney General was of a stern, sad, certain woman describing a terrible tragedy and using none of the greasy legal language that would have shielded her from blame...
...there is one criticism of Reno it is that she has a knack for what one White House official acidly described as "acquiring her popularity at the expense of the President." Though Waco was the first and most public incident, that dynamic surfaced again the next time Reno streaked across the % capital heavens. When the White House fired its entire travel department, charging seven workers with corruption, she slapped the White House publicly for using her FBI to justify the decision. White House aides grumble that Reno would have known about the FBI investigation had she bothered to read...
About 20 protesters from the Spartacus Youth Club, a Marxist group, chanted "Clinton and Reno, you have lied--Waco was murder, not suicide" outside Sanders. But the protesters were largely ignored by the crowd, who seemed in a generally festive mood...