THE A.G. COMES TO JUDGMENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606260031-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 27, 2010
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: November 9, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/27: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606260031-9
STAT
.ART CAF APPEAR D
In the spring Smith pushed back. "He's
not a hard-charging Cabinet officer," says
one official. "But when he fights, people get
out of his way." He met with Reagan-
whom he still calls Ron when they're
alone-and the President's top men, James
Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin R.
Meese, to bring a halt to what he called "the
character assassination." Armed with a
pocket. calculator, he dueled with budget
Smith with his inner circle: `He's not a hard-cha ding Cabinet officer'
spy-war veteran. "You have to be experi-
enced and an alley fighter."
Downgrade: Smith got a taste of intelli-
gence hardball last March, when a -
ni to execu the or er W as trcuTaRd i -
11 the agency permission to spy wi hin fIie
m ed Sta es and sharply 3owiigrading
Justice s aut oFi- it W th n Smith Iearned of
t~"proposaT,Tie aridFSTiifirec~or~ifIi`am
Webster r rained to the-White House;
more drafts were ordered: Tfie latest; leaked
last month continues the FBI's control
over domestic bugirig and"searcJies; but
gives the CIA i power toinfiltrate~(c omes-
die A.G. Comes to judgment
William French Smith came to Wash-
ington known only as Ronald Rea-
gan's personal lawyer, a bland boardroom
politician with a decent tennis serve. Now,
ten months after Smith took the helm at
the L.S. Department of Justice, describing
the new attorney general has become a
Capital Rorschach test. To the extreme
right, he's running an agency still in the
grip of radical leftists. To liberals, he seems
determined to remake civil-
rights law in his conservative
image. As senior White House
aides see it, he has mastered
enough of his job to win
grudging respect; in labor law
and immigration, for example,
Smith is considered as sharp
as a managing partner. In
areas that have yet to gain his
full attention, however-nota-
bly national security he is still
fortably weak.
Smith's tenure has gone through two
stages. He started slowly, spending much of
his time building an inner circle; Justice hit
the ground creeping on Inauguration Day.
"We had a low profile," admits Smith, "be-
cause we were doing low-profile things."
But to Washington's snipers, a figure bent
over his task often makes the best target.
Before long, Administration aides took pot-
shots from behind the cover of blind quotes
("Has he woken up yet?" cracked one),
leaving the impression that there was a,
vacuum at Justice that competitive agencies
could exploit. Some tried. A committee at
the Central Intelligence Agency proposed
an Executive order that would have sharply
trimmed Smith's oversight powers. And
Reagan's budget cutters proposed major
cuts for law enforcement even as the Presi.
MOM=
9 NOVEMBER 1981
director David Stockman and
eventually won a concession
that law-enforcement agencies
would be immune from further
budget cuts in 1983 and'84. He
was the point man for Sandra
O'Connor's appointment to
the Supreme Court. And he
emerged from a seven-month
immersion in immigration law
with a controversial package of
changes aimed at restoring order to a policy
that is clearly in disarray.
Smith made immigration his personal is-
sue. The plan he announced last August was
introduced in Congress two weeks ago. It
calls for slowly conferring legal status on
millions of aliens now considered illegals,
creating a "guest worker" program for
Mexicans and, for the first time, penalizing
employers who break the rules. Also, if
Congress approves, the President would
have emergency powers to ban travel by
American citizens and vessels. "This pro-
posal developed only because Smith mas-
tered the area," says Associate Attorney
General Rudolph Giuliani. "It would not
have been possible if he had spent his time
blowing his horn."
Smith faces more formidable problems in
the bare-knuckle world of.managing spies.
Ac Atrnrnev C;enerat he has two distinct
dent prepared Sanitized Copy Approved for Release
tic giroups and trail law-abiding Americans
abroad: AltWiigfi tliirss vezsto`n is likely to-e
rfioditie`d-diAtii g negotiations 'with C h-
gres`s; itinara victory for CIA director
Smitems had his own way on civil-rights
policy. Reagan's campaign rhetoric includ-
ed repeated denunciations of -busing for
school. integration and affirmative-action
programs. Justice has followed that lead,
although not fast enough for right-wing
critics. The head of the Civil Rights Divi-
sion,William Bradford Reynolds, has flatly
disowned any future use of forced busing.
"Blind allegiance to an experiment that has
not withstood the test of experience obvi-
ously makes little sense," he says. Instead,
Reynolds plans to focus on the quality of
education offered, relying on such devices
as magnet schools or voluntary student
transfers to bring about desegregation.
The problem with the new strategy, say
civil-rights activists, is that the law of the
land requires more aggressive measures
than better curricula. They cite Supreme
Court decisions which say that school dis-
tricts found guilty of discrimination must
adopt corrective remedial measures; bus-
ing, the justices have held, is a permissible
and sometimes necessary tool. "The Smith
people," says Robert Reinstein, a law pro-
fessor and former Justice attorney, "are
approaching civil-rights enforcement on
the basis of what they would like the law to
be rather than what the law is."
Quotas: Indeed, Reynolds is freely con-
ceding territory that has been hard won in
court battles. For instance, he will no longer
use the court-made rule that if one part of a
school system is found to be illegally segre-
gated, the local school district has the bur-
den of proving that the rest was not-a
presumption that has led to citywide inte-
gration orders. Also, in their denunciation
of hiring quotas, Reynolds and Smith have
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