John Ashcroft's power grab: The saga of a troubled--and troubling--attorney general.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

WREN U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL John Ashcroft was eight years old, his father, J. Robert Ashcroft, took the boy up in a Piper Cub airplane. Then Dad blessed young John with a special treat.

"John, I'd like you to fly this plane for a while," he said.

"I was one awestruck kid," Ashcroft remembers lovingly at the very beginning of his 1998 memoir, On My Honor: The Beliefs That Shape My Life. But he was also a lost one: "What do I do?" he shouted to his pa.

"Just grab the stick and push it straight forward."

Which of course sent the plane into a terrifying "bombing-raid dive toward a farm...I lost all sense of time or place as fear gripped my insides."

Turned out it was all just a practical joke. Dad saved them in the nick of time--and, recounts John, "had a good chuckle" at the expense of his naive son.

Was young John mistrustful of his trickster father after such an intense prank? In his autobiography, Ashcroft chooses the high road, completely recasting what might seem a particularly mean bit of joshing as a deliberate attempt to teach him a valuable lesson. the lesson, Ashcroft writes, is that "actions have consequences....In a positive sense, I learned that wherever I was, if I put my hand to something, I could make a difference."

Uh, yeah. The boy in the famous joke, digging through the pile of manure looking for the pony, has nothing on our nation's top cop. The most obvious response to Ashcroft's version of this story is, What the hell is wrong with this guy? While it's certainly the type of thing a boy is apt to remember, what would possess a man writing a memoir--meant largely to honor dear old dad--to start his book with this particular anecdote?

The stories we choose to tell on ourselves are, well, telling. Given its place of pride in his book, Ashcroft's father tricking him seems to be his most beloved, or at least most vibrant, childhood memory. Ashcroft, one can infer, believes in something like Tough Love. (Indeed, treating juvenile crooks as adults has been a pet theme through his entire political career.) And if the attorney general, the "nation's top cop," is the symbolic disciplinarian and parental figure for American society, then we're all Ashcroft's kids now--which could mean some harrowing times ahead.

Yet Ashcroft is a far more complicated father figure than most of his enemies grant. They see him in one role only: the stern disciplinarian driven by an unshakable belief that God and he are as one, a man so prudish he can't tolerate unclothed statuary. But the American father-figure template includes many different roles, and Ashcroft has filled more than a few during his public life. At times, he's come across as an obsessive, driven, and ultimately self-destructive tyrant given to fits of rage (think Robert Duvall in The Great Santini). Other times, he's an overly earnest goody-two-shoes quick with an uplifting Bible verse (think The Simpsons' Ned Flanders). And sometimes, he comes across as a sleepy-brained, bumbling doofus falling into trouble (think Blondie's Dagwood Bumstead).

Especially given the immense power he's holding in post-9/II America, it's worth contemplating the varied facets of John Ashcroft--and their flaws. He's a religious man at loggerheads with the dominant culture; a politician who has mostly been (despite surface appearances) a failure; and an attorney general who may be turning into something worse than his enemies anticipated--though perhaps not in the way they assumed.

True Believer

In December, The Weekly Standard, as staunch a friend as Ashcroft has in the media, did a laudatory cover story on "General Ashcroft," praising the fightin' spirit that 9/II brought out in the former senator from Missouri. Indeed, Ashcroft is a man at war not simply with Muslim extremists, but with secular America. Central to any consideration of him is his religion, which was also one of the reasons, rightly or wrongly, that he was hated and feared by the left long before 9/II. Born in 1942, Ashcroft grew up the dutiful child of a roving Assemblies of God minister who later settled down to run various Bible colleges in Missouri. Grandpa was an Assemblies holy man as well.

The Assemblies of God is the largest Pentecostalist denomination in America, with 2.3 million members in the United States and 30 million worldwide. It was the first centralized religious institution to emerge from the radically decentralized Pentecostal movement that began to sweep America in the first decade of the 20th century. Pentecostals believe that every child of God should be his own minister, imbued directly with the Holy Spirit and the gift of speaking in tongues. Ashcroft is thus that most derided figure on the American religious landscape, the Holy Roller-an actual, serious one. (The notorious Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, icons of ridiculous religiosity, were both Assemblies preachers.)

Besides speaking in tongues, the Assemblies practice such peculiarities as faith healing. In short, it's the sort of religion that scares cosmopolitan secularists witless. In biblical style, Ashcroft has had himself anointed in oil (Crisco, if that's all that's on hand) upon ascending to political office. He once vowed that were he ever to become president, he would publicly kneel and pray for divine guidance while being sworn in. That's the sort of statement that makes centrist liberals, hardcore lefties, and the odd atheistic right-winger fear Ashcroft as much as he fears God. And the attorney general follows other Assemblies dictates that further place him outside the American mainstream: He's staunchly opposed on religious grounds to drinking, gambling, and even dancing.

Yet he is, in his own straight-laced and traditional way, a radical cultural rebel. Despite his outsider status and the opprobrium it generates, he won't give in. Like a caring though peculiar dad advising against peer-group conformity, he stands against the crowd and is publicly (and by all accounts privately) true to the values of a serious religious conservative with one-and-only-one wife (Janet, a law professor with whom he's collaborated on legal textbooks) and three kids.

He's also hopelessly corny, creating waves of contemptuous mirth all across the Internet, where clips of him singing one of his self-composed gospel songs abound. While a member of the Senate, he and three colleagues formed a vocal quartet, the Singing Senators, to record and perform patriotic and devotional ditties. The group even trekked to that capital of American cornpone hokum, Branson--tellingly located in Ashcroft's home state--to croon with the Oak Ridge Boys.

Ashcroft's squeaky-clean Christian image is built on more than personal habits. People have reported that while being interviewed for jobs by Ashcroft, they were asked if they had ever committed adultery. (One applicant reports being asked if he were gay, a story Ashcroft denies.) He was the first senator to publicly call upon President Clinton to resign over his affair with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. As Missouri governor, he vetoed a Sunday liquor sales bill, signed into law the first Missouri restrictions on underage smoking, restricted rentals of violent movies to minors, and cracked down on casual drug use (even as one of his top aides was exposed by a squealing college buddy as a pothead and coke-sniffer and quietly resigned). As federal attorney general, he has revived the sort of porn prosecutions that languished in...