Ah, that special time of year. It’s fall, and just as the trees are shedding their leaves, this nation is shedding its appointed officials.
So far, of 15 secretaries in the president’s cabinet, 6 have resigned, ranging from the oft-mentioned John Ashcroft, attorney general, and Colin Powell, secretary of state, to the obscure Ann Veneman, secretary of agriculture. Let’s look at the two most important ones: Ashcroft and Powell.
John Ashcroft has a lengthy career in public service, culminating in his 2000 senate loss to Mel Carnahan, who had died two weeks before the election. Carnahan’s wife agreed to serve in her husband’s place, but nonetheless, the “couldn’t beat a dead guy” charge stuck.
Thereafter he was appointed as attorney general, where he proceeded to take offense at the naked statues of Liberty and Justice and ordered them covered. He also began holding daily, morning, prayer sessions in the Justice
Department and eliminated the phrase “no higher calling than public service” from official parlance; he felt that service to God was higher.
As part of the War on Librarians, in 2001 he pushed the Patriot Act to allow authorities to investigate suspected terrorists’ reading habits, among many, many other provisions. Defending the bill before a compliant Senate, he declared “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists – for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”
Ashcroft also presided over the administration’s disastrous prosecutions of suspected terrorists in the United States, which so far have netted no one; and its detentions in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners are often held indefinitely. Overall, his legacy is one of failure – failure to catch the terrorists before they attacked, and failure to distinguish between terrorists and American residents afterwards.
His successor is better, though not by much. White House counsel
Alberto Gonzalez, who will likely gain Senate approval, is decidedly more moderate than Ashcroft. However, in January 2002 he sent a memo supporting Ashcroft’s position that captives taken in Afghanistan need not be treated as prisoners of war, as is customary under the Geneva Convention. This policy later resulted in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandals.
On a worse note, Colin Powell, one of the better bureaucrats under
Bush, resigned from his position as Secretary of State. A September poll showed Powell has approval ratings of nearly 63 percent, almost 20 points higher than other leading Republicans (certainly higher than Bush), and for good reason. Powell served over 30 years in the military, eventually heading the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest echelon of the Pentagon, yet he was put in control of the State Department. Meanwhile, ideologues with little direct military experience like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were placed in charge of the Defense Department.
This set the stage for disaster. The hawks in the Defense Department and elsewhere swayed Bush over to invading Iraq. Powell delayed it by seeking UN approval. In early 2003, he went before the UN and lectured on mobile chemical labs and other WMD threats, which the invasion proved to be an utter fallacy. Powell has attempted to make progress on other fronts, including North Korea and the Israel-Palestine conflict, but has received limited support from the Bush administration. His attempts at improving
America’s image has been sabotaged by hubris from the Bush administration, such as Rumsfeld’s characterization of Germany and France as “Old Europe” (anywhere in Europe is old compared to the United States).
Powell will be replaced by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, another foreign policy expert and even-tempered administrator, but it is unlikely that we will see an upswing in international relations, barring any major changes in policy by Bush. While Cabinet secretaries have substantial power, none of them have really challenged Bush on important issues. The departures of this fall have been mixed, and may result in an improvement for this country, but don’t count on it. In the end, the only man whose departure would’ve changed things is the one we reelected.
Andrew Freeman is a Collegian columnist.
