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CHAPTER ONE A Low-Tech Lynching Nearly two years ago, Clarence Thomas sat before the klieg lights and television cameras and declared that he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching." Lani Guinier yearned mightily for that same opportunity, but was denied it by a combination of editorial racism, Senatorial cowardice, and White House incompetence. Lani Guinier was politically lynched, but in a pre-television way. It was a "low-tech lynching." --Political Woman, vol. 1, no. 9 (July 1993) IT WAS JANUARY 23, 1993, the first Saturday night of Bill Clinton's presidency. It was a social gathering, a small dinner party I hosted with two other women. We were law school classmates. Lila, now a psychologist, had wanted to do all the cooking; it would be more "authentic and personal." Nancy, a friend of Hillary's from Wellesley College as well as Yale Law School, thought we should hire a caterer. I compromised--we would cater dinner and serve homemade dessert. Lila got to bake a cake, which, like everything else, was eaten first by the president's official taster, who had arrived early to perform his duties. The party was held at Lila's family home in northwest Washington, D.C. It was a solid brick house, a corner house, unprepossessing and surprisingly small. In fact, the size of the house had been a useful excuse--we could, in all good faith, limit the guest list. Lila had grown up in this house with her four brothers and one sister. The house was not shabby but it showed signs of age. Little effort had been made to disguise its wear and tear, evidence of a large family with so many boys. That night, however, the house positively glowed. We had even hired an older black man recommended by a friend of Lila's to play the piano. About thirty minutes after we were all assembled, we got a telephone call from the White House. The president and first lady were on their way. As soon as they arrived, a group of us huddled around Hillary. Confident in our credentials, we nevertheless were giddy with disbelief. Just two days after the official inaugural festivities, the newly minted president of the United States and his wife had left the White House to come to a private home in northwest D.C. Giggling like schoolgirls, we listened eagerly as Hillary described her new digs. Hillary spoke with the authority of someone in charge. It was important to her, she confided, to maintain an atmosphere of informality in the White House. She wanted to make friends with the staff. By contrast, the Bush family had coped, she sensed, by being detached, maintaining a strict hierarchy, expecting to be served by their "employees." Hillary and Chelsea had gone exploring the first night. One of their stops was the White House roof, where they noticed the marksmen positioned at the ready. Hillary described the scene with a mixture of awe and shock. She was being protected, for her own safety, for the good of the country. She told the story in a straightforward manner, but I sensed she felt captured, maybe even imprisoned. She had moved into the White House and found herself instead in a fortress. I began to understand why dinner with "real people," as Hillary had said in accepting our invitation, was important. Casually dressed (except for the designer scarf to complement her headband), eating buffet, here she was "just folks." I began to breathe normally. Harlon Dalton, a professor at the Yale Law School, adroitly performed the emcee duties. Teaching at Yale Law School was high status in some circles, but little did we know how it had prepared Harlon to reach a much wider audience as a professional comedian. He roasted the president and first lady with gag gifts--a fake hand, big ears, a toy army tank, a black witch's hat. Each present had passed Secret Service scrutiny first, but the sniffing dogs could not detect the contents' significance. Each package was a mere prop, a setup for our master-of-ceremonies' cutting and nimble repartee. Sitting comfortably, legs outstretched in an armchair in the living room next to the fireplace, the president was a willing audience. His enthusiasm was generous. He laughed and laughed. Big, body laughs. Maybe the president had no choice, since Harlon stood so close he was almost in the president's lap. The first lady, more demure at first, sat upright in a side chair at the president's left. She too quickly responded to Harlon's easy banter. With very little prodding, she and the president cavorted for the amateur photographers among us, modeling the witch's hat and the fake hand. When we joined hands to sing "America the Beautiful," Hillary grasped my fingers tightly, eager, it appeared, to establish connections. We considered ourselves--a group of serious, long-standing friends--to be the president and first lady's intellectual if not political peers. Each of us shared the sense of portent, of arrival; we believed in him, in his bigheartedness, in his passion for justice. Congressman Mel Watt, representing the Highway 85 district in North Carolina, was there. Earlier in the evening, he and the president had had a heated conversation in the dining room about voting rights. I remember joining the conversation, challenging the president's interpretation of the motor voter provision, especially, I reminded him, in light of our experience in Arkansas. As a staff lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (often referred to simply as LDF or the Legal Defense Fund), I had sued Governor Clinton over Arkansas's deputy voter registration statute. We had settled the case. My co-counsel in that case was Deval L. Patrick. Deval was not there that night, but several other people who would later serve in the Clinton presidential administration were, including the future Solicitor General, the first Solicitor of Labor, counsel to the Army, counsel to the FCC, and the head of an important Justice Department law and order project. Two of us who were there were eventually to be nominated, or at least considered in turn, for the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. This was not a fund-raiser. No one notified the press. It was not a public relations gala. By his own choice, Bill Clinton savored his national debut with people most of whom forty years earlier would not have been able to join him publicly for lunch at the Capitol. In his moment of public triumph, Bill Clinton had simply left his grand House to celebrate in the modest home of an honest-to-goodness black friend. We were impressed. We knew that Bill Clinton was probably the very first president of the United States to have enough black friends to hold a party, not just convene a photo opportunity. When we said good-bye at the end of the evening, my husband, Nolan, casually said to Hillary, "Both of us would be happy to serve in this administration," to which she replied, "That is good to know." That was the extent of any direct conversation about a job. After the party, I received a personal note from the president: Dear Lani, Thanks for the party. We loved it. Tell Nolan not to forget about the stuff he promised to send--Hope to see you soon. Best, Bill. Nolan had talked to "Bill" about his favorite topic--information policy. The "stuff he promised to send" was not a resume but a position paper. Then, in early February, Bernard Nussbaum, White House counsel, called and said, "I am not offering you a job but I would like you to cooperate with us in the vetting process. We are thinking about you for a job at Justice. I am going to send you some forms. Please fill them out and return them asap." Bernie never specified the job, except to say it was a high-ranking senior position at Justice. When I returned the forms, I was interviewed by phone about their contents by Liz Fine, an associate in the White House counsel's office. She advised me that the FBI would begin a background investigation. I did not want that to happen unless I was being offered a position because I had not yet talked to the dean at Penn Law School, where I was a tenured professor. Nevertheless, a week later I got a call from Special Agent Scott Perkins of the FBI, asking to talk to me about the background investigation. I asked him to hold off until I did my own "background investigation" to find out which job I was even being considered for. He gave me his home phone number and his beeper and assured me that he would not proceed. He also made clear that he was under pressure to move forward. After the call from Special Agent Perkins, I called Bill Kennedy, Liz Fine's boss in the White House counsel's office, to ask what was going on. He was quite put off, suggesting that it was standard procedure to begin a background check at this point. He implied that something was wrong with me for even questioning it. I noted that they might be following standard procedure, but I reminded him that I hadn't been offered a position as yet. Finally, after going back and forth several times, he understood that I needed to be able to tell my dean something before FBI agents began to roam the law school checking up on me. Nussbaum called me back the following Monday. He said, "You are being considered for a senior position; you have not been offered the position but I am confident that you will be given a senior Justice Department position. That is what you should tell your dean." Bernie Nussbaum called me again at the beginning of March to say he wanted to set up a meeting with Janet Reno, then the nominee for Attorney General. He also advised me to stop by his office to introduce myself to him on my way to see her. At the time, Janet Reno was working out of the Old Executive Office Building. I was unable to arrange both meetings for the same day so I met Bernie first, on a Wednesday at 4:00 P.M. The television in his office was tuned to the Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Reno. He was staring at the television and occasionally would look up to ask me a question. Except for twenty minutes spent reading and discussing a memo about me that was on his desk, Nussbaum used most of the hour and fifteen minutes that I was in his office to make small talk or watch television. After the favorable Judiciary Committee vote sending Reno's nomination to the Senate floor, he declared he was the second happiest person in America, the first being the president. I interjected, "Don't you think Janet Reno is also happy?" "Yes, I guess I am the third happiest person in America," he replied. Nussbaum then excused himself and raced out to tell the president that the committee had voted unanimously to confirm Janet Reno as the first woman Attorney General of the United States. I was left to interview myself in his office. Bernie wore many different hats. He was my uncle Murray's friend; he was Hillary's friend. He talked about how he knew Hillary and how she had been his employee and now she was his client, although some would say she was his boss. He talked about my uncle Murray, who was a member of the same predominantly Jewish country club in New York and who, during the transition, had faxed him a memo saying that Lani Guinier should be considered for the Attorney General position. I laughed and told Bernie I had not put my uncle up to it. Bernie said, "In fact your name was on a list to be Attorney General in December." I laughed again. "Don't worry," he reassured me. "It was not a short list." I asked Bernie what the administration's civil rights agenda was. I wanted to know whether they had a strategy, an affirmative agenda of areas to emphasize or a negative agenda of issues to minimize. I asked, "Does the administration have either a positive or a negative agenda on civil rights?" He answered that it had neither. I asked Bernie about his personal agenda on civil rights. He said, "To enforce the law." I told him I certainly had no problem with that. He asked what I would do if nominated to head the Civil Rights Division. This was the first time we had even talked about a specific position. We had been talking around the issue. I was pleased, even relieved finally to be talking substance. I said it was really important to revive the morale of the line lawyers, the career civil servants in the division who had been committed to doing their jobs, and during both the Bush and Reagan administrations had not been allowed to, or had been discouraged from doing so in a vigorous and effective way. In some situations, it would be a challenge to show them how to litigate civil rights cases again. I had been told that during the last twelve years some of the Civil Rights Division attorneys spent the day reading the newspapers. I also told him that I was interested in talking about different ways of enforcing some civil rights laws; that some of them possibly had outlived their usefulness or at least might be more effectively administered in different ways; that an administration interested in embracing change should be open to change in this arena as well. He said, "I have no problem with that." He then paused to reread the memorandum on his desk. He looked away from the television set and directly at me. He said, "I understand that you have done some writing that is controversial. What is that about?" I had written several law review articles as part of the pre-tenure review process of Penn's law school. I received tenure in 1992. Law professors receive tenure based primarily on the theoretical rigor of their academic scholarship. Scholars are also evaluated on whether they make an original contribution to their fields: they must say something new, or something no one else has quite thought of before. Tenure guarantees lifetime employment. It requires a vote of confidence by senior members of the law school faculty, who judge candidates on teaching, institutional citizenship and service, and scholarship. Especially at schools such as Penn, scholarship requires the publication of well-researched, multifootnoted, densely argued analyses. In my pre-tenure articles, I had written about alternative election systems to remedy violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I told Bernie that the particular system I had described, cumulative voting, was an alternative to single-member districts. Instead of dividing a city with seven elected officials into seven wards or districts, all city voters get seven votes. Voters can use their seven votes in any combination to support candidates of their choice. They could vote all seven for one candidate or divide their votes, putting three on one candidate and four on another. In corporations that use cumulative voting, each shareholder--even so-called minority shareholders--gets the same number of votes as there are directors. If five positions exist for the corporate board of directors, each holder of stock gets five votes per share. In a corporation with one hundred shares of stock, a shareholder with twenty shares can put all her votes on one director-candidate, thus assuring the candidate's election to one of the five seats. Cumulative voting is race-neutral. It has been used in a variety of ways throughout the United States, including by American corporations to protect minority shareholders from being overwhelmed or ignored by those who own a majority of the stock. It has also been adopted to elect members of local collective decision-making bodies (legislatures, city councils, county school boards) in places like Chilton County, Alabama, in the 1980s; and Illinois throughout most of the middle of this century. Similar election systems are used throughout Europe and most other Western democracies, including Israel, to ensure that minority viewpoints are democratically represented. South Africa now uses this kind of a system to assure representation in the national legislature for the white Afrikaners. The advantage of cumulative voting was that it might encourage the participation of those who felt left out of a system that overrepresented the winners and gave those who lose nothing. It was one of the ideas I drew from the experiences I had gained as a civil rights lawyer in Washington, D.C.; in Selma, Alabama; in Helena, Arkansas; and in Charlotte, North Carolina; as well as from the experiences of my voting rights colleagues in many other places. But it wasn't just a theoretical notion. Cumulative voting, which was then in place in Chilton County, Alabama, led to the election of the first woman, the first black, and the first Republican in many years. To elect the seven-person school board there, all voters received seven votes. A politically cohesive group of voters could concentrate their seven votes to gain representation. That is exactly what blacks in Chilton County did. Their gains, however, did not come at the expense of other disenfranchised political or religious minorities. Indeed, women also benefited, as did Republicans, then the minority political party in that heavily Democratic county. Cumulative voting also enabled some blacks and whites to form cross-racial coalitions because after voters aggregated some of their votes to express their most intense preferences, they still had other votes left over to support their allies. Bernie said, "That sounds great. Great. When you talk to Janet Reno, tell her about all those things." That was the end of our conversation. I returned to D.C. that Friday to meet Janet Reno. She was sworn in that morning. I had a meeting with her in the afternoon. I approached the Justice Department entrance on Tenth Street. The quite ordinary-looking security guard was in a very friendly mood. He greeted me with affection. He didn't know me; he only knew I was here to meet the Attorney General. He told me he knew this was a historic day. His face lit up when he said, with a touch of fatherly pride, "We have a new Attorney General. A woman." Until that moment, I had been alternately excited and ambivalent about the job. The Assistant Attorney General (AAG) for Civil Rights was a subcabinet post, supervising hundreds of lawyers and other enforcement personnel who brought cases in a range of civil rights areas, including housing discrimination, disability rights, criminal civil rights violations, and voting rights. It was a job I knew well. For four years in the Carter administration I had played right hand to then Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days III as his lone special assistant. My job under Days came with an impressive title and a spacious office, but I found that the actual chores often allowed limited autonomy. As a public servant, I learned early to swallow my pride when necessary to get the job done. Other people were setting the agenda and they often set it in ways that involved shuffling papers with little results. The AAG for Civil Rights reports directly to the Associate Attorney General, who then reports to the Attorney General. Under no circumstances that I recalled did AAG Drew Days enjoy complete independence. On routine enforcement matters he may have had little oversight from those above him in the chain of command. But in any high-profile case, the back and forth was often mind-boggling. Especially in cases filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Solicitor General has final authority and must sign off on the content of all briefs filed by the Civil Rights Division. The prospect of putting myself in that position again was less than inviting. This was especially true in an administration led by someone who held himself out as a friend but who had not yet made clear the civil rights agenda he intended to follow or his willingness to fight hard for things in which he believed. My ambivalence returned when I first entered the Justice Department building in March 1993. It was dignified. It was massive. To all comers it announced its importance. But I remembered the frustrations, the endless meetings, the feeling that whatever you filed was written by a committee, often including many people with absolutely no expertise except politics. The brief may have been filed with your name on it, but it was not recognizable as a document you had written. It was not government that was the problem. It was bureaucracy. To some extent, the Justice Department was a euphemism for a bureaucracy filled with lawyers. I had convinced myself by now, however, that I wanted the job, that I could do the job even if it meant getting up every morning geared for battle. I was confident that if I got the job, the opportunity would present itself for me to fight that battle alongside many of my friends within the administration. Once I walked into the Attorney General's office on the fifth floor, I got into a celebratory mood right away. "I am just so proud," I gushed when I greeted her. I was really moved to be in the Attorney General's office, now occupied by a woman, for the first time in more than ten years. Reno herself seemed almost dazed. The office was overflowing with flowers and the phone was ringing off the hook. She escorted me through the conference room into her interior chamber. She sat down on the couch opposite an oil painting of Robert Kennedy--the epitome of youth and transcendent mission. It pictured him walking on the windswept beach, hands stuffed in the pocket of his leather jacket, deep in thought about something probably related to his commitment to public service. She announced, "This is the best day of my life and the worst day of my life." I said, "I can understand why it is the best day. But why is it the worst day?" She paused, then answered. "I am sitting here. I have been in this office two hours. I am sitting across from a portrait of Robert Kennedy, who is one of my heroes, and I just feel overwhelmed." She seemed so genuine, so honest that I immediately liked her. She was treating me as a peer, not a subordinate. I was honored, but I also felt compelled to say: "I heard your testimony about your mom, sitting in the middle of the house that she built with her own hands, sitting in her chair while a hurricane swirled around her, confident that because she had built that house, it was going to stand. I am sure that you are your mother's daughter and that you will be able to stand the hurricane of the next four years." With that, we really hit it off. She asked me to tell her about myself. I told her I'd always wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. She warmed immediately; it seemed she'd found the person she wanted. We talked about my articles. She said, "Bernie tells me you have written some radical stuff. Is that something that you wrote ten years ago? Is it not important?" And I said, "No, it is something I have written recently and this is what it's about." I repeated what I'd said to Bernie, spending no more than five or ten minutes explaining the premise and the thesis of the articles. She listened politely, but took no notes. When I finished, she said, "Okay. That is fine." And she took some papers from her lap and laid them on the couch as if to say, "Okay. We've moved off that subject. Now we can talk more about you." I then asked her the same questions I had put to Bernie. I asked, "Are there things you definitely want or don't want to do in civil rights?" She said, "No, I just want somebody in here who is going to enforce the law." Janet Reno, a woman I only just met and about whom I knew very little, became one of the reasons I now desperately wanted the job. Whenever I thought about Janet Reno over the weeks that followed, I softened. Thinking about how overwhelmed she seemed on her first day on the job made me vulnerable, too. I was drawn to her, convinced that her commitment to do what was right came from the heart. She was a steadfast ally. She offered to accompany me on my courtesy calls, should that become necessary. It made me really, really want to work with her, to enforce the law in her shop. I was worried, however, that no one else in the administration seemed to be taking the nomination process seriously. They treated me as a job applicant, not an administration workhorse. With the exception of Janet Reno herself, the White House and Justice Department staff were almost indifferent to filling in even the broad outlines of an agenda on civil rights. My concerns were augmented in mid-April when The Jewish Forward (edited by Seth Lipsky, who came to the paper from the Wall Street Journal) published a critical article about me. I had not spoken with the reporter, on instructions from the administration, whose customary policy was to keep nominees from speaking to the press pending confirmation hearings. Several of my Jewish friends had taken on the task of reaching out to the author of the article; they also called some people they knew within prominent Jewish lobbying organizations. Their efforts seemed to pay off. There was no further press in the next few days. But the article reminded me that I could easily become a lightning rod for controversy. From the start there was a strong whiff of controversy in the air, as right-wing ideologues promised revenge after the bruising confirmation battles over Judge Robert Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas. I was told that back in December, when my name had surfaced as the leading candidate for the civil rights position. Early in January 1993, I had had a conversation with Elaine Jones, Wade Henderson, and Barbara Arnwine, each of whom had recently assumed leadership positions in a prominent civil rights organization: the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the Washington office of the NAACP, and the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, respectively. They told me I was their unanimous choice, that they really wanted me to do this job. They thought I could make a difference; they were pushing for me. They didn't want to be pushing for me if I was not going to take the job. I talked to them about my reservations. I was completely honest. I told them that the only way I would do the job was if I felt I had a base of people who would support me in the position. That I couldn't go into the administration and do this by myself, but that I could work in conjunction with them. The top priority would be enforcing the civil rights laws, but I also wanted to initiate the conversation about new remedies and new ways of thinking about civil rights issues. I shared with them that I thought we needed fresh approaches that were consistent with where the country was right now, the changing demographics, and the nature of the problems all Americans were facing. I was awed by their confidence. It felt as if I was being enlisted to do an important job by the people I admired the most. That I did indeed quickly become a lightning rod for controversy should not have been surprising. After all, I was talking about rebuilding a commitment to civil rights through innovative approaches in a climate in which much of the constituency for civil rights had been in hiding, in response to the systemic attacks of the past twelve years. The civil rights community had experienced the twelve years of Reagan/Bush Republican administrations as devastating. Under the leadership of William Bradford Reynolds, the Justice Department Civil Rights Division had been leading the assault against civil rights as I knew them. Their agenda, of dismantling the vigorous role that the federal government had been playing in civil rights enforcement since the mid-1960s, was destroying the federal commitment and eliminating the resources devoted to carrying out that commitment. The civil rights community had weathered the storm, anonymously infiltrating sympathetic federal agencies, litigating where necessary to hold the line. They were slowly regrouping, but the damage of the Reagan/Bush years would take time to repair. Everyone was eager to move forward quickly, to clean house. But the Jewish Forward article tipped me off that the right wing would not sit idly by, and, indeed, would be encouraged by the Justice Department and White House staff's apparent inattention to the substance and process of the civil rights nomination. I kept pressing for signs of real presidential leadership, or at least a signal from the staff that there was a coherent civil rights vision, even if no one was willing to launch a preemptive strike. No one, however, was listening. Nor did anyone seem to be in charge. That is, until Ricki Seidman walked into my life. Ricki Seidman is a big woman; she wouldn't get lost easily in a crowd. Her entrance into a room was often a political statement. The day that I was nominated, April 29, 1993, was the day I first saw Ricki in action. A group of us were eating lunch in the Attorney General's dining room. Six among us were about to be introduced in a public ceremony as Justice Department nominees. We had arrived early, assuming we would find an agenda, but none of us had yet seen any evidence of a plan. Webster Hubbell--the president's friend from Little Rock, former justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, and Hillary's law partner in the Rose Law Firm--sat at the head of the lunch table. He tried hard to make it appear as if someone was in charge. His nomination as Associate Attorney General had already been announced weeks before. The assembled chatted lightly yet nervously. The mindless chatter did nothing to distract me from a feeling that had been growing in the pit of my stomach that at least one of us was a lamb waiting to be taken to slaughter. As I pondered my fate, the door to the Attorney General's dining room opened wide and Ricki Seidman walked in--marched in was more like it. She arrived alone, but she might have been leading a parade. Her majestic presence was announcement enough: we all stopped in mid-forkful. She bent over to whisper something in Webb Hubbell's ear. He may have been at the head of the table, but now Ricki was in charge. She waved her arms in the air, sweeping away the Justice Department staff minions surrounding the table. By now we were all ears, waiting to be told whatever secrets she had hidden somewhere on her huge frame. We were not disappointed. With no time to spare, she walked all the nominees through our roles. In a brief fifteen minutes, Ricki restored a sense of order. I saw her then as a true saviour--a get-things-done-now kind of person. The formal announcement ceremony was scheduled to begin within less than an hour. Ricki Seidman, a staffer in the White House Communications Office, had arrived just in time. Thirty minutes later, I and the other political neophytes were thrust into the public limelight on a platform in the Justice Department courtyard. But while Ricki had prepared us for where to stand and how to walk, neither she nor anyone else had sat down with me to talk about the substance of what to say. We gathered in the hallway just inside from the courtyard stage and were lined up in the order we would be introduced. We were given our final instructions and then the president arrived. In what we were told was a last-minute decision, President Clinton himself would make the presentations. The president had a regal bearing. He wore a beautifully tailored blue suit that seemed as much cloak as business uniform of the country's commander in chief. As he strode down the row of nervous nominees, he greeted each of us in his typically physical style: he grasped my hand, congratulated me, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. As he moved on to the others, I remember overhearing one of the nominees pass on a greeting from an old friend from Arkansas. The president stepped back and with a wistful look in his eyes said, "I remember Steve. That was when I had a real life." And I remember the response, "Mr. President, this is real life." I pondered the exchange, immediately thinking to myself that it can't get more unreal than this. I realized later I was wrong. As we were introduced, there were cheers and signs saying: ATTA GIRL, JANET! and the like. I also saw many old friends, including Marie Klimesz and Jerry Hebert, career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, who were giving the thumbs-up; some were smiling so broadly I thought they would burst. I had not been back in that courtyard in twelve years, yet here I was accepting the nomination to head the Civil Rights Division, determined to enforce the laws as passed by Congress. As a former staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and now as a law professor reflecting on that experience, I accepted the nomination with a dual sense of mission. I believed it was critical to enforce existing laws. I also wanted to change direction in the fight for civil rights. I was not sanguine about simply recommitting the federal government and its resources to enforcing a 1960s vision of formal equality. I believed that innovative remedies were needed to address a different, more complex set of problems. I wanted to start a genuine dialogue to bridge the different world views on race. I had hoped to begin that conversation, using this first public announcement to signal a new civil rights commitment and mission. I wanted to use the job to create a space for people to begin to speak for themselves. I wanted to create a space for the constituency of the Civil Rights Division--the disabled, the discriminated against, the marginalized Americans who could enrich our public conversation so that others would learn why they should care that this constituency be represented. I had drafted a written statement to that effect, with the help of my University of Pennsylvania law professor colleagues Susan Sturm and Barbara Woodhouse. No one from the administration had suggested I prepare such a statement, but I had learned from watching Brad Reynolds and other right-wing Republicans that it was a mistake to forgo a public opportunity to define your own agenda. I also felt it important to establish why exactly I was here with the president of the United States. As a staff attorney for the Legal Defense Fund, I had litigated several voting cases against Arkansas Governor Clinton. In introducing me, the president now seemed to take particular pleasure in announcing to the crowd the depth of his commitment to civil rights, symbolized by his nomination of someone who had sued him. Although his remarks were not substantive, his inaugural address had already, in my mind, set the right tone. He recalled Thomas Jefferson's belief that "to preserve the very foundations of our nation we need dramatic change from time to time." "This is our time," the president had said. "Let us embrace it." I believed he would embrace our time in the interests of a genuinely inclusive vision. I held fast to my hopes on this remarkably sunny April day--even though the president and I had not had a sustained conversation about civil rights policy since our discussion about motor voter laws at the party back in January. I waited patiently as the president and the Attorney General spoke. They were experienced politicians, undaunted by the television cameras or reporters. Both were obviously at ease, despite the many pairs of eyes evaluating their every gesture. Their skilled smoothness contrasted with our visible discomfort. One of the nominees, Walter Dellinger, who had gone to the trouble of memorizing his prepared statement, gripped the written text behind his back, just in case. Another, Sheila Foster, announced that she was "unabashedly ecstatic," but her tight, frozen smile conveyed the opposite. Several friends who witnessed the ceremony on video, or viewed pictures in news reports, told me I looked radiant and self-possessed, framed by a beaming president in the background. They were kind. I was anxious and used my lawyerly formality to camouflage the butterflies in my stomach. Although I wanted very much to be part of a new, progressive administration and was eager to launch a public education campaign, I was a novice in this new world of "real life." We each were given first ten, then five, then two and a half minutes to speak. I tried to wedge several themes into my allotted time. I talked about my parents. I spoke first of my black father, who had taught me through the stories of his life how to look injustice in the eye and then to fight back. But I was not just my father's daughter. I told how my mother, who is Jewish, had taught me to see the other person's side, how not to internalize criticism as rejection, and how to try to bridge differences with open, frank dialogue and creative compromise. Just after announcing my nomination to the world, the president had whispered in my ear, "Thanks for not gloating about the Arkansas registration case. I thought you would boast that you had won." Janet Reno said nothing as she escorted me down the stairs. For her, words were unnecessary. Bill Clinton and Janet Reno were cast from different molds. One had living-room charisma; the other was more self-contained. One talked to the people; the other believed in them. At the conclusion we were shepherded into a room for our first, and until the Senate confirmation hearings, our only press conference. There I got an inkling of how little I knew about this new, unreal life. I was not skilled at the task of facing down journalists: projecting symbols and reducing complex ideas to sound bites. I was asked about a reference I had made in my acceptance comments on the need to change direction in civil rights enforcement. I chose to respond by explaining in great detail the facts in the case of Major v. Treen. That was the "Donald Duck" gerrymandering case in Louisiana where a previous Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Brad Reynolds, had declined to enforce the law despite evidence that legislators and interested parties had made explicitly racist comments about how New Orleans didn't need any more "nigger bigshots" and "nigger mayors" to run in voting districts that gave blacks a fair chance to win. Reynolds's decision had contravened recommendations from his career staff, who were experienced in detecting voting discrimination. I, as attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had been forced to go to court. We prevailed in the litigation; yet the weight of my description of how prior administrations had tolerated actual examples of intentional discrimination was more than the reporters wanted to hear that day. Afterwards, my fellow nominees thanked me for what they took as a filibuster. From their perspective, I had successfully distracted the press, whose interest in nonpayment of Social Security taxes could not regain momentum. Momentum is something I would learn much about. Copyright © 1998 Lani Guinier. All rights reserved.