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 Last month, the low-key Keisler was looking forward to some downtime with his wife and three kids when he resigned as the chief of the Justice Department's civil division.
Before he could leave, President Bush asked Keisler to serve as acting attorney general until the Senate confirms retired judge Michael Mukasey as the nation's top law enforcement officer.
Keisler's tenure at the top will be short-lived: Mukasey's confirmation hearings begin Wednesday, and the judge is expected to be easily approved.
By most accounts, Keisler already has helped to soothe a Justice Department roiled by political scandal and the sudden resignations of more than a dozen top officials
-- including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
"He has been a terrific leader for this time," Michael Garcia, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said Monday of Keisler. "He's a very calm and knowledgeable hand on the tiller as we're going forward."
Keisler declined to be interviewed for this article, saying through a spokesman that the spotlight should be on Mukasey, and not himself.
Initially, Solicitor General Paul Clement, the department's No. 4 official and next in line for the job, was to temporarily replace Gonzales. But Bush tapped Keisler instead, freeing Clement to focus on his primary responsibility
-- representing the federal government in cases before the Supreme Court.
Keisler, a conservative, is praised as a brilliant attorney -- even by those who oppose the policies he defends in court.
"He's got a sterling reputation," said Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center, who has argued against civil attorneys Keisler oversaw in the Bush administration's lengthy legal fight over the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
The Justice Department's argument that Guantanamo detainees have no rights "is indefensible from a legal and moral standpoint," Hafetz said. "But Peter is a lawyer for the government. My disagreement is not with him
-- it's with the position that they have."
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 In one of his first duties as attorney general, Keisler spoke with federal prosecutors last month at an Atlanta conference about combating street violence. People who attended said Keisler asked the U.S. attorneys to simply call him "Peter" instead of the honorary "General."
And though Keisler said he wouldn't make decisions better left to a Senate-confirmed attorney general, "he felt it was inappropriate to do nothing at all," said Stephen Murphy, U.S. attorney in Detroit who attended the conference.
"The fact that he is known to us and he is accessible brings quite a bit of confidence and quite a bit of optimism to the U.S. attorney community, at the least," Murphy said.
Political grandstanding is not Keisler's thing, said one of his bosses, former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey, who nearly quit the Justice Department in 2004 over the administration's domestic spying program.
Comey, who was No. 2 at the Justice Department and Keisler's boss at the time, said he was approached by Keisler about a proposed legal strategy and was convinced to reverse course.
"He had a lot of guts to go to the deputy attorney general and say,
'Hey, you screwed up,'" Comey said. "And he was right."
The day he resigned, Keisler said he had no job already lined up and was planning some time with his family before going back to work.
He has been nominated for a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but it's uncertain if the Senate will confirm him or other judicial candidates waiting for their approval.
[Associated Press; by Lara Jakes
Jordan]
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
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