|
 Reno's goddaughter, Gabrielle D'Alemberte, said she succumbed
to complications of Parkinson's disease early on Monday in
Miami.
The blunt-spoken lawyer worked as the top U.S. law enforcement
official under Clinton from 1993 to 2001, becoming the
longest-serving attorney general of the 20th century.
Just weeks into the job, she authorized the deadly 1993 raid on
the Branch Davidian cult compound at Waco, Texas.
Reno later authorized federal agents to seize six-year-old Cuban
shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez from relatives in Miami in
2000, and headed the Justice Department during the government's
huge antitrust case against Microsoft.
The former Miami prosecutor, picked by Clinton after his first
two choices for the job ran into trouble at the confirmation
stage, exhibited an independent streak and a brusque manner that
often upset the White House.
Reno weathered White House complaints that she was not a team
player and that she sought too many special prosecutors to
investigate cases, including the Whitewater affair involving the
finances of the president and first lady Hillary Clinton.
She always said she made decisions based on evidence and the
law.
WACO, GONZALES
Reno was only 38 days into the attorney general's job when she
approved the April 19, 1993, FBI raid that led to the deaths of
about 80 people, including many children, at the Waco cult
compound.
Federal agents had earlier tried to serve a warrant on the
cult's leader, David Koresh, who said he was the Messiah, for
stockpiling weapons. Four agents and six cult members were
killed in an ensuing shootout, leading to a 51-day standoff.
With negotiations at an impasse, Reno gave the go-ahead for the
raid after hearing reports of child abuse in the compound. The
raid on the heavily armed cultists ended in an inferno that
engulfed the site.
"I made the decision. I'm accountable. The buck stops with me,"
a grim-looking Reno told a later news conference.
Reno took a personal interest in the political tussle over Elian
Gonzalez, the young shipwreck survivor whose mother drowned
fleeing Cuba.
Reno met the boy and his Miami relatives who battled to keep him
from returning to communist Cuba, and his father and
grandmothers, who wanted to raise Gonzalez in his homeland.
Reno argued that Elian belonged with his father and acted after
the Miami relatives defied a U.S. government order to hand him
over. She authorized armed agents to take the boy from his
relatives' home in a pre-dawn raid in April 2000 and re-unite
him with his father, who took him back to Cuba.
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The raid infuriated Miami's Cuban exile community, whose members
picketed her home and denounced her as a "witch" and lackey of Cuban
President Fidel Castro.
MICROSOFT, OKLAHOMA
In 1998, Reno's Justice Department brought a huge antitrust case
against Microsoft. Two years later, a federal judge ordered the
breakup of the software giant because it had ignored his ruling that
it had used unlawful monopolistic practices.
The case was settled in 2001 by the administration of George W.
Bush, Clinton's Republican successor, in terms seen as favorable to
Microsoft.
Reno appeared with Clinton after the 1995 truck bomb attack on the
Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people, and vowed to
seek the death penalty for the perpetrators.
Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in 2001 become the
first federal prisoner executed since 1963. McVeigh said he carried
out the attack to punish the U.S. government for the Waco cult raid
and another raid in Idaho.
Some comedians made fun of Reno during her time in office,
lampooning her appearance and height, around 6 feet 2 inches, among
them Will Ferrell who impersonated her on "Saturday Night Live."
Shortly after leaving office in January 2001 she appeared on the
show next to Ferrell, both wearing identical outfits, in a sketch
called "Janet Reno's Dance Party."
She was diagnosed in 1995 with Parkinson's disease, a progressive
disorder of the central nervous system that caused trembling in her
arms. "All it does is shake and you get used to it shaking after a
while," she told a TV interviewer.
Reno was attorney general throughout Clinton's two terms as
president and was in the job longer than anyone except William Wirt,
who held it from November 1817 until March 1829.
After leaving Washington, Reno returned to Florida and ran for
governor in 2002, but lost in the Democratic primary.
Reno was born on July 21, 1938, in Miami to parents who were
newspaper reporters. She attended public schools in Miami and earned
a chemistry degree at Cornell University in 1960.
She received her law degree from Harvard three years later and
worked as a lawyer in Miami.
(Reporting by Will Dunham and Chris Michaud; Editing by Andrew
Heavens)
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