11-07-2016, 08:22 AM
(CNN)Janet Reno, former US attorney general under President Bill Clinton, died Monday morning following a long battle with Parkinson's disease, her sister Maggy Hurchalla said. She was 78.
Reno, the nation's first-ever female attorney general, served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 2001.
From Miami to Washington D.C.
Born in 1938, Reno grew up in Miami, Florida, with parents who both worked as reporters for Miami newspapers. After attending Cornell University for her undergraduate degree, Reno enrolled at Harvard University for law school in the early 1960s. During her first year, she heard one of her heroes, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, speak at the Sanders Theater.
"She was so wonderful and her voice was still so clear and so magnificent," Reno later recalled in a 1993 speech to the Women's Bar Association. "And I went up to her afterwards, and I said, "Mrs. Roosevelt, I think you are perfectly wonderful." And I will never forget her looking at me and saying, 'Why, thank you, my dear. Those words mean so much to me.' And she seemed to mean it."
Caught in the middle of Clinton-era scandals
When Clinton's administration was rocked by the Whitewater scandal, Reno was the person tasked with appointing special prosecutor Robert Fiske to lead the probe in 1994.
The Clintons were never charged with criminal wrongdoing.
In Clinton's second term -- months before his impeachment -- the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted to cite Reno for contempt of Congress for failing to hand over key memos.
Reno eventually provided those documents. Congress never moved forward with a vote on the matter.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/07/politics/j...um=twitter
Reno, the nation's first-ever female attorney general, served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 2001.
From Miami to Washington D.C.
Born in 1938, Reno grew up in Miami, Florida, with parents who both worked as reporters for Miami newspapers. After attending Cornell University for her undergraduate degree, Reno enrolled at Harvard University for law school in the early 1960s. During her first year, she heard one of her heroes, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, speak at the Sanders Theater.
"She was so wonderful and her voice was still so clear and so magnificent," Reno later recalled in a 1993 speech to the Women's Bar Association. "And I went up to her afterwards, and I said, "Mrs. Roosevelt, I think you are perfectly wonderful." And I will never forget her looking at me and saying, 'Why, thank you, my dear. Those words mean so much to me.' And she seemed to mean it."
Caught in the middle of Clinton-era scandals
When Clinton's administration was rocked by the Whitewater scandal, Reno was the person tasked with appointing special prosecutor Robert Fiske to lead the probe in 1994.
The Clintons were never charged with criminal wrongdoing.
In Clinton's second term -- months before his impeachment -- the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted to cite Reno for contempt of Congress for failing to hand over key memos.
Reno eventually provided those documents. Congress never moved forward with a vote on the matter.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/07/politics/j...um=twitter
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.