“Eric Holder’s War,” The American Prospect, March 2010.
For the attorney general, remaking the rule of law in a new century is as personal as it is professional.
Hours before dawn on one of the last days of October 2009, the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan since 2001, Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States, strode out of a C-17 cargo plane parked at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. President Barack Obama, having reversed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of war dead at Dover, trailed just behind. During the official military ceremony, the two friends stood in dark suits, silently saluting 18 servicemen, including three Drug Enforcement Agency officials claimed by the Afghan War days prior. The aggrieved expressions on their faces were identical.
Holder’s presence was surprising. The attorney general has played only a minor role in the public debate over issues of war and peace. But as the president contemplates the legal and logistical puzzles bequeathed to him by George W. Bush — chiefly the management of what the administration no longer calls a “war on terror” — Holder has provided crucial, if understated, counsel and support.
As a Justice Department veteran in an administration elected on a message of change, Holder is both an insider and an outsider — a dual role to which he has grown accustomed in his decades of working in Washington. One of his first meetings as attorney general was with Janet Reno, his Democratic predecessor and former boss. Yet he has adopted an “in with the new” attitude, focusing on reversing Bush-era policies that gutted civil-rights protections, for example. Holder has also been forced to confront a set of legal questions relating to terrorism — including touchy jurisdictional negotiations with the Department of Defense and the relatively young Department of Homeland Security — that rarely crossed his desk in such high volume, or with as much urgency, in the Clinton days.
In an era where counterterrorism outstrips traditional law-enforcement activity in its ability to generate headlines, Holder must balance agency priorities. His long tenure in Washington has gifted him a certain bureaucratic agility — he was able to keep his department out of the messy public wrangling between the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel over the release of incriminating photos of detainees being abused. At other junctures, such as his controversial Black History Month speech about race relations in America, his lack of interest in Washington’s political politesse is evident.
Through it all, he has managed to maintain a close relationship with the president. For Holder and for Obama, both talented lawyers and torchbearers for black political power in America, remaking the rule of law in a new century is as personal as it is professional. This is a war they fight together.
***
The Obama-Holder partnership began in a dining room in upper Northwest Washington, D.C. In late 2004, Ann Walker Marchant, a media consultant and cousin of Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, hosted a dinner party to which she invited the young senator-elect and Holder, a 30-year veteran of the capital. Vernon Jordan, a former Bill Clinton adviser and Marchant’s uncle, has joked that “all black people that finish college know one another.” But the two Ivy League lawyers with immigrant fathers had never met. When Marchant seated the lanky basketball junkies next to one another, they discovered their now well-known biographical similarities — from attending Columbia University as undergraduates to slogging out years of public service while their wives served as the family breadwinners.
“I wasn’t setting anybody up on a date,” says Marchant, who had known the Obamas and the Holders separately for years. “But there was a connection, a conversation, and clearly there was an affection that was created.” A scant five years later, the two friends have run a successful presidential campaign, put together their dream team of lawyers and policy thinkers, and are, incidentally, the first African American president and attorney general.
Like Obama’s road to the White House, Holder’s journey to the pinnacle of legal authority in America was somewhat improbable. He was born in New York City, 10 years before the president, to a father from Barbados and a mother from New Jersey. At age 14, he began a daily commute from his mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood in Queens to Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious public school in Manhattan. He entered Columbia in the fall of 1969, just in time to grow an Afro and participate in some heated student protests. (Holder, now a trustee of the university, has left both behind.) He entered the university’s law school upon graduation, and after a year at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City, he joined the Justice Department he leads today.
When he first arrived in the capital, the 25-year-old Holder worked as a prosecutor at the agency’s brand-new public–integrity unit and joined a gaggle of young lawyers also making their way in the capital — including successful African Americans like Eric Washington, now chief justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals; James Dyke, former state secretary of education for Virginia; Alexis Herman, the first black secretary of labor; and then–public defender Charles Ogletree, now a scholar at Harvard Law School, where he taught both Michelle and Barack Obama. The young professionals shot hoops after hours, went to parties, and played rounds of bid whist, a card game popular among African Americans of their generation.
“Clearly he was a star lawyer then,” says Ted Shaw, a Columbia professor and former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who has maintained a close friendship with Holder. “But Eric was down to earth and he was one of the fellas, and still is in many ways,” he says. Adds Ogletree, “The same conversation you’d have with Eric Holder at the Department of Justice you’d have in his living room, or in a quiet conversation during summer break at Martha’s Vineyard, or at a barbecue in Washington, D.C.”
