Bill Clinton, ‘America's first Jewish president’

Former President Clinton (Mark Lennihan/AP)


In September, New York Magazine ran a contrarian cover story characterizing President Obama, who has been criticized as insufficiently pro-Israel by some, as “The First Jewish President.”


The headline quote for that story came from Abner Mikva, who said during the president’s ’08 campaign, “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” The author of the piece, John Heilemann, argued that while it hadn’t quite worked out that way, there was more truth to that assessment than one might think.

There was no mention at the Jewish Federation of Arkansas event of any intention to strip Obama of that distinction, never conferred in earnest in the first place.

Since his days as governor, Clinton has had a close relationship with the state’s Jewish community.

But “since I’ve seen you, I acquired a Jewish son-in-law,” he said as the crowd laughed. He really feels part of the Jewish community, he said, since Chelsea Clinton's 2010 marriage to Marc Mezvinsky.. He even celebrates the Jewish holidays, he said.

Among the 500 who attended were Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and one-time presidential candidate and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Wesley Clark. Clinton also posed for photos with teenagers who weren’t born when he took the oath of office.

“I have a zillion friends here,” he told the crowd in his keynote speech.

Clinton said he wanted to talk about the current situation in the Middle East, but felt he should hold back: “You can say whatever you want [as a former president], unless your wife happens to be Secretary of State.”

He did, however, recommend two books for the crowd to read.

First, he praised Ben-Gurion: A Political Life by Shimon Peres, the Nobel Peace laureate and President of Israel, about the country’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

He also suggested The Crisis of Zionism by Peter Beinart, which will be published next month. Clinton said he’d written a blurb in which he called it, “a deeply important book for anyone who cares about Israel.”

Many in the crowd dutifully jotted down the names.

He told a story about how he used to walk alone in the Jewish cemetery in Hot Springs, Ark., where he grew up.

And he said he prays that in “twenty, thirty or forty years” the entire Middle East region will be strong and Israelis will have “genuine partners of peace” in the region.

After his speech, Clinton had planned to exit quickly and hop a plane to New York. But he was having such a good time he nixed that idea at the last minute and stayed for the rest of the awards ceremony.

Janet Reno, First Woman to Serve as U.S. Attorney General, 1938 -2016

Janet Reno was sworn in before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1993, becoming the first woman to hold the position of United States attorney general. CreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press

Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States — the first woman to hold the job — and whose eight years in that office placed her in the middle of some of the most divisive episodes of the Clinton presidency, died on Monday at age 78.

She died at her home in Miami-Dade County, Fla., from complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to her sister, Margaret Hurchalla. The disease was diagnosed in November 1995, while she was still in office.


Ms. Reno’s tenure as attorney general was bracketed by two explosive events: a deadly federal raid on the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Tex., in 1993, and the seizing in 2000 by federal agents of Elián González, a young Cuban refugee who was at the center of an international custody battle and a political tug of war.


In those moments, and others in between, Ms. Reno was applauded for a straightforward integrity and a willingness to accept responsibility, but she was also fiercely criticized. Republicans accused her of protecting President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when, in 1997, she refused to allow an independent counsel to investigate allegations of fund-raising improprieties in the White House.

After leaving office, she mounted a surprise though unsuccessful bid in Florida in 2002 to unseat Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, amid the resentment of Cuban-Americans in South Florida over her negotiating for the return of Elián to Cuba.

Ms. Reno was never part of the Clinton inner circle, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms, longer than any attorney general in the previous 150 years. She was a latecomer to the team, and her political and personal style clashed with the president’s, particularly as she sought to maintain some independence from the White House.

Her relations with the president were further strained by her decision to let an independent inquiry into a failed Clinton land deal in Arkansas, the so-called Whitewater investigation, expand to encompass Mr. Clinton’s sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an episode that led to his impeachment.

Mr. Clinton and his allies thought that Ms. Reno was too quick to refer to special counsels in the Lewinsky matter and other cases of suspect administration behavior. The president let her dangle in the public eye for weeks before announcing in December 1996, after his resounding re-election, that she would remain for his second term.


Bill Clinton named Ms. Reno United States attorney general in 1993. She was never part of the Clinton inner circle, however, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms.CreditRobert Giroux/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Reno was never a natural fit in Washington’s backslapping, highly competitive culture. At weekly news conferences in the barrel-vaulted conference room outside her office in the Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue, she was fond of telling reporters that she would “do the right thing” on legal issues and judge them according to “the law and the facts.”

Imposing at 6-foot-1, awkward in manner and blunt in her probity, she became a regular foil for late-night comics and a running gag on “Saturday Night Live.” But she got the joke, proving it by gamely appearing on the show to lampoon her image.

The comedy could not obscure her law-enforcement accomplishments. Ms. Reno presided over the Justice Department in a time of economic growth, falling crime rates and mounting security threats to the nation by forces both foreign and domestic.

Under Ms. Reno, the agency initiated prosecutions in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century.

The Reno Justice Department also prosecuted spies like the C.I.A. mole Aldrich H. Ames; it filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, a milestone in the new-technology era; and it sued the tobacco industry to reclaim federal health care dollars spent on treating illnesses caused by smoking.

Ms. Reno was a strong advocate of guaranteeing federal protection to women seeking abortions and safeguarding abortion clinics that were under threat.

But in some areas she seemed conflicted about the law. She opposed the death penalty, for example, but repeatedly authorized her prosecutors to ask juries to impose it.

When she took office, she endorsed the use of independent counsels to investigate administration figures. But she later testified against renewing the law governing their use, saying it did nothing to take politics out of the inquiries.

Before becoming attorney general, Ms. Reno was the Dade County state attorney for 14 years, a period when the Miami area was growing rapidly and experiencing rising drug-related crime, widening racial divisions, demoralizing police corruption and waves of immigration from Cuba.


Ms. Reno during a news conference at the Justice Department in 1995.CreditPaul Hosefros/The New York Times

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies.

“I’m just delighted to be here, and I’m going to try my level best,” Ms. Reno said at the Rose Garden ceremony at which Mr. Clinton announced her nomination on Feb. 11, 1993.

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children.

Ms. Reno’s candor was viewed as refreshing in a city where blame-shifting is the norm, and it gave her sudden celebrity status in the new administration.

The luster faded quickly. Within weeks, Ms. Reno faced tough questions about the raid and her claim that children were being abused at the compound. She was also faulted for failing to influence an important crime bill. By the end of her first year in office, she was facing mounting scrutiny in the news media.

With Mr. Clinton’s re-election and his decision to keep Ms. Reno at her post, Republicans began questioning her independence when she resisted their calls for a special counsel to look into allegations that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore had broken campaign fund-raising laws in 1996.

The clamor, led by the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, grew when it was disclosed that Louis J. Freeh, the head of the F.B.I., who had had a tortured relationship with Ms. Reno, also favored a special counsel.

Ms. Reno would not budge, saying her stance had nothing to do with protecting the president. A review of the evidence, she said, convinced her that a special counsel was not warranted.


Ms. Reno testified in Washington in 2004 before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.CreditDennis Cook/Associated Press

“Let me be absolutely clear,” Ms. Reno told hostile Republican questioners during one of several hearings on Capitol Hill about the call for a special counsel. “I’m not going to violate my oath in this matter because of pressure from any quarter, not from the media, not from Congress, nor from anywhere else.”

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound.

The revelation further soured her dealings with Mr. Freeh, with whom she had been close early in her tenure, but he let it be known that he favored a special counsel in the fund-raising case and a new inquiry into Waco. She sent marshals to F.B.I. headquarters to seize a tape of communications made the day of the assault.

Her final and perhaps most personal crisis as head of the Justice Department was the case involving Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat.

The boy became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint. Congressional Republicans and many Cuban exiles were outraged. Some in Miami said Ms. Reno would be in danger if she returned there after her service in Washington.

Early in 2001, however, she did go home, her service finished. She said she was excited about a red pickup truck she had bought.

Janet Reno was born in Miami, on the edge of the Everglades, on July 21, 1938, to Henry Olaf Reno and the former Jane Wood. Her father, born Henry Rasmussen in Denmark, came to the United States in 1913 with his own mother and father, who chose the name Reno off a map, believing it sounded more American.

Ms. Reno during a taping of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” in Burbank, Calif., in 2002.CreditRic Francis/Associated Press

Henry Reno was a police reporter in Dade County for more than 40 years. Jane Wood, born in Georgia, was an eccentric naturalist who would have a profound effect on Ms. Reno.

“Outspoken, outrageous, absolutely indifferent to others’ opinions, Janet Reno was truly one of a kind,” Paul Anderson, a former Miami Herald reporter, wrote in his biography of her. It was her mother who had wrestled small alligators, though the stunt was sometimes erroneously ascribed to the attorney general.

Ms. Reno, the eldest of four siblings, was about eight when her parents bought 21 acres bordering the Everglades and moved there. Her mother, who had no construction experience, built the family home. “She dug the foundation with her own hands, with a pick and shovel,” Ms. Reno told senators at her confirmation hearing in 1993.

It was a rustic life; peacocks and other creatures roamed the property, and Janet and her siblings — Robert, Mark and Margaret — cavorted barefoot. But she also glimpsed a more sophisticated world: After junior high school, she traveled to Europe to stay with an uncle, a military judge, as he presided over a spy trial.

Her sister, Ms. Hurchalla, who is known as Maggy, survives her, as do seven nieces and nephews. Her brother Robert, a former columnist for Newsday on Long Island, died in 2012 at 72. Her brother Mark had an adventurer’s life: game warden, boat and oil supply ship captain, alligator wrestler, scuba diver, paratrooper as well as carpenter and bailiff at the Miami-Dade Justice Building. He died in 2014.

After finishing high school in Miami, Ms. Reno attended Cornell University, graduating in 1960 with a degree in chemistry. She won admission to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1963, one of a handful of women in her class of more than 500.

Seeking to practice law in South Florida, Ms. Reno was turned down by one of the state’s best known law firms, Steel, Hector & Davis, and went to work for a smaller firm instead. She became active in local Democratic politics and met a fellow Harvard graduate, Gerald Lewis, a lawyer with electoral aspirations. Ms. Reno helped him win a state House seat in 1966, and the two opened a general practice law firm together.

Ms. Reno entered government service in 1971 as general counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives, where she worked on a difficult overhaul of Florida’s courts. Her work in Tallahassee, the capital, whetted her appetite for public office, and she campaigned for a state legislative seat of her own the next year. She lost in an upset to a Republican candidate helped by the landslide re-election victory of President Richard M. Nixon.

Ms. Reno did not wait long for her next opportunity. The day after her defeat, Richard Gerstein, the state attorney for Dade County, offered her a job on his staff. As she told The Miami Herald, she expressed reservations in her characteristically straightforward manner.


Ms. Reno in her office in 1998. Under her leadership, the agency launched prosecutions in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century.CreditSusan Walsh/Associated Press

“My father was always convinced you were a crook,” she said she told Mr. Gerstein. “And I’ve always been a critic of yours.”

Mr. Gerstein replied that those were the reasons he wanted to hire her. Within a few years, she was Mr. Gerstein’s chief assistant.

Ms. Reno left the prosecutor’s office in May 1976 to join Steel, Hector & Davis, the firm that had rejected her out of law school. But her tenure there was short-lived.

After Mr. Gerstein announced that he would resign in early 1978, after 21 years in the office, Gov. Reubin Askew appointed her interim state attorney, choosing her from about 50 candidates. She was the first woman to hold the title of state attorney in Florida and one of the few in the nation’s history to be responsible for such a large jurisdiction.

Ms. Reno retained the post through a thicket of drug, murder and corruption cases. In one, she was accused of being anti-police when she prosecuted five Miami officers in the beating death of a black insurance executive after a traffic stop; the officers, she said, had tried to make it look like an accident.

The officers were acquitted — one by the presiding judge in the trial, held in Tampa, and the others by an all-white jury — provoking criticism of her legal strategy and four days of deadly riots in Miami’s predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood.

To quell the furor, Ms. Reno undertook an outreach effort that restored some support among Miami’s black citizens. She remained state attorney through five election campaigns — until February 1993, when the White House called.

Ms. Reno was formally nominated to be attorney general that same month, just a few weeks after the death of her mother, Jane, the guiding influence in her life. She invoked her mother’s memory in her remarks that day at the White House in a Rose Garden ceremony with Mr. Clinton.

“My mother always told me to do my best,” she said, “to think my best and to do right.”

Janet Reno, First Woman to Serve as U.S. Attorney General, 1938 -2016

Janet Reno was sworn in before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1993, becoming the first woman to hold the position of United States attorney general. CreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press

Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States — the first woman to hold the job — and whose eight years in that office placed her in the middle of some of the most divisive episodes of the Clinton presidency, died on Monday at age 78.

She died at her home in Miami-Dade County, Fla., from complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to her sister, Margaret Hurchalla. The disease was diagnosed in November 1995, while she was still in office.


Ms. Reno’s tenure as attorney general was bracketed by two explosive events: a deadly federal raid on the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Tex., in 1993, and the seizing in 2000 by federal agents of Elián González, a young Cuban refugee who was at the center of an international custody battle and a political tug of war.


In those moments, and others in between, Ms. Reno was applauded for a straightforward integrity and a willingness to accept responsibility, but she was also fiercely criticized. Republicans accused her of protecting President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when, in 1997, she refused to allow an independent counsel to investigate allegations of fund-raising improprieties in the White House.

After leaving office, she mounted a surprise though unsuccessful bid in Florida in 2002 to unseat Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, amid the resentment of Cuban-Americans in South Florida over her negotiating for the return of Elián to Cuba.

Ms. Reno was never part of the Clinton inner circle, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms, longer than any attorney general in the previous 150 years. She was a latecomer to the team, and her political and personal style clashed with the president’s, particularly as she sought to maintain some independence from the White House.

Her relations with the president were further strained by her decision to let an independent inquiry into a failed Clinton land deal in Arkansas, the so-called Whitewater investigation, expand to encompass Mr. Clinton’s sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an episode that led to his impeachment.

Mr. Clinton and his allies thought that Ms. Reno was too quick to refer to special counsels in the Lewinsky matter and other cases of suspect administration behavior. The president let her dangle in the public eye for weeks before announcing in December 1996, after his resounding re-election, that she would remain for his second term.


Bill Clinton named Ms. Reno United States attorney general in 1993. She was never part of the Clinton inner circle, however, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms.CreditRobert Giroux/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Reno was never a natural fit in Washington’s backslapping, highly competitive culture. At weekly news conferences in the barrel-vaulted conference room outside her office in the Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue, she was fond of telling reporters that she would “do the right thing” on legal issues and judge them according to “the law and the facts.”

Imposing at 6-foot-1, awkward in manner and blunt in her probity, she became a regular foil for late-night comics and a running gag on “Saturday Night Live.” But she got the joke, proving it by gamely appearing on the show to lampoon her image.

The comedy could not obscure her law-enforcement accomplishments. Ms. Reno presided over the Justice Department in a time of economic growth, falling crime rates and mounting security threats to the nation by forces both foreign and domestic.

Under Ms. Reno, the agency initiated prosecutions in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century.

The Reno Justice Department also prosecuted spies like the C.I.A. mole Aldrich H. Ames; it filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, a milestone in the new-technology era; and it sued the tobacco industry to reclaim federal health care dollars spent on treating illnesses caused by smoking.

Ms. Reno was a strong advocate of guaranteeing federal protection to women seeking abortions and safeguarding abortion clinics that were under threat.

But in some areas she seemed conflicted about the law. She opposed the death penalty, for example, but repeatedly authorized her prosecutors to ask juries to impose it.

When she took office, she endorsed the use of independent counsels to investigate administration figures. But she later testified against renewing the law governing their use, saying it did nothing to take politics out of the inquiries.

Before becoming attorney general, Ms. Reno was the Dade County state attorney for 14 years, a period when the Miami area was growing rapidly and experiencing rising drug-related crime, widening racial divisions, demoralizing police corruption and waves of immigration from Cuba.


Ms. Reno during a news conference at the Justice Department in 1995.CreditPaul Hosefros/The New York Times

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies.

“I’m just delighted to be here, and I’m going to try my level best,” Ms. Reno said at the Rose Garden ceremony at which Mr. Clinton announced her nomination on Feb. 11, 1993.

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children.

Ms. Reno’s candor was viewed as refreshing in a city where blame-shifting is the norm, and it gave her sudden celebrity status in the new administration.

The luster faded quickly. Within weeks, Ms. Reno faced tough questions about the raid and her claim that children were being abused at the compound. She was also faulted for failing to influence an important crime bill. By the end of her first year in office, she was facing mounting scrutiny in the news media.

With Mr. Clinton’s re-election and his decision to keep Ms. Reno at her post, Republicans began questioning her independence when she resisted their calls for a special counsel to look into allegations that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore had broken campaign fund-raising laws in 1996.

The clamor, led by the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, grew when it was disclosed that Louis J. Freeh, the head of the F.B.I., who had had a tortured relationship with Ms. Reno, also favored a special counsel.

Ms. Reno would not budge, saying her stance had nothing to do with protecting the president. A review of the evidence, she said, convinced her that a special counsel was not warranted.


Ms. Reno testified in Washington in 2004 before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.CreditDennis Cook/Associated Press

“Let me be absolutely clear,” Ms. Reno told hostile Republican questioners during one of several hearings on Capitol Hill about the call for a special counsel. “I’m not going to violate my oath in this matter because of pressure from any quarter, not from the media, not from Congress, nor from anywhere else.”

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound.

The revelation further soured her dealings with Mr. Freeh, with whom she had been close early in her tenure, but he let it be known that he favored a special counsel in the fund-raising case and a new inquiry into Waco. She sent marshals to F.B.I. headquarters to seize a tape of communications made the day of the assault.

Her final and perhaps most personal crisis as head of the Justice Department was the case involving Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat.

The boy became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint. Congressional Republicans and many Cuban exiles were outraged. Some in Miami said Ms. Reno would be in danger if she returned there after her service in Washington.

Early in 2001, however, she did go home, her service finished. She said she was excited about a red pickup truck she had bought.

Janet Reno was born in Miami, on the edge of the Everglades, on July 21, 1938, to Henry Olaf Reno and the former Jane Wood. Her father, born Henry Rasmussen in Denmark, came to the United States in 1913 with his own mother and father, who chose the name Reno off a map, believing it sounded more American.

Ms. Reno during a taping of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” in Burbank, Calif., in 2002.CreditRic Francis/Associated Press

Henry Reno was a police reporter in Dade County for more than 40 years. Jane Wood, born in Georgia, was an eccentric naturalist who would have a profound effect on Ms. Reno.

“Outspoken, outrageous, absolutely indifferent to others’ opinions, Janet Reno was truly one of a kind,” Paul Anderson, a former Miami Herald reporter, wrote in his biography of her. It was her mother who had wrestled small alligators, though the stunt was sometimes erroneously ascribed to the attorney general.

Ms. Reno, the eldest of four siblings, was about eight when her parents bought 21 acres bordering the Everglades and moved there. Her mother, who had no construction experience, built the family home. “She dug the foundation with her own hands, with a pick and shovel,” Ms. Reno told senators at her confirmation hearing in 1993.

It was a rustic life; peacocks and other creatures roamed the property, and Janet and her siblings — Robert, Mark and Margaret — cavorted barefoot. But she also glimpsed a more sophisticated world: After junior high school, she traveled to Europe to stay with an uncle, a military judge, as he presided over a spy trial.

Her sister, Ms. Hurchalla, who is known as Maggy, survives her, as do seven nieces and nephews. Her brother Robert, a former columnist for Newsday on Long Island, died in 2012 at 72. Her brother Mark had an adventurer’s life: game warden, boat and oil supply ship captain, alligator wrestler, scuba diver, paratrooper as well as carpenter and bailiff at the Miami-Dade Justice Building. He died in 2014.

After finishing high school in Miami, Ms. Reno attended Cornell University, graduating in 1960 with a degree in chemistry. She won admission to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1963, one of a handful of women in her class of more than 500.

Seeking to practice law in South Florida, Ms. Reno was turned down by one of the state’s best known law firms, Steel, Hector & Davis, and went to work for a smaller firm instead. She became active in local Democratic politics and met a fellow Harvard graduate, Gerald Lewis, a lawyer with electoral aspirations. Ms. Reno helped him win a state House seat in 1966, and the two opened a general practice law firm together.

Ms. Reno entered government service in 1971 as general counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives, where she worked on a difficult overhaul of Florida’s courts. Her work in Tallahassee, the capital, whetted her appetite for public office, and she campaigned for a state legislative seat of her own the next year. She lost in an upset to a Republican candidate helped by the landslide re-election victory of President Richard M. Nixon.

Ms. Reno did not wait long for her next opportunity. The day after her defeat, Richard Gerstein, the state attorney for Dade County, offered her a job on his staff. As she told The Miami Herald, she expressed reservations in her characteristically straightforward manner.


Ms. Reno in her office in 1998. Under her leadership, the agency launched prosecutions in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century.CreditSusan Walsh/Associated Press

“My father was always convinced you were a crook,” she said she told Mr. Gerstein. “And I’ve always been a critic of yours.”

Mr. Gerstein replied that those were the reasons he wanted to hire her. Within a few years, she was Mr. Gerstein’s chief assistant.

Ms. Reno left the prosecutor’s office in May 1976 to join Steel, Hector & Davis, the firm that had rejected her out of law school. But her tenure there was short-lived.

After Mr. Gerstein announced that he would resign in early 1978, after 21 years in the office, Gov. Reubin Askew appointed her interim state attorney, choosing her from about 50 candidates. She was the first woman to hold the title of state attorney in Florida and one of the few in the nation’s history to be responsible for such a large jurisdiction.

Ms. Reno retained the post through a thicket of drug, murder and corruption cases. In one, she was accused of being anti-police when she prosecuted five Miami officers in the beating death of a black insurance executive after a traffic stop; the officers, she said, had tried to make it look like an accident.

The officers were acquitted — one by the presiding judge in the trial, held in Tampa, and the others by an all-white jury — provoking criticism of her legal strategy and four days of deadly riots in Miami’s predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood.

To quell the furor, Ms. Reno undertook an outreach effort that restored some support among Miami’s black citizens. She remained state attorney through five election campaigns — until February 1993, when the White House called.

Ms. Reno was formally nominated to be attorney general that same month, just a few weeks after the death of her mother, Jane, the guiding influence in her life. She invoked her mother’s memory in her remarks that day at the White House in a Rose Garden ceremony with Mr. Clinton.

“My mother always told me to do my best,” she said, “to think my best and to do right.”

Clinton Foundation - the Facts not the Fiction

Clinton Foundation

Founded	1997; 19 years ago[1] 2001 (as William J. Clinton Foundation)[2] 2013 (as Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation)
Founder	Bill Clinton, former President of the United States
Purpose	Humanitarian
Location	New York City
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Bill Clinton (2001–present) Hillary Clinton (2013–15) Chelsea Clinton (2011–present) Donna Shalala (president, 2015–present) Eric Braverman (president, 2013–2015) Bruce Lindsey (president, 2004–2011) Ira Magaziner (head of Clinton Health Access Initiative) Doug Band (originator of Clinton Global Initiative)
Revenue	$214 million in 2012; $262 million in 2013 $223 million in 2015
Employees	350 in 2013 2,000 in 2015
Mission	"To bring people together to take on the biggest challenges of the 21st century"
Website	www.clintonfoundation.org

History

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton

The origins of the foundation go back to 1997, when then president Bill Clinton was focused mostly on fundraising for the future Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Bill Clinton founded the William J. Clinton Foundation in 2001 following the completion of his presidency Longtime Clinton advisor, Bruce Lindsey, became the CEO in 2004 Later, Lindsey moved from being CEO to being chair, largely for health reasons. Other Clinton hands who played an important early role included Doug Band, and Ira Magaziner. Additional Clinton associates who have had senior positions at the foundation include John Podesta and Laura Graham.

Most of the foundation's successes came from Bill Clinton's worldwide fame and his ability to bring together corporate executives, celebrities, and government officials. Similarly, the foundation areas of involvement have often corresponded to whatever Bill Clinton suddenly felt an interest in.

Preceding Barack Obama's 2009 nomination of Hillary Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State, Bill Clinton agreed to accept a number of conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the Clinton Presidential Center and the Clinton Global Initiative. Accordingly, a list of donors was released in December 2008.By 2011, Chelsea Clinton was taking a dominant role in the foundation and had a seat on its board.To raise money for the Foundation, she gave paid speeches, such as her $65,000 2014 address at the University of Missouri in Kansas City for the opening of the Starr Women's Hall of Fame. Neither Chelsea Clinton, or her parents Bill and Hillary Clinton have ever  been paid anything from their foundation.The Clinton Foundation has released audit financials for every year of its existence including major donors . The two largest auditing firms in the world Deloitte Touche and PWC ( Price Waterhouse Cooper) jointly audit the Clinton Foundation and all of its projects and initiatives.

In 2013, Hillary Clinton joined the foundation following her tenure as Secretary of State. She planned to focus her work on issues regarding women and children, as well as economic development. Accordingly, at that point, it was renamed the "Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation". Extra attention was paid to the foundation due to the United States presidential election, 2016.

In July 2013, Eric Braverman was named CEO of the foundation. He is a friend and former colleague of Chelsea Clinton from McKinsey & Company. At the same time, Chelsea Clinton was named vice chair of the foundation's board. The foundation was also in the midst of a move to two floors of the Time-Life Building in Midtown Manhattan.

Chelsea Clinton moved the organization to an outside review, conducted by the firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Its conclusions were made public in mid-2013. The main focus was to determine how the foundation could achieve firm financial footing that was not dependent upon the former president's fundraising abilities, how it could operate more like a permanent entity rather than a start-up organization, and thus how it could survive and prosper beyond Bill Clinton's lifetime. Dennis Cheng, a former Hillary Clinton campaign official and State Department deputy chief, was named to oversee a $250 million endowment drive. The review also found the management and structure of the foundation needed improvements, including an increase in the size of its board of directors that would have a more direct involvement in planning and budget activities. Additionally, the review said that all employees needed to understand the foundation's conflict of interest policies and that expense reports needed a more formal review process.

In January 2015, Braverman announced his resignation. Politico attributed the move to being "partly from a power struggle inside the foundation between and among the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades and who helped start and run the foundation."^[ He was succeeded at first in an acting capacity by former deputy assistant secretary, Maura Pally.

On February 18, 2015, The Washington Post reported that, "the foundation has won accolades from philanthropy experts and has drawn bipartisan support, with members of the George W. Bush administration often participating in its programs."

In March 2015, former Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration, Donna Shalala, was selected to run the Clinton Foundation going forward.^[

In August 2016 The Boston Globe's editorial board suggested that the Clinton Foundation cease accepting donations. The Globe's editorial board offered praise for the foundation's work but added that "as long as either of the Clintons are in public office, or actively seeking it, they should not operate a charity, too" because it represents a conflict of interest and a political distraction.

In 2016, the Reuters wire news service reported that the Clinton Foundation suspected that it had been the target of a cyber security breach. As a consequence of the suspected cyber security breach, Clinton Foundations officials retained a security firm to evaluate its data systems. The cyber security breach has been described as sharing similarities with cyberattacks that targeted other institutions, such as the Democratic National Committee.

Programs and Initiatives

Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)

As of January 1, 2010, the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, became a separate nonprofit organization called the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI).  Organizations such as the Clinton Foundation continue to supply anti-malarial drugs to Africa and other affected areas; according to director Inder Singh, in 2011 more than 12 million individuals will be supplied with subsidized anti-malarial drugs.

CHAI launched the Pediatric and Rural Initiatives in 2005 to focus on bringing AIDS care and treatment to those most often marginalized— children and those living in rural areas. CHAI also negotiated agreements that reduce the prices of second-line drugs and rapid diagnostic tests. In May 2007, CHAI and UNITAID announced agreements that help middle-income and low-income countries save money on second-line drugs. The partnership also reduced the price of a once-daily first-line treatment to less than $1 per day.

In addition to drug access programs, CHAI also focuses on country operations, with programs that help governments with pediatric care and treatment, improving rural health care and human resources for health and the prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT). In 2008, approximately 185,000 children benefited from increased access to infant diagnosis aided by the training of 8,500 health care workers who offered pediatric antiretroviral treatment (ART). 2008 also saw six PMTCT country programs launched which ensured that every HIV-positive pregnant woman in the program catchment area was provided with prevention, care and treatment services including counseling, testing and feeding recommendations.

In the Summer of 2008, CHAI's Executive Vice President, Inder Singh, announced the closing of cost-reduction agreements with several suppliers of malaria medication, which will be extended to CHAI partners as part of its care and treatment program.

The Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative's work on the ground has been subject of some criticism. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote that governments and organizations in Africa and Asia that partnered with the Foundation expressed caution and alarm at the Foundation's focus on treating a large number of patients with less regard for the importance of adherence, follow-up and quality of care.

CHAI was spun off into a separate organization in 2010; Ira Magaziner became its CEO (he had been a key figure in the Clinton health care plan of 1993).Chelsea Clinton joined its board in 2011, as did Tachi Yamada, former President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Clinton Global Initiative (CGI)

The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was founded in 2005 by President Bill Clinton. Doug Band, who was a key architect of Clinton's post-presidency, was heavily involved in the formation as well. Clinton has credited Band with being the originator of CGI and has noted that "Doug had the idea to do this." Band left his paid position at CGI in 2010, preferring to emphasize his Teneo business and family pursuits, but remains on the CGI advisory board. The overlap between CGI and Teneo, which Bill Clinton was a paid advisor with for a while, has drawn criticism at times.

President of Brazil Dilma Rousseffopens Clinton Global Initiative Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, 2013

CGI meetings also include CGI University, an annual conference for college students, and CGI America, an annual event focused on finding solutions that promote economic recovery in the United States. In December 2013, CGI hosted its first CGI Latin America meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

One of its major donors is Norway's government—20 million Norwegian kroner per year as of 2013.

CGI University

In 2007, President Clinton launched CGI U, which expanded the model of CGI to students, universities, and national youth organizations. CGI U includes two days of plenary sessions and hands-on breakout sessions, followed by a day-long service project.

The CGI University inaugural meeting was held in March 2008 at Tulane University in New Orleans and had more than 600 attendees. In 2009, the meeting was held at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, in 2011 at the University of California, San Diego and in 2012, at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. ^[. 2012 panelists included Jon Stewart, Madeleine Albright, and Vandana Shiva.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton with Alonzo Mourning during CGI University Day of Service in Miami, Florida.

Washington University in St. Louis hosted CGI U in early April 2013. The event featured Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Stephen Colbert, Jack Dorsey, Salman Khan, and many others.The seventh annual CGI U conference was held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, which included speakers such as Mayor Greg Stanton and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The University of Miami hosted the 2015 CGI U conference, which featured notable individuals such as Shane Battier. In 2016, the University of California, Berkeley hosted the ninth annual CGI U conference, which featured over 1200 student participants and notable guests such as Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy) and U.S. Rep. John Lewis.^[

Clinton Global Citizen Awards

The Clinton Global Citizen Awards are a set of awards which have been given by the Clinton Global Initiative every year since 2007. The awards are given to individuals who, in the opinion of the Clinton Foundation, are "outstanding individuals who exemplify global citizenship through their vision and leadership". Past recipients of the award include Mexican business magnate and philanthropist Carlos Slim.Irish billionaire Denis O'Brien,Moroccan entrepreneur Mohammad Abbad Andaloussi, Rwandan President Paul Kagame,Afghan women's rights activist Suraya Pakzad, Dominican Republic PresidentLeonel Fernández,^[ and Pakistani labour rights activist Syeda Ghulam Fatima.

Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI)

President Clinton started a program to fight climate change, the Clinton Foundation's Climate Initiative (CCI) in August 2006.

On August 1, 2006, the Foundation entered into a partnership with the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, agreeing to provide resources to allow the participating cities to enter into an energy-saving product purchasing consortium and to provide technical and communications support.

In May 2007, CCI announced its first project which will help some large cities cut greenhouse gas emissions by facilitating retrofitting of existing buildings. Five large banks committed $1 billion each to help cities and building owners make energy-saving improvements aimed at lowering energy use and energy costs.

At the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, President Clinton announced the 1Sky campaign to accelerate bold federal policy on global warming. The 1Sky campaign supports at least an 80% reduction in climate pollution levels by 2050.

On May 19, 2009, CCI announced the global Climate Positive Development Program where it will work with the U.S. Green Building Council to promote "climate positive" city growth.

Clinton Development Initiative (CDI)

The Clinton Development Initiative, originally the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative, was formed in 2006 as a partnership between Scottish philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter's Hunter Foundation and former President Bill Clinton's Clinton Foundation to target the root causes of poverty in Africa and promote sustainable economic growth.

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation is a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association that is working to end the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States by 2010.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which provided an initial $8 million to start the Healthy Schools Program, awarded a $20 million grant to expand the program to over 8,000 schools in states with the highest obesity rates.

At the industry level, the Alliance struck agreements with major food and beverage manufacturers to provide kids with nutritional options, and established nutrition guidelines for school vending machines, stores and cafeterias to promote healthy eating. Some of the companies involved in these efforts are Coca-Cola, Cadbury plc, Campbell Soup Company, Groupe Danone, Kraft Foods, Mars and PepsiCo.

Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative

President Clinton established the Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative to help individuals and families succeed and business grow. The Foundation's domestic efforts began in 2002 with the Harlem Small Business Initiative, which provided local business with pro bono consulting services. In 2007, CEO initiated the Financial Mainstream Program, which increases the access of unbanked populations to starter bank accounts and the Entrepreneur Mentoring Program, which pairs inner city entrepreneurs with successful business mentors. These new initiatives broadened CEO's focus by promoting financial stability and money management skills and helping to develop sound business knowledge. As part of the Harlem Small Business Initiative, in August 2009 the foundation released a Harlem guide with Zagat Survey highlighting hundreds of local businesses in an effort to promote them to a wider audience and to attract additional economic development.International Initiatives:

Significant along the path to economic opportunity is also the countdown towards Brazil's involvement in the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto.

Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative

Frank Giustra is a Canadian business executive sitting on the board of the Clinton Foundation. Launched in 2007, CGSGI describes itself as working with local communities, the private sector, governments and other non-governmental organizations to develop models for businesses to spur social and economic development as part of their operations in the developing world. CGSGI says it is focusing on market-driven development that creates jobs and increases incomes, and on enabling factors such as health and education.

CGSGI says it will focus on Latin America in its early phases, and anticipates expanding its work to additional countries to Latin America, Africa and beyond.

CGSGI says it has engaged in social and economic improvement including projects in health, education and business entrepreneurship and development. In 2008, CGSGI described itself as working to deliver health care and job training to people in rural areas.

Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI)

In November 2012, Bill Clinton announced the launch of the Clinton Health Matters Initiative (CHMI). CHMI is a national initiative, building on the Clinton Foundation's work on global health and childhood obesity, that works to improve the health and well-being of people across the United States by activating individuals, communities, and organizations to make meaningful contributions to the health of others. CHMI holds an annual Health Matters conference every January in the Coachella Valley. 

Disaster relief

The Foundation has funded extensive disaster relief programs following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, President George W. Bush asked former Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to raise funds to help rebuild the Gulf Coast region. The two Presidents, having worked together to assist victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, established the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to identify and meet the unmet needs in the region, foster economic opportunity, and to improve the quality of life of those affected.In the first month after the hurricane, the Fund collected over 42,000 online donations alone; approximately $128.4 million has been received to date from all 50 states and $30.9 million from foreign countries. The foundation was again involved following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

No Ceilings project[

In 2013, Hillary Clinton launched a partnership between the foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to gather and study data on the progress of women and girls around the world since the United Nations Fourth World Conference On Women in Beijing in 1995. This is called "No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project." The Project released a report in March 2015.

Transparency

Around 2007, the Clinton Foundation was criticized for a lack of transparency. Although U.S. law did not require nonprofit charities — including presidential foundations — to disclose the identities of their contributors, critics said that the names of donors should be disclosed because Hillary Clinton was running to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that the Clintons should make public the names of foundation donors to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

A lengthy donors list was then released by the Foundation in December 2008^, which included several politically sensitive donors, such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Blackwater Worldwide. The Foundation stated that the disclosures would ensure that "not even the appearance of a conflict of interest" would exist once Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

The ethics agreement between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation that was put into force at the beginning of the Secretary of State Clinton's tenure came under scrutiny from the news media during February 2015. A Wall Street Journal report found that the Clinton Foundation had resumed accepting donations from foreign governments once Secretary Clinton's tenure had ended. Contributions from foreign donors who are prohibited by law from contributing to political candidates in the U.S. constitute a major portion of the foundation's income. The foundation's chief communications officer Craig Minassian explained that it is a "false choice to suggest that people who may be interested in supporting political causes wouldn’t also support philanthropic work." A Washington Post inquiry into donations by foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation during the secretary's tenure found six cases where such governments continued making donations at the same level they had before Clinton became secretary, which was permissible under the agreement, but also one instance of a new donation, $500,000 from Algeria for earthquake relief in Haiti, that was outside the bounds of the continuation provision and should have received a special ethics review, but did not. Foundation officials said that if the former secretary decided to run for president in 2016, they would again consider what steps to take in reference to foreign donations. But in general, they stressed that, "As with other global charities, we rely on the support of individuals, organizations, corporations and governments who have the shared goal of addressing critical global challenges in a meaningful way. When anyone contributes to the Clinton Foundation, it goes towards foundation programs that help save lives." State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki attested that the foundation's commitment to the ethics agreement in question "has been over and above the letter of the law". August 2016, with less than 90 days before the upcoming presidential election, the Clinton Foundation announced that it will stop accepting foreign donations if Clinton is elected.

In March 2015, Reuters reported that the Clinton Foundation had broken its promise to publish all of its donors, as well as its promise to let the State Department review all of its donations from foreign governments. In April 2015, the New York Times reported that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the State Department had approved a deal to sell American uranium to a Russian state-owned enterprise Uranium One whose chairman had donated to the Clinton Foundation, and that Clinton had broken her promise to publicly identify such donations. The State Department "was one of nine government agencies, not to mention independent federal and state nuclear regulators, that had to sign off on the deal." FactCheck.org notes that there is "no evidence" that the donations influenced Clinton’s official actions or that she was involved in the State Department's decision to approve the deal, and PolitiFact concluded that any "suggestion of a quid pro quo is unsubstantiated."

After her January 2009 appointment as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton proposed hiring long-time Clinton friend and confidant Sidney Blumenthal as an advisor, however, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked Blumenthal's appointment at the State Department.Blumenthal was subsequently hired by the Clinton Foundation and after the 2011 uprising in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi, Blumenthal prepared, from public and other sources, about 25 memos which he sent as emails to Clinton in 2011 and 2012 with advice regarding Libyan matters.

2015 State Department Subpoena

In February 2016, The Washington Post reported that the United States Department of State issued a subpoena to the foundation in fall of 2015. According to the report, the subpoena focused on "documents about the charity's projects that may have required approval from federal government during Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of state" and "also asked for records related to Huma Abedin, longtime Clinton aide who for six months in 2012 was employed simultaneously by the State Department, the foundation, Clinton's personal office, and a private consulting firm with ties to the Clintons."

Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair, Clinton Foundation

Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation, works to drive the vision and programmatic work of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Over the past 15 years, the Clinton Foundation has convened businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for girls and women, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change. As only a few examples, because of the Clinton Foundation’s work, more than 31,000 American schools are providing kids with healthy food choices in an effort to eradicate childhood obesity; more than 105,000 farmers in Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania are benefiting from climate-smart agronomic training, higher yields, and increased market access; over 450,000 people have been impacted through market opportunities created by social enterprises in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia; an estimated 85 million people in the U.S. will be reached through strategic health partnerships developed across industry sectors at both the local and national level; and through the independent Clinton Health Access Initiative, over 11.5 million people in more than 70 countries have access to CHAI-negotiated prices for HIV/AIDS medications.

As Vice Chair of the Foundation, Chelsea is a tireless advocate for the work of the Foundation. She works alongside Foundation leadership toward a shared goal of making the Clinton Foundation one of the most effective and efficient global NGOs in the world. She works in-depth across a number of the Foundation’s programmatic areas including: No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project working to advance the full participation of women and girls; the Clinton Global Initiative University, a program focused on empowering the next generation of change-makers; the Clinton Foundation’s Day of Action program which she founded; the Foundation’s various health programs and the conservation of Africa’s Elephants through the Clinton Global Initiative.

Chelsea currently teaches at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and previously worked at McKinsey & Company and Avenue Capital. Chelsea also serves on the boards of the Clinton Foundation’s affiliated Clinton Health Access Initiative, the School of American Ballet, the Africa Center and the Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Of Many Institute at NYU. Chelsea holds a B.A. from Stanford, an MPH from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and both an MPhil and a Doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University. Chelsea is the author of It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going, a book for young readers ages 10-14 which explores some of the biggest challenges facing our world today, particularly impacting kids and shares inspiring stories of young people who are already making a difference in their own communities and around the globe.

She lives with her husband Marc, their daughter Charlotte, and their son Aidan in New York City.