Levi Looks Back At Justice

When University of Chicago President Edward Levi became U.S. Attorney General two years ago, he found the Justice Department battered and demoralized by the storms of Watergate. Now, as he prepares to return to Chicago, he can look back over some significant changes. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Don Sider, he assesses some of those changes:

ON PARTISANSHIP. The Department had been wounded. There was a suspicion both outside and inside that it might be expected to be a partisan arm of the Executive Branch. The purpose of my appointment and my taking the job was to show that that was not to be true, that the department could operate in a highly professional, nonpartisan way. Every action I took, so far as I could tell, was toward that point. Parts of the department had been set up so they reacted to calls from the White House, and this made the department vulnerable to manipulation. The department is much more one department now, and the White House speaks with me.

ON REFORMING THE FBI. When we started the guidelines for the FBI,* I really did think that it might be about a six-month job. But it is not. They are not finished. But the very fact that some of them are now in place and that they have made a considerable change in the operations of the bureau, I regard as very important. I assume they will be perfected and that there will be legislation. The whole point of the guidelines is that various decisions have to come over at a high level in the department for checking so that the department really does know what is going on. I had heard prior Attorneys General tell me they knew everything that was going on in the bureau. I am quite sure they did not. I am sure I don't either, by the way.

I think part of the bureau was realizing that the days of J. Edgar Hoover were not with us today, and was divided between those who thought that was a good thing and those who thought that was terrible. I think the bureau was very uneasy about its relationship to the Department of Justice and probably had considerable suspicion about its intentions. I think Mr. Kelley understands his problems and has been trying to give the bureau a new kind of leadership that is not the authoritarian leadership that Hoover gave.

ON CIVIL LIBERTIES. An Attorney General has to stand up against other parts of the Government, which will not have the same interest in civil liberties or the law. I feel very uneasy looking at past history and thinking of the pressures that I know exist--and what the future will be like--unless we can get some legislation. There ought to be legislation on electronic surveillance. We have spent an enormous amount of time in the department trying to provide proper safeguards for electronic surveillance, and I think we have. I am not satisfied to say that civil liberty is just a matter of prosecutorial discretion. The problems of granting immunity and of plea bargaining are very serious issues and are, in a sense, defacing the law. We ought to have more articulate rules.

ON REASONING. The law has to encourage a kind of reasoning together. That is going to be hard for some people who don't regard the law as a reasoning device. They say use it as a weapon and go as far as you can. The danger is that you lose the case or get something established that you can't live with or, more likely, something so ambiguous that it leads to all kinds of problems.

I came to Washington to try to show a commitment to the administration of justice. That is how the President got me. I would like to be remembered as one who, in a transition period, helped the President in his effort to restore faith in the operations of Government and particularly in the administration of justice. Some days I think, "By God, I have succeeded." Other days I think I certainly didn't.

* Strict standards, some still classified, banning illegal activities in FBI investigations and giving the Attorney General more control over the bureau.

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