Gonzales and wife (his second) at swearing-in with Justice O'Connor.
Alberto R. Gonzales (born August 4, 1955) is the 80th and current Attorney General of the United States, becoming the first Hispanic to serve in the position. He formerly served under U.S. President George W. Bush as White House Counsel, and prior to that had been appointed by Bush to the Texas Supreme Court.
Personal background
Gonzales was born in San Antonio, Texas and raised in Houston. He was the second of eight children born to Pablo and Maria Gonzales. His father, who died in 1982, was a construction worker. Both his parents were children of immigrants from Mexico with less than a high-school education themselves; in the midst of a national debate in the US about immigration from Mexico, Gonzales told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that no immigration documentation exists for three of his grandparents and they may have entered and resided in the United States illegally. An honors student at MacArthur High School in Houston, Gonzales enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1973, serving for two years at Fort Yukon, Alaska before being accepted to the United States Air Force Academy in 1975. In 1977, he transferred to Rice University, where he was a member of Lovett College and earned a degree in political science in 1979; he then earned a Juris Doctor (J.D) degree from Harvard Law School in 1982. He was the only one of his siblings to finish college. He has been married twice: he and his first wife, Diane Clemens, divorced in 1985; he and his second wife, Rebecca Turner Gonzales, have three sons.
Despite keeping a low profile about his religious affiliation, Gonzales has described himself as a Catholic.
Texas career
Gonzales was an attorney in private practice from 1982 until 1994 with the Houston law firm Vinson and Elkins, where he became a partner. In 1994, he was named general counsel to then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, rising to become Texas Secretary of State in 1997 and finally to be named to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999, both appointments made by Governor Bush.
Outside of his political and legal career, Gonzales was active in the community. He was a board director of the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast from 1993 to 1994, and President of Leadership Houston during this same period. In 1994, Gonzales served as Chair of the Commission for District Decentralization of the Houston Independent School District, and as a member of the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions for Rice University. He was chosen as one of Five Outstanding Young Texans by the Texas Jaycees in 1994. He was a member of delegations sent by the American Council of Young Political Leaders to Mexico in 1996 and to the People's Republic of China in 1995. He received the Presidential Citation from the State Bar of Texas in 1997 for his dedication to addressing basic legal needs of the indigent. In 1999, he was named Latino Lawyer of the Year by the Hispanic National Bar Association.
As counsel to Governor Bush, Gonzales helped Bush be excused from jury duty when he was called in a 1996 Travis County drunk driving case. The case led to controversy during Bush's 2000 presidential campaign because Bush's answers to the potential juror questionnaire did not disclose Bush's own 1976 misdemeanor drunk driving conviction.[1] Gonzales' formal request for Bush to be excused from jury duty hinged upon the fact that, as Governor of Texas, he might be called upon to pardon the accused in the case. Upon learning of the 1976 conviction, the prosecutor in the 1996 case (a Democrat) felt he had been "directly deceived". The defense attorney in the case called Gonzales' arguments "laughable".[2].
As Governor Bush's counsel in Texas, Gonzales also reviewed all clemency requests. A 2003 article in The Atlantic Monthly asserts that Gonzales gave insufficient counsel, failed to take into consideration a wide array of factors, and actively worked against clemency in a number of borderline cases. (The state of Texas executed more prisoners during Gonzales' term, and still has more prisoners on death row, than any other state.)[3] [4]
Legal problems
Gonzales has been accused of having connections with the former energy company Enron, which collapsed amid financial scandals in 2002; the law firm Gonzales worked for in Texas, Vinson and Elkins, represented Enron, and the company gave Gonzales $6,500 in campaign contributions for his 2000 run for re-election to the Texas Supreme Court, in which he defeated Libertarian Lance Smith with 81% of the popular vote.
Those and other incidents have led many to questions Gonzales' integrity and his perception of justice. Many others, however, regard these accusations as politically motivated attacks.
When Bush was sworn in as President of the United States in 2001, he appointed Gonzales White House Counsel. In this position, Gonzales has been already party to controversial legal matters involving the Bush administration. As a result, he has become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's actions in these affairs.
It has come forward that during his January 2005 Attorney General Senate confirmation hearings, Gonzales apparently lied to Congress. Senator Russ Feingold, in attempting to determine where Gonzales believed the president's authority ends, asked whether the president could act in contravention of existing criminal laws and spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant. Gonzales avoided answering the question by claiming that warrantless eavesdropping was a "hypothetical situation" and thus impossible to answer. He went on to add that it was "not the policy or the agenda of this president" to authorize actions that conflict with existing law. These statements were later proven false, when on February 6, 2006, he testified before Congress to his knowledge of the U.S. domestic spying program while he was White House Counsel.
Gonzales has avoided further investigation surrounding his testimony, partly because Republican Senator Arlen Specter refused to swear in Gonzales, but also because confirmation hearings testimony was ruled as off limits as a precondition to questioning Gonzales.
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