OH, the Places He Went (Gonzales) James Moore

[Demeter]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/oh-the-places-he-went_b_61978.html



"We grow small trying to be great."

- Eli Stanley Jones



...There was no reason not to expect Gonzales to soar. His humble background began in Humble, Texas, where he was raised in a home of less than a thousand square feet with a half dozen siblings. Eventually, he graduated from Harvard Law School and became a partner with Vinson and Elkins, one of Texas' most prestigious law firms. And that's where Karl rove found him.

It's impossible to know if there was something broken inside Gonzales from the beginning or if the amorality of the people who surrounded him in the Bush circle somehow darkened his bright American rise. All of his teachers at Rice University said he was a fine student and he had also served his country in the Air Force before turning to higher education. But when he joined the Bush team and became general counsel to the then governor of Texas, the moral arc of Alberto Gonzales' narrative began bending away from justice...But he must have wanted success so badly that he was willing to do whatever was needed to help Bush, regardless of whether it was right or wrong.

He first surfaced in a public way when he asked a Travis County judge in Austin to dismiss Mr. Bush from jury duty on a drunk driving case. The Texas governor had left out information on his juror questionnaire about his own arrest for DUI. Gonzales argued with the judge that Bush ought to be dismissed because there was a chance of a conflict if the governor were to be asked to pardon the person who might be convicted in the case. Of course, there is no record of any such thing ever happening in the history of the Texas Republic, DUI pardons don't make it to the governor's desk. But the legal ploy worked. Bush was taken out of the jury pool and his personal DUI secret went undisclosed until the final days of his first presidential campaign. It is not torturing the facts to suggest he might have never made it to the White House if Gonzales had not effectively kept the DUI information from the public.

Gonzales became the Texas Secretary of State by Bush appointment, usually an anteroom to a higher political profile, and then was put on the State Supreme Court, eventually winning election to the seat in 2000, which completed the elimination of all Democrats from statewide office in Texas. But his greatest reward for serving Bush and Rove did not come until he was named US Attorney General and became the highest ranking Hispanic to ever serve in the federal government.

POSTMORTEM ON A POLITICAL TOOL