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As President Obama ponders whom he will nominate as Eric Holder’s successor as attorney general, he should consider President Ford’s appointment in 1975 of Edward Levi to head the nation’s Department of Justice.

Four decades ago, the United States was reeling from Watergate. President Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell, was on his way to federal prison while Ford’s pardon of Nixon remained controversial.

In this difficult environment, President Ford reached outside his official and personal circles to appoint as attorney general a preeminent legal scholar, Edward Levi.

Levi was a distinguished law professor, an accomplished dean of the University of Chicago Law School, and the widely-admired president of the University of Chicago. In a contentious political setting, Edward Levi was confirmed as attorney general by a voice vote in the United States Senate. Everyone understood that Ford had gone beyond politics as usual to choose an outstanding attorney general capable of restoring confidence in the Department of the Justice.

Ed Levi didn’t need the job. But the United States needed Ed Levi.

Levi’s tenure as attorney general did not disappoint. When Levi left the Justice Department at the end of the Ford Administration, the department’s reputation had been restored in large measure because of Levi’s integrity, professionalism, and independence.

President Obama should strive for an Ed Levi-type appointee for his second attorney general.

Many fine individuals are being mentioned to replace Holder. Most of these individuals are excellent lawyers and, under other circumstances, would be good leaders for the Department of Justice. But the United States today, like the United States in 1975, requires more than a good lawyer as attorney general. It requires someone with Ed Levi’s gravitas.

Some might retort that nothing comparable to Watergate has transpired in recent years. True. But we are a nation badly fractured on political lines. Legitimate concerns have been raised about the recent performance of the Department of Justice. In this difficult atmosphere, it is vital to reaffirm that the Department of Justice is an institution of law, not just another hyper-partisan political arena.

Like President Ford, President Obama should look beyond his official family and his circle of acquaintances to find an attorney general whose prime credentials are professional, not political. Holder’s replacement should be perceived as an independent attorney general who doesn’t need the job.

This heavyweight appointee could, like Ed Levi, come from academia or could come from the private sector. Another potential source for such an attorney general is the judiciary. Among those meeting the Ed Levi-test would be such personages as Justice Sandra O’Connor and Judges Richard Posner, Jon Newman and Jose Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

President Ford’s historical reputation improves with each passing year. His pardon of Richard Nixon, widely condemned at the time, is now seen as an act of statesmanship which helped to move the United States beyond Watergate. Ford’s appointment of Edward Levi as attorney general was similarly an act of high statesmanship which reaffirmed America’s commitment to the rule of law. President Obama should make a comparably outstanding appointment for his second attorney general.

The post Mr. President: Nominate Another Ed Levi as Attorney General appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at “swine flue”. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

“Swine flu” or a strand of influenza A subtype “H1N1?” Try as federal officials might, the media continues to resist their call to term the “swine flu” the new strain of “H1N1″ virus.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was at pains to say, “This really isn’t swine [flu], it’s H1N1 virus.” He also explained why: “and it is significant because there are a lot of hard-working families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message.” (At least ten countries have placed bans on the import of pork even though the World Health Organization has attested that H1N1 is an air-borne and not a food-borne virus.)

The hegemony of “swine flu” over “H1N1″ is even more peculiar given that the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) reports that the particular strand of H1N1 virus (which typically infect pigs) that is causing the current epidemic has not previously been reported in pigs and actually contains avian and human components. It was only on May 2, long after “swine flu” had gained rhetorical currency that the strain was found in pigs at a farm in Alberta, Canada. Even there the story has a twist - the pigs had gotten infected because of their contact with a farm worker who had recently returned from Mexico, and not the other way around - prompting some to suggest that the proper nomenclature ought to be “human flu” or “Mexican flu.”

But the media’s job is to transmit the news in the best way that rolls of one’s tongue, not deal with the fallout of their infelicitous use of words. To be fair, administration officials were slow to catch on. As late as April 26, two days before Vilsack’s press conference, the White House and Richard Besser of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were still referring to the “swine flu.” Clearly, the pork lobbyists aren’t going to win this battle and the malapropistic epidemic will continue. Administration officials should know that if they really wanted a working alternative to “swine flu,” they would have to do a lot better than a robotic scientific abbreviation.

Our current malapropism has an ancient pedigree. The 1918-1920 H1N1 pandemic called the “Spanish Flu” didn’t start in Spain (and probably started in Kansas). This is ironic, because the “Spanish Flu” acquired its name only because Spain was a neutral country in WW1 and with no state censorship of news of the disease, was offering the most reliable information about it. This ended up generating the impression that the disease originated and was particularly widespread in Spain. Even when the media is not trying, it defines and shapes our reality.

Why does any of this matter? Because words characterize an issue in such a way as to insinuate a cause and to frame our reactions. Sometimes, words can even drive mass hysteria. Consider the “swine flu” outbreak in 1976, which claimed a single life at Fort Dix, NJ. Because this particular strain of virus looked a lot like the one that caused the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1920 (also misleadingly named), public health officials convinced President Gerald Ford to commence a mass immunization program for all Americans. The use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut was not without consequences. Of the 40 million Americans immunized, about 500 developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder.

So let us pick our words carefully, lest our slovenly words presage our slovenly deeds.