Rebels in White Gloves (20 page)

The world of paid work would permit and require most of the women in the class to make that leap. Some would find in work a tremendous liberation from the personal: It would offer a way out of the feminine expectations that were so deeply ingrained at home and the financial dependency that had trapped many of their mothers, and a way in to useful work and citizenship. Others would find the “man’s world” too alien for comfort: These would have to reconsider what it means to be a woman, and have to alter either the workplace or themselves.

All would face critics on both sides. From the feminist left would come charges of elitism and careerism and selling out. From the traditionalist right would come charges of selfishness. If a man raises a family, performs productive work for society, and engages as a citizen, that is honorable. For a woman to attempt the same would be denounced as a greedy effort to “have it all.”

CHAPTER FOUR
 
 
Reinventing Womanhood

O
f all the revolutions made by the members of the class of ’69, none has been more radical than their wholesale entry into the professional world. Though many of the women had experimented with political activity in the sixties movements, work would set them, unlike any previous generation of women, firmly within the public sphere.

Work promised many freedoms and possibilities: independence, adventure, the chance to pursue passionate curiosities, even perhaps some influence on the world. Most of all, work afforded an escape from their mothers’ small domestic chambers into the larger spaces where they might become “self-made.” But entering the workplace also required of these women their first serious negotiations between the personal and political. Individually and collectively, they had to consider anew what it meant to be a woman, in harmony with or opposition to the expectations of what had long been men’s worlds.

For some, work would fulfill all their hopes. Entering into worlds where women had not been before, they discovered a liberating absence of the clear expectations laid out for them at home and in relations with men. On this tabula rasa, women could experiment with new ways of being: more competent and controlled, less racked by the complexities of domestic and emotional life. For others, the world of work would prove unexpectedly hostile, alien in its values, and isolating, with neither the community of women they had known at Wellesley nor the solidarities of the sixties movements. Nearly all, having breached the border between men’s and women’s separate spheres, would struggle for a deeper integration of those two worlds: importing into the workplace the gentler
habits associated with home, bringing home such “public” values as justice and equality.

It was 1984, fittingly, when Kris Olson Rogers began to doubt the moral possibility of remaining obedient to the government she served. Working as a federal prosecutor in Portland, Kris was ordered by Oregon U.S. attorney Charles Turner to get an indictment on a former Black Panther then living in town. The evidence against the man was flimsy but adequate for the task: Informants, disguised as housepainters, had ransacked his home and found in an upstairs closet a box containing a disassembled gun, which they had stolen and turned over to the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Kris knew, as did her boss, that in five minutes she could run an ATF agent before the grand jury and indict the defendant on hearsay, no matter the merits of the charges.

It was no accident that Charles Turner, a conservative Christian and Reagan appointee, had chosen Kris for this task. From the moment of his arrival, Kris had felt Turner’s disdain for her, the “liberal lady prosecutor,” as she puts it, now in his charge. There was no doubt who would win their contest of wills: In an administration recently censured by its own Civil Rights Commission for having reduced by half the numbers of women in the judiciary and the White House, Kris could count few allies. Nor could she easily afford to jeopardize her job, with two small children to support and both parents seriously ill.

The story of her confrontation with Turner is one Kris has told many times. In the course of those many tellings, she has shaped it into an allegory, a parable on the question that has also plagued Hillary Rodham Clinton: how much to compromise personal principles in order to get and keep power to do things in the world.

Kris and her husband, Jeff, had gone to Oregon soon after law school, drawn by their love for the great northwestern forests and mountains and sea. They settled first in a country house all overgrown with blackberries, then moved into a big, silent house ringed by hemlock and Douglas fir at the edge of Portland. It was, in the early seventies, a common pilgrimage. Celebrated in the best-selling novel
Where the Wasteland Ends
as a secessionist “ecotopia,” the shadowy woods of western Oregon offered perfect refuge for dreamy back-to-the-landers and radical environmentalists and marijuana growers in exile from California. More
than a few imagined themselves founding the kind of alternative society proposed by Charles Reich and elaborated in the
Yale Review of Law and Social Action
when Kris and Hillary were contributors: One article called for “the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process.” These “alienated or ‘deviant’ members of society” would then test the elasticity of such traditional institutions as marriage and democracy, “providing a living laboratory for social experiment through radical federalism.” The radical federalists already in residence—loggers and fishermen, most of them—did not see in the newcomers kindred spirits, and their mutual hostility made for a volatile mix. Even today, the Northwest remains a place of extremes reminiscent of those times. With Earthfirsters and the Oregon Christian Association both committed to principled violations of the law, it is a perfect place for a woman with complex notions about the proper balance between accommodation and dissent.

When she accepted a job as a federal prosecutor in Oregon, Kris told herself that it would be a brief, strategic sojourn: She would go inside as “a fifth columnist” only to become a better defense attorney by “learning the enemy’s ways.” As it turned out, she remained through three administrations, persuaded over time by the justification offered by her first boss and mentor, U.S. attorney Sid Lezak—that, as a prosecutor, she “could do more.” While a defense attorney could react only to other people’s legal initiatives, Kris could initiate her own: against white-collar and environmental crimes, for civil and tribal rights. The last would become a principal focus of her work. Having first fallen in love with Oregon on a visit with Lezak to the Warm Springs Reservation to watch ritual dances and feast on buffalo stroganoff—the same year that the American Indian Movement seized Wounded Knee and brought native rights to the foreground of left consciousness—Kris became one of the nation’s experts in tribal courts and the protection of cultural traditions and religious freedom. She was also the first woman in Oregon to prosecute high-profile criminal cases: kidnappings, bank robberies, and drugs.

Kris did not get an indictment on the former Panther. Sabotaging Turner’s goal, she brought the phony housepainters in as witnesses, encouraged the grand jury to fulfill its role as a “shield” for the individual
from the state, and ultimately persuaded the jurors not to indict. Turner was furious. “He spluttered that I had embarrassed him with the local police chief, to whom he had made a promise that the Panther ‘thorn’ would be removed.” He complained to Washington that Kris was insubordinate, a complaint he repeated a few months later, when she chaired a committee for an organization of local business and civic leaders on how to deal with growing street prostitution in Portland. She recommended decriminalization to limit pimping and public health dangers, and the provision of alternative programs for those who wanted to leave the life. When she then spoke out against Attorney General Ed Meese’s antipornography campaign, she incurred the wrath of some feminists and, again, of Turner, who attacked her on the front page of the
Portland Oregonian
as “unfit to represent the United States” and demanded that she resign. Kris felt she had no choice but to do so, and was sure her government career was at an end.

Nine years later, in 1993, when Bill Clinton asked Kris to leave her job as professor and dean at Lewis and Clark Law School and become the first woman U.S. attorney in Oregon, her appointment roused her local enemies anew. Turner led a campaign to defeat her nomination, persuading the state’s leading newspaper to reprint his letter of a decade earlier denouncing her to Washington and to editorialize against her appointment, branding her “soft on crime.” At her swearing-in, Kris retaliated with a bit of political theater reminiscent of her commune days. While Turner’s conservative Christian fellows were gaining legislative victories against gay rights around the state, Kris invited members of the Warm Springs tribe to say the invocation prayer and the Gay Men’s Chorus to sing a song by the Grateful Dead.

As the chief federal law enforcement officer in Oregon, Kris has watched her life take several ironic turns. Having once been known in her commune for baking delicious hashish brownies to serve with English tea, she has become, in America’s prime marijuana-growing region, a frontline soldier in the war on drugs. She is an outspoken critic of efforts to expand government surveillance of citizens, including the antiterrorism bill supported by Clinton, but it is frequently her signature that authorizes wiretaps and search warrants. And though a lifelong champion of civil disobedience, she has come down hard on what is at present the nation’s most active antiestablishment movement, prosecuting
a string of antigovernment militants. Among her targets have been the “Posse Comitatus,” radical advocates of property rights who refuse to pay taxes and menace federal employees; operators of a Corvallis, Oregon, methamphetamine lab, who stockpiled diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate in quantities sufficient for a bomb like the one used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City; and a survivalist in the Columbia Gorge, who nearly burned down a small town when his booby-trapped arsenal of 1,400 pounds of plastic explosives blew up.

Even as she has busted marijuana growers and civil disobedients, however, Kris has also used her office to aggressively pursue what local critics deride as her “liberal agenda.” In 1995, her office negotiated the plea with Shelly Shannon, the mother of two who shot an abortion clinic doctor while awaiting sentencing for firebombings at Lovejoy Surgi-center in Portland; the information they got from Shannon helped flush out the leaders of the “justifiable homicide” movement and forestall other planned attacks in the region. In disputes over grazing rights and dam construction pitting the Environmental Protection Agency and Native Americans against property rights groups and the Forest Service, Kris has frequently chosen to intervene on behalf of the EPA and the tribes, winning her the admiration of local environmental activists.

She has several times scorched local bridges. She contributed to the Packwood 26, the women bringing sexual harassment charges against former Oregon senator Bob Packwood, and denounced the “weak-kneed” Republican chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Oregonian John Frohnmayer. And she has raised the ire of Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassley over her handling of pornography cases. Disturbed at what she considered a “reverse sting” by the U.S. Postal Service, which would buy mailing lists from gay magazines, peddle child pornography to their readers, produce and mail the materials, and then secure search warrants and arrest recipients when it arrived, Kris issued guidelines to her office that they would not prosecute for receipt of government-produced porn.

Kris has also offended law enforcement officers and the FBI (though she depends on both and pleaded the Fifth when I asked if she had ever called a cop a pig). In a speech to the Yale Club of Oregon, she recounted her experience in 1994 filing a Freedom of Information request to look at her own FBI file. She waited two years without a response;
when she finally asked again, the agency said it had been eager to help but couldn’t find her, because she’d moved to a new address. Kris was a U.S. attorney at the time. At last she received the file, which was more than five hundred pages long and stretched back to her days at Yale, though chunks had been withheld and redacted “for national security.” In her speech, she detailed the shabbiness of the investigation—the agency’s reliance on rumor and ludicrous sources and its clear pursuit of the political agenda of the J. Edgar Hoover era.

After more than twenty years in Oregon, Kris looks like a westerner: Her straw-colored hair hangs long, with schoolgirl bangs; her eyes are a wide, clear blue; her square face is tawny and scrubbed. She wears flowing skirts the colors of jewels, dangling turquoise earrings, silver Indian bracelets, and thick ropes of beads. Though she spends much of her time amid good old boys with slicked-back hair and bolo ties, her manner is neither coquettish nor tough but rather patient and soothing—almost motherly. She has a soft voice and a calm, direct gaze and, like Bill Clinton, a highly developed capacity to calibrate the effect she has on people. Having not forgotten the usefulness of her little white gloves as cover in her years as a rebellious coed, Kris remains calculated in her demeanor and style. “I’m not going to be flirtatious and manipulative, but I also don’t want to out-men the men, in my hobnail boots. It jolts them when the federal prosecutor shows up in ethnic clothes.” A tribute to her political skills, presented by her law school colleagues, hangs on the wall of the private bathroom that adjoins her large, formal office: a “bullet-proof” bra made of kitchen strainers, suggesting the protection from political enemies her earth-motherliness affords.