Holder Announced as Obama's Choice for Attorney General
Barack Obama announced Eric Holder as his choice for attorney general this morning when the president-elect formally revealed his national security team at a Chicago news conference. Holder will be the first African-American to head the Justice Department.
A New York Times profile of Holder reaches back to his childhood, when he was an overachiever and a huge basketball fan. “I didn’t have any idea what I would be when I grew up,” he told the Times in an interview. He didn’t become aware of racial divisions until he went to middle school in 1963 when integration at the University of Alabama was in the news along with the assassination of President Kennedy.
“That clicked the switch in me,” he told the Times. He read The Autobiography of Malcolm X along with biographies of public servants. At the competitive Stuyvesant High School, he became student body president and was co-captain of the losing basketball team.
He majored in political science at Columbia and also attended law school there. Yet he also found time for basketball and helping others. He clerked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and landed a job in the Justice Department after law school graduation, the story says.
He also has served as a judge, a U.S. attorney and as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports in a story on today’s announcement. He is currently a litigation partner at Covington & Burling.
Besides Holder, new appointees include: Hillary Clinton as secretary of state; Robert Gates, who will keep his job as defense secretary; Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security; and Susan Rice as ambassador to the United Nations. Both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal carried news of the expected announcement earlier today.
The Wall Street Journal says Obama is moving more slowly in naming his intelligence appointees as he looks for experienced officials who aren’t associated with policies regarding harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration.
Officials told the business newspaper that Obama had planned to name 25-year CIA veteran John Brennan to head the CIA , but he withdrew from consideration after liberals complained. They had contended he had a senior role when harsh interrogation policies were developed, but Brennan and his defenders said he had spoken out against tactics such as waterboarding.
Updated to include more information on Holder and news of the announcement.
