Making Room for “Good” Americans
Political Hiring in Justice Division Probed
Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago — over the objections of their immediate supervisors — by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to “make room for some good Americans” in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.
Being a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male, and a member of the Republican Party as well, I am personally delighted to call myself, in Schlozman’s terms, a “good” American.
I am even tempted to point out that, if I chose to define my own “goodness” according to slightly more stringent criteria of my own, if I chose to consider that “P” in WASP, then, in that case, I’d be an even “more good” American than Schlozman himself.
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