I Cogitate

Mr. Fitz Goes to Washington
By DAVID MARGOLICK
Vanity Fair
February 2006

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is a crime-busting phenomenon, the scourge of al-Qaeda terrorists, corrupt Chicago political machines, former media tycoon Conrad Black, and—as special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame investigation—the West Wing. Meet Karl Rove's worst nightmare

For months he was the specter haunting Washington, rarely seen and even more rarely heard, incessantly discussed, psychoanalyzed, anticipated, criticized—and feared. Who, everyone wondered, was this guy Patrick Fitzgerald, and exactly what was he up to? What was taking him so long? Why was he seemingly letting columnist Robert Novak, the source of all the trouble, off the hook? And where would it all end, especially after he threw New York Times reporter Judith Miller in the clink for refusing to answer his questions? Critics labeled him a First Amendment scourge and compared him to Inspector Javert, the monomaniacal policeman in Les Misérables, a man without humanity or perspective. A "runaway Chicago prosecutor," columnist William Safire called him. A "junkyard-dog prosecutor," seconded The Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Fitzgerald's treatment of Miller, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs charged, was "an onerous, disgusting abuse of government power."

Then, on October 28, everything magically flipped when Pat Fitzgerald took his place on the television screen. The president of the United States was in one corner and the vice president in another, but they were each on mute; it was Fitzgerald—the 45-year-old son of an Irish-immigrant doorman, the man who'd questioned all of the president's men and the reporters to whom they liked to leak—that people really wanted to hear.

Officially, Fitzgerald's mission that day was to announce that a federal grand jury had charged Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, with five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to the F.B.I. But his agenda was actually more ambitious. He would explain why his investigation, designed to determine who had leaked the name of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the press, had netted only someone who'd allegedly lied about it afterward, and why that mattered, and what accounted for the ferocity with which he'd handled it. He would lay out the legal issues involved. And mostly, after nearly two years of taking hits silently, he would finally introduce himself to America.

The face he showed that day looked a bit banged up, as if he'd just come out of a rugby game, though in fact it reflected only sleeplessness. There was a kind of wide-eyed, youthful sweetness to it. One easily understood why, when Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy, a fellow Irish-American, had prosecuted Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in a Manhattan terror bombing and assassination conspiracy a decade ago, defense lawyers petitioned for a recess on Ash Wednesday: the blackened foreheads of the prosecutors would only accentuate their maddening altar-boy images. (The judge, incidentally, granted the request.)

All three networks pre-empted their regular programming for the announcement of the grand-jury indictment of Libby except, oddly enough, in Fitzgerald's current home base of Chicago, where he was bumped by the White Sox victory parade. But it didn't matter; there, at least, they already knew him. He started nervously, blurting out his words in shaky, sometimes garbled phrases. One could detect the shyness his friends routinely describe. Staring ahead blankly, speaking mechanically, he laid out his case against Libby as if reading it off a teleprompter. In fact, although he'd written something down beforehand, what he said was entirely extemporaneous; while the rest of Fitzgerald was still unwinding, his remarkable mind was already up to speed. The angst and awkwardness vanished once he took questions, and that made sense; he had always been better, more himself, in rebuttals than in opening statements. When he had to think on the fly, he could be sincere, joke or provoke, become Everyman. "We all have our shticks: his is the up-from-the-gutter Irish kid from a poor family," says a lawyer in the Plame case. "It's essentially authentic. But it's also served him well."

Again and again, reporters pressed Fitzgerald for specifics, not just about Libby but also about Dick Cheney (who had discussed Plame with his chief of staff before the leak), White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove (who had discussed Plame with at least two reporters), and Novak (who had outed Plame in his syndicated column, then, presumably, told Fitzgerald). They got only crumbs, but Fitzgerald doled them out entertainingly and ingratiatingly, appearing more forthcoming than he really was. Some non-answers came with humor, some with baseball metaphors or colloquialisms. There was none of the usual lawyerly stiffness and aloofness, nor was there elegance or eloquence. Fitzgerald was modest, self-deprecating, nimble, patient, accessible, even-tempered, reassuring, likable, real. And the press quickly turned. Charles Laughton as Inspector Javert suddenly morphed into Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith and Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness.

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