Proving His Mettle in the Reagan Justice Dept.

The Political Appointee

Cooper was promoted soon afterward to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the constitutional adviser to the president and his Cabinet. He wanted Alito to be his deputy.

Cooper was impressed not only with Alito's legal acumen, but also his ability to "throttle back his own philosophical passions" in pursuit of administration objectives.

But a big hurdle remained. The position of deputy assistant attorney general required White House political clearance. Cooper and Reynolds knew Alito's loyalties, but the White House did not.

On Nov. 15, 1985, Alito penned an uncharacteristically zealous application letter. Laying bare his personal politics, he declared, "I am and always have been a conservative."

He shared the administration's strenuous opposition to decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1960s, particularly those involving criminal procedure, separation of church and state, and legislative reapportionment, which he viewed as usurping power the Constitution intended lawmakers to wield. And he was "particularly proud" of the contributions he had made toward the administration's conservative civil rights agenda and its efforts to convince the court "that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion."

Alito got the job and was immediately thrust into a variety of high-profile controversies.

In 1986, Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III disclosed that as much as $30 million from the covert sale of arms to Iran had been secretly diverted to anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua. Reynolds and Cooper said Alito helped craft the administration's defense of its actions.

"Sam was the kind of person you want when the entire world is going to be flyspecking everything you write and challenging every construct you advance," Cooper said.

Alito was designated to defend the office's widely criticized conclusion that the law did not bar employers from firing people with AIDS because of "fear of contagion, whether reasonable or not." He also helped the office's efforts to quash an independent counsel's investigation into whether a high-ranking Justice Department official misled Congress. And when Congress began investigating allegations that the White House had fired a top aide because of political pressure from conservatives, Alito advised a key witness to claim executive privilege and tell Congress nothing.

Even as his job grew increasingly political, to those beneath him, Alito remained above politics. He was cautious, thorough and logical. There was no aura of fervency about him, and career lawyers saw him as the epitome of what an Office of Legal Counsel lawyer should be -- someone who considered the law and rendered an opinion, whether the administration liked it or not.

"People make enemies in the types of jobs he had," said Bradford R. Clark, who worked for Alito and is now a law professor at George Washington University. "But there's nobody out there that dislikes Sam."

Former colleague John McGinnis said he believes Alito struggled with conflicting impulses. On the one hand, he said, Alito had a civil servant's respect, honed at the Solicitor General's Office, for incrementalism and stability in the law. At the same time, Alito "really wanted to forward" the administration's legal agenda -- a goal that demanded a radical departure from the status quo.