LA Times 9/18/02
At Home in War on Terror: Viet Dinh has gone from academe to a
key behind-the scenes role. Conservatives love him; others find his
views constitutionally suspect
Loretto, PA. – Viet Dinh is working the room. Viet Dinh, it seems, is
always working a room.
The room itself isn't much, at least not by the standards of one of
the rising stars of the Bush administration. A hundred or so faculty
members and supporters at Saint Francis University in rural Pennsylvania
are lunching in a nondescript student center to hear Dinh, advisor to
U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and a point man in the war on terrorism,
philosophize about how liberty and freedom can thrive even in a time of
national crisis.
But look closer, and the Vietnamese-born, Southern California-bred
Dinh has a more immediate agenda. Seated at lunch next to him is a local
district judge, D. Brooks Smith, whose promotion to a federal appellate
court has been imperiled by protests over his civil rights record.
Literally and figuratively, Dinh is at Smith's side.
Amid Dinh's broad legal colloquies and historical references to
Nathan Hale and William Penn, he delivers an impassioned endorsement of
Smith. He steps up the drumbeat for local television reporters after his
speech, decrying the ”liberal activists“ who have threatened to derail
President Bush's nominee.
The scene is typical of Dinh and his remarkable ascent to power: Part
law school professor, part political pit bull, Dinh has navigated
seamlessly between the worlds of Ivory Tower academia and sharp-elbowed
Washington politics to leave his imprint on a wide array of policy
decisions.
If Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are the face of
the Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign, Dinh and a small
cadre of other behind-the-scenes advisors have emerged as its brain
trust.
At age 34, he already has filled a resume befitting a man twice his
age: boat refugee from Vietnam, Oregon fruit picker, Orange County
burger-flipper, Harvard Law School graduate, U.S. Supreme Court clerk,
Georgetown Law School professor, constitutional scholar, lawyer to a
high-powered congressional committee. His is ”a spectacular American
story,“ Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) said in introducing Dinh to the
Senate during his confirmation hearings 16 months ago.
Dinh's current role as an assistant attorney general clearly has
given him his most important platform yet. At first a somewhat obscure
player in Ashcroft's Justice Department, his prominence in recent months
has made him both a darling of the conservative movement and a lightning
rod for criticism from liberal-leaning politicians and civil rights
activists who assert that his views run roughshod over the Constitution.
On topics as far-ranging as gun control, cyber pornography, human
trafficking and the selection of new federal judges, Dinh has played an
increasingly critical role in shaping federal law enforcement policy.
But nowhere has his impact been felt more keenly than in the Bush
administration's highest priority: its aggressive war on terrorism.
Crafted Patriot Act
Dinh was the chief architect of the USA Patriot Act, the legislation
approved by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that gives law
enforcement agencies vastly expanded powers to track terror suspects. He
has been the official responsible for crafting a series of
anti-terrorism initiatives that would, among other things, require the
fingerprinting of potentially tens of thousands of visiting foreigners
from Middle East countries and would put foreign students on a much
tighter leash.
He revamped the law enforcement guidelines that Ashcroft announced in
May to give FBI agents new powers to snoop in mosques and surf the
Internet. And he is now working on a plan to promote better coordination
within the Justice Department and with agencies such as the CIA, a task
aimed at preventing the communication breakdowns that preceded Sept. 11.
”I did not sign up for a war,“ Dinh said in an interview. ”But it's a
privilege, a profound honor really, to serve your country in a time of
crisis. I can't imagine a better place for me to be right now.“
What is perhaps most surprising to Justice Department observers is
that Dinh has achieved such influence as one of 11 assistant attorneys
general in charge of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy.
The office was once a low-profile, somewhat nebulous operation chiefly
concerned with federal judicial nominations--''a backwater,'' one former
employee, who worked for the department during Janet Reno's tenure,
called it. But with Ashcroft's blessing, Dinh has expanded the office's
reach into areas once considered far outside its domain.
Ashcroft's a Fan
Dinh, a wiry, energetic man who spews out ideas and legal theory at a
furious staccato clip, has turned his boss into one of his biggest fans.
”It's hard to point to a part of this department,“ Ashcroft said in
an interview, ”that isn't related to sound legal policy, so [Dinh] has
become an integral part of virtually every decision we make.... He
operates on a gold-medal level.“
Dinh recalls the instructions Ashcroft gave him when he took over the
job last year.
”He told me: 'The art of leadership is the redefinition of the
possible. I want you to be the think tank to help me redefine the
possible for the Department of Justice.' That was a great charge for an
academic,“ Dinh said.
Some Republicans even speculate that Dinh could someday be a
candidate for the first Asian American justice on the Supreme Court. But
with success and visibility have come a growing chorus of critics who
attack his policies and politics.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have publicly chastised Dinh for
disregarding the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans. An irritated
former Secretary of State Warren Christopher challenged him at a law
conference last summer by suggesting that the administration's refusal
to identify terrorist detainees reminded him of Argentina's notorious
practice of simply making prisoners ”disappear.“ And gun control
advocates accuse Dinh of serving as Ashcroft's buffer on 2nd Amendment
issues, helping to scale back regulations for enforcing gun laws.
”John Ashcroft has put together the most right-wing legal team in
modern Justice Department history, and Viet Dinh is, by all accounts, a
principal player. His impact has been felt across the department,“ said
Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal civil
rights group.
Where Bush administration loyalists see an aggressive counterattack
on terrorism, civil rights activists see an infringement on American
liberties. Where supporters see well-crafted public policy, critics see
far-reaching edicts made under a veil of secrecy.
”When you start acting by executive fiat, that's what leads to
governmental abuses,“ Neas said, ”and that's why I'm so worried about
what Viet Dinh and John Ashcroft have been doing in the last year.“
Emotional Memory
Nearly a quarter-century later, Dinh still becomes emotional when
remembering one scene: his mother in a Malaysian port, wielding an ax
that seemed bigger than she was, whacking holes in the side of the
vessel so she and five of her children would not be sent back out to
sea.
It was 1978. Dinh was 10. His father was being held as a political
prisoner in the family's war-ravaged homeland, when his mother, Nga Thu
Nguyen, tried to escape by sea with Viet and the other children. They
were among 85 people crammed on a 15-foot-long boat, but as Dinh's
mother recalled in a recent telephone interview from her Garden Grove
home, ”after three days, the boat was broken. After seven days, there
was no more food or water.“
After 12 days, she had lost nearly all hope. But they came upon a
Thai fishing crew who gave them food and gas, helped fix the boat and
pointed them toward land. They reached Malaysia--only to be met by
gunshots from a patrol boat. The Malaysians didn't want them. Their boat
managed to dock, but Nguyen realized that the port police would force
them to leave the next morning, so she crept back out to the boat alone
that night with an ax, she said. ”I just hit it and hit it and made
holes everywhere,“ she said.
Dinh, recounting the events last year before the Senate Judiciary
Committee as his nomination was considered, said it demonstrated for him
the ”incredible courage“ of his mother and the ”incredible lengths“ to
which people will go in search of freedom.
The administration's critics now find it ironic that Dinh, a refugee
himself and an inspiration to many Asian Americans in Southern
California, would advance policies that civil libertarians say place
many Arabs and Arab Americans under a cloud of suspicion. But Dinh
counters that his experience has given him a ”special sensitivity to
what it means to be an American“ and how important it is to apply the
law equally, regardless of race or ethnicity.
After six months as refugees in Malaysia, Dinh's family made it to
Oregon for Thanksgiving of 1978. They picked strawberries for menial
wages, sending money back to Dinh's father and a sibling hiding out in
Vietnam. After Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, the crop damage forced
his family to relocate to Fullerton.
In Orange County, the teenager worked with his mother in a sewing
shop and put in time at fast-food restaurants after school. The family's
persistence paid off in 1983 when Dinh's father finally made it to
America. Dinh's parents wanted him to be a doctor. But politics was his
passion, an interest fueled by his mother.
''He had a hatred of the Communists because I made him understand it
was the Communists who had taken his father away from the house and put
him in prison,'' Nguyen said. ''I instilled that in him early on.''
Like many Vietnamese immigrants, Dinh's emotional experience in his
homeland steered him toward the Republican Party because of the GOP's
hard-line stance against communism.
Youthful Volunteer
Garden Grove Councilman Van Tran remembers Dinh, just out of
Fullerton High School, volunteering to work the phone banks at an Asian
American voter registration center set up by then-Rep. Robert K. Dornan.
”He used to call me anh, or 'elder brother.' He stood out even then
as a lanky 18-year-old because he was someone who was very quick and
very witty,“ Tran said.
Dinh's reputation as affable, bright and politically astute would
follow him through Harvard University and Harvard Law School, which he
attended with the aid of scholarships and graduated magna cum laude, and
to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he clerked for Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor.
”He was a wonderful law clerk,“ O'Connor recalled recently. ”I was so
fascinated by his background and the fact that he had arrived on our
shores with nothing but the clothes on his back, yet somehow he had
persevered.“
By 1999, Dinh had firmly established his Republican credentials as a
lawyer for two of the most bitterly partisan initiatives in Washington,
working first for Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-N.Y.) in the Senate
investigation into President Clinton's Whitewater dealings in the
mid-1990s, and later for Domenici during Clinton's impeachment trial.
When the 2000 presidential election led to a landmark lawsuit, Dinh
was there to write a friend-of-the-court brief before the U.S. Supreme
Court on behalf of a group of Florida voters who backed Bush's position.
When Ashcroft's nomination as attorney general ran into widespread
opposition in January 2001 over his record on civil rights and other
issues, Dinh wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post extolling
Ashcroft's ”deep compassion“ for minorities.
And when Dinh was nominated a few months after that article
to become one of Ashcroft's top deputies, he contacted Tran and asked
him to call Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) to see whether she
would be willing to introduce him at his Senate confirmation hearings,
even though he was a Republican nominee, Tran said. Dinh's nomination
was confirmed by a 96-1 vote in the Senate.
Dinh was feted as a returning hero at a Vietnamese American festival
in Orange County last year.
”Sanchez understood right away the political significance of
such a gesture, and Viet got a bipartisan introduction“ before the
Senate, Tran said. ”I thought it was a brilliant move on his part.“
Too brilliant, some of his Democratic detractors on Capitol Hill say.
While demanding anonymity because of frayed relations with Ashcroft's
office, several Democratic officials describe Dinh in terms such as
”rawly political,“ and have even coined a derisive nickname to describe
his aggressive politicking: ”Viet Spin.“
Democrats whisper that during his days on the Whitewater
investigation, Dinh was suspected of leaking confidential information to
the news media in order to hurt Clinton.
Dinh vehemently denies the charge, but Democrats say lingering
resentments over his Whitewater days--Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y)
was the only senator to vote against his confirmation--have hurt his
relations on Capitol Hill and caused tensions as the Ashcroft
administration has pushed to expand its law enforcement powers.
No Time for Golf
If such political sniping has bothered Dinh, he doesn't show it.
Indeed, about the only regret that Dinh, a bachelor, confesses is that
his hectic pace has given him time to hit the golf links only once or
twice since Sept. 11.
After reaching a pinnacle in his career, he insists his mind is
squarely focused on the task at hand: revamping federal law enforcement
to confront the threat of terrorism.
That has to be ”the overriding priority,“ Dinh said. ”The day that we
relax is either the day that we have definitely won this war or the day
that I get somebody else to continue my job."
"The Orange County Register 5/10/01“
Ex-refugee is nominated for Justice post: A Fullerton High grad
gets praise at his Senate confirmation hearing.
Viet Dinh wiped tears from his eyes as a United States senator
chronicled his remarkable journey from a 10-year-old fleeing Vietnam in
a boat to a law professor facing a congressional panel Wednesday as a
nominee for assistant attorney general.
For a young Dinh and his family it was the point of no return. They
had fled Vietnam by boat in 1978. After 12 days with no food or water,
they landed in a port in Malaysia, where they were met by gunfire and
cast back into the South China Sea.
That night they swam ashore, sure their boat could not withstand
another sea voyage. Dinh's mother, Nguyen, stayed aboard and, ”wielding
an ax that was almost as tall as she was,“ put a hole in the side of the
boat to sink it so they would not be forced back to sea, Dinh said.
”That image of my mother destroying our last link to Vietnam really
stands in my mind to this day as to the courage she possesses, but also
the incredible lengths which my parents, like so many other people, have
gone to in order to find that promise of freedom and opportunity.“
”This is a spectacular American story,“ Sen. Pete Domenici said
Wednesday as he introduced Dinh, formerly of Orange County, who was the
New Mexico Republican's special counsel for President Clinton's
impeachment trial. Dinh was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which
could vote as early as today on his confirmation as assistant attorney
general for policy development.
”You've got a Vietnamese scholar who just 23 years ago was a young
man out on a boat at sea who could just as well have drowned, and we
never would have heard from him. But because of a loving family around
him, they eventually ended up American citizens.“
As Domenici talked, Dinh's parents — who split their time between
Garden Grove and Salem, Ore. — sat proudly next to their son. Dinh's
lower lip quivered as he fought the emotion of the moment.
His journey and the patriotism for his new country came flooding
back, he said, as he heard Domenici's words.
The young professor has seen much in his 33 years.
His family was separated in 1975 when his father, Phong Dinh, was
imprisoned in a re-education camp after the fall of Saigon. His father
escaped in 1978, and while he remained a fugitive in Vietnam, Dinh's
mother, Nga Nguyen and his older siblings got on a boat with 85 other
people and set out for freedom.
After their harrowing journey and a stay at a refugee camp in
Malaysia, they made their way to the United States.
The family began their life in America in Portland, Ore., picking
strawberries. But the eruption of Mount St. Helens volcano in 1980 wiped
out their livelihood. They moved to Orange County.
Dinh was reunited with his father in 1983. In 1992, he was reunited
with one of his sisters at a refugee camp in Hong Kong — a meeting
filmed by NBC's Dateline newsmagazine show.
Those who knew Dinh during his teen-age years in Orange County are
not surprised by his success at such a young age. They describe him as
an outgoing, gregarious teen-ager with an incredibly bright and
inquisitive mind.
Fullerton High School classmate James Campbell, called him a ”well
rounded whiz kid. He seized all the things that a lot of us take for
granted about this country,“ said Campbell, a spokesman for Supervisor
Charles Smith.
Dinh will be honored by his high school alma mater this fall when he
is added to Fullerton's wall of fame. He will share that wall with an
ideological opposite, David Boies, former Vice President Al Gore's
lawyer for the Florida recount.
Dinh was a familiar figure during that historical case, delivering
sound bites on CNN and other network news shows. And Dinh filed a brief
with the Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush.
For many in the Vietnamese legal community in Orange County, Dinh is
viewed as a trailblazer and risk taker.
”With his achievements, he puts the idea that a Vietnamese- American
can be successful in law and on a national level,“ said Hao-Nhien Vu, a
Garden Grove lawyer. If confirmed, Dinh will be the highest-ranking
Vietnamese- American legal official in the nation. ”A lot of people will
be watching what he does and learning from his example.“
And he honed his political skills early.
Van Thai Tran, a lawyer and Garden Grove councilman, first met Dinh
in 1986 when the 17-year-old showed up at a voter-registration drive and
volunteered to help.
”Even then he was quick-witted,“ Tran said.
Dinh is not expected to face a difficult confirmation. But Democrats
and Republicans on the committee are feuding over the confirmation
process for federal judges, and it was clear Wednesday that Department
of Justice nominations are caught in the crossfire.
The only critical questioning Dinh faced was from Sen. Pat
Leahy, D-Vt. Leahy asked Dinh how he could be in charge of reviewing
judicial nominees when he has never been a trial lawyer. Dinh
went directly from clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor to a political post and then to Georgetown Law Center as a
professor.
Dinh said he would look to those in the department with such
experience for help.
It's traditional for lawmakers close to the nominee or from their
hometown to formally introduce him to the panel. Rep. Loretta Sanchez,
D-Santa Ana, who represents a large part of the Vietnamese -American
community in Orange County, introduced Dinh along with Domenici.
Sanchez met with him Tuesday. She said she was satisfied that ”as an
immigrant himself, he wants to make sure the gates are open for other
immigrants.“ She also talked to Dinh about racial profiling, an issue
Attorney General John Ashcroft says is a high priority.
”He said that was of great interest to him,“ Sanchez said, ”because
he himself has experienced that sort of discrimination.“
Dinh says he's not looking beyond his new job.
”It will be in the public service,'' Dinh said. “I am really enamored
by the institutions of government. They protect the most precious aspect
of America, the promise of opportunity and freedom.
”Even when I was in the refugee camp, I knew the value of this
promise."