A political career beset by controversy

Janet Reno returned on Tuesday from a two-hour grilling on Capitol Hill over ordering the controversial seizure of Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives to find her office smelling like a florist's shop. It was full of bouquets and vases from admirers, one of whom wrote: "God bless you. You did the right thing both morally and psychologically for this child."

While the calls to her office may be running at nine to one in her favour, the first woman Attorney General is only too aware that she has become a hate-figure in her native Miami among the Cuban exile community, for whom she has professed great admiration.

Investors in Microsoft and other high-tech companies who have seen the value of their stocks tumble blame her for successfully pursuing the software giant in an antitrust action and now demanding it be broken up.

Long before the Elian Gonzalez issue dominated headlines in the US and abroad, Reno has been battered by one controversy after another. Soon after she was appointed in March 1992 she was plunged into a crisis as the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, ended in a fiery catastrophe. She gave the go-ahead for the FBI to launch an assault which resulted in the deaths of 80 adults and children.

But Americans liked the way she took full responsibility, and she is still admired for a gritty independence which sometimes leaves her on barely speaking terms with her boss, President Clinton. When they spoke last week on Air Force One for 45 minutes on her handling of the Elian case, it was probably their first substantial conversation for a long time.

It has been her job to authorise the investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by the President and several of his cabinet, most spectacularly when she gave Ken Starr the go-ahead to extend the Whitewater investigation to Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Janet Reno was not the President's first choice for Attorney General in 1992. He had announced he would appoint a woman to the top justice post for the first time in US history but then found that his first two choices had to withdraw due to personal problems.

A Democratic senator, Bob Graham of Florida, urged the President to appoint Reno. She had been a popular state attorney for Dade County, which includes Miami, for 14 years.

Clinton did not even know her, but after the debacle of his first two appointments he was glad to approve. Mr Graham is now a virulent critic of Reno over the armed raid to seize the six -year-old Elian, reflecting the passions of the electorally powerful Cuban community in Miami.

Reno came into office with ideas for rethinking crime policy, but admirers say she became frustrated as the Clinton "centrist" agenda was to show that he could be as tough as Republicans on cracking down on crime through longer sentences and extending the death penalty.

There is a portrait of Robert Kennedy, whom she admires as "my favourite attorney general", on the wall of Reno's office. Nearby is a mounted photograph showing Reno and the President admiring the Kennedy portrait with a note from Clinton that says in part: "Some day people will look at your picture like this."

But by the time Clinton was picking the cabinet for his second term in 1996, the White House let it be known that he wanted Reno to step down. If they were hoping she would go quietly, they had not reckoned with the woman whose favourite recreation is kayaking and long treks into remote forests.

Reno, who was beginning to suffer from Parkinson's disease, stayed on. The President was unwilling to demand her resignation in case it was seen as interfering with the calls on her to investigate fresh allegations of fund-raising abuses by himself and the Vice-President, Al Gore, during the election campaign.

However, in spite of huge pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill, Reno has refused to appoint an independent counsel to investigate these allegations. This has led to a breach with the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, who is subordinate to Reno but who let it be known there should be such an investigation.

The 61["] Reno with her schoolmarm glasses is one of the few senior Government figures to hold weekly press briefings. She likes to remind people that her Danish-born father was a court reporter for 23 years in the Miami police department.

Viewers can see and hear her hands shaking from the effects of her disease, but she has cut down on her medicine because it affected her sleep. "So I'll be an old lady who shakes," Reno told her press officer when he pointed out her hand-shaking could be seen.

She refuses to accept VIP treatment, travels economy class on aircraft and insists on putting her baggage through the normal checks. Her love of the outdoor life worries her FBI bodyguards. Her sister, Maggy Hurchulla, who treks with her sometimes says: "She has tried to convince them - the agents - that if she is eaten by a grizzly bear or drowns in rapids, it's not their fault. But they don't see it that way."

Reno denied reports that her health would lead her to resign this year and take up a post as dean of the law school at Florida State University.

When her term ends this year, "What I would like to do is sail away and skin-dive and such on my brother's boat for a while and let people forget what I look like, then put on my old hat and get in my truck and go across the country and see the places I've always wanted to stay in," Reno says.

Meanwhile, she continues to love her job but quotes a predecessor, while toning down the language: "This job is just one blank-blank thing after another."