MIAMI — (CNN) Janet Reno, former US attorney general under President Bill Clinton, died Monday morning following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, her sister Maggy Hurchalla said. She was 78.
Reno, the nation’s first-ever female attorney general, served in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 2001.
From Miami to Washington D.C.
Born in 1938, Reno grew up in Miami, Florida, with parents who both worked as reporters for the Miami Herald. After attending Cornell University for her undergraduate degree, Reno enrolled at Harvard University for law school in the early 1960s. During her first year, she heard one of her heroes, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, speak at the Sanders Theater.
“She was so wonderful and her voice was still so clear and so magnificent,” Reno later recalled in a 1993 speech to the Women’s Bar Association. “And I went up to her afterwards, and I said, “Mrs. Roosevelt, I think you are perfectly wonderful.” And I will never forget her looking at me and saying, ‘Why, thank you, my dear. Those words mean so much to me.’ And she seemed to mean it.”
After law school, Reno worked for four years as an associate at Brigham & Brigham, before becoming partner at Lewis & Reno, where she stayed for four years. In 1971, Reno decided to work with the Florida House of Representatives as staff director.
After a brief return to the private sector, she was appointed as Florida’s State Attorney in Miami, becoming the first woman to ever hold that position. Reno held the position for a decade and a half until Clinton tapped her to become the 78th US attorney general.
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Convictions and controversies
As part of the Clinton administration, Reno oversaw the high-profile convictions of numerous bombers including Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist infamously known as the “Unabomber;” Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for their roles in the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing; and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.
Reno’s time in office was also bookended with a pair of major controversies that gripped the US: the 1993 Waco, Texas, standoff — which resulted in the death of over 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect — and the 2000 armed raid that led to the capture of young Cuban immigrant Elian Gonzalez.
At a ceremony to honor Reno in 2009, then-Attorney General Eric Holder praised his predecessor for her tenacity and tireless work ethic during her eight years holding the post.
“I don’t know how many times she said to me, ‘What’s the right thing to do’,” Holder said. “It was never what’s the easy thing, what’s the political thing, or the expedient thing to do.”
After the White House
In 2002, Reno ran to become Florida’s governor, but narrowly lost in the Democratic primary.
Reno died at her home in Miami. She had battled with Parkinson’s disease for 20 years.
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