General Ashcroft
More and more, C-SPAN is becoming my favorite television network to watch. And it’s not only because the entertainment networks are in summer reruns. Last night, I chanced upon a rebroadcast of a Justice Department Terrorism Prosecution Roundtable, described on C-SPAN’s website this way:
From the Department of Justice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and several State Attorney Generals deliberate the success of continued efforts to prosecute arrested terror suspects.
Well, not quite. It was really a press conference. Ashcroft spoke for about 10 minutes at the very beginning, ticking off his “accomplishments”, but got up and left before any of the reporters in the room could ask him any questions.
At that point, Alice Fisher, Deputy Assistant AG for the Criminal Division, took over. She had to deal with the anger and tumult of a number of pissed-off reporters, who had expected to have an opportunity to address a few questions to Ashcroft before he hightailed it off the stage and into whatever nefarious (or prayer) meeting was next on his agenda for dismantling the rights of Americans.
But I digress. What interested me, and prompted this blog entry, is that she started off her portion of the show by thanking Ashcroft, addressing him as “General”. That got me to wondering about that honorific title. My recollection is that the first time I ever heard a reference to an AG as “General” occurred during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. It was G. Gordon Liddy who said it, in testimony about some meetings he’d had with John Mitchell, and he said something on the order of “I told General Mitchell about ...” I also recall some consternation from the Senators regarding the term, though perhaps I’m projecting my own consternation.
It seems to me that calling the Attorney General of the United States “General” is as valid and appropriate as using the term when referring to a corporation’s General Counsel, or when talking about a baseball team’s General Manager. In other words, not at all.
Maybe there’s something more to the term than the implication that the AG is the nation’s general purpose lawyer. If so, I’d be very interested in documentation of such a connotation.
On the other hand, perhaps it’s time to start referring to General Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s, or General Pat Gillick of the Seattle Mariners, or General Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox.
UPDATE: Further evidence that the AG isn’t a general—according to the Wikipedia entry, when talking about more than one AG, the appropriate term is Attorneys General. In its description of the “Roundtable”, then, C-SPAN formed the plural incorrectly ... maybe I should drop them a line about that.
From the correct grammatical construction, it is clear that “general” is an adjective modifying the noun “attorney”. More research is needed, however, to ascertain whether my memory that Liddy invented the improper honorific has any validity.
Comments
Yeah, he wishes to be addressed by that title. Talk about an unbelievable ego!
He has been kind of the de facto general. I believe he sees himself on a par with the likes of Patton.
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