ACLU v. ACLU (Page 3)

In the wake of these controversies--which Romero's supporters insist were blown wildly out of proportion by the critics and the Times--the ACLU board could have elected to fire Romero. He kept his job, in large part because many of his colleagues viewed him as young, inexperienced and overwhelmed by the complexities of running the ACLU after 9/11. Burt Neuborne believes that Romero needed a powerful mentor inside the organization, one akin to Norman Dorsen, who was the ACLU's president from 1976 to 1991. According to Neuborne, the current feud "wouldn't have happened if Norman were the president." He elaborates: "He would have seen it coming. He would have told Anthony what to do. He would have guided him. Anthony was essentially on his own. When Norman's hand went off the tiller at ACLU, it lurched a bit." (These days the hand of Norman Dorsen, who is also on the NYU law faculty, is again evident at the ACLU, in an advisory capacity.)

Many current board members vociferously insist that Romero's mistakes must be viewed in the larger context of his accomplishments, which are indeed impressive: He doubled the size of the full-time staff in the ACLU's national office, from 186 to nearly 400; he raised staff salaries; he lifted the ACLU's membership from 300,000 to 550,000; he nearly doubled both the total revenue of the ACLU and the net assets of the ACLU Foundation; he brought in new support from foundations; and he launched a TV series.

Supporters also point to a long list of ACLU achievements: its defense of aliens deported from the United States after 9/11; its legal challenge to the NSA spying program; its innovative use of the Freedom of Information Act, which led to the release of more than 100,000 pages of government documents relating to torture and abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay; and its various challenges to the Patriot Act, especially Section 505, which gives the FBI power to obtain sensitive records without judicial approval.

Top legal experts echo Romero's supporters. "I would give the ACLU a grade of A since 9/11," says University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. David Cole of Georgetown University Law Center (and The Nation's legal affairs correspondent), who supports Romero, agrees. "They've done a superb job in defending civil liberties, doing public education on civil liberties and challenging a variety of Bush Administration measures," says Cole. "They have also galvanized a large segment of the American population in defense of civil liberties."

The battles of 2004, combined with the aggressive coverage in the Times, created deep divisions within the ACLU board. Longtime board member Vivian Berger, emeritus professor of law at Columbia, says that many of her board colleagues felt obligated to rally around Romero: "The critics were so vicious toward him, trying to make a big deal out of every little thing," says Berger. "And here's Anthony, trying to fight off the forces of evil in the country and the world. We had to protect him, to some extent, just because we were afraid he would go under, which does not mean we never criticized him; which does not mean that many of us did not speak to him privately, myself included. The extreme nastiness of the dissidents had the countereffect of naturally making people circle the wagons."

When Berger talks about the "dissidents," she is primarily referring to Wendy Kaminer and Michael Meyers, who launched the initial onslaught against Romero. Until he left recently, Meyers had served on the ACLU board for twenty-four years. He is a controversial and contentious figure. He grew up poor in the South Bronx and Harlem, where his older brother was killed in a mugging, and has worked as a staff member of the NAACP and as a columnist for the New York Post. To his supporters--including the writer Nat Hentoff, who demanded Romero's resignation in the Village Voice and USA Today--Meyers is a man "of unbending integrity and independence." To his detractors, he is an exasperating presence. Aryeh Neier allows, "He is not someone who could ever last in any institution. He always wanted to call attention to himself. I would never consider hiring him. He would be impossible."

"We've lost the ACLU," Meyers lamented in October 2005, when I first began to follow the dispute. Regarding Romero, Meyers comes right to the point: "There have been serious violations of ACLU policy, protocols, philosophy, and I think the board made a serious mistake in hiring Anthony Romero." Why? "This guy can't think. He can't talk. He can't write. He's not an intellectual leader, and therefore he's an embarrassment." (Meyers says that he preferred another candidate for executive director.) Meyers does credit Romero in one area: "This guy's raised a lot of money. I think we should have hired him as our fundraiser, as our director of development."

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