The Untouchable

I'm in luuurrve with this guy (thanks to Atrios for the pic). I confess that I was deeply cynical when, in late 2003, the U.S. Justice Dept. began its investigation into the CIA-leak/Plame scandal. John Ashcroft was Attorney General at the time and who woulda thunk anything but the purest whitewash would come from his office. But after Ashcroft recused himself (too many dirty, moneyed ties with Rove & co. from his Missouri days) and appointed Spec. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald...well, I still expected nothing.

And now here we are on (what could be) Fitzmas Eve. So I thought to myself: time to find out a bit about this guy they call "Fitzie". First off, there are strains of 'Hollywoodism' in almost every bio of this type, so I'm sure some of these writers are forcing the narrative just a tad. Even so, the guy comes off as a cross between Eliot Ness and the "doorman" from that hilarious Seinfeld episode. Both the NY Times and WaPo bios describe his dogged prosecution of terrorists in the mid-late 90s. Ditto corrupt politicians (former Gov. of Illinois and Chicago Mayor). That's all fine and dandy. The guy's a prosecutor after all; it's kinda his job, eh? Furthermore, the bios like to stress his reputation as a smarty-pants (Amherst for Math & Economics; Harvard Law School)...again, the guy's a federal prosecutor. I'm sure he's very smart but so what? Nope, what endeared me to this Fitzie guy were the following anecdotes:

1. For months he did not bother to have the gas connected to the stove in his Brooklyn apartment. Once, in a fit of domesticity, he baked two pans of lasagna, recalled Amy E. Millard, a New York colleague. Distracted by work, he left them uneaten in the oven for three months before he discovered them, Ms. Millard said. When he tried to adopt a cat, she remembered, he was turned down because of his work habits and only later acquired a pet when a friend in Florida had to give up her cat and had it flown to him to New York. [NY Times bio]
2. He worked as a school janitor in Brooklyn to make money for college and spent summers opening doors at an upscale co-op building on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. (His father worked at a building on East 75th, just off Madison Avenue.) It is part of Fitzgerald lore that he bit his tongue when rich apartment dwellers talked down to him as "just the doorman." [WaPo bio]