Alumni Newsmakers
Among the new faces-elected and appointed-inside the Beltway this past winter were three U of C alumni whose arrivals made headlines.

Jon S. Corzine, MBA'73, former chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs, made campaign history in his November race for the U.S. Senate, spending more than $60 million on his bid for the New Jersey seat left vacant by the retirement of fellow Democrat Frank Lautenberg. Corzine campaigned on social issues such as universal access to health care, tighter environmental standards, and gun control.

Joining Goldman Sachs in 1975 as a trader, Corzine rose through the ranks to become a general partner in 1980 and chair and CEO in 1994. He amassed a personal fortune of $400 million while guiding the firm to its decision to go public in 1999.

For the Senate, Corzine's Wall Street credentials won him an appointment to the Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over financial services, and the Joint Economics Committee. He also rubs elbows with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) on the Environmental and Public Works Committee.

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The Bush administration's new deputy secretary of defense is Paul D. Wolfowitz, PhD'72. Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University since 1994, Wolfowitz has made a name for himself as a conservative intellectual with hawkish views on military defense and strategy.

He was a member of the Rumsfield commission, the panel that in 1998 warned that the U.S. was vulnerable to long-range ballistic missile attacks by countries such as North Korea and Iraq. For the first Bush administration, he served as undersecretary of defense for policy, working closely with Dick Cheney, now vice president. During the Persian Gulf War he supported Cheney's case for an aggressive response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Under Ronald Reagan, Wolfowitz served as the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and later became the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia.

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John D. Ashcroft, JD'67, grabbed headlines this winter when he was nominated and confirmed as U.S. attorney general in a heated 58-to-42 Senate vote. Previously, Ashcroft served the state of Missouri as a U.S. Senator (1994-2000), as governor (1985-1993), and as attorney general (1976-1984).

The nation's new attorney general takes a conservative stance on social issues-opposing abortion except to save the life of the mother and supporting gun control only in the form of licensing and registration. Opponents of Ashcroft's appointment cited past actions they construed as racist, including his opposition to Ronnie White, a black Missouri Supreme Court justice nominated to the U.S. District Court by President Bill Clinton. Ashcroft's detractors accused him of distorting White's record on the bench, leading the Senate to reject White's nomination.

During Ashcroft's own confirmation hearings, he pledged to "enforce the laws as written, not enforcing my own personal preference." His first action as attorney general is to continue a study commissioned by President Bill Clinton of racial disparities in death penalty cases. An opponent of racial profiling, he aims to combat the discriminatory practice by examining the types of contact between law enforcement officials and the public.

Said President George W. Bush of his new attorney general, "There's no question in my mind that he will uphold and enforce the law, [and] the civil rights laws on the books of America."-B.C.

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