NYT : In the Defense of Basic Rights, an Official Led a City’s Defiance

In the Defense of Basic Rights, an Official Led a City’s Defiance

By WILLIAM YARDLEY | Published: September 8, 2006

PORTLAND, ORE. When Portland refused to cooperate in interviewing young Middle Eastern men, a son of a prominent Republican family, Jeffrey L. Rogers, who was city attorney, defied Washington.

Jeffrey L. Rogers remembers the letters, the e-mail messages and the taunts.

“You’re a disgrace,” one said. “When the terrorists blow up the Rose Garden, you’ll be responsible,” said another, referring to the 20,000-seat sports arena in Portland, Ore.

Two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft asked local police forces across the country to help federal agents interview 5,000 young Middle Eastern men as part of a nationwide antiterrorism effort.

Portland, which has long marched to a distinctive civic drummer, was the first city to refuse, citing an Oregon law that forbids such questioning if the subject is not a suspect in a crime.

Mr. Rogers, a Vietnam veteran from a prominent Republican family, was the city attorney here, making him an instant face of Portland’s defiance.

“It’s common sense in a less emotionally charged atmosphere,” he said. “Let’s say the same thing came up now. I think the reaction would be much more muted. I mean, the wounds were really fresh. It was really raw, and people were really scared.”

Nearly five years later, nonetheless, the tension between protecting civil liberties and preventing another terrorist attack remains at the center of post-9/11 American life, with the disclosure that the federal Education Department shared personal information on hundreds of student loan applicants with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In 2005, Portland formally withdrew its Police Department from the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the F.B.I. Mr. Rogers approves of that position, though not necessarily with how civil liberties are protected elsewhere.

“We should be very worried that the way Bush and his handlers are going about ‘defending the country’ is eroding the essence of our country,” he said. “Fortunately, history has shown that sooner of later Americans catch on to those who exploit fear, and we return to our true values.”

Mr. Rogers grew up in what he called a “progressive Republican” household. His father, William P. Rogers, was attorney general in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second term and the first secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon.

When Nixon, as a congressman in the late 1940’s, pursued espionage accusations against Alger Hiss, he did so based on advice from William Rogers, then a committee counsel on Capitol Hill.

“J. Edgar Hoover and Dad were pretty close, and I used to go to the firing range at the F.B.I. and all that stuff,” Jeffrey Rogers said. “I had a lot of respect for the F.B.I.”

He graduated from Yale Law School in the same class as Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. There are pictures of them all clowning around after moot court.

He campaigned for Mr. Clinton and has jogged with him in Oregon. Mr. Rogers is a Democrat and calls himself “pretty liberal.”

Yet neither his Republican upbringing nor his Democratic views affected his actions in Portland in 2001, he said.

All that mattered was the law, which a deputy first pointed out conflicted with Mr. Ashcroft’s request.

“And I believe with no question that we were right in our interpretation,” he said. After 19 years in the city attorney’s office, Mr. Rogers left in 2004 to pursue a second career.

He soon completed a master’s in counseling psychology and now spends his days listening to the troubles of others. His specialty, according to his business card, is “lawyers, clients of lawyers and others affected by the legal system.”

In some circles, Mr. Rogers is bitterly recalled as the city attorney who fought the American government rather than the terrorists. To many others, his stance was heroic.

“My favorite,” he said as he recalled one note, “was that I was ‘the Gandhi of Portland.’ I kept that.”