STEVE INSKEEP, host:
Next, let's remember a man who led the U.S. Justice Department in the wake of a scandal. The scandal was Watergate, and the attorney general in the years afterward, some of the years afterward, was Griffin Bell. He grew up with President Jimmy Carter and became his attorney general in the late 1970s, and he has died in Atlanta. Bell was 90 years old. And Griffin Bell was one of those widely credited with restoring public confidence in the Justice Department after Watergate. Our legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg is here. She spoke with him last summer, not long after he learned - we learned that he was dying. And she joins us now live. What made him a significant figure, Nina?
NINA TOTENBERG: Well, you have to remember what the Justice Department was like in the wake of Watergate. The attorney general had gone to jail for obstruction of justice, and many of - and he had sort of pulled the entire department, including the head of the FBI, into this massive obstruction along with the president to protect the president.
INSKEEP: The definition of a politicized Justice Department.
TOTENBERG: The definition of a politicized Justice Department. You know, we think we've just had a very nasty political scandal in the Justice Department, but nobody went to jail because of it. And it was - it never reached into the presidency itself or the attorney - the attorney general has not been charged with any crime. But that is where we were then. And the first guy who inherited this mess was President Ford's attorney general, Edward Levi, who was an academic and sort of righted the ship.
And then came Griffin Bell, who was a political figure in the sense that he'd always been involved in politics, but he'd been a judge for 15 years. And he was just a sort of a breath of fresh air and a ray of sunshine. And he sort of knew what his job was. And when I talked to him a few months ago, at the time that he knew he was dying, here's what he said was the task before him in restoring trust.
Mr. GRIFFIN BELL (Former U.S. Attorney General): Trust is a coin of the realm, and if the public doesn't trust the Justice Department, we're in trouble. So I think you have to be transparent. And so you need to let people know what's going on and who you're meeting with and who's influenced you and who had a chance to influence you. And I took great pride in that.
TOTENBERG: Yeah, he did. What he did was he published his log every day, the log of who he met with and who he talked to on the telephone. And he gave it to the press corps every day.
INSKEEP: So you never had any questions about backdoor dealing, or at least fewer questions about backdoor dealing.
TOTENBERG: And he said he had fewer calls from members of Congress.
INSKEEP: Because who wants to have that publicized that they're calling the attorney general about something?
TOTENBERG: And it's so interesting that here is this guy who was - initially people said, oh, he's a crony of the president. And he was fiercely protective of the career people in the Justice Department, brought them into the decision making process on a routine basis. He did a lot of things that we take for granted today. He was sort of a hawk, a hardliner, on national security. But he was a fierce advocate for doing it within the confines of the law - wiretapping. And he fought off the CIA on that. He fought off and wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which has been in place ever since until President Bush started circumventing it.
INSKEEP: This allows wiretapping against national security targets, but only within limits and with the permission of a court.
TOTENBERG: He said there had to be a court, an independent judge overseeing it.
INSKEEP: Which gets back to that issue of trust and confidence in the system.
TOTENBERG: Absolutely.
INSKEEP: NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. Nina, thanks for coming by.
TOTENBERG: My pleasure.
INSKEEP: And again, former attorney general Griffin Bell, attorney general in the Carter administration, has died at the age of 90.