John Kroger’s book describes his life as a federal
prosecutor in New York before he moved to Oregon. It’s a surprising
book, because judging from our Attorney General’s public demeanor
recently—gray suit, flat delivery, no charges for Mayor Sam Adams
over the Breedlove scandal—you could be forgiven for thinking
he’s boring.
He’s not. Kroger’s austere father kicked him out of their Texas home
at age 16, after police caught Oregon’s future supreme prosecutor
drunkenly stealing hubcaps from a Ford Mustang that belonged to a state
senator. Lacking direction or a roof over his head, Kroger joined the
marines, where he became an expert with a rifle and learned to swim
long distances in the ocean under the cover of darkness. Never mind
potential future governor of Oregon—by chapter two, Kroger sounds
like he’s auditioning for a role in a remake of Under Siege.
Kroger’s military experience was a riot of fistfights, sexism, and
drunken brawls, he writes. From there he studied philosophy at Yale,
where it seems he acquired a new moral conscience. Then he went to
Harvard Law before working as a senior policy advisor for Bill Clinton
at just 26. I was surprised when Kroger told me during a recent phone
interview that he has never experienced jealousy directed at the
professional success or opportunities he’s enjoyed. Perhaps he’s just
been unaware of it—I, for one, would probably have preferred
working for Clinton than an unpaid internship here at the
Mercury at the same age.
Was Kroger’s description of his military experience a preemptive
tell-all in the vein of Barack Obama writing that he “did a little blow
now and then” in The Audacity of Hope, I wondered?
“No. The book was 90 percent written before I started thinking about
running for office, and so all that was already written,” says Kroger.
“If it causes political trouble, it causes political trouble. But 40
years from now, when my life is near an end, I want to say that this
book was the best book I could write.”
Kroger took inspiration from New Yorker medicine writer Atul
Gawande, who “writes about medicine in a way that’s very accessible to
people who are not physicians,” he says. From Clinton’s office, Kroger
became an Assistant United States Attorney and set about prosecuting
“drug dealers, mafia kingpins, and Enron thieves,” to quote the jacket
text. These cases are described in sufficient detail to be engaging
without compromising the book’s narrative tautness.
Kroger’s most consistent theme is exploring the ethical conflicts of
being a prosecutor, between the utilitarian goal of doing good for the
most people, and treating each criminal as an individual in their own
right. This was a tough line for Kroger to walk when flipping Mafia
capos against their bosses in exchange for shorter sentences, but it is
crystallized in the book when Kroger prosecutes the wife of an Enron
executive who might otherwise have been let off with a small fine, only
to put pressure on the woman’s husband to cooperate in a larger case
against the firm.
Does Kroger’s rigorous ethical self-examination make him ill suited
for a life in government?
“You do get ethical quandaries in government, and I tend to struggle
with them, I think that is accurate,” he says. “But I think that’s not
a negative, I think that’s a positive, because I think I’m more often
aware of the ethical complexity of government action than I would be
otherwise.”
Imagine, an Oregon politician who’s honest both about his past and
in the examination of his own conscience. I’d be recommending Kroger’s
book even if it were terribly written, but it shines.