I will never forget that it was John “Let The Eagle Soar” Ashcroft’s Justice Department that spent taxpayer dollars on covering up Lady Justice’s bosoms. Yet more and more these days, Ashcroft is also being indelibly identified as a man who stood by his principles against torture and warrantless spying in an administration that was scrambling for these and other perversions.

An article yesterday revealed that Ashcroft had made a list of five candidates to lead the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 - an office responsible for overseeing the legality of DoJ deeds - only to have the White House shoot down his candidates and insist on appointing a chief architect of pro-torture, pro-warrantless spying policy.

In an angry phone call hours after Ashcroft’s list reached the White House, President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., quickly dismissed the candidates, all Republican lawyers with impeccable credentials, the sources said. He and White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that Ashcroft promote John Yoo, a onetime OLC deputy who had worked closely with Gonzales and vice presidential adviser David S. Addington to draft memos supporting a controversial warrantless wiretapping plan and detainee questioning techniques.

Ashcroft’s response, despite ailing health and an uphill battle, was to dig in his heels. He fought hard for a compromise candidate, Jack Goldsmith by name. And it was Goldsmith who went on to help expose and undo a lot of the grim deeds of the Gonzales-Yoo policies.

This has brought an interesting distinction to light for me. This distinction is one that I anticipated to develop after the Bush administration, but considering how long and eventful the administration has been, I suppose it was crafted rapidly. It is the distinction that even among the cliquish Neo-Conservatives, as in practically any group, there are moral true believers and there are self-serving hypocrites.

John Ashcroft is, apparently, a man that does indeed walk the walk. He surely has a few skeletons in his closet, but by all indications he struggled to stick by the Constitution, even when the agenda of his cohorts was pulling hard in a dangerous new direction. He may have wanted to chip away at civil rights progress - there is no painting him as other than a staunch enemy to the ACLU, pro-choice movements and drug users - but apparently believed in his gut that there were certain lines America did not cross.

I would imagine in Ashcroft’s clean-cut, picket-fence America, they may have locked up the hippies, but they did not torture.

On one level, I’m happy to hear it. It’s nice when someone with dramatically opposing views turns out to have fought the kind of fight I’d want fought.

On the other, it strikes me as an eviscerating tragedy that because a fanatical social conservative doesn’t sink so low as to okay sexual assault as a means of interrogation, he stands out as an exceptional hero in an administration the greatest country in the world has lived under for eight of its most critical years.