Former attorney general Janet Reno died this morning at her home in Miami-Dade County, Fla, reports the New York Times. Reno was the first woman to hold the job of attorney general, and served for eight years during Bill Clinton’s presidency — longer than anyone had held the role for the previous 150 years.
Reno was born in Miami in 1938 to mother Jane and father Henry Olaf Reno, whose own parents had chosen the named “Reno” off of a map after immigrating to the United States from Denmark in 1913, according to the Times. She eventually left home to attend college at Cornell and law school at Harvard, where she was one of only a few women in her 500-person class.
Her time overseeing the Justice Department was marked by a number of significant national crises, including a federal raid on a religious cult in Waco, Texas, early in her tenure, and the government seizure of a young Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, in 2000. Her service during the Clinton administration also meant that she had heavy involvement in the investigations of President Clinton around both the Whitewater controversy and his sexual involvement with White House staffer Monica Lewinsky.
After her term as attorney general, Reno returned home to Florida. According to her sister, Margaret Hurchalla, she died of complications related to Parkinson’s disease, with which she was first diagnosed while in office in 1995.
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