In 1975, President Gerald Ford named Edward H. Levi, the president of the University of Chicago, as attorney general. Eulogizing Levi 25 years later, Ford said that in the aftermath of Watergate, he had been looking for someone divorced from politics who could restore public confidence in the Justice Department and the legal system.

“No campaign managers need apply, nor members of the family, official or political,” noted Ford. “I wanted him to protect the rights of American citizens, not the president who appointed him.”

Ford’s choice of Levi would be an excellent model for President Bush as he selects a new attorney general to succeed Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales was everything that Ford warned against. He was a member of Bush’s political “family,” who owed his entire career to the president and always placed his patron’s interest first.

Bush’s abuse of the Justice Department does not rival the crimes of the Watergate era (Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell spent 19 months in jail). But presidential scholar Robert Dallek accurately assessed Gonzales’s tenure in telling the Financial Times: “People will be looking through the official records for many years to ferret out just how deep the political corruption went during his time at Justice.”

This “corruption” has demoralized the department. Most of the top leadership has left. The career professionals who provide consistency and coherence to law enforcement – whichever party occupies the White House – have been dangerously downgraded.