Can Anthony Romero ’90 change the way Americans view civil liberties?

Anthony Romero doesn’t exactly blend in as he walks across the Stanford campus, but he feels right at home. He’s wearing a black Italian suit, dark tie, and mauve shirt, and his pace is brisk. A Law School employee offers to carry his garment bag, but Romero, the guest of honor, won’t have it. 

“Let me do that,” Romero insists, taking the suitcase, and then he marvels, “This is such a gorgeous campus—I love being here.” He studies the throngs of undergraduates on the quad between classes. “They’re our future,” says Romero. He rattles off a succession of stories about students he has met recently in his efforts as Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union to reach out to a younger crowd. 

Romero has returned to Stanford this November day to receive the first-ever Stanford Public Interest Lawyer of the Year Award (see p. 32). This is not a prize he would have predicted his winning when he was in his final year of law school and couldn’t find work. Back then, he didn’t even have a decent suit, and always wore the same pair of cheap rubber sandals and baggy pajama-like pants. His hair was sometimes in a ponytail. He was known for being incredibly nice, not for being ambitious. As a leader of student protests pushing for increased faculty diversity, he wasn’t welcome in the offices of top University officials—a far cry from an hour earlier on this particular afternoon, when Stanford President John Hennessy and he discussed the new restrictions being imposed on foreign students. Hennessy later invited Romero, who is gay, to be a featured speaker at the University’s Queer Awareness Day. 

Romero was named to the ACLU’s top job in May 2001, and it was a surprising choice. He was 35 years old. He had never been in the national spotlight. He was an executive at the Ford Foundation with no direct experience in litigating and lobbying on civil liberties. He had actually been rejected for a fellowship at the ACLU earlier in his career. When the previous executive director approached him about the job, Romero says, “I was completely unnerved. I felt like I had been thrown into a pool of water.” 

Roughly three years after Romero took the helm, no one is voicing any regrets about his selection. Under his guidance, membership in the ACLU has reached a record high of more than 400,000, up from slightly under 300,000 when he started. He has raised unprecedented sums of money, including an $8 million donation from Peter B. Lewis to fund the ACLU’s general operations. 

Most important, Romero and the ACLU have galvanized public opinion. The Patriot Act, which makes it easier for law enforcement to spy on citizens and detain noncitizen immigrants, has drawn increasing scrutiny. At the ACLU’s urging, more than 240 cities have passed resolutions decrying it. Attorney General John Ashcroft took the unusual step of touring the country last fall to explain why he believes the law is necessary. And the title of a talk at the Law School last October was “Ashcroft Is Not Darth Vader.” 

Although the ACLU is one in a coalition of groups attacking the law, Romero is the point man. A Justice Department spokesman accused him of spreading fear and misinformation, and Details magazine describes him as the “most hated man in America.” 

If Romero is uneasy with such attention on the day of his visit to campus, it doesn’t show. He’s intent on building a civil liberties mass movement, and he’s thinking about the speech he will deliver later in the evening. “The key question now is, What do we want our democracy to look like?” he says. “The momentum is against making permanent the powers granted in the Patriot Act.” The thousands of new ACLU members are a welcome addition, he says, but there should be thousands and thousands more: “Everyone should be a member.” 

There is a chapter about Anthony Romero in the book We Won’t Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action by Georgetown University Law Center Professors Charles R. Lawrence III and Mari J. Matsuda. In it, Romero, then the Ford Foundation executive in charge of international human rights and antipoverty programs, is giving a tour of a Manhattan housing court to a group of potential philanthropists. They are impressed by his presentation and knowledge, and wondering about the background of this guide, with the “second-generation Puerto Rican accent.” 

One woman asks how he reached such a position. “Two words,” he answers. “Affirmative action.”

Romero grew up in housing projects in the Bronx. His parents were Puerto Rican immigrants. When his father returned from work at night to his neighborhood subway stop, he would call home, and Romero, his younger sister, and his mother would count the seconds until he walked through the door, fearing that he might meet his end in the gunshots echoing outside the windows. 

In his speech at Stanford on November 12*, Romero explains that the ticket out for him and his family was a lawyer whom he never met. After 20 years as a janitor and busboy, Romero’s father applied for a promotion to be a waiter. When the application was denied, he turned to a union lawyer, who successfully contended that he had been discriminated against because he was Puerto Rican. The new salary allowed the family to move to New Jersey, and Romero thrived at his high school there—he graduated salutatorian. According to the chapter about him, he didn’t realize that college was an option, until Ivy League admissions officials, driven by the demands of affirmative action, began to recruit him. He graduated from Princeton; then, inspired by the union lawyer, enrolled at Stanford Law School. 

Faculty and classmates remember Romero as a rail-thin knot of energy. Ira Glasser, the previous ACLU Executive Director who is renowned for being a fast talker, says, “Anthony is one of the very few people I know who speaks more rapidly than I do.” At the Law School, Romero helped to found the Stanford Law & Policy Review and was president of the Stanford Latino Law Students Association. 

But what set him apart at Law School was his zest for life, his charm, and his caring. He arranged road trips to the Pacific Northwest, Mexico, and India. When a classmate, Magdalena “Bebe” Revuelta, was hospitalized with chickenpox for several weeks, he visited daily and made sure she received lecture notes. “He was just so incredibly nice,” says Jeanne Merino ’86, Director of the Law School’s First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program. In her class, he challenged other students, but he was “so sweet” that no one ever was ruffled, she says. 

Those three years at Stanford were a critical period in Romero’s life. “This is where I grew up,” he says. He came with deep convictions about social justice, but Stanford is where he says he figured out how to put that passion into action. He spent much time at the East Palo Alto Community Law Project, representing clients and writing a manual on tenants’ rights. He learned that he wasn’t suited for a traditional law practice when Merino assigned Revuelta and him their first moot court case involving a lawsuit by an Indian tribe against the government for building a road through sacred land. Over his objections, Romero and Revuelta were told to argue on behalf of the government. He recalls how, after he made a point in his presentation about the government’s claim, the moot court judge asked whether he really believed that to be the case. 

“No, I don’t believe it,” he blurted out, “but I was told I have to argue this side.” 

That moment was something of an epiphany for Romero. “It became clear to me right then,” he notes, “that I would never argue a case that made me uncomfortable.” 

Still, finding a public interest position straight out of law school was a challenge. Romero had pinned much of his hopes on winning the ACLU’s Marvin M. Karpatkin Fellowship, but he was a runner-up. “I was absolutely crushed,” he says. He had loans to pay back, and he despaired about his family’s reaction. Revuelta told him to hang in there. His patience paid off: he was awarded a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation just before graduation. 

From 1990 to 2001, Romero’s career flourished. He left Rockefeller and rose through the ranks of the Ford Foundation, distinguishing himself not only as a grant maker but also as an advisor to nonprofits, a manager of people, and a master of back-office systems. Susan V. Berresford, the Ford Foundation president, notes that there are a select few who can make smart, well-informed funding decisions, and there are another select few who can revamp office administration practices. Romero was the rare individual who could do both —and be charming at the same time. “He has it all,” she says. “I’m glad that the ACLU was able to see it and hire him.”

Romero was executive director for exactly one week when the September 11 attacks occurred. As the first 747 jet crashed into the World Trade Center towers, he was in Washington, D.C., about to address his first meeting of the organization’s biggest donors. A staff member directed him to a television, he saw the mayhem, and quickly took the podium away from another speaker. 

Romero’s remarks revealed a brilliance and sensitivity under pressure that laid the foundation for the organization’s strategy in the coming months. Phil Gutis, an ACLU staff member, says that Romero was immediately aware that this was a seminal moment in the history of civil liberties. But the first thing he mentioned that morning, as he broke the news to the audience, was his concern about friends, family, and the employees at ACLU headquarters, a few blocks from the towers. He acknowledged that the most important thing right then was for people to contact their loved ones, then advised them to make new travel arrangements. 

Throughout that day, Romero was under tremendous pressure to deliver rousing remarks warning about potential civil liberties abuses. Instead, he issued a statement that the group “joins the nation today in grieving over the devastating loss of life.” He applauded President George W. Bush’s remark that “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” He pledged to work with the administration “to protect the security and freedom of all people in America.” He continued, noting that “one of the greatest symbols of freedom and democracy in our nation still stands: through the billowing smoke of destruction in lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty lifts her torch to freedom.” And he finished, “Long may she survive.” 

The statement carried no sign of how Romero was actually feeling. “I was scared out of my wits,” he says. “But I knew that this was about caring for people, and that we had to meet the public where they were, that they needed time to grieve their losses.” 

Over the next few days, Romero studied how his predecessor, Glasser, had handled the bombing in Oklahoma City, and it confirmed his sense that the ACLU had to gather information first, before it mobilized for action. Polemics had to be avoided at all costs, he says. One day as Romero was on a conference call with staff members discussing the Patriot Act proposal, he heard Attorney General Ashcroft testifying before Congress about the need for expanded wiretapping authority—and challenging the patriotism of those who did not support such a measure. “That’s when I said, ‘Go! Now we kick into action,’” Romero says. “I actually kicked someone off the telephone to talk to a New York Times reporter. I remember with surgical clarity that moment as the opening salvo.” 

In the ensuing weeks, he reached out to a host of foreign embassies, offering to work with them to discover the identities of the hundred Middle Eastern people whom the government had detained. He helped to form a coalition of more than a hundred groups that ranged the political spectrum. He focused the organization on fact gathering. And he developed what would become the theme of the ACLU’s campaign in the coming years: that security and freedom go hand-inhand, that the ACLU did not oppose the entire Patriot Act but wanted only to remove the provisions that permitted the government to spy on citizens without good cause. 

The ACLU has displayed its lobbying muscle in Washington over the past few decades. As a national organization, with affiliates in every state, it also has been influential in shaping public opinion. But since September 11, 2001, Romero has raised the organization’s game to a new level. 

In the previous decades, the ACLU had grown into a big national organization. Romero began to fine-tune it so that the different units pulled together. He created a new department which was responsible for supporting the affiliates: the 53 state and regional chapters, which receive some money from the national organization but are independent entities. Romero worked with these affiliates to develop a new financing formula so that the smallest would be able to receive additional money and bring in visiting attorneys on yearlong fellowships. And he began holding regular weekly teleconference meetings so that the different branches could coordinate their actions.

At the same time, Romero saw to it that the national organization stepped up its effort to energize and empower the individual members. The group began holding teach-ins on the Patriot Act around the country. It encouraged cities to pass resolutions opposing the law. It began holding ACLU forums at colleges with hip-hop performers and comedians. And it held a very different sort of national membership conference in Washington, D.C., last summer, which drew a large crowd of young people. Staff members noticed a difference when they walked into the hotel conference room and saw a huge ACLU banner and two giant television screens behind the stage: a few years earlier there would have been only a small placard. 

Communications at the ACLU have entered the 21st century. E-mail news alerts go out to subscribers several times a day. When a crisis arises, the organization calls members and patches them through to their representatives in Congress. Romero is already thinking about developing programming for television and radio. When ACLU President Nadine Strossen was about to testify on Capitol Hill shortly after September 11, Romero made sure that a camera crew was rushed over there. 

Romero is determined to raise the ACLU’s public profile. He hired a new communications director, Emily Tynes, who revamped the department, redesigned the ACLU logo, and made sure it now appears on all the releases and publications in the ACLU family. Together they hired a new advertising agency and launched a $4 million advertising campaign—the organization’s largest ever. These magazine ads and television commercials are stylish and edgy (one critic compared them to a Gap ad), featuring such celebrities as actor Al Pacino, rock singer Michael Stipe, and Kristin Davis of Sex and the City. 

The ads show how the ACLU continues to cultivate its connection with artists and entertainers, but Romero has also opened doors to less traditional allies. One radio ad was done jointly with the American Conservative Union; under Romero’s watch, the organization has hired as a consultant former congressman Bob Barr and has worked closely with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, two Republicans who share the group’s criticisms of the Patriot Act while disagreeing with its positions on abortion and gay rights. And at the membership conference in D.C. last summer, Romero brought in FBI director Robert Mueller (Stanford Law School’s 2002 Ralston Lecturer) to speak. 

While organizing these events, campaigns, and backoffice changes, Romero is taking calls from reporters. He’s giving speeches. He’s updating the organization’s pension plan. And he’s trying to build a larger and stronger ACLU by developing relationships with donors. “He has raised boatloads of money,” says Glasser, who himself was a gifted fundraiser. “Anthony could have just rested on his laurels, but he went out there aggressively and raised money like we were going to go under; that creates confidence on a whole host of levels.” 

Glasser adds that the phenomenal increase in fundraising and membership—annual new membership has broken the previous record high for each of the three years that Romero has been in office—can’t be attributed solely to increased public concern in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Romero’s successes in these areas have “led to a permanent change in the institution,” Glasser says. 

Aryeh Neier, another former director of the ACLU and now president of the Open Society Institute, says that Romero’s admirable performance has been “somewhat startling. He had spent his career prior to ACLU in foundation positions. Most foundations are risk averse, and they are not used to taking the lead on controversial public issues—and doing so in the limelight.

“Far from being overwhelmed by the role he had to play in the weeks following September 11, he has responded to it in a superb manner: he articulates policy positions marvelously and marshals resources effectively.” 

The effect of Romero’s work has been a gradual yet significant shift in the political landscape over the last three years on civil liberties issues. Unlike the 1988 presidential election, in which George H.W. Bush scored points by accusing his opponent of being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” such an attack today would likely backfire. 

Civil liberties are becoming a mainstream issue, not just a cause for the fringe. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, for example, ran an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle calling for a reexamination of the Patriot Act, and a bipartisan group of senators is pushing a bill that narrows certain parts of the 2001 law. When the President urged Congress to extend some portions of the act that sunset in 2005, including a provision that allows the government to subpoena private records, some top Republicans immediately rejected the idea. “I’d say he’s about a year early,” Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told the New York Times. “If I were running for president, I wouldn’t have brought it up now.” 

In a telephone interview, Romero mentions that he is looking out at the Statue of Liberty from his office. He says that he makes sure not to take the view for granted. It is 11 a.m. on a cold winter day in January, and he has had a typical morning. Before leaving his apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, he spoke in confidence with a senior government official about the new airport screenings that were to start nationwide that day. After hanging up the phone, he said goodbye to his partner, whose name he asks be kept private to protect him from the spotlight, and took the subway to the ACLU building. He then had a meeting with the ACLU’s direct mail firm and spoke with members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about his testifying about the Patriot Act at a hearing later in the spring. He did some brainstorming with staff about new media projects. At the end of the day he’s scheduled to meet for dinner with the composer Philip Glass, whose work Romero loves. He is hoping that Glass might be willing to participate in some new ACLU media projects. 

The work is endless, and Romero says he never stops thinking about it. His classmate and friend Revuelta recalls talking with Romero just before he accepted the job and his saying that his one reservation was that his life would become so public. “He doesn’t want it or need it,” she says, adding that he was willing to do it only because he believed so strongly in the ACLU’s mission. 

Of course, the celebrity factor isn’t all negative. Not only is he dining with Glass, but he also mentions doing a fireside chat with actor Tim Robbins and chatting with hip-hop producer Russell Simmons. But Romero isn’t starstruck. “They’re just human beings like everyone else,” he says. Indeed, Romero’s ability to connect with his fellow human beings is legendary. Another classmate, Wendy Pulling, describes how Romero charmed both her elderly aunt at a formal Thanksgiving and a poor fisherman the two met while traveling in India. The fisherman was so taken with Romero that he invited them to his hut for dinner and to meet his wife and children. 

Romero laughs when reminded of the incident. “Sometimes I become aware of whom I’m interacting with and think what an incredible privilege this job is and how lucky I am to be meeting these leaders of politics, finance, and entertainment,” he says. “Then I realize that what everyone is looking for is to be treated as a human being, whose aspirations matter. 

“You have to be an extrovert to be in this job, and I’ve always loved people. Being at the ACLU allows me to build on these people skills for a good cause.” 

Of course, it can get a bit tiring. Romero recently shaved his beard after being beset with suggestions about how it should be styled. And there are moments when Romero just wants to escape. A few days earlier he had gone to a movie with his partner and his partner’s mother and sister. Romero says he was dressed informally—black leather jacket and jeans. He was at the concession stand buying popcorn, when a man next to him remarked, “I know you, aren’t you Anthony Romero?”

 Romero says that he may have winced momentarily, as he waited to hear what the man had to say. He admits that for a second or two he just didn’t want to be bothered. But that wouldn’t do. “I realized that I represent an organization and a cause, and that this guy had an issue,” Romero says. With the popcorn and drinks in his hands, Romero listened and then explained the ACLU’s position. He apparently provided a satisfactory enough explanation, as the man was ready to go catch the opening credits. 

But before they could part, Romero says he got in two final questions. “Hey, are you a member?” Romero asked. And when the guy said no, Romero chided him. “Why not? It’s easy.” Romero gave the stranger instructions on how to do it over the Internet, before going back into the theater to watch Jude Law.