Alberto Gonzales likes to retell the story of his first business meeting with George W. Bush. It was in late 1994, only a week after Mr Bush had been elected governor of Texas. The governor had called together a hand-picked group of individuals who would form his first cabinet. Mr Gonzales, a high-flying young lawyer in one of Austin's most respected firms, wondered why a politician he knew only in passing wanted to pluck him from a lucrative career in private practice and into the modestly paid arena of public office as the state's general counsel. 'He told me I first got on his radar screen because I had turned down his old man for a job,' recalls Mr Gonzales, a Hispanic, referring to how Mr Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, sought out rising stars from racial minorities and invited them to join his administration in Washington. 'I didn't know him and I was surprised that he wanted me to be his lawyer,' he said. 'He told me that he had first heard about me many years ago. When you work with someone as their lawyer, if the relationship is right, you really get to know them as a person.' That close personal friendship and strong working relationship, forged in the Texas capitol building 13 years ago, is the reason Mr Gonzales is still a member of the US cabinet. For it is likely that without the president's passionate public defence of his attorney-general, after a mauling at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating the sacking of eight federal prosecutors, Mr Gonzales would by now have felt compelled to resign. 'The attorney-general went up and gave a very candid assessment, and answered every question he could possibly answer, honestly answer, in a way that increased my confidence in his ability to do the job,' Mr Bush said, contradicting the widely held view of Democratic and Republican senators alike that Mr Gonzales had, at best, been evasive in his testimony. The New York Times counted more than 50 occasions when he said he could not recall details of his involvement in the dismissals, and linked millions of 'missing' White House e-mails to the scandal. Such loyalty comes as little surprise to observers who have studied the president's relationships with his trusted consultants and political appointments through two terms in office. Mr Bush generally stands by those who have stood by him, they say, and the scandal in which Mr Gonzales is currently embroiled is not large enough for the president to cast him loose. 'It's not just because Bush is loyal to people, but because he didn't see anything that required Mr Gonzales to go,' said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on White House staffing. 'Gonzales definitely screwed up and it looked like there was a lot of legal bumbling, but after the release of thousands of documents there's no smoking gun and it's not apparent in the minds of anyone that anything illegal had gone on.' Speculation over Mr Gonzales's future continues to fill many column inches of the nation's newspapers and to provide ammunition for late- night TV comedians. 'Gonzales has a new office computer,' said Jay Leno, host of the Tonight Show. 'It destroys e-mails and has virtually no memory.' This is just the latest of several controversies that Mr Gonzales, a softly spoken graduate of Harvard Law School and former judge of the Texas Supreme Court, has been caught up in during his time in Washington. As counsel general to the White House, he was the author of a contentious executive order signed by Mr Bush in 2001 that limits public access to presidential records. 'The people's right of access to government information is the cornerstone of our democratic society,' the furious American Library Association said. Yet it was his entanglement in a series of episodes regarding the use of torture during America's so-called 'war on terror' that brought the sharpest criticism. In January 2002 he wrote a memo to Mr Bush in which he concluded that Taleban and al-Qaeda prisoners in US detention at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention during questioning. Later that summer he was involved in written exchanges between the CIA, State Department and Department of Justice that rewrote the legal definition of torture to exclude inflicting pain short of organ failure, permanent psychological damage or death. Opponents charge that those exchanges led directly to the prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and other incidents when so-called enemy combatants died in US military custody. For all that, Mr Gonzales was still considered a moderate compared to his predecessor when he was nominated by Mr Bush to replace John Ashcroft as US attorney-general in November 2004. The Senate's 60-36 vote to confirm him made him the first Hispanic to achieve such high office. Critics, who include of a growing number of senior Republican politicians, say that he has become a liability to the administration and should step down. 'The attorney- general's testimony was very, very damaging to his own credibility. It has been damaging to the administration,' said Senator Arlen Specter, former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. 'No doubt it is bad for the Department of Justice. It is harmful. There has been a very substantial decrease in morale.' But Mr Gonzales, 51, insists that he wants to see the job through. 'As long as I think that I can be effective and the president believes that I should ... I'll continue serving as the attorney-general,' he said. One of eight children born to migrant worker parents in San Antonio, Texas, Mr Gonzales says he learned his work ethic from four years in the US Air Force and from his father. 'He was an alcoholic,' he said, 'but no matter how much he drank on a particular night, if it was a work day the next morning, he was always up and he was always gone to provide for his family, so I learned that lesson very early on. 'The three biggest influences of my life, in terms of maturing me as a person, were my mom, my dad and our president, who's given me some wonderful opportunities. I've learned a lot from him in the various roles that I've seen him in, as a father, and as a governor, and as a president.' Mr Gonzales has three sons with his second wife, Rebecca, and says that family time is the most precious to him. But despite the growing pressure for him to step down, Professor Tenpas believes this will have to wait. 'When people have to resign is when there's a public outcry, like Michael Brown, the head of Fema, having to resign after Hurricane Katrina when it was clear he didn't have the kind of resume needed for the job,' she said. 'Mr Bush knows how to twist arms. He appeals to their sense of loyalty and will say, 'We really need you'.'
