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Ashcroft lost that race but got a break in 1975, when he was named an assistant state attorney general under John Danforth. Ashcroft found himself working in a 16-ft. by 16-ft. office in Jefferson City alongside another Danforth protege whose career was on the rise: Clarence Thomas. The two men could not have been more different. Thomas was more liberal then, with an easygoing manner and appetite for night life. Ashcroft was "prim and proper," a colleague recalled, and Thomas loved to make sport with him, get under Ashcroft's skin. At times Ashcroft would leave a room when his colleagues joked around or waxed profane. Ashcroft and Thomas did share a deep knowledge of the Bible, but it didn't always bind them. Ashcroft often quoted Scripture to make a point, only to have Thomas cite a verse making precisely the opposite point.
Ashcroft became attorney general in 1977 and proceeded to build his reputation and power base opposing court-ordered school desegregation in St. Louis and Kansas City. He fought a 1983 voluntary-busing scheme for St. Louis, even though the 22 school districts in the surrounding white suburbs--where 12,000 inner-city kids would be transported every year--approved it. Among other things, he inveighed against the financial burden that the desegregation order imposed on the state--upwards of $100 million, he said, doubling the true cost, critics charged. Ashcroft appealed the federal-court ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. "The 22 school districts' agreeing to take this step was extraordinary," says William L. Taylor, who represented the N.A.A.C.P. and a class of black schoolchildren as plaintiffs. "You'd think a state leader like Mr. Ashcroft would recognize that and support it as an act of racial reconciliation."
More incendiary, given the current climate, are charges that Ashcroft worked to suppress black voter turnout by twice vetoing laws that would have promoted voter-registration efforts in the City of St. Louis, which is half black and heavily Democratic. Voter registration there was the lowest in the state, Democrats charge, largely because the Ashcroft-appointed St. Louis election board, unlike boards in other counties, failed to deputize groups like the League of Women Voters to help increase voter registration. Ashcroft vetoed bills that would have ordered the board to do so.
But Ashcroft was a popular Governor; he balanced eight straight budgets, kept taxes down and poured money into education. The closest thing to scandal to touch him as Governor came in 1990, when his wife ordered library officials to open the Missouri State Library on a Sunday night so that one of the Ashcrofts' sons could research a homework assignment on the Elizabethans.