No wonder the president has said very little about affirmative action. The Justice Department, however, doesn’t have that luxury. It enforces the law of the land, which clearly permits – and in some cases requires – minorities to be given preference over whites to redress past discrimination. Just how aggressively the federal government should enforce the law has been the subject of a simmering debate among Justice officials in recent months. The discussion, which pits moralists against political pragmatists, illustrates how difficult it is to find middle ground.

Deval Patrick, chief of Justice’s civil-rights division, is an unapologetic defender of affirmative action. An African-American who grew up in the Chicago projects, he won scholarships to prep school, Harvard and Harvard Law. Patrick’s swearing-in speech at Justice (“Give us your commitment to equality . . . and we will set your hearts afire”) was so moving that some listeners wept. When Patrick learned that Clinton pined to speak at Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace in Atlanta last month without mentioning civil rights, he quietly refused to appear with the president.

Patrick’s sense of principle collided with political reality last year when he took on a reverse-discrimination case in Piscataway, N.J. Faced with declining enrollments, the school board had to decide whether to lay. off a white teacher or an equally senior and qualified black teacher. The board chose to keep the black teacher to promote racial diversity in a school with few minority faculty members. The Bush Justice Department had gone to court in 1992 to oppose that decision, but Patrick reversed course and committed Clinton’s Justice Department to defending it. To Patrick, the school board’s affirmative action was benign: it did not involve quotas, which he says he “scorns.”

Conservatives, however, reacted furiously. Patrick was pegged as a “quota lover,” and nastier critics began mispronouncing his first name (De-val) as “Devil.” In public, both Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno tepidly endorsed Patrick’s position on the Piscataway case, but Reno in particular privately worded about his choice of cases for taking a stand on this issue. Reno is wary of hiring by the numbers. Briefed on the department’s support for an affirmative-action plan in Alabama that used numerical goals and timetables, Reno interjected, “I thought we didn’t do that.” At Justice, the joke is that the administration is eager to have civil-rights laws aggressively enforced – as long as no one knows about it.

It has fallen to Reno’s number two, Jamie Gorelick, to lead the search for a compromise standard. A no-nonsense manager, Gorelick is credited with bringing order and purpose to a chaotic department. Her personal goal is a “race-neutral society. I don’t like numbers games,” she told NEWSWEEK. Though she is a Democrat and friendly with liberals like Patrick, her own views on affirmative action are moderate to conservative.

Sick with the flu over Christmas, Gorelick read up on the tangled history of affirmative action. The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court were not much help. Though the justices have clearly sanctioned the use of racial preference, they have been confusingly divided over the precise rules.

Gorelick wants an approach that is narrow and carefully calibrated. She would back affirmative action to remedy a clearly demonstrated wrong, like a history of past discrimination against minorities by a state agency. Or she would back it to meet a particular and obvious need, like integrating a white police force in a mostly black city. But she is skeptical about using it for general goals like making society more diverse or to overcome the long-term effects of slavery. Gorelick was away last summer when Justice took on the Piscataway case. Though she publicly supports Patrick’s stand, other Justice officials say that she would not have chosen to intervene to defend the layoff of the white teacher.

Because of her caution, Gorelick has been accused by some civil-rights lawyers of selling out. Meanwhile, other Justice officials – and some White House aides – would like to cut back severely on affirmative action. Officially, the Justice Department has reached no overall position. And until the political crosscurrents subside, the Clinton administration will be taking affirmative action one delicate case at a time.

Have we gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country?

BLACKS WHITES TOTAL CURRENT CURRENT CURRENT/1987[a] Agree 31% 54% 51%/42% Disagree 64% 43% 46%153%

a TIMES MIRROR.

FOR THIS NEWSWEEK ROLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES TELEPHONED 758 ADULTS, INCLUDING 252 AFRICAN-AMERICANS, FEB. 1-3. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS +/- 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS FOR THE TOTAL, 5 FOR WHITES AND 8 FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANS. THE NEWSWEEK POLL (C) 1995 BY NEWSWEEK, INC.