The New Face of the ACLU

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ANTHONY ROMERO, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has at least one thing in common with George W. Bush: He doesn't have any trouble getting to sleep at night.

And that's probably a good thing, since Romero spends all day, every day battling the president and his Justice Department in a struggle over civil liberties that shows no signs of abating two years after the Twin Towers came down. 'The adrenaline begins to flow as soon as I read the newspaper every morning,' says Romero, 38. 'It's an enormous honor, an enormous thrill to see the issues of the day and know that it's your job to do something about them.'

Two years ago, he was tapped to replace the legendary Ira Glasser as head of the ACLU -- Romero is the first Latino and first openly gay person to head the venerable organization -- and was greeted almost immediately by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. (He was about to be introduced to a group of the ACLU's most prominent donors in a Washington hotel when the nearby Pentagon was hit.) The attacks threw Romero and the ACLU into a national political turmoil that has transformed the organization from an effective, albeit solidly mainstream, political player into perhaps the nation's most dynamic opponent of the Bush regime.

Much of the credit for that transformation can be attributed to Romero, the Bronx-born son of Puerto Rican immigrants who's built a grassroots network of activists that is extending the ACLU's mission to a broader range of issues than ever before. Some 400,000 new members have joined the organization since 9/11, partly as a result of mounting fears about what U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft might do to our basic rights, and partly as a result of Romero's commitment to street-level mobilization and his ability to connect with young activists.

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