WASHINGTON – Attorney General Michael Mukasey says he never has sought the spotlight, instead living by his parents’ axiom of achieving success by keeping his head down and working hard.

Look where that landed him: at the helm of the Justice Department, defending unpopular Bush administration policies and picking the best among bad options for fighting terrorists and crime.

The irony is not lost on Mukasey, who has begun to settle into the job that he undertook five months ago – one he says he never asked or competed for.

But, as he puts it with a slight grimace of embarrassed impatience, “And so what?”

“Look, the fact is, sometimes interesting things happen to boring people,” Mukasey said last week during an in-flight interview above California with The Associated Press.

Accidents figure in

He added: “Anybody in a position like this has a series of accidents that happen … Many people do a very good job and that’s the job they do. And there are some people who get a more visible one and I’m one of them.”

During a Los Angeles news conference, he shut down a reporter who suggested gang members should be considered domestic terrorists and subjected to waterboarding, an interrogation tactic that simulates drowning and is called torture by critics. “I’m not going to talk about interrogation techniques,” Mukasey snapped.

In San Francisco the next day, he choked up mentioning the Sept. 11 attacks to illustrate what might happen if the government cannot eavesdrop on the phone calls of suspected terrorists. “You’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, pausing first to compose himself. The federal courthouse where he served as chief judge at the time of the attacks is just blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

$2M in 21 months

Mukasey, 66, came to the Justice Department after 18 years on the bench and a lucrative 21 months as a partner at New York law firm Patterson, Belknap Webb & Tyler, during which he netted almost $2 million. He is a native New Yorker who grew up in a lower-middle-class Bronx family as the son of a Belarus immigrant.

Along the way, he worked in his father’s laundromat, as a messenger boy, as a law firm gofer and at a summer job at a Utah lumber mill. He was fired from that stint for sawing boards in incorrect lengths.

Known by his friends more often as “Michael” than “Mike,” Mukasey has a dry and self-deprecating wit that “maybe doesn’t come across when you first meet him,” said longtime pal Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and unsuccessful candidate for president. The two met in the early 1970s as federal prosecutors and have been close friends since.

He doesn’t gain weight

“It’s annoying to eat with him because he doesn’t gain weight,” Giuliani said. Recalling a trial they worked on together, Giuliani said, “every day we would have lunch together and he would order Ring Dings.”

Mukasey fondly recalls his 18 years as a judge in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where he was chief judge for six years and presided over some of the first terrorism cases from the government’s investigation of the 2001 attacks. It was a particularly liberating job compared to being caught up in the daily maelstrom at the Justice Department.

“When you’re on the bench it’s not a fair fight,” he said. “You have the power as a judge to do two things that you can’t do here: One is to take a recess and the other is to adjourn. And you can’t stop it from happening here. Not in that way.”

Given last year’s tumult at the department, the partisan hiring and firing of prosecutors and the investigations that led to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, it is important for the public to feel comfortable with Mukasey, said political scientist and psychoanalyst Stanley Renshon.

Mukasey has good reasons to keep his head down. The job of attorney general is a lightning rod, and Mukasey came in at a critical time. As such, there were not a lot of bright spots in his first few months in Washington.

Discouraged at first

“For four to six weeks into it, I was – depressed is too strong a word – discouraged on a pretty frequent basis, particularly by the end of the day, at the fact that people kept coming in and describing situations that were in one way or another a problem, where something was wrong,” he said.

“And then the light went on and it was, ‘Look, dummy, you’re in a job where nobody is going to come into your office like a messenger with winged feet to say there has just been a great success and this has gone right.”‘

Once he realized the job involved fixing problems and choosing the best option among bad solutions, “it didn’t get a whole lot easier, but I wasn’t quite in the emotional funk that I had been before,” Mukasey said.

He calls his staff his saving grace, comparing himself to a bodysurfer diving into a mosh. “I’m in that position every day,” he said. “They catch me and they get me, I feel, to a good place.”