Reno Vows to Attack Crime by Curbing Home Violence : Justice: Attorney general nominee is praised by senators at hearing on confirmation. She says domestic fights breed tomorrow’s criminals.

WASHINGTON —  Atty. Gen.-designate Janet Reno, praised by Republicans and Democrats at her Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, vowed to be tough on hard-core lawbreakers while trying to reduce crime by curbing the domestic violence that she said spawns lawlessness.

Reno appears headed for swift confirmation. The state attorney in Dade County, Fla., is President Clinton’s second nominee to become the nation’s first woman attorney general.

At a daylong session of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she deftly defused questions on her opposition to the death penalty, on her preference for emphasizing drug treatment over interdiction of drugs coming from foreign countries and on whether the White House is inappropriately dictating the selection of key Justice Department appointments without consulting her.

The hearing is expected to end today.

In vowing to lash out against domestic violence, Reno said that she has been struck by the fact that children born about the time she became state attorney--many of whom lived under the veil of domestic violence--are now coming before her office on charges of robbery and murder.

Describing youth violence as the worst crime problem facing America, she said, “It breaks your heart to talk to the kids.”

Insisting that she would not let her office be used for political ends, Reno bristled when asked whether she would keep the White House informed about the possible indictment of a powerful House committee chairman. In a tightened voice she said: “I keep politics out” of legal matters.

The question referred to Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), who is under federal investigation in connection with the House post office scandal. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he could play a crucial role in efforts to pass Clinton’s economic program.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Judiciary Committee chairman, underscored the effects of the vacancy in the attorney general’s post by urging Reno to “move quickly” on the pending ethics case against FBI Director William S. Sessions.

Biden, in his first public comments on a report by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit that Sessions had repeatedly abused his office, said that the FBI director “has been swinging in the breeze. . . . Right now there is a lack of continuity and disarray at the FBI.”

Reno said that she “will review all information as early as possible and make as informed a judgment as possible” on Sessions, who can be removed from his post only by Clinton.

Clinton nominated Reno after his first choice, Zoe Baird, asked that her nomination be withdrawn amid controversy over her hiring of an illegal immigrant couple as a nanny and chauffeur.

Clinton was later on the verge of nominating U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood, but her appointment also was dashed by the illegal immigrant issue--even though she had hired foreign workers before the practice was barred by law.

The President then turned to the 54-year-old Reno, who was elected five times as the Miami area prosecutor.

In her opening remarks before the committee Tuesday, Reno delivered a highly personal statement, drawing from childhood experiences and from her 15 years as state attorney to illustrate the kind of attorney general she intends to be.

She told of living in a house that her mother, who recently died, had built with her own hands.

“Each time I come down the driveway through the woods with a new problem, an obstacle to solve, that house stands as a symbol to me--that you can overcome any problem and you can do anything you really want to, if it’s the right thing to do and you put your mind to it.”

Noting that she had been turned down for a summer job as a law clerk by a Miami firm that made her a partner 14 years later, Reno said that she knew “what it was like to be told I couldn’t have a job because I was a woman.” She then pledged to make “civil rights enforcement one of the high priorities of the (Justice) Department.”