WASHINGTON (By Eric Lichtblau, NYTimes) February 4, 2004 - Alberto R. Gonzales, a longtime adviser to President Bush who helped to shape the White House's aggressive response to the Sept. 11 attacks, won confirmation on Thursday as the nation's first Hispanic attorney general despite protests from Senate Democrats over his record on torture.

The Senate approved his nomination on a largely party-line vote of 60 to 36. The vote, with much stronger opposition than many lawmakers had predicted when Mr. Gonzales was nominated in November, reflected the deep split between Republicans and Democrats over the administration's counterterrorism policies and whether those policies led to the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

Vice President Dick Cheney swore in Mr. Gonzales, 49, as attorney general in a small ceremony at the Roosevelt Room at the White House at 5:35 p.m., shortly after the Senate vote. President Bush, who was traveling, called to congratulate him.

"The president knows that Judge Gonzales will make an outstanding attorney general," said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman.

But after three days of rancorous debate over the Gonzales nomination, Democrats characterized the vote as a strong statement of opposition to the policies on the detention and treatment of prisoners in the administration's campaign on terrorism. With all but 6 of 41 Democrats present on Thursday opposing Mr. Gonzales, he received fewer Democratic votes than John Ashcroft did in his 2001 confirmation as attorney general. Eight Democrats supported Mr. Ashcroft in that 58 to 42 vote, the closest confirmation vote for an attorney general since 1925.

As the nation's chief law enforcement officer, Mr. Gonzales, a Harvard Law School graduate who served for the last four years as White House counsel to Mr. Bush, takes control of a Justice Department facing widespread uncertainty over major planks in the administration's antiterrorism policies.

He becomes the chief lobbyist in the effort to persuade Congress to extend main provisions of the USA Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of 2004. The initiative is a top White House legislative priorities, but many Democrats and some Republicans have pushed to curtail the sweeping antiterrorism powers granted to the government in the legislation, which was passed in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Gonzales will also have to grapple with decisions from the Supreme Court and lower appellate courts that have cast doubt on the administration's powers to detain foreigners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. And the department has suffered several recent setbacks in domestic terrorism prosecutions, most notably in the collapse of the prosecution of a group of Detroit men who were once considered part of a terrorist "sleeper cell."

Shortly after Mr. Bush announced Mr. Gonzales's nomination, several leading Democrats voiced initial support, calling him a man of intellect and integrity.

But support for Mr. Gonzales clearly waned after his confirmation hearing last month, as Democrats accused him of being evasive and "stonewalling" in his answers about the Bush administration's policies on the treatment of foreign prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay and his role in developing them. Even some Republican supporters said they thought his performance was lacking in some respects and probably hurt his cause.

Democratic leaders reserved some of their most caustic accusations for the confirmation debate's waning hours on Thursday.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been one of Mr. Gonzales's toughest critics, said it was "a sad day for the Senate" to confirm "a person who was at the heart of the policy on torture that has so shamed America in the eyes of the whole world and has so flagrantly violated the values we preach to the world."

Mr. Kennedy and other Democrats focused their attacks on two legal opinions linked to Mr. Gonzales: a 2002 memorandum that he wrote calling some provisions of the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete," and a Justice Department memorandum written to Mr. Gonzales that same year giving a narrow definition of torture and a broad reading of presidential power to detain suspected enemies. The administration has now disavowed that opinion in favor of a broader definition of torture, but Democrats said both legal interpretations showed Mr. Gonzales to be too much of a loyalist to Mr. Bush to be an independent attorney general because of his refusal to question policies later deemed excessive.

"We need to find our way back to the moral high ground," Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in opposing Mr. Gonzales's nomination.

Republicans were clearly exasperated by the attacks.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Republican and the former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, "Some of my colleagues say they will against him because he does not have the proper respect for the law." Grimacing, he added, "Give me a break."

Mr. Hatch and other leading Republicans hailed Mr. Gonzales's Horatio Alger-like rise as the son of migrant workers in Texas who grew up in a small, crowded home without hot water or a telephone.

Mr. Gonzales attended Rice University and Harvard Law School before Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, picked him in 1995 to serve as his general counsel in Austin and in 2001 brought him to Washington as his White House counsel.

Mr. Gonzales's Republican defenders accused Democrats of "monstrous" distortions of his record and said he was being unfairly tarnished for policies that were often outside his control. Indeed, some Republicans went beyond simply defending Mr. Gonzales's legal opinions and instead extolled them as essential.

In pressing for new strategies after Sept. 11, Mr. Gonzales had "aggressively explored every possible legal means" to detain terror suspects and extract potentially valuable information from them, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said. To do anything less, he added, would have been "a dereliction."