BOB KERREY: A Senator Of Candor

In their endless struggle to please and appease special interests and large voter blocs, most of the 535 members of Congress have succeeded mainly in diminishing themselves. Their fundamental obligation to order the nation’s finances has given way to the politician’s primal instinct: inflict no pain; ruffle no feathers; get re-elected.

How, then, to explain Bob Kerrey? The junior Senator from Nebraska, whose personal valor was certified for all time when he lost a leg in Vietnam, is equally fearless wading through political minefields. Opposing a Senate resolution supporting George Bush’s gulf policy, adopted 97-3, Kerrey declared, “No American should die in the Persian Gulf in order to hold down the price of gasoline.” Impatient with the inadequacy and dithering of the budget debate, he predicted, “We will pass a budget that will reduce the deficit by $34 billion, the economy will continue to weaken, and the deficit will grow beyond $300 billion.” Feather-ruffling talk.

Beyond the borders of his native Nebraska and outside the domains of the political cognoscenti, Kerrey, 47, is known, if at all, as actress Debra Winger’s sometime boyfriend. But since taking his seat in the U.S. Senate 21 months ago, J. Robert Kerrey has emerged as an intriguing figure in a capital where blunt talk is a scarce commodity that attracts lots of attention. Explains Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman, who has worked for Kerrey: “He isn’t caught up in status quo thinking. I don’t know if I have seen anyone quite so fearless.” There is of course a dissenting view. “He’s long on rhetoric,” grumbles Scott Matter, former executive director of the Nebraska Republican Party. “Almost like a stage performer. But it’s hard to come up with any accomplishments.” Still, in Nebraska, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 70,000, Kerrey, a slender, earnest man with outsize eyes, has won two statewide elections — for Governor in 1982 and for Senator in 1988 — in which Republican support was essential. Dick Mercer, a cattle rancher from Kearney and a lifelong Republican, in 1988 headed up an organization called Third Congressional District Republicans for Kerrey. Why? Says Mercer: “I never met a person like Bob Kerrey.” Members of the Navy Sea/Air/Land (SEAL) team who followed Kerrey into battle in Vietnam voice similar sentiments. The fact that he lost a leg and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for “conspicuous gallantry” is part of Kerrey’s political appeal. It also shields him from some of the voter wrath that would rain down on other politicians if they dared to be equally outspoken.

The Kerrey candor dates back to childhood. But it first registered strongly on Washington’s political Richter scale when he defended the right to burn the flag, while George Bush, also a war hero, was leading a posse of television camera crews to the Iwo Jima Memorial in Virginia, where he grandly condemned such acts. More recently, Kerrey has questioned the Persian Gulf deployment and flatly opposed a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Even before he first ran for office, Kerrey supported amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers. These positions have not won much favor among generally conservative Nebraskans. Nor did his role at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, where Kerrey so aggressively upbraided Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter (who is from his home state) that the chairman, Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, whispered in Kerrey’s ear, “We usually leave our grenades in the anteroom.”

Born into a large (three brothers, three sisters) middle-class family in Lincoln, Kerrey received an early baptism in political discourse around the dinner table. The discussions “were always issue-oriented,” recalls his sister, Jessie Rasmussen. “Never partisan. To this day I don’t know if our parents were Republicans or Democrats.” The younger Kerreys were taught by example to express and adhere to their beliefs. Before the 1960 presidential election, a dinner guest argued heatedly that if John Kennedy won, the Pope in reality would be running the country. When James Kerrey, Bob’s father, persistently rejected the notion, the angered guest bolted out of the house.

Despite the family sport of wrestling with issues, Kerrey gave no early indication that within him beat the heart of a skillful, if unorthodox, politician. High school classmates remember him as bright, fun loving, outspoken and very competitive, but he was not a B.M.O.C. At the University of Nebraska he held a few minor student and fraternity offices, dated often and pursued a degree in pharmacy, which he was awarded in 1966. By then, U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam was escalating and Kerrey enlisted. “I was pretty gung-ho,” he says now. In March 1969 he led his SEAL team on a night raid against an enemy unit holed up in a cave. Struck by a grenade, he suffered a wound that required amputation of his right leg just below the knee. Ironically, he was the only U.S. casualty during the raid. Kerrey has difficulty plumbing his own feelings about having been crippled at age 26. In 1986 he appeared before a 900-student class at the University of California at Santa Barbara as a guest lecturer on the impact of the Vietnam War. Recalls Walter Capps, who initiated the course: “He gave a textbook lecture. It was almost as if he was going for tenure. A woman student complained, ‘You haven’t told us how you felt.’ Kerrey looked at me helplessly but I just stared at the floor. He told the class he couldn’t tell them — he would have to do something he usually does only in the shower — sing.” Then Kerrey in a steady baritone talked/sang And the Band Played “Waltzing Matilda,” the mournful lament of a World War I Australian who lost a leg in battle. The lyrics include the gut-wrenching line “Never knew there were worse things than dying.” Says Capps: “When he turned and limped off the stage, nearly everyone wept.”

After a long convalescence, briefly interrupted in 1970, when the entire family traveled to Washington to see President Nixon award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, Kerrey abandoned plans to open his own pharmacy because the Lincoln area was “overstocked.” Instead, he and sister Jessie’s husband Dean Rasmussen launched a restaurant they called Grandma’s because Kerrey wanted it to feature “grandmother’s kind of food.” Recalls Jessie: “Dean and Bob were everything at first — busboys, waiters, cooks and managers.” For months, “they worked almost around the clock,” says Jessie. Today the brothers-in-law own six restaurants and two fitness centers, employ 500 people and are easily millionaires. There seemed no reason why Kerrey would not continue as a successful small businessman, but by 1981, he had grown restless. With small groups of family and close friends, the talk frequently had an “Is this all there is?” theme. Maybe, Kerrey mused, he would try politics. Sure, everyone agreed. Mayor? The legislature? No, said Kerrey. He was thinking of running for Governor. Rasmussen was astonished. “Bob was not that well-known — some community involvement, businessman, war hero. But he didn’t know politicians, and they didn’t know him.” Adds Rasmussen: “But it was typical of him to go for the top job.” There were other problems: his marriage had ended in divorce, hardly a plus for a politician; he had changed his registration from Republican to Democrat only three years earlier; and the incumbent Republican Governor was heavily favored to win a second term. Kerrey had little initial party support in the primary — he had to rely on himself, friends and family.

Nevertheless, in a major upset, Kerrey in November of 1982 edged Governor Charles Thone by 7,000 votes. Buffeted by a sagging farm economy and fascinated by the charismatic newcomer, enough Republicans crossed over to send Kerrey to the state house. Kerrey inherited a state debt of $24 million, which he attacked with budget cuts, a temporary new tax and a broadened tax base, “none of which was popular,” he notes. After dating Winger several times (they met when she was on location in Nebraska for a movie), he moved her into the Governor’s mansion and somehow his approval rating in staid Nebraska remained in the mid-70s.

Then as his first term neared an end and the state’s surplus reached $49 million, Kerrey withdrew from politics as suddenly as he had entered. “I had accomplished what I wanted to. It was time to move on,” he says simply. Scott Matter, whose party regained the state house thanks to Kerrey’s decision not to run, thinks his sudden disinterest is typical and unsettling. “He’s got a short attention span,” says Matter. “He’s opportunistic. He could get bored with the Senate too.” Kerrey concedes the point. “I could,” he admits. Observes pollster Hickman: “He could walk away from politics and have a very fulfilling life. He takes issues a lot more seriously than he takes himself.”

Kerrey’s re-entry into politics came sooner than he wanted. When Democratic Senator Edward Zorinsky died suddenly in 1987, Governor Kay Orr named a Republican to the vacancy. After a semester teaching a course on Vietnam at Santa Barbara, Kerrey decided to run for the seat and defeated the appointee, David Karnes, by 100,000 votes. Groused Orr: “Nebraskans are having a love affair with Bob Kerrey,” a remark that drives Kerrey intimates up the wall with its implication that he is more style than substance.

In Washington, Kerrey is usually in his office by 6 a.m. He jogs six miles (on his good leg and his prosthesis) almost daily, has run marathons, reads voluminously. “He always does his homework,” says Leahy. On weekends, he usually returns to Nebraska, where he divides his time between constituents and his children, Ben, 15, and Lindsey, 13, who live in Omaha with their mother. On longer recesses, he is likely to travel abroad (early this year to Vietnam and Cambodia, in part for sentimental reasons, chiefly to shore up his foreign policy credentials). He is critical of the Bush Administration’s Asian policy, but has yet to formulate one of his own, which he believes is a President’s role, not a Senator’s. Congressional colleagues, including some Democrats, fault Kerrey as unfocused and naive about Senate customs. Early this year, for example, he introduced a bill to revamp the savings-and-loan bailout agency, the Resolution Trust Corporation, even though he is not a member of the Banking Committee. “Kerrey should have known better,” says a House Republican. “With five members under investigation in the Keating scandal, the Senate isn’t about to revisit the S&L scandal in an election year.”

But Kerrey does things his way. He supports campaign-finance reform but not compulsory public funding. He accepts PAC contributions but refuses honorariums for speeches and public appearances. Despite his need for Republican votes, Kerrey is blistering in assessing the Bush presidency. On the Persian Gulf, Kerrey says, “I am profoundly uneasy about the instant deployment of over 100,000 American troops, sold to the American people on the false assertions that Saddam Hussein is Adolf Hitler, that our way of life is at clear and present danger, that we have as much at stake as we did in World War II. I believe our military action was improperly rationalized, incompletely thought out and dangerous.” But his broader criticisms spring from his belief that the most serious problems plaguing the nation are domestic. “Poverty is rising, particularly among the working poor. Our schools are deteriorating. We can’t go on the way we are in health care. But with Bush there is no sense of urgency, no challenge to the American people. There is no leadership. Congress can’t provide it. Only the President can. It’s time for him to spend some of his political capital.” Inevitably, this sort of criticism is hailed by Democrats and dismissed by Republicans as the prelude to a Kerrey bid for national office. To his discomfort, Kerrey often is introduced as “the one who will regain the White House for the Democratic Party.” How does he react to such talk? “I ignore it,” says Kerrey. “It’s flattering, but I ignore it.” He seems to sense that he may not be ready. But given the Democrats’ abysmal shortage of candidates who are both ready and willing, Kerrey-for-President talk may continue to resonate — to a point that it may become increasingly difficult to ignore by 1992, impossible by 1996.