Gov. Dan Lungren?

The day California killed Robert Alton Harris, the ritual of blood and justice became a carnival of the absurd.

In an extraordinary cross-country duel, two bodies of feuding judges wrangled by phone and fax over the fate of the condemned double murderer. Four times a federal panel in San Francisco blocked Harris’ trip to the gas chamber. Four times an increasingly exasperated U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay of execution.

Stationed inside San Quentin Prison that day--April 21, 1992--was the face of public vengeance, state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren. Two years earlier, he had campaigned for capital punishment. And among his first post-election actions was to weed out so-called “conscientious objectors” from his criminal division.

Now, for the first time in 25 years, California’s top law enforcement official had to carry out the professed will of the people.

As first light streaked across San Francisco Bay, Harris was led a final time into the sickly green gas chamber. It was his second trip since midnight, nearly 10 hours after a last meal of pizza and fried chicken. In Washington, the high court had issued its final decree: Enough already. Harris was strapped down, the chamber filled with cyanide fumes.

Lungren’s work was complete, his job done. So California’s hang-’em-high attorney general closed his eyes and prayed for Harris’ soul.

*

In certain respects, Daniel Edward Lungren seems oddly ill-suited for his profession. Barring something entirely unforeseen, he will be the GOP nominee for governor this fall. (Lungren is without serious opposition in the June Republican primary.) If elected in November, he will instantly become a leading candidate for the No. 2 spot on the national GOP ticket in 2000, a leg up that, along with a driver and corner office at the Capitol, comes automatically with California’s top job.

Yet for all his designs, even after 10 years in Congress and 20-plus years pursuing public office, the politicking part of politics has never been easy for Lungren. Basically a shy man, he hates asking people for money, so he has never been good at fund-raising. A strapping 6-foot-2 with a swagger in his voice, Lungren would rather stay late shaking hands than work a room during dinner and intrude on people’s meals. He has little use for schmoozing or boozing, preferring to rush home to his wife, Bobbi, or eat lunch at his desk. Hence he suffers a reputation in Sacramento as aloof, condescending, even a bit of a prig. (When others order wine or a cocktail, he asks for milk. An occasional “damn” is about as foulmouthed as he gets.)

“Would I rather be hanging out at Frank Fats”--one of Sacramento’s watering holes--”or taking a trail ride up in the foothills?” Lungren asks, in a way suggesting no response is expected or necessary. “I’d rather be on a horse enjoying myself.”

He disdains polling and pollsters and scoffs at campaign consultants and their ilk. Thus he operates with exceedingly narrow feedback. His closest confidants are his father, wife and kid brother, Brian, the latter a paid consultant to Lungren’s campaign. Dan Lungren is so utterly cocksure, so unswervingly convinced of himself, it is sometimes hard to tell where self-confidence ends and smug self-righteousness sets in.

“He thinks he knows it all,” says one periodic advisor, voicing a criticism frequently heard from some who otherwise praise Lungren.

“Dan needs people around him to say, ‘No, that’s bull- - - -. You’re wrong,’ ” agrees another associate who has known Lungren many years. “And he has tended to surround himself with people who don’t do that, who can’t do that.”

A child of comfort, if not privilege, Lungren’s linear progression from parochial school in Long Beach--where his parents were leading lights of the Republican Party--to Notre Dame University, his dad’s alma mater, bespeaks a tidy, almost regimental order to a life largely uncluttered by adversity, tragedy or periods of youthful rebellion. That white-bread background and insularity beg a question: Can this 51-year-old retro-boomer, who worships Elvis, idolizes Nixon and harks back to the World War II experience, relate to the realities of transitory, trend-setting, multicultural California as it hurtles toward a new millennium?

Already, Democrats have fit Lungren with an image. “A man in his 50s with ideas from the ‘50s, whether it’s abortion, the ban on assault weapons or the environment,” scoffs Bob Mulholland, a state Democratic Party strategist. “Basically, you’ve got Bob Dole running in California.”

*

The Republican class of 1978 was a distinctly different breed from the fusty go-along-to-get-along brand then typical of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gleefully confrontational, the rookie insurgents were incited by a Georgia freshman, Newt Gingrich, who sometimes seemed as much at war with the GOP’s Old Guard as the majority Democrats. Bursting on the House floor like an artillery shell, they engaged in parliamentary sabotage, highly publicized clashes with Speaker Tip O’Neill and lengthy partisan harangues delivered before an empty chamber but carried nationally on C-SPAN to a home audience none the wiser.

Among those freshmen who eagerly enlisted in this guerrilla warfare was Dan Lungren. His voice “begins at a near shout and sometimes ends closer to a scream,” reads a 1981 Congressional Quarterly account. “Nearby listeners sometimes wonder whether there is something in the sound of his voice that makes him angry.” The theatrics, however, were a bit deceptive. As congressional scholar Jack Pitney points out, the House is a place that operates on two levels: “The floor is the House on display. The committee is the House at work.”

And in Lungren’s work on the Judiciary Committee--and, no less, during workouts on the basketball court and the weightlifting machines at the House gym--he began to build the sort of personal relationships, with Democrats and Republicans alike, that subtly grease the commerce of Congress. While keeping his combative stance on the floor, Lungren played a more substantive, if quiet, role behind closed doors, helping negotiate and push through major crime and immigration-reform legislation.

Nothing illustrates that dichotomy so much as a letter from Speaker O’Neill, the devil himself, that Lungren kept framed on his office wall. “You have the qualities I admire in a politician,” O’Neill wrote. “You are loyal to your party and your President, you love your country and you love politics. You never do anything halfheartedly and in true Notre Dame fashion, when you rise to debate in the House, you shake down the thunder from the sky.”

Other Democrats took note as well. “He and I disagree most of the time, but I have respect for him,” says Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), the dean of the California delegation. “I think he’ll go far, and we’ll try to stop him every step of the way.”

*

If not for Douglas H. Ginsburg, California’s political scene might look vastly different today. In October 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Ginsburg, a 41-year-old Washington, D.C., appeals court judge, for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. One week later, in response to press inquiries, Ginsburg admitted that he had smoked marijuana, “once as a college student in the ‘60s and then on a few occasions in the ‘70s.” His nomination was withdrawn, but the ensuing media frenzy gave new definition to the expression “reefer madness.”

About the same time, California Gov. George Deukmejian was narrowing his choices to replace state Treasurer Jesse Unruh, who had died three months earlier. After sifting through 20 prospects, Deukmejian narrowed the choice to either Lungren, an old acquaintance from Long Beach, or Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno, the favorite of his Legislature colleagues.

During a 1978 run for governor, however, Maddy had admitted smoking marijuana twice. For a law-and-order governor, Maddy’s confession promised headaches Deukmejian didn’t need. Besides, Lungren was not only Cub Scout-clean (he’d never even puffed a cigarette), he seemed hungrier than Maddy. And more than anything, Deukmejian--the lone statewide Republican officeholder--saw the treasurer opening as a chance to start building the GOP’s political bench.

Despite rumblings from Democrats, Deukmejian picked Lungren in late November. The governor hailed his nominee as “an individual of unassailable integrity” and vouched utmost confidence that Lungren would be confirmed by state lawmakers.

But rubber-stamping the governor’s pick--in effect creating a new Republican star on the Sacramento scene--seemed like sheer lunacy to Democrats in the Legislature. They savaged Lungren, calling him “a zealot, a dogmatic ultraconservative,” in the piquant words of Senate Leader Barry Keene.

Highlighting Lungren’s congressional votes against clean-water legislation, his support for offshore oil drilling, opposition to abortion rights and, most particularly, his stand against war reparations for Japanese American detainees, they summoned a parade of witnesses who depicted Lungren as not merely out of step with Democrats but also far afield from his fellow Republicans.

After a week of bellicose hearings, the Assembly voted to confirm Lungren, but the state Senate rejected his nomination. The split verdict sent the case to the California Supreme Court for an unprecedented ruling. The following June, a panel dominated by Deukmejian’s conservative appointees ruled unanimously that Lungren’s nomination was dead.

By then, Lungren had sold his Washington-area home, announced he would give up his congressional seat and moved his wife and three children to Sacramento.

In a suburban neighborhood outside the state capital that afternoon, Brian Lungren gathered his children and went to the garage, where they spread butcher paper on the floor and painted a welcome-home sign. When the failed nominee stepped off his flight from Washington that night, he was greeted by family members with a banner: “Lungren for A.G. in 1990.”

Setting out to destroy Lungren, Democrats had instead created a Republican hero.

*

Family and faith--in the holiness of the Roman Catholic Church and the virtue of the Grand Old Party--are two constants in the seamless thread of Dan Lungren’s life.

His parents met while his father, John, interned at County-USC Hospital. After World War II, during which John Lungren earned a Purple Heart as a surgeon, the couple settled in Long Beach. Through Junior League associates, the Lungrens were introduced to Pat and Richard Nixon, who became family friends.

In 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower tapped California Sen. Nixon as his running mate, John Lungren temporarily shuttered his medical practice and traveled as one of Nixon’s attending physicians, a role he reprised in every campaign until Nixon reached the White House in 1968. Nixon, in turn, would keep close tabs on the promising political career of young Dan Lungren.

Family lore has a 6-year-old Dan--Din-Din, as his mother called him--walking precincts and passing out campaign literature for Republican Rep. Craig Hosmer, whose seat Lungren would eventually fill. In truth, it was more than 25 years before he would consider politics as a profession.

The second of seven children, Dan Lungren grew up expecting to follow his father into medicine. The notion of service, of finding oneself through caring for others, was instilled from a young age, as part of the family’s deep Catholic faith.

“My parents taught us to give back to the community, not just to take a job,” Christine Lungren Maddalone recalled in 1993 after receiving a national teaching award. “We were taught you can’t be a successful adult unless you can say to yourself on a daily basis, ‘I feel good about what I’m doing, and I’m making a difference.’ ”

Their parents also frowned on self-aggrandizement. Although it might help soften his image, Lungren never mentions the years he spent tutoring inner-city schoolchildren while at Notre Dame and rarely discusses his volunteer work in Sacramento finding homes for abandoned or unwanted children.

“We don’t like to wear our good works--I don’t even like to call them ‘good works’--we don’t like to wear our commitment on our sleeve,” says Lungren’s older brother, John Jr., a state trade executive.

More than 30 years later, John Jr. still remembers the night Dan revealed his plans to abandon his premed studies.

Today, the attorney general jokes about his decision. “I wanted to be a doctor,” he tells audiences, “but then I ran into something called organic chemistry.”

At the time, though, it was no laughing matter. In fact, the closed-door discussion in his parents’ bedroom reverberated throughout the two-story Lungren home. “All of us wondered if Dan was going to hold his ground,” John Jr. says. “He did.”

Lungren eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Notre Dame and drifted into law school as much for his love of debate as anything else. (He remains fanatically attached to his alma mater. Devious Democrats might try scheduling major campaign events against Notre Dame football, then see if Lungren shows up.)

Returning to college for his sophomore year, Lungren took a Labor Day detour to Yosemite. There he met a pretty brunet playing volleyball with a group of friends on the beach near the Merced River. Lungren was 19 and Barbara Kolls was 17. After a three-year courtship, they were married at their local parish and held a potluck reception in the backyard of his boyhood home.

While Lungren had suffered notably few hardships growing up in one of Long Beach’s more prosperous neighborhoods, the Kolls family lived a more tenuous paycheck-to-paycheck existence in working-class Inglewood.

Barbara--or Bobbi, as everyone calls her--was the only child of elderly parents. Her father, a Northrop dispatcher, died when she was in high school, forcing mother and daughter to sell the family residence and move to a Carson mobile home park. To help make ends meet, Bobbi spent the rest of her high school years in a work-study program. After the Lungrens married and moved to Washington, she helped put Dan through Georgetown Law School by working as a secretary at the Health, Education and Welfare Department. She later followed then-HEW Secretary Robert Finch to a secretarial job in the Nixon White House.

Those who know the couple say Bobbi brings a much-needed perspective to their partnership. “Dan is a very strong personality. He believes in what he does and he has a little bit of stubbornness to him,” says John O’Connor, a San Francisco attorney and friend from Notre Dame. “There are people who are afraid to tell Dan, ‘Gee, you’ve got to do something about this,’ or, ‘Take a look at your policy on that.’ She’s not afraid.”

A handsome woman with a ready, full-throated laugh, Bobbi Lungren says she tries to give her husband “the viewpoint of John Q. Citizen,” a common-sense outlook he might not find in law books or derive from his political experience. She also urges him to can the scripted speeches and talk from notes, to be more engaging.

Her down-to-earth practicality was evidenced when Dan Lungren first launched his political career. By 1976, incumbent Rep. Hosmer had retired and been replaced by Democrat Mark Hannaford. When Hannaford sought reelection, Lungren, a young Long Beach attorney already active in local GOP circles, figured he was better qualified than any other potential Republican challenger.

Bobbi was then pregnant with the couple’s second child. “I think I really need to do this,” Dan told her. “Well you’ve got to work,” she replied. “We depend on you to put food on the table.’ ”

(Their son and two daughters are now grown and away from home. Jeff and Kelly work for Republican members of Congress. Kathleen is in college, studying film production.)

Lungren, campaigning when time allowed, won an upset in the 1976 primary and barely lost in November. He triumphed in a rematch against Hannaford two years later, and never faced another close race until his first statewide run for attorney general in 1990.

Strangely, though, instead of expanding along with his success, his political inner circle seems to have shrunk over the years. Some closest to him have died or retired. Other once-welcome advisors, who find Lungren less open to input, say they now speak up more gingerly. Or not at all.

Lungren bristles at the notion of isolation or being too self-sufficient: “Is your openness gauged by how large your entourage is?” he demands. “I mean, are we all supposed to be like Muhammad Ali walking into a ballroom, or Mike Tyson with 27 people? Sometimes having a large retinue means you keep other people out.”

*

One thing Lungren has acquired over the years is a somewhat skewed political profile.

Opponents portray him as an unswerving, unbending right-wing ideologue. He certainly is conservative. But Lungren is also far more reflective, and less reflexive, than the caricature suggests.

“I was brought up to be someone who thinks,” he says, citing his Catholic school education, kindergarten through law school. “We were required to discipline ourselves, intellectually and otherwise. We were forced to look at questions and their underlying principles involved.”

Lungren remains deeply committed to the church and its teachings. He rarely misses weekly Mass and grew up observing meatless Fridays (always halibut, scrambled eggs or tuna casserole), continuing the tradition as an adult until the edict ended in the mid-’60s.

But while faith certainly informs his thinking, Lungren is no more wed to strict religious orthodoxy than rigid political orthodoxy. Take, for instance, the matters of abortion and the death penalty. Lungren says his unwavering opposition to abortion--except in instances of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother--is grounded in his religious beliefs. (In a “perfect world,” he says, the mother’s life would be the only exception.)

At the same time, however, Lungren supports the death penalty, which the Catholic church just as staunchly opposes. A cynic might suggest political expediency, but to Lungren there is no inconsistency, and no quarter given. “I take the traditional position of the greatest part of Western civilization of the last 2,000 years,” he says, “which found abortion to be the taking of innocent life and found the death penalty to be an appropriate response to the most egregious crimes of our society.”

Only in the last 40 or so years, he adds, have attitudes changed. It is the church, in other words, that has switched its death-penalty position, not Dan Lungren.

That pugnaciousness, the love of verbal jousting, is a Lungren hallmark. Drop him in the desert, says one friend, come back an hour later and you’ll find him debating a post.

Still, a thin line separates certitude from sanctimony. And a certain haughtiness, coupled with a fists-up response to the slightest provocation, is one of Lungren’s less-appealing qualities.

“If you could get Dan Lungren to go to a physical image-maker, someone who deals with hairstyle and use of powder, he could benefit a lot,” offers Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), a friend and fan from Lungren’s congressional days. “His rough edges show most of the time because he is intense. He doesn’t shave the edges.”

And that’s a side of politics Lungren hates. What does hairstyle have to do with solving California’s perennial water problems? What does makeup have to do with making over welfare?

For Lungren, the perfect campaign would consist of a series of high-minded, issue-oriented debates staged up and down California before audiences of highly engaged, deeply informed voters. Just the candidates, stripped bare of pretense, their prospects resting on the merit of their ideas and the validity of their arguments.

But a campaign, of course, is more than an exercise in forensics. It’s about faith and trust, hope and fear, believability, likability and--let’s face it--who can raise the most money and perform best on television.

TV, in the parlance of the trade, is a cool medium. And Lungren has a hot personality and gale-force temper, a combination that can prove combustible.

Like his old family friend, Lungren harbors a Nixonian suspicion of the media and its methods, exacerbated by the shoddy coverage, as he sees it, of his rejection as state treasurer. When the “Doonesbury” comic strip lampooned Lungren in 1996 over his opposition to medicinal use of marijuana, he didn’t laugh it off as many would. He called a petulant press conference that led to even more embarrassing coverage.

Running for governor could, as much as anything, become an exercise in self-restraint. Democrats will undoubtedly revive the image of Lungren as right-wing crackpot, piling on attacks on his lack of military service (bum knees and kidney surgery made him 4-F, he says), the tens of thousands of dollars he has collected in donations over the years from the tobacco industry and what some consider lax enforcement of the state’s assault-weapons ban. In short, they will reprise the 10-year-old campaign that shredded his treasurer nomination, this time on a grander scale.

Let ‘em try, says Lungren: “That only worked the last time because they controlled the game. That was within the four walls of the Legislature. Now we’re talking about the state of California. And I think that game is doomed to failure.”

Indeed, given the chance, Lungren can demonstrate he is far more thoughtful than the bug-eyed zealot his political opponents wish to portray.

He backs certain gun controls. He fought efforts in Congress to deny hate-crime protection to gays and lesbians. He helped bring about the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. He voted to raise the federal gasoline tax a nickel a gallon.

And then there’s the case of Richard John Longstaff. The British-born clothier was facing deportation in 1984 for lying to federal authorities when he arrived in the country nearly 20 years earlier. In the eyes of the government, he had perpetrated a fraud by answering no when asked whether he suffered a “psychotic personality”--a classification that, back in 1965, covered homosexuals as well as epileptics and others with “mental defects.”

His statement resurfaced 10 years later when Longstaff, who is openly gay, applied for U.S. citizenship. When the authorities moved to deport him, Longstaff unsuccessfully fought all the way to the Supreme Court.

A bill to block Longstaff’s expulsion was introduced in Congress, and Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank immediately took up the cause. For Frank, then one of just two admittedly gay members of Congress, the bill represented a wedge, a chisel to start chipping away at one of the nation’s most repugnant examples of government sanctioned gay-bashing bigotry. He found an unlikely vote in Lungren.

Looking back, the attorney general has forgotten the details, saying he probably supported the legislation as a matter of equity. In the end, the INS bowed to popular sentiment by sparing Longstaff, so the bill was moot.

But Frank approvingly cites Lungren’s support as a show of Lungren’s intellectual integrity and proof of his “willingness to break with right-wing lock-step.”

If Lungren and Frank are not exactly bosom pals--the one devoutly Catholic, deeply conservative and starchily conventional, the other Jewish, outspokenly liberal and proudly gay--they still share an abiding, if improbable, regard.

“He’s a guy you would enjoy debating, even when you disagreed, because he was smart, he understood the issues,” says Frank.

*

Consider Lungren’s gubernatorial candidacy a test of faith--faith in himself, in the rightness of his beliefs, in the soundness of his strategy. Above all, faith that someone can hew to a moral and personal code and still do what must be done to win.

On the November night in 1990 that Lungren first won election as attorney general, his political and spiritual halves collided.

After a bitterly fought campaign, Lungren went to bed assuming that he had lost an achingly close contest to Democrat Arlo Smith. He figured his political career was over.

After a few restless hours, he got out of bed and began to dress. His wife sat up. “I’ve been praying all night that God would give us the wisdom to handle whatever it is he has in store for us,” she told him.

“You’ve been praying for the wrong thing,” Lungren replied. “First you pray that we win. Then you pray for wisdom.”