With 2d presidential bid comes a personal touch
This is the fourth in a series of profiles of leading candidates in the 2004 presidential race.
ST. LOUIS -- In May 1972, Dick Gephardt picked up the phone at his downtown law office. Jane, his wife, was sobbing. She was at St. Louis Children's Hospital. Come quickly, she said, something's wrong with Matt.
Doctors had found an enormous and extremely rare type of cancerous tumor on the prostate gland of the 18-month-old toddler, the Gephardts' first-born child. The prognosis was terrible. Doctors gave the boy weeks to live. The couple wept and prayed through the night for a miracle.
It was the start of a years-long ordeal for the Gephardts. They traveled from hospital to hospital, nursing Matt through experimental treatments and three years of chemotherapy and radiation.
"He underwent 10 operations," Gephardt regularly tells crowds at political gatherings. "But he's 32 years old, he's married, and he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. . . .
"He's a gift of God."
Matt's story rarely surfaced during Gephardt's early years in Missouri politics. It appeared occasionally in 1988, the last time Gephardt ran for president, but the candidate was reluctant to speak publicly about it. A deeply personal memory, an emotionally devastating experience -- these were not easy things for the 1988 version of Dick Gephardt to share. So programmed and stiff was he the last time he ran for president that some pundits and members of his own staff called him "RoboCandidate."
Not this time. As 62-year-old Richard Andrew Gephardt campaigns once more for the presidency, he has been relating in wrenching detail the story of his son's brush with death. He tells it morning, noon, and night on the stump. This is passion with a purpose. Made possible by Gephardt's health insurance, Matt's cure provides context for the candidate to tout his aggressive blueprint for universal health care. A proposed tax rebate, equaling 60 percent of the cost of any insurance plan, existing or new, it would double as an economic stimulus and is the biggest idea of a Gephardt candidacy that promotes expanded government in several areas.
Matt isn't the only family member whom Gephardt now talks about on the campaign trail. When the subject is pension reform, Gephardt mentions the $42 monthly retirement benefit from one of several clerical jobs held by his mother, Loreen, who died in May at the age of 95. As he courts support from organized labor, the candidate extols his late father, Louis, for almost a decade a Teamster, delivering milk in St. Louis.
Selling his "teacher corps" plan - the government would pay student loans of teachers who work five years in target areas - Gephardt mentions his daughter, Kate, whose first teaching job paid $17,000 a year, forcing her to live at home with her parents. And when Gephardt talks about his support for civil unions, he mentions daughter Chrissy, a social worker who told her parents that she is gay 2 years ago and now campaigns full time for her father.
The 14-term congressman, who was Democratic leader in the House of Representatives until last fall, acknowledges that he has had to abandon the reserve for which he had once been known. He may never be as emotive a politician as Bill Clinton, but today's Dick Gephardt has no misgivings about sharing intimate family details with the public, aware that his woodenness was a shortcoming the last time he sought the White House.
"You need to let people know why you feel the way you do about an issue," he says matter-of-factly. "We're all human beings, we all go through similar experiences, and if you're not willing to talk about it, you sound like an automaton or something."
ufxMidwest roots
Richard Gephardt is as centered as the time and place he comes from. He grew up in a close-knit, working-class, all-white St. Louis neighborhood in the late 1940s and '50s at a time when boys played ball in the street, families attended church each Sunday, and union jobs provided stability. The city has changed dramatically in the past half century, but Gephardt's boyhood home, in the low hills of South St. Louis, looks as it did in his youth when he and his dad listened to Harry Caray call Cardinals baseball games on KMOX radio.
In a starkly segregated city, the south side for generations had been home to whites, mostly of German, Irish, English, Lebanese, and Italian extraction. The Gephardts lived on Reber Place, a dead-end street packed with tidy five-room look-alike bungalows, with small porches and neat patches of lawn.
"It was a nice atmosphere. People watched out for you," said Gephardt's older brother, Don, a musician and educator by training and now a dean at Rowan University in New Jersey.
Neither Gephardt parent completed high school. Lou Gephardt, grandson of German immigrants, farmed family land in Washington, Mo., after his own father died, then left for the big city on the Mississippi River, 45 miles to the east.
"He finished one year of high school when his mother took him out to work the farm," Don Gephardt said. "He kind of resented that and felt he got a bum deal."
Between stints selling life insurance and real estate in St. Louis, the elder Gephardt drove a horse-drawn milk wagon, then a truck. His son the politician recalls the Teamster years of the 1940s as the best and most lucrative job his dad ever held. It's a better story than the one less told - that Lou Gephardt then went into real estate and secured his retirement by selling at a nice profit an eight-unit apartment building he had built.
When brother Don disclosed several years ago that their father took the milkman job as a last resort and joined the union because he had to, conservative commentators teed off, noting that Louis Gephardt was also a Republican who couldn't stand Democratic President Harry S. Truman, a fellow Missourian admired by his son.
"There were things about the union my dad didn't like," Dick Gephardt responds. "But he always liked the fact that he was able to get paid good wages for his hard work." In a union town such as St. Louis, the best truck-driving jobs were Teamster jobs.
By the time Don was entering high school and Dick was in fifth grade, their mother also began to work, taking secretarial jobs to save money so that her boys could go to college. By all accounts, Loreen Gephardt was a great influence on her sons. Dick attributes his neatness to his fastidious mother. Deeply religious, she took the boys on Sundays to the Third Baptist Church, where Dick became a youth minister. At one point, he considered entering a theological seminary.
"My mom gave us the idea that we could be anything we wanted to be if we worked hard," said Don. "Dick really believed all that stuff, which is why he's running for president of the United States."
Marie Cantagi, who still lives on Reber Place, remembered Gephardt in his teens.
"He was well liked and always spoke to people on the street," said Cantagi, now 85. "The Gephardts were strait-laced people. The whole family was well respected."
But that doesn't matter at election time.
"I won't vote for him," Cantagi said. "I'm a Republican. He's wishy-washy and goes along with the tides."
It's a sentiment echoed by several Gephardt constituents, who said the congressman has become more liberal than his old neighborhood.
Another former neighbor, though, is an important fan of Gephardt. Joseph J. Hunt grew up a few blocks from Gephardt, an Eagle Scout who was his patrol leader in Boy Scout Troop 249. Parents held up the young redhead as a model. "Dick followed the rules," Hunt recalled.
Hunt followed his father into the iron workers' union and rose through the ranks. Today he is general president of the 130,000-member International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers. The union was the first of 19 internationals to endorse Gephardt's presidential candidacy so far this year.
Well scrubbed, well liked
Gephardt sometimes calls himself a baby boomer, a member of the generation born after World War II and often defined in terms of the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s. But he was born on Jan. 31, 1941, before the nation entered the war. He came of age in the placid Eisenhower administration.
At then all-white Southwest High School in St. Louis, Gephardt showed a flair for drama and was cast in the senior play. He was also an alternate on the school's undefeated tennis team. Throughout high school and college, he remained a straight arrow.
He never grew long hair, used coarse language, or embraced the counterculture of the late 1960s and early '70s. He has been, and remains, a color-inside-the-lines guy. He's had a few speeding tickets but says he has never been arrested, smoked pot, or tried other illegal drugs. A nose-to-the-grindstone style leaves him little time for other pursuits. He reads mostly public policy treatises, and describes his family as his only real hobby, though he loves to cook (French sauces and barbecued ribs are specialties), garden, and watch sports on TV.
The Globe interviewed dozens of people who have known Gephardt at various stages of his life. His wholesomeness is not a pose, they say. Tony Coelho, who served in the House with him for more than 10 years, describes his friend as someone out of the 1950s TV show "Ozzie and Harriet." Donna Brazile deputy manager of Gephardt's 1988 campaign and a friend of Loreen Gephardt, calls the Gephardt family "the kind of Baptist people who didn't just talk the talk, they walked the walk."
Universally described as a workaholic, Gephardt in college and law school worked part-time jobs to get by while struggling to keep good, if unspectacular, grades. At Northwestern - where he met Jane Ann Byrnes of Columbus, Neb., his future wife - Gephardt was active in fraternity life and immersed in campus politics. Known as "Rich" in those days, Gephardt in his senior year won the presidency of the student senate with a record vote.
"It was a quiescent period at Northwestern, not the kind of time when there were protests and sit-ins," recalled Jack Guthman, who was two years ahead of Gephardt.
"Dick was very well known and highly regarded," said Guthman, a Chicago lawyer and sometime Gephardt fund-raiser.
Early in 1962, Gephardt broke a student senate tie and voted for a student boycott of a local barbershop accused of racial discrimination - charging a black student $5 for a haircut that cost whites $2. "The extra cost was for the alleged 'additional work' involved," minutes of one meeting say. In his year-end address, Gephardt, almost in passing, mentioned the boycott as a senate achievement. Most of his speech was devoted to the issue of whether the school should remain a member of a national student organization.
After graduating from Northwestern with a degree in speech, Gephardt went to law school at the University of Michigan. As with his boyhood friend, labor leader Joe Hunt, Gephardt made a similarly important acquaintance at Michigan. Although he and classmate James P. Hoffa, son of the fiery Teamsters Union leader, weren't close, the sons of Teamsters have since become political allies. Hoffa is now general president of the 1.3-million member union, the largest to endorse Gephardt so far.
Into the machine
"Young man, you ought to come to our meetings!"
That invitation, from an old, cigar-smoking St. Louis pol, introduced Gephardt to the world of machine politics, according to author Richard Ben Cramer in "What It Takes/The Way to the White House," his mammoth 1992 account of the '88 campaign.
Phelim O'Toole was the clerk of the Circuit Court and committeeman, or boss, of the 14th Ward Democratic Organization. One day O'Toole spotted Gephardt, a young lawyer at the big downtown firm of Mitchell & Thompson, in the courthouse. Overhearing the well-scrubbed young man say he lived in the neighborhood, he invited him to a ward meeting on the spot, Cramer wrote.
Gephardt recalls events differently, saying he and Jane arrived uninvited in the summer or fall of 1966. In a smoke-filled room of middle-aged public payroll patriots, "no one was happy to see us," and O'Toole, "eyed us suspiciously," Gephardt wrote in his own book, "An Even Better Place/America in the 21st Century," published in 1999.
In either case, Dick and Jane Gephardt began their long political partnership, enlisting in a flagging St. Louis operation that a generation earlier, under powerhouse Bob Hannegan, had been among the nation's most efficient Democratic machines. By the mid-'60s, the apparatus needed new parts. O'Toole recognized talent and made Gephardt a captain, in charge of constituent contact and Democratic voter turnout in the 2d Precinct at election time.
In a tumultuous political era, when many contemporaries were either fighting or protesting the Vietnam War, Gephardt was advancing his career on parallel legal and political tracks. As a law student, he had received a deferment from the draft, and in 1965, the year he received his degree, Gephardt enlisted in the Air National Guard. He served until 1971, reaching the rank of captain.
By then, his political star was also rising. When O'Toole died in 1968, Gephardt became ward committeeman. By 1971, he was a candidate for alderman in the 14th Ward. After a year of shoeleather politicking with Jane, Gephardt beat the Republican incumbent by slightly more than 100 votes.
Gephardt became a player in a decaying city. St. Louis was suffering from white flight and urban abandonment that left sections of the nearly all-black north side a moonscape of barren lots and vacant shells. Since 1950, St. Louis has lost almost 60 percent of its population. The percentage of white residents plunged from 82 percent to 44 percent, US Census data show. In 1972, Gephardt's first year in office, St. Louis became a national symbol of failed urban policy when the housing authority began dynamiting the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, a 17-year-old warren of modernist high-rises that had become a sprawling slum.
From his City Hall platform, Gephardt fought "redlining" by banks that wouldn't invest in poor neighborhoods. But like many white politicians in the city, Gephardt has stepped lightly around the minefield of St. Louis's racially polarized politics. Some local African-American leaders say that throughout his political career Gephardt has been a remote presence in North St. Louis.
Veteran Alderman Freeman Bosley Sr., who represents a northside ward, said he could not consider Gephardt "a friend of black people in St. Louis," but he noted that Gephardt's constituency is mostly white "and he responds to that, and you can't blame him for it." Bosley's son, Freeman Bosley Jr., who in 1993 became the first African-American mayor of St. Louis, credited Gephardt's concern for the city throughout his career but agreed with his father that "you don't find [Gephardt's] fingerprints on a lot of things in terms of race relations here."
By late 1975 Gephardt was mentioned as a possible candidate for governor. In early 1976 he chose to run for mayor instead. But on March 9 that year, the young pol's life changed course. Leonor K. Sullivan announced she was giving up the Third Congressional District seat she had held since 1952. Loreen Gephardt told the Washington Post years later that her son had been planning to tell his law firm that day of his mayoral plans when the Sullivan headline hit.
"I ran to the phone and called Dick, and he said, 'Mother, did you ever hear such a clear answer to our prayers?' " she told the newspaper.
Gephardt jumped in that day.
Door-to-door-to-D.C.
Despite four-plus years and acclaim as an alderman, Gephardt was an underdog in a four-way Democratic field. Don Gralike, a state senator and leader of a big electrical workers' local, had the upper hand. Now a darling of labor, Gephardt in that race was more like the Chamber of Commerce candidate.
"His money was coming from the business establishment," Gralike recalled.
"I knew a lot of the downtown people because I was in a law firm downtown," Gephardt explains.
With his parents and wife, Gephardt waged an all-out door-knocking campaign. It's part of Gephardt lore that, from March to November, the four personally contacted 50,000 or 60,000 homes. The mathematics strain credulity, but Gephardt insists it's true. "That's all we did, day and night," he says.
Gephardt won easily, burying Gralike in the city, home to two-thirds of the voters, and holding his own in suburban St. Louis County, where Gralike lived.
In the final, Republican Joseph L. Badaracco, a former alderman president, tagged the busy alderman "Richard the Regulator." But in one interview, Gephardt styled himself "conservative when stacked against the Democratic platform" and such party leaders as Senators Walter F. Mondale or George S. McGovern. He vowed to seek a constitutional amendment banning abortion and said he objected to a proposed blanket pardon of Vietnam War draft evaders. He won in a walk, crushing his GOP rival by nearly 50,000 votes.
In Washington, he stepped onto a fast track immediately. A cross-state colleague, Representative Richard W. Bolling of Kansas City, marked Gephardt a comer. A sagacious veteran of the powerful Rules Committee, Bolling helped install the freshman on the prestigious Ways and Means Committee. Two years later Gephardt won an equally coveted berth on the Budget Committee.
He had a conservative streak, proposing constitutional amendments to ban abortion and court-ordered school busing (a 1972 lawsuit in St. Louis produced a desegregation order in 1980). And he was willing to buck a president of his own party on major issues.
Alvin From, then President Jimmy Carter's deputy adviser on inflation, recalled clumsy efforts by the White House to lobby Gephardt in 1979 on Carter's bill to create the Department of Education.
From was a good choice to schmooze the young congressman resisting his president. At Northwestern, From had covered Gephardt for the student newspaper. They became friendly when Gephardt arrived in Washington. Knowing Gephardt was an avid Cardinals fan, From said, Carter aides "gave me this picture of President Carter, with Dick, his son Matt, and Lou Brock," the Cardinals' future Hall of Famer. "They thought that was going to help."
"'Don't they think I have any brains?' " From quoted Gephardt.
The bill passed, with Gephardt opposed.
Late that year, Gephardt led the fight against another major Carter initiative, a hospital cost-control bill. Not only did he break ranks with the White House, he joined Michigan Republican David A. Stockman, later President Ronald Reagan's budget director, in backing an alternative that promoted competition, not regulation. Carter's bill went down in flames.
In only three years, Gephardt had become a player.
He also was a Democratic force on tax and trade policies and, in December of 1984, moved into leadership when colleagues named him chairman of the Democratic caucus, succeeding Gillis Long of Louisiana, another Gephardt mentor. Two months later, Gephardt assumed another chairmanship - of the new Democratic Leadership Council. This placed him in the vanguard of a group of Democrats restless to hold the center after the '84 election that produced President Reagan's 49-state shellacking of Mondale.
A political shift
Gephardt had already been associated with other Democratic hyphenates - groups that were labeled Atari Democrats, neoliberals, New Democrats, and that considered themselves skeptics of big-government solutions. But the centrist DLC, with its heavy southern accent, was the most dramatic response within a party routed by the Reagan Revolution. Since then, however, Gephardt has drifted to the left of the spectrum in Congress. In the runup to his 1988 White House bid, he distanced himself ideologically from his always conservative and increasingly Republican district, which now extends deep into suburbs and rural areas south of St. Louis.
Back home, some critics have tagged Gephardt a shapeshifter, with malleable beliefs, who embarked on a leftward journey guided by ambition.
"This is a guy who changed his entire political makeup on economic and social issues," asserted John Hancock, a consultant and former executive director of the Missouri Republican Party.
Gephardt has been for and against a minimum-wage increase, various military weapons systems, Republican tax cuts, and war in Iraq. In 1991, he voted against the first Gulf War because, he said, he feared heavy US casualties and believed economic sanctions might force Saddam Hussein's regime to withdraw from Kuwait. But last fall, Gephardt worked with President George W. Bush on the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq. He still believes military intervention was justified, but, with other Democrats, has criticized Bush's failure to enlist more allies to secure the peace and rebuild the country.
Campaigning now, he advocates repeal of the Bush tax cuts to pay for his universal health care plan, but in 1981 he voted in favor of a similar tax-cut package by another Republican president, Reagan. ("I readily admit that was a vote I'd rather have back," he said.) Gephardt's record has also become markedly "greener" on environmental issues, and over time, he's moved from friend to foe of the National Rifle Association on gun control issues.
Abortion, though, is the issue opponents in the 1988 campaign used most effectively to make the "flip-flopper" label stick. In May 1986, as he prepared for his first presidential bid, Gephardt turned 180 degrees on the issue, abandoning his long-held opposition to abortion rights. Missouri's muscular antiabortion movement was outraged. One leader accused him of selling out his principles "for personal political ambition."
"I've had an evolution and a journey, through my wife," Gephardt says today, "so that I came to a different conclusion than I once had, and I think for valid reasons."
"We both grew up in families with religious backgrounds that thought abortion was wrong," said Jane Gephardt, a Roman Catholic of Czech descent (the Gephardts' children were raised as Catholics). "But because of our experiences with friends and acquaintances, we began to think maybe that wasn't the right way. We talked about it a lot."
Earlier this year, Dick Gephardt told the National Abortion Rights Action League: "I came to realize that the question of choice is to be answered, not by the state, but by the individual."
He did not mention late-term abortions, however. Gephardt voted to ban what opponents call "partial-birth" abortions, except when the mother's life is in danger.
By the time Gephardt completed his self-described "journey" on abortion, he had already judged himself worthy of presidential consideration in 1988. Looking back, Gephardt says, "Reagan was inadequate as president. I thought if he could be president of the United States, why shouldn't we have someone who could work with Congress, have some substance, and get things done?" In his mind, of course, that someone was Dick Gephardt. The shift on abortion and other issues had moved him closer to the left-of-center activists who dominate Democratic caucuses and primaries.
By staying close to his blue-collar roots, he was already compatible on many economic matters with a core party constituency, organized labor. Gephardt broke with the Democratic Leadership Council over trade and labor issues. In 1985, he proposed what would become known as the Gephardt Amendment - punitive import restrictions on countries that maintained excessive trade surpluses with the United States. It became his signature issue, the centerpiece of his 1988 presidential candidacy, and remains Gephardt's calling card with labor unions today. The bill never became law, but in the early 1988 contests, the issue helped propel Gephardt to victory in the Iowa caucuses, second in the New Hampshire primary, and a win in South Dakota.
Gephardt's populist message, with its fair-trade theme, earned him the "protectionist" brand and presaged his 1993 opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, a priority of another Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
To stop Gephardt in 1988, two Democratic opponents, Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis and Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, pounced on Gephardt's shifts on abortion and other issues. Dukakis wounded him with a devastating TV ad, featuring the acrobatic contortions of a red-headed gymnast.
Running on fumes and vendors' credit, Gephardt was too broke to answer the Dukakis and Gore attacks. He financed some campaign expenses by running up nearly $105,000 on his personal credit card (the Federal Election Commission years later would fine his committee $80,000 for that violation - an excessive personal loan - and eight others).
On March 8, "Super Tuesday," the Gephardt candidacy collapsed. He lost all but his native Missouri among 20 states up for grabs. For three weeks, he limped to the Michigan caucuses, seeking a miracle. He found none, finishing third. Less than two months after the Iowa triumph, he was done.
Gephardt accepted failure with equanimity. "I have no alibis," he told reporters. "I lost."
Another run for White House
Defeat didn't diminish Gephardt's stature in Congress. The year after his failed presidential campaign, colleagues elected him majority leader, No. 2 in the Democratic House. Five years later, in the Democratic debacle of 1994, Speaker Thomas Foley lost his seat and Republicans took the House for the first time in 40 years. Gephardt ascended to the party's top post, now as minority leader.
"The worst day of my life," Gephardt says of the day he handed the gavel to incoming Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich. He wasn't referring to the fact that he was in excruciating pain from a gall bladder attack. After giving a speech to a shell-shocked Democratic caucus, he retired to a gurney in the House physician's office. At Bethesda Naval Hospital the next day, surgeons removed his gall bladder.
Gingrich's tumultuous four-year reign was marked by bitter partisanship and a partial government shutdown during the 1995 budget stalemate. Still, Gephardt was known for his fairness. Dick Armey, then Gingrich's majority leader and now cochairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative fiscal advocacy group, calls his former foe "a good, decent person" and says Gephardt handled congressional conflict "with as much grace as anyone."
At the height of Gingrich's speakership, a war of ethics complaints raged in the House, producing an unprecedented reprimand of a sitting speaker and a retaliatory charge against Gephardt. In many ways, Gephardt was an unlikely target of an allegation of financial impropriety. He had never showed much interest in accumulating wealth.
"It was a big nothing," Gephardt says of the complaint that he had failed to disclose certain details of a complicated land swap involving rental property the Gephardts owned on North Carolina's Outer Banks. After bipartisan review, the complaint was dismissed in 1997, but Gephardt amended official financial statements to reflect unreported rental income from the property. By then, the Gephardts had already sold the beach house and applied a $47,000 profit to pay down loans for their childrens' college educations, Gephardt said.
The couple has always been heavily in debt and lives modestly. The family car is a leased Ford Focus wagon. Their homes are a suburban St. Louis condominium and a Washington town home, both bought in 2001 at a combined cost of $560,000. They borrowed $397,000 to finance the DC purchase. Their other assets total between $134,000 and $614,000 (reports require disclosure only within a range of values), ranking Gephardt's net worth last among the major Democratic candidates.
Gephardt's financial nonchalance is limited to his private life. For years, he has been one of the most prolific fundraisers in Congress, though that success has not been duplicated in this year's presidential race, in which Gephardt is in the middle of the fundraising pack.
After the 1988 presidential bid, he considered running again in 1992 and 2000 but passed each time. Meanwhile, he continued to strengthen his ties to labor and other key constituencies, and he trekked through the country, collecting chits by raising money for Democratic candidates. And he continued learning lessons from his first race.
In his 1988 quest for the White House, Gephardt was, by his own admission, "naive about what it would take to get it done." As the only one of the nine Democrats in the 2004 race with presidential campaign experience, he is aware of the flaws in his dry style and delivery. He has self-consciously tried to personalize his message.
"I just came to the conclusion, and Jane and Matt did as well, that this is reality," he said. "You need to let people know why you feel the way you do about an issue."
To announce his candidacy on Feb. 19, Gephardt returned to the Mason Elementary School, atop a hill in the South St. Louis neighborhood that reflects so much of who he is. At the end of his speech, Gephardt offered a simple self-assessment of his candidacy.
"I'm not the political flavor of the month," he said. "I'm not the flashiest candidate around. But the fight for working families is in my bones. It's where I come from; it's been my life's work."
