How dangerous is Lungren for California?

So it has come down to this: The citizens of California have to live with Daniel Edward Lungren as a looming presence in their collective psychic and then cast judgment on whether Lungren as governor would be a boon or a burden to their dreams. There are those who have already decided, and either accepted the man into their fantasy future, or else exorcised him from residing in even the slightest crevice of their souls. But for the vast majority, Dan Lungren remains an unknown entity, a name barely registering on the radar screen of their lives.

For these citizens, millions and millions of dollars are being spent by both Lungren and his Democratic opponent Gray Davis, and the surrounding media, to tell various versions of his story.

Which Lungren story will come to dominate the public imagination? How close will it be to the reality? Lungren''s campaign did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. But we have gathered many shards and fragments recorded from his 22 years in elective politics, consisting of 10 campaigns, only one of which was unsuccessful, and another of which was aborted. There is also his decade as the U.S. Congressman from Long Beach and north Orange County; and eight more years as this state''s attorney general. And all along the way are profiles and sketches of Lungren drawn by numerous reporters.

Whether these indicators provide us with an approximation of the reality of the man is questionable. But they can certainly give us important information about the limits of the man.

Nixon and the Lungrens

Dan Lungren''s public record begins with his first campaign for office in 1976. But any attempt to understand Lungren requires knowledge of events crucial to him personally and politically long before he handed out his first election brochure.

Some empathetic imagination for the times in which he emerged is required to give depth to the portrait. Dan Lungren was born in Long Beach in 1946. His mother was an avid GOP socialite. By the early ''50s, his father, Dr. John Lungren, had become the personal physician to Richard Nixon. In fact, Dr. Lungren found himself inscribed in Nixon''s 1962 memoir, Six Crises: During the fall 1960 campaign against Kennedy, Nixon awoke ill in the middle of the night.

"I had a raging fever and was shaking with a chill," Nixon wrote. "I woke Don Hughes and asked him to get Dr. John C. Lungren, who was traveling with us and was a veteran of three previous campaigns. When he came to my room, he found that I was running a temperature of over 103, caused probably by a flu virus...He gave me an extra-large dose of aspirin, antibiotics and other assorted pills. Whatever they were, the fever broke, and while I got very little sleep for the balance of the night, I was able to get up at seven and proceed..."

There were to be other, more public medical ministrations by Dan Lungren''s dad to Nixon, most famously when Nixon''s phlebitis blocked his ability to participate in the trial of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and other aides indicted for Watergate.

But what most calls our attention in this story is how much the connection to Nixon must have influenced the Lungren household. While there surely would have been admiration for the father''s medical skills, the focus in the Lungren household, with Mrs. Lungren''s enthused attention, must have been on the powerful patient. It was a lesson that could not have escaped the notice of young Dan Lungren.

The Lungrens'' relation to Nixon does not often find a prominent place in the typical Lungren biography. Combing through the record, you will find mention of trips by the Lungren boys with Julie and Trish Nixon to Catalina Island; a report on Dan Lungren being taunted by his parochial schoolmates for supporting Nixon over the Catholic Kennedy. There will also be mention that Dick Nixon took the time to console the 30-year-old Dan Lungren after the loss of his first campaign for Congress in 1976. But the relation with Nixon also tends to undercut a basic tale Dan Lungren has told about himself since his beginning in politics: the myth of the tieless, cheeseburger-chomping, self-made man.

As the story goes, young Dan Lungren went to Notre Dame. Before going off to law school, he worked as a shipyard construction worker and lifeguard. Then he returned as a graduate from Georgetown Law School, worked in a law firm and finally reclaimed his home congressional district from the liberal Democrat who had stolen it away in the wake of Watergate.

All of which might be accurate. But what is left out is the lifelong familial connections he had to the most powerful parts of the national and state Republican apparatus. When he went to Washington for law school, he easily found positions with Republican Sens. George Murphy from California and Bill Brock from Tennessee. Far from matching the image of an up-from-the-Long Beach-shipyards regular guy, Dan Lungren had spent his entire youth being cultivated by and cultivating the politically potent.

There is another reason why publicity of the Nixon connection may be something Lungren has carefully modulated: Its name is Vietnam. And, as with Bill Clinton in 1992, this central crucible of Dan Lungren''s generation threatens to take center stage in his 1998 governor''s race.

Lungren and Vietnam

Dan Lungren never went to Vietnam. Indeed, he seems never to have had to face the issue, although he graduated from Notre Dame and lost his student draft deferment at the height of the war in 1968. But instead of being subjected to the draft, Lungren found himself easily obtaining a 1-Y classification, which found him unfit except in times of national emergency or declared war. How he got that classification has remained unanswered, for he never had to take a physical examination. Supposedly the draft board simply accepted his medical record indicating knee injury from sports and a childhood kidney surgery.

When questioned by Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee reporters on the issue, Lungren claimed that he had no particular reaction over his draft status. His wife Bobbi remembered otherwise: "He didn''t like it because so many of his friends had to go and he felt like he needed to give something back to his country," she told Dan Smith of the Bee. "On the other hand, it allowed him the freedom to go to graduate school without that hanging over his head."

For anyone who lived through the Vietnam era and was anywhere within eligible draft-age range, the experience of Vietnam is indelibly marked in their psyches and characters. If you were draft age or thereabouts, every day and every night you wondered: Am I willing to kill? Am I willing to die? Should I fight? If not, should I go to jail? Should I go to Canada? Am I truly a conscientious objector? The discussion and self-examination by potential draftees was endless.

The campaign ahead may well determine whether we ever learn the truth about Lungren''s draft history. Certainly if Lungren needed intervention on his behalf, he had the connections. And certainly, if consulted at the time, Nixon cynically knew that this was a war that was not worth his personal physician sacrificing his son for.

Still, it must have been difficult for someone as athletic as Lungren and as hawkish (he believed the U.S. didn''t do enough to win the war) to imagine himself too disabled to serve.

But Lungren''s sideway waffle on his memory of the issue tells us something obvious yet profound about this man: He is political to the core. And however much he claims to glory in his personal family history and the unshakable personal values nurtured there, there is really no part of his personal identity that he would not modify in his grasp for power. The proximity of power has a mysterious effect on the memories of the politically ambitious and Dan Lungren is no exception.

Lungren and Watergate

The Lungren tale also shows a gap of information when it comes to that other national trauma of his generation: Watergate.

Most often, whether in official biographies or newspaper accounts, 1972 rarely exists in the Dan Lungren story. For at least part of that year, he worked at the Republican National Committee. As Lungren is quick to point out during the few occasions when it comes up, the Republican National Committee (RNC) was not the White House-directed Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), where most of the Watergate criminal skullduggery occurred. Indeed, CREEP was created to bypass the official party machine that Nixon suspected of disloyalty.

What was young Dan Lungren doing in the midst of all this? Differing accounts have appeared over time. A 1980''s Who''s Who in the West bears this notation for Dan Lungren: "1972: dir spl prjts Republican National Committee."

Whatever those special projects he directed for the Watergate-era RNC were, Lungren made his way back to a Long Beach law firm in 1973. That year, "peace with honor" descended on Vietnam and Nixon descended into the Watergate coverup. Caught between his ideals and the criminal revelations around his ideal figure, Lungren seems to have taken the only option open to him without abandoning his entire history: He moved to the hard right.

Three years after Lungren returned to Long Beach, he launched his first congressional campaign using Nixon-style tactics. Attempting to unseat Congressman Mark Hannaford, a Democrat who had been elected in the wake of Watergate, Lungren mailed out literature with headlines like "Hannaford rated radical" and "NYC representation for the 34th." "NYC," of course, stood for New York City, but could be read as code for Jews, blacks and other urban minorities. Although he would claim naivete about such interpretations, he would continue with such coded attacks on "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984 and "Willie Horton" at the 1992 Republican convention.

Elected to Congress after his second campaign in 1978, Lungren quickly established a reputation as a member of the radical Republican right. He favored the Human Life Amendment, which forbade abortion even in the case of rape or incest. He advocated expansion of off-shore oil drilling in California. He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment. The rigidity of Lungren''s views may be measured in part by the ratings he received from a variety of the interest groups that track legislative records.

From 1980 through 1986, he averaged a 99.3 percent rating on congressional votes important to the Business Industry PAC, but only 1.6 percent on votes tracked by the Children''s Defense Fund. For the same period, he voted favorably on legislation important to Christian Voice 97.8 percent of the time, but rated only 36 percent on environmental votes important to the League of Conservation Voters. The National Manufacturer''s Association rated him positive on 83.8 percent of their votes while the National Council of Senior Citizens could count on him on average only 6.5 percent of the time.

Perhaps the congressional voting comparison that best encapsulates Lungren''s ultra-conservative record is the following: For the 1980-86 period, Lungren''s voting record matched that of radical right-wing Orange County Congressman Robert Dornan 95 percent of the time.

By 1986, Lungren was obviously tiring of the reins placed on his ambition by being a Republican minority member in a Congress with a Democratic majority. He briefly considered challenging U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, but withdrew when the necessary financial backing didn''t emerge. In 1987, then-Gov. George Deukmejian nominated him to replace deceased state Treasurer Jesse Unruh, but he failed to obtain confirmation by the state senate. He let it publicly be known that he would accept the position of the nation''s drug czar in a Bush administration, but nothing materialized there either.

Announcing his retirement from the House of Representatives, he moved to Roseville, joined a high-powered Sacramento law firm and began plotting his 1990 campaign for attorney general. Winning that post by the narrowest of margins in 1990, and then re-elected in 1994, Lungren has carried forward his conservative agenda into the state''s law enforcement.

Dan''s Law, Dan''s Order

Asserting himself as the law-and-order force in the state with advocacy of measures like "Three Strikes," Lungren as state attorney general has allowed the areas of consumer protection and civil rights to wither on the vine. When he could, he has actively and passively sided with the interests of business, as in his reluctance to join in the multi-state suit against the tobacco industry. In his recent announcement joining the states'' antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft''s monopoly practices, he sounded almost apologetic.

Lungren''s combination of zealotry and public relations occasionally has tripped him up. After ordering a raid on the San Francisco medicinal marijuana buyers'' club in 1996, Lungren was the subject of a series of Doonesbury comic strips. Calculating that it would be good publicity to be viewed in opposition to one of the epitomes of liberal culture, he held a press conference denouncing Doonesbury. "My opinion is this week''s Doonesbury strips mislead and attempt to lend credibility to a criminal enterprise," he intoned, with the state''s media portraying it as a battle between Dan Lungren and the cartoon character Zonker Harris.

Even the attorney general''s claim to success in cutting the crime rate has come under scrutiny. While there is no doubt that crime rates have dropped in California during the past several years, the reality is that crime rates have dropped equally dramatically throughout the country, including in states without a "Three Strikes" law.

Dueling analyses between Lungren and groups critical of "Three Strikes" have made little headway in their attempts to isolate the factors contributing to the decline in crime. Locking away repeat offenders obviously must account for some portion of the drop. But so must an improved economy and a decline in the nation''s population in the age group most prone to criminal activity.

Dan McAllair, associate director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, sees it this way: "There''s no single factor to account for the drop in crime. But it''s not unusual for politicians to stretch the truth during election years."

Lungren as politician in a race for power is increasingly emerging as he attempts to soften his positions and actions that run counter to the mainstream of California. During the gubernatorial debate in May, he even attempted to deny his previous opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest, while belittling the impact that a governor can have on the issue.

But what must count in considering Lungren as the state''s chief executive is not the rhetorical smoke screen during a campaign season, but what he has done once power has been in his grasp.

As a signal lesson on Lungren in power, one might look at his decision to withdraw Department of Justice support for a state agency that was enforcing an anti-discrimination law.

In 1993, the Fair Employment and Housing Commission (FEHC) found it unlawful for a Chico landlord to refuse to rent to an unmarried couple because of the landlord''s religious beliefs. The state Court of Appeal found in favor of the landlord, based on the opinion that the free exercise of religion pre-empted state anti-discrimination law.

Lungren declared that he agreed with the court and would no longer represent FEHC in the matter.

Remaking the Man

During the primary election, Lungren began to attempt to undo the vague fear of him as a radical by running television commercials in which he talks directly to the voters. At the end of one, he states, "Character is doing good when no one else is watching."

It''s actually a strange notion of character, but perhaps accurate for Dan Lungren. For it directly implies that the good is not embedded in our relations with each other, but encased in some ideal apart. It also confirms the concern that caused the state Senate to reject Lungren as a nominee for state treasurer in 1987. "What we fear about your record," then-Senate Pro Tem David Roberti told Lungren, "is that in every tough question...[your] fiscal conservatism takes precedence over social responsibilities..."

If Dan Lungren believes that what counts is what you do when no one else is watching, his message is clear: You better keep a watch on Dan Lungren. cw

Ralph Brave is new editor of the Sacramento News & Review. >