Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301170156
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PHYLLIS W. JORDAN LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: MCLEAN LENGTH: Long
ROBBS SAY PAST MAY HAUNT FUTURE
It hit hardest on Sundays. U.S. Sen. Charles Robb remembers waking up and reading the stories splayed across the morning paper, then walking down the aisle at church for communion and knowing all those people must have read the same stories.The polite Episcopalian congregation never said anything. Those who did offered their support. "But you have enough of these stories that you know what they must be thinking," Robb says.
Last week brought sweet vindication for Robb as a grand jury refused to indict him after a 19-month investigation.
Friends showered his home with cards, letters and phone calls after the announcement Tuesday. Northern Virginia Democrats swarmed to shake his hand, hug him, even seek his autograph at a pre-inaugural ball Friday night.
But even in the glow of his legal success, Robb acknowledges he still has to deal with what the rest of Virginia has been thinking about him through all the controversy - the grand jury investigation of an illegal recording, the reports of womanizing and drug parties at Virginia Beach.
"It will take a long time to recover from that. I understand that," Robb says, his wife, Lynda Bird, holding fast to his hand.
"The response we've had in the last few days, just hundreds and hundreds of letters and calls" are a good start, Lynda adds.
At the Robb house in McLean, vindication smells a lot like flowers: tulips, lilies, roses in giant arrangements sent as gifts. They fill the coffee table of the bright green living room, the antique table of the formal dining room, the round, glass table where the family eats dinner.
The house sits above the Potomac River, and the roar of the water over rapids drowns out planes flying overhead. The Robbs recently doubled the size of the house, adding an indoor swimming pool in the process.
Robb has been spending more time at home lately.
The whisperings about Robb began even before he ran for the Senate in 1988. But it reached the national stage nearly two years ago, when a former Miss Virginia claimed she had a lengthy affair with Robb. Trying to deflect attention from the scandal, Robb's aides leaked a tape of Gov. Douglas Wilder criticizing the senator.
The tape was illegally recorded, and its release prompted a grand jury investigation. Three Robb aides pleaded guilty to infractions, and news reports suggested the senator could be indicted in the case.
The controversy was wreaking havoc on his professional and personal life, forcing Robb and his family to re-evaluate both.
Politically, the toast of the Democratic Party very nearly became - to use the vernacular - toast.
Once a big draw for political fund-raisers across the country, Robb found himself avoiding these events, lest his presence detract from the candidate's efforts.
He recalls a Democratic fund-raising event early in the campaign, when Senate colleague Wyche Fowler called on him to come to Georgia. Once there, reporters began pounding Robb with questions about his own problems.
"I recognized that in the eyes of the public there was a cloud hanging over my head," Robb says. "I couldn't be as effective as an advocate or a spokesman."
Serving a two-year term as the Democrat's chief Senate fund-raiser, Robb called on other senators to take his place speaking at parties and dinners.
"I just reduced the visibility of my role and worked the phones like crazy," Robb says.
Any national political aspirations he harbored were quickly dashed. When a woman asked about that at Friday night's ball, Robb laughed. "Re-elected in `94. We'll settle for that," he told her.
But that's not even a sure thing anymore, Robb acknowledges.
Once the state's most popular politician, Robb earned a favorable rating from only one in five voters in a poll last June. That's down from the three in five earlier in his Senate term. Or the seven in 10 voters who elected him to the Senate in 1988.
Robb says his efforts to turn that around were hampered by a press corps that refuses to report anything but the scandals swirling around him.
"There was a frustration in that anytime I would talk about substantive issues, they never made it out on the public radar screen," Robb says.
He recalled a meeting at a Richmond homeless shelter where he and several other officials gave speeches. "The reporter waited through two hours just to ask a couple of pointed questions that were meant to put me on the defensive," he says.
Robb says the scandals hurt him personally, since the implication was that he was lying about his involvement with the former Miss Virginia, Tai Collins, and about the illegally recorded tape.
A retired Marine, Robb recently saw the movie "A Few Good Men" and says he identified with the Marine sergeant accused of wrongdoing. Like the movie character, Robb says he lives by a "code."
"I live by a core set of values, a code," he says. "In the world that I live in, truth is an absolute. I know it drives people crazy. It sounds self-righteous. It sounds self-serving . . . That's the absolute in terms of . . . my personal integrity."
The controversy began to touch his family, as well.
His daughter Catherine, 22, then at the University of Virginia, would catch people talking about her father. "The bad part is overhearing things, not people you knew, just hearing other people talking about it . . . You want to break in and say something," she recalls.
Lucinda, 24, says she would shut out the bad news by picking up one of her favorite books and rereading it. "Why is this happening to him?" Lucinda, 24, asks quietly. "He really is every bit like he's supposed to be. He really drinks milk. He just thinks if he tells the truth, everybody will believe him."
Both daughters would come home on weekends, when their parents seemed particularly weighed down by the deepening scandal.
His wife Lynda, the daughter of President Lyndon Johnson, held her tongue for months until Collins came out with new allegations in a Playboy spread. Lynda lashed out in meetings with reporters across the state.
Throughout the scandals, she stood firmly beside her husband, affectionate and supportive at public appearances.
During the interview at their home, she kneaded his neck and grabbed his hand time and again, lacing her fingers with his. As they drove to the ball Friday night, theirs was the banter of a couple married for 25 years: how to get to the Tyson's Corner hotel quickest and where to park.
The Robbs say the two years of controversy have taught them some lessons.
"It has made me much more understanding and less judgmental of other people," Lynda says. "When I read something in the paper that says something bad about somebody, I take a deep breath and say `Maybe it's not all true. Maybe there's another side.' "
Robb says he was impressed with the loyalty he found among colleagues on Capitol Hill.
He credits Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, who was under pressure to remove Robb from his fund-raising role at the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. Under Robb's leadership, the committee raised a record $25 million.
Lynda recalled how Delaware Democratic Sen. Joe Biden had helped the Robb daughters through the hardest time. Running into them at a "Batman" movie, Biden took the girls aside and told them to trust in their father's integrity, not in what they read about the scandals.
And then there were ordinary people, such as the Spanish teacher at McLean High School. On the day that Robb was expected to be indicted, the teacher took 14-year-old Jennifer Robb aside and told her that her father couldn't be a bad man if he'd produced a daughter like her. Lynda Robb's voice cracked with emotion as she recalled that story.
And there's the $50 campaign contribution they received in the mail yesterday from a retired, elderly woman, who once worked with them in the governor's office.
"What we want to do is not dwell and get bogged down in all of this, but to talk about what we want to do in the future," Lynda says.
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