THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 26, 1994 TAG: 9410260415
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EDWARD POWER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 336 lines
He has been described at various times as so stiff that he appears robotic; as a milk-imbibing, spit-and-polish Marine; as a New Democrat savior sent by Hollywood central casting to liberate Virginia from the death grip of Republicans; and as a hapless, would-be playboy who, on hot summer nights, like a lost character from Tennessee Williams, fell in with a Virginia Beach Oceanfront crowd that moved so fast it blurred the lines between his marital fidelity and - some would say, worse - his moral vision.
Whatever one thinks of Charles Spittal Robb, his political career - from lieutenant governor to governor of Virginia to U.S. senator - has been, in the context of American political life, one of the strangest evolutions imaginable.
Spanning nearly two decades, Robb's political life has traveled from a youthful and tenacious pursuit of office based on issues and ideology to a present-day, often weary march through the minefields of innuendo and late-night TV comedy routines. Talk show hosts, political cartoonists, celebrity reactionaries - all have mocked Robb's infamous New York massage by a onetime beauty queen, his former aides' inept handling of electronic eavesdropping on a political rival, and even Robb's staunch attempts to maintain what for most politicians is a rock of ages trait: his earnest public demeanor.
And yet, through it all, Chuck Robb - Great Society scion, forgiven husband (in a news conference no less), respected Capitol Hill policymaker - seems almost unfazed.
He may look a bit battle-fatigued these days. He is still plagued by what critics and even supporters say is a tongue that can treat the English language as if it were aimlessly wandering through a labyrinth.
And the question of his using a Senate seat as a steppingstone to higher office is now useful only as theoretical debate in a political science class.
But Chuck Robb soldiers on. Lynda Bird at his side. A valuable political future, he clearly believes, still well within his grasp.
Whether Election Day holds for Chuck Robb yet another milestone in that political future - or his effective political demise - it will nonetheless be a juncture in a political journey far different from the one Robb set off on nearly 20 years ago.
To examine Chuck Robb's life is to understand both the singlemindedness of his political rise and the contrasts in character that have bedeviled that rise. His has been a life of political celebrity, grand aspirations and small ironies, a life of public images that are sometimes at war with the private man.
To have witnessed Robb's astounding fall from grace in recent years is to sense the driving forces of his psyche. And while there are many theories about Robb's true self, few people - perhaps no one except Robb himself - profess a full and intimate understanding of him.
Serious, meticulous and remote are terms that have tagged Robb since he parachuted into Virginia politics in the mid-1970s as the son-in-law of the late President Lyndon B. Johnson.
``Sometimes I think Chuck has planned our whole lives, and just shows me a little at a time,'' said Lynda Bird Johnson Robb during an interview when her husband was running for governor in 1981. According to friends, Lynda Robb was surprised - and initially disconcerted - to discover that the Marine captain she had married in White House splendor wanted to pursue a political career.
It was, in a large sense, marriage that gave birth to Robb the politician. Without the coupling, the odds of his moving so quickly from obscurity to his first public office - lieutenant governor, in 1978 - would have been remote. And even after Robb established his own identity, the association with America's political royalty helped to propel him.
Certainly the affiliation with Johnson - embedded in the public eye by countless news clips of the first White House wedding in 50 years; of the president's son-in-law on the front lines in Vietnam; of the former First Daughter and her dark-haired, law-student husband setting up housekeeping in Charlottesville - all this gave Robb instant access to Virginia's Democratic circles.
That connection, in the eyes of some, also gave Robb the financial clout and recognition to catapult almost overnight from political newcomer to lieutenant governor.
Despite the initial opposition from his wife, Robb entered a three-man contest for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 1977, emerged the winner, and went on to defeat Virginia Beach Republican A. Joe Canada Jr. with 54.2 percent of the 1.2 million votes cast.
While Robb had ostensibly run for lieutenant governor, few political insiders doubted where his sights were focused: the Executive Mansion.
Indeed, Robb, the former Marine, brought to campaigning the tactics of a field commander. Some supporters remember how Robb had sat with a map of Virginia spread on his law office floor and checked off the towns - the Grundys, the West Points and the Altavistas - that he needed to visit before launching a state political career.
Robb was equally organized in his policymaking. Working closely with associates, he would later develop a plan as governor that called for investing heavily in education while holding the line on other state spending and on growth in the bureaucracy. Another top priority, one with no price tag and high political return, was an unprecedented involvement of minorities and women in state government.
Robb's achievements at that time were not limited to politics. Without an increase in the state sales tax or income tax, average teacher salaries rose from $17,009 to $23,095. Over four years, $1 billion was added to the education budget, helping bring per-pupil spending in the state from an average of $2,310 to $3,421. Virginia's national ranking on teacher salaries improved from 34th to 26th among the 50 states; per-pupil spending went from 31st to 25th.
His formula, which also accented economic growth and a cleaner environment, ultimately unified conservative and liberal Democrats. And it produced what many said at the time was Robb's greatest legacy - the restoration of a state Democratic Party to dominance in the 1980s.
Indeed, before Robb's gubernatorial victory in 1981, no Democrat had been elected governor or senator in Virginia since 1966, the longest dry spell in the nation. Only one of Virginia's 10 U.S. representatives was a Democrat.
When he left the governor's office in 1986, Robb set out on a calculated and little-known mission, but one that recalled, in a global way, the exercise he had conducted years earlier on his law office floor: On a world map, he pinpointed hotspots that any national leader would need to have visited - Angola, Nicaragua and the Soviet Union, among them - and began ordering airline tickets and arranging briefings. Over the next two years, he would visit 28 countries.
``Robb,'' Washington Post political columnist David Broder wrote in 1988, ``is everything that Democrats want.''
If it seemed to many observers that Chuck Robb married into political life, his family legacy offered up its own justification for his ambitions.
Born in Phoenix on June 26, 1939, Robb grew up with the memories of a maternal grandfather who managed Woodrow Wilson's 1916 presidential campaign and a paternal grandfather who was longtime executive secretary to U.S. Sen. Henry Gassaway Davis of West Virginia.
His youth was distinguished by frequent family moves - from Arizona to Ohio to Virginia to Wisconsin - and by a failed family venture that Robb seems to have largely erased from memory.
When Robb was about 8, his father, who had once homesteaded 640 acres in Arizona, and his mother opened one of that region's first dude ranches. An unusually severe winter and a post-World War II recession, however, resulted in financial failure and what Robb called ``a period of retrenchment.'' His mother has described the period more bluntly: ``We lost our shirts.''
Whatever effect the setback might have had on the Robbs' eldest son remains a matter of conjecture.
``It all kind of runs together . . .,'' he once recalled. ``My first real recollections'' - and, the first references in Robb's early campaign biographies - ``come in high school and college.''
From there, the notable events and kudos came rapid-fire: National Merit Scholarship finalist . . . 1957 graduate of Alexandria's Mount Vernon High School . . . regional scholarship winner to Cornell University . . . transfer to University of Wisconsin on NROTC scholarship . . . University Senate . . . top ranking in Marine basic training class at Quantico . . . aide-de-camp to commanding general at Camp Lejeune, N.C. . . . assignment in 1966 to the Marine Barracks in Washington.
Robb could have left the Marines after four years, but he kept postponing the decision. By 1965 the Vietnam War had begun in earnest, and Robb began a three-year effort to get himself transferred to combat.
Robb has said he was haunted by the feeling that, as a Marine officer, Vietnam was where he belonged. ``I was here to serve,'' he said. ``I was expected to take some type of risk, and I was well-prepared for it. . . . As a young Marine officer, you feel you can overcome anything. I hated to be here in what seemed like a safe place.''
To describe ``here'' as a ``safe place'' was an understatement. For in those days, ``here'' often meant 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
As an aide to then-President Johnson, Robb was one of small number of military officers chosen for that role on the basis of looks, personal appeal and reliability to serve in ceremonial roles. But his official role soon turned to something more intimate with the Johnson family when he met their daughter Lynda Bird and quickly enough found himself invited to play bridge with Lynda and her friends.
``We became good friends, and one day she asked me to be her escort to some party,'' Robb recalled of their early relationship. Soon, the 28-year-old captain and the 23-year-old president's daughter decided to marry.
Robb once admitted to some hesitation about the marriage.
``The big thing for me was that I had to give up my bachelorhood. I enjoyed to the hilt my freedom and lack of personal responsibility. I felt I was too selfish to give up my bachelorhood. I was having too good a time.''
If he gave up his freedom, Robb didn't give up trying to get into combat. And finally, soon after his marriage, he got his wish.
He spent half of his 13-month tour in Vietnam in charge of an infantry company and ``constantly in combat,'' he once recalled.
In 1970, Robb resigned from the Marines and enrolled in law school. He picked law because most of his Washington friends were lawyers and recommended it.
But his life was distinguished from that of the struggling law student. Using his Marine savings account and part of his wife's fortune, Robb and his wife bought a $50,000 home in Charlottesville.
In law school, Robb headed the student legal forum. He brought such divergent political figures as Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and left-wing activist priest Daniel Berrigan to campus.
Upon graduation, Robb landed a job as clerk for a federal judge in Richmond. And by 1974, Robb was working for one of the top Washington law firms, which included among its members Joseph Califano, one-time secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.
As Robb's professional fortune grew, so did his private one. Past campaign financial reports have shown that he and his wife, Lynda, were worth at least $9.2 million; much of that wealth has come from her father's estate.
Practicing law in Northern Virginia gave Robb a means to make contacts on his own and build on those of his famous in-laws. But the law wasn't an end to itself. Gravitating to politics first through membership on a local Northern Virginia Democratic committee, Robb quickly decided, in 1977, to seek the office of Virginia's lieutenant governor. If his entry into politics had seemed preordained to others, Robb tended to play down the calculated appearance of it.
``It was more of an evolution,'' he said in a 1981 interview. ``I'd always been interested in politics, not necessarily Republican-Democrat politics, but school politics. . . . To me that's where the action is . . . influencing public opinion and events, solving problems, charting directions.''
While Robb may have initially soft-pedaled the ultimate direction of his political aspirations, in time it became clear, with his quick rise to the Virginia governor's mansion and then to the U.S. Senate, that he was covering ground and sowing the seeds for something even greater.
While Robb cultivated support for what he obviously hoped would be a bid for the Democratic nomination for president, other seeds, planted during his Virginia governorship, were quietly spawning the weeds of rumor and innuendo that would eventually choke off Robb's ascent toward the Oval Office.
Despite the existence of those rumors during his gubernatorial term, Robb ran a strong campaign for the Senate in 1988, trouncing his opponent, Maurice Dawkins, receiving nearly 800,000 more votes than the Republican. But the rumors persisted. And what finally became clear, through press reports and other sources, is that in the 1980s Robb had spent considerable time, against the advice of some astute local Democrats, with Virginia Beach businessman Bruce Thompson and a crowd in which access to sex and drugs was easy. It was a relationship that mystified longtime associates and that seemed 180 degrees from the straight-arrow image that had propelled Robb throughout his public career.
``For some reason, his judgment had a blind spot, that I never saw anywhere else, when it came to some of the people and some of the activities in Virginia Beach,'' state Del. Glenn R. Croshaw, D-Virginia Beach, once observed of Robb. In the mid-'80s, Croshaw told Robb's former press secretary, George Stoddart, to warn his boss to steer clear of the group.
``You just have to assume he started to look at 50 and said, `My life's slipping away here, and there are a lot of things I'd like to do, and nobody's looking, and I'm governor,' '' observed one man who had worked closely with Robb. ``I don't know how else to explain how a guy I had known as personally disciplined and morally disciplined could have taken part in the kind of things you heard he may have been involved in.''
At the very least, Robb's activities in Virginia Beach social circles revealed a willingness to court danger that was not always apparent in his public image. More significantly, Robb's attraction to the Oceanfront scene ultimately led to the unraveling of the political plan he had so carefully crafted.
The frayed edges of his reputation developed into a severe tear in the late 1980s when Tai Collins, a former Miss Virginia USA, publicly claimed that in 1984 the two had had a 10-month affair. Collins would carry her tale - and her physical traits - to the cover and inside pages of Playboy magazine, all of which seemed to publicly mock the image Robb had spent more than a decade building, an image of himself as a studious, aspiring senior statesman.
``This man was worshiped,'' University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato observed of Robb, ``and like all powerful figures he had lots of temptations, and unlike lots he was young and handsome and had the air of the future about him.''
With his wife, Lynda Bird, and their three daughters standing firm by his side, and his eventual admission of his transgressions (a nude massage rather than an affair), Robb might have weathered Tai Collins' disclosures in time. But quick on the heels of the Collins publicity came revelations about a Robb associate illegally taping a cellular telephone conversation of then-Lt. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who was critical of Robb in the conversation.
The tape fell into the hands of some Robb aides who plotted as to how it might be used to political advantage. Convinced that Wilder was peddling rumors about Robb's escapades, the senator's aides leaked the tape in which Wilder claimed Robb's career was finished. In their zeal, the most critical fact about the tape - that it was illegal goods - was apparently ignored. Three of Robb's top aides eventually pleaded guilty in federal court to crimes related to leaking the tape. Robb himself was notified that he was the target of a grand jury investigation.
Never prosecuted, Robb still bore the fallout from incessant press accounts of the tape scandal. And the feud between Robb and Wilder escalated, causing many Democrats to blame them for intraparty splits that developed and that some blamed for opening the door that ushered Republican George F. Allen into the governor's mansion.
Despite all this, Robb has managed to carve out a respectable role for himself on Capitol Hill. He has built a quiet reputation as a Democratic lawmaker who really studies issues and isn't afraid to take a controversial stand, such as his advocacy for a military in which gays can serve without fear of reprisal.
Close associates have said Robb, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a C average, is not a creative thinker or a scholar of philosophy or history. Nor is he always a particularly quick thinker. But they credit him for a highly organized and disciplined approach to government and marvel at his raw political instinct for picking issues that galvanize public opinion.
``Robb is not an intellectual in the scholarly or academic sense,'' once observed Will Marshall, a speech writer for the Democratic Leadership Council, a think tank of moderate-to-conservative Democrats that Robb led into prominence when he left the governor's office. ``But he has a highly disciplined, trenchant mind that is alert to subtleties.''
And of course there is always Lynda Bird at his side, in spirit if not literally on the campaign trail, occasionally even bringing her mother, Lady Bird Johnson, out of retirement for an appearance on the stump as she did in Norfolk this month.
Intelligent, shrill, outspoken, difficult, Lynda Robb is easily her husband's match in energy and political magnetism, say those who know and have watched her over the years.
She can work a crowd with a force and a flair seemingly instilled in her genes, and her loyalty to friends is renowned. Recalled a friend - W. Douglas Davidson, a Maryland stockbroker who was part of the White House bridge foursome when the Robbs dated nearly 30 years ago: ``There was nothing she wouldn't do to try to help.''
Robb's own assessment of his 26-year marriage could be seen either as an indictment or an endorsement. ``Very, very pleasant,'' he once said of it.
Amid the whirl of rumors and allegations about Robb's extramarital actions, the senator's loyalists prefer to take his acknowledgment of a few ``peccadilloes'' as the definitive word.
``He's human,'' his brother, Wick Robb, once remarked of the Tai Collins scandal.
In the wake of the Tai Collins and Wilder controversies, many political oddsmakers said Robb would face such a tough time winning his party's endorsement for the 1994 Senate race that he would likely retire from politics. Why not retreat from the embarrassment of scandal sheets and TV gossip into the privacy so readily available from his and his wife's wealth?
The answer may be in an observation that Robb made nearly 20 years ago.
At the time, he had been asked whether he thought his wife's family connections had been more of a help or hindrance in his political career.
``It's sort of a presumption of a lack of ability that you sort of have to meet at the threshold,'' he said. ``It can tend to obscure where you've been.
``The more important question to ask is, `What have you done with the opportunities you have been presented?' Each and every one of us has some advantages and opportunities. How we proceed, given those opportunities, seems more relevant.''
Where he has been - and how he proceeds with his advantages and opportunities - may well be Chuck Robb's last prescription for achieving something akin to his original political vision. Not to mention his own private redemption. MEMO: This profile was written using reporting that has appeared in The
Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star since 1977. Among the reporters
whose work the writer drew from are Margaret Edds, Warren Fiske and
former staff member Jim Gallagher. In limited excerpts, their writing
was taken directly from previously published reports.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by BILL TIERNAN, Staff
Sen. Charles S. Robb: Catapulted to golden boy - partly by
achievement, partly by links to Lyndon Johnson - then tarnished by
scandal.
ASSOCIATED PRESS photo
Charles S. Robb, with EPA chief Carol Browner, Tuesday announced an
EPA grant for revitalization projects during a tour in Richmond.
With them was U.S. Rep. Robert ``Bobby'' Scott, who represents the
Peninsula's 3rd District.
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