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‘A Real Tiger’ : Dornan Enlivens Congress as a Budding Folk Hero of the Right

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Times Staff Writer

When Rep. Robert K. Dornan seized Democrat Thomas Downey by the tie and scuffled with him on the House floor after Downey objected to being called a “draft-dodging wimp,” Dornan’s admirers smiled with satisfaction. It was another example of what endears the red-haired Republican from Garden Grove to conservatives across the land.

“I just love it when he is aggressive,” said his wife, Sallie. “He can be a real tiger.”

“Bob puts a little zest back into Congress,” conservative California Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Long Beach) agreed. “He has the reputation of having a steel-trap mind, of working at an energy level exceeded by no one and of being somebody you never have to worry about where he stands because he makes it very obvious.”

Indeed he does. The day after the March 4 tie-tugging incident, Dornan vowed to deal similarly with other foes, declaring that he felt like “Julius Caesar returning from Gaul.”

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In the scant three months since he returned to the House after an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 1982 interrupted a three-term congressional career, Dornan is once again a budding folk hero of the right, a flamboyant, uninhibited battler who wrings cheers from conservative audiences with graphic one-liners, vivid denunciations of communism and a stream-of-consciousness style unlike anything else in Congress these days.

And he has instilled a wary caution among many colleagues. In the Downey episode, for example, although Dornan’s action offended congressional decorum, even some of Downey’s friends concede that it was the New York liberal who was the loser politically. “Dornan put Downey in the position of having to deny he was a wimp,” said one of Downey’s friends.

Yet for all his calculated maneuvering--”It took Jack Kemp 10 years to get on ‘Meet the Press.’ I made it in my fifth year--no, sixth,” Dornan boasted--the 52-year-old college dropout and former Air Force pilot seems as much driven as driving, a man continually straining against conventional boundaries.

Dornan describes himself as impatient and frustrated, propelled by “a sense of urgency that the world is going to end next week” and guilt that he has not suffered as others have.

He talks of having been born on the anniversary of Christ’s Crucifixion and of celebrating his 100th birthday on “the 2,000th anniversary of the redemption of the world.” He acknowledges that he sometimes has feelings of forewarnings of important events--knowing before any announcement was made, for example, that a world leader would die the night Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko passed away.

His wife says that sometimes in the middle of the night, when the MIA-POW bracelet he wears scrapes his skin, Dornan awakens crying and begins to say prayers because he fears that an American soldier is still alive and in trouble in Vietnam.

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An inveterate traveler with more than 100 trips abroad, Dornan has a taste for the world’s trouble spots. “I love to go to El Salvador, Grenada, Ethiopia, Cambodia--anywhere that there’s danger. But I don’t get foolhardy and disobey the embassy.” When touring areas of guerrilla activity, he said, he gets a gun from embassy escorts. “The odds of you using it are a million to one, but after Leo Ryan. . . ,” Dornan said, referring to the California congressman who was killed in Guyana.

He also tells of dodging bullets while doing free-lance reporting in Vietnam and being shot at by British soldiers during a riot in Northern Ireland while he was simulating what he described as “the charge of the elite British paratrooper” for a television film.

“How many congressman have ever been shot by a rubber bullet?” he asks with pride. “One. Me.”

At home, Dornan keeps a .38-caliber pistol for protection, saying he would use it only in self-defense. “Even then, I don’t think I could fire a gun point-blank into somebody’s upper body and certainly not their head,” Dornan said. “Unless they had already struck me or drawn blood or something, or had a weapon themselves, I think I would just be inclined to shoot in the air or at their legs.”

On a recent morning, as he prepared to go on “Donahue,” the television show hosted by Phil Donahue, a keyed-up and beaming Dornan was thinking ahead to the impression he would make, saying repeatedly that he wanted to do well for his five grown children and the White House.

“I know Nancy (Reagan) watches this show,” he said happily.

Explodes on Air

But once on the air, Dornan could not contain himself. When another guest suggested that Dornan supported former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, the congressman exploded. “No, no, no,” he shouted, interrupting the guest. “He was a drunk, an adulterer and a bastard and I didn’t support him.”

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Moments later, in response to a question about the middle class in Nicaragua, he offended two Jewish women in the audience by declaring: “There’s no middle-class people left. Every single Jewish person has been driven out.” He later tried to placate the women by pulling aside his jacket and exhibiting a big gold belt buckle emblazoned with an Israeli jet fighter.

During a break, Dornan stood on the stage, raised his arms as though he was lifting barbells and roared like a lion. He said later that Donahue, like Downey on the floor of the House, had aggravated him by touching his arm during the show.

Watching the show, Dornan’s older brother, Don, a political advertising consultant who lives in Sherman Oaks, said he kept wishing he could tell his brother to calm down and yell less.

“I am sensitive to the impression that is often left that he is a violent whacko,” Don Dornan said. “I know him. He is not a violent whacko. People forget that people with strong convictions express them.”

Admires Duncan Hunter

At times, Robert Dornan, too, wishes he could be different. He said he would like to be more like California Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-San Diego), a colleague he admires. But Dornan said he is uncertain exactly what it is about him that separates him from those he admires.

To his wife, Dornan is a “little kid” who has not yet learned reserve.

Dornan was born in New York on April 3, 1933, the second of three children, and grew up in California. He said he believes that his older brother was his mother’s favorite and that his younger brother was favored by both parents because he seemed headed for the priesthood.

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Dornan’s father was a strict--sometimes harsh--disciplinarian, but his children considered him fair. Once, when Dornan was 16, his father punched him in the chin and then put his face under a cold water faucet to keep him from passing out, according to the congressman’s older brother.

Don Dornan said that he, too, was once punched by his father and that he believes both deserved the blows.

It was the congressman’s travel-loving father who gave Dornan his lust for adventure and his mother who provided the inspiration for a political life, Don Dornan said.

Mother’s Encouragement

After a traffic accident in 1939 left her badly scarred, Dornan’s mother spent most of her time inside the family home, devouring books on history and conservative political thought, he said. She encouraged her second son to pursue politics.

At age 15, Robert Dornan forged his father’s signature to get into a civilian pilot training school. His brother remembers Dornan flying over their Jesuit high school, opening the door of the plane and shouting to his classmates below.

Dornan enlisted in the Air Force at age 19, dropping out of what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he said he received mostly Cs and skipped his final examinations his last semester. He became a fighter pilot, achieving the rank of captain, but by the time his training was over, so was the Korean War.

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Twice, however, while flying alone during peace-time duty, Dornan bailed out of military planes just before they crashed. Each crash, he said, was caused by a mechanical problem--a verdict Air Force records appear to confirm.

As a civilian in California, he crashed a helicopter while simulating engine failure.

Dornan married the former Sallie Hansen in 1955, and the couple have five children.

There have been some rough times in the Dornans’ marriage. During a period when she now says she was addicted to Valium, Sallie Dornan filed a divorce suit against her husband, charging him with striking and attacking her. She obtained a restraining order to prevent him from harassing her.

‘Everybody Pushes’

Later, she decided against seeking a divorce, but the accusations have dogged the couple in political races. Actually, she said, her husband never beat her. “Oh, we fight,” she concedes. “A push. Everybody pushes and shoves.”

Dornan, a former television talk show host, returned to Congress this year after representing a coastal Los Angeles County district from 1977 to 1983. He moved to Orange County last year and waged a raucous, aggressive campaign against former Democratic Congressman Jerry Patterson.

The battle was marked by hostile confrontations with Patterson supporters. Msgr. Wilbur Davis, pastor of a Roman Catholic church in Dornan’s district, said Dornan “stormed” into the priests’ Orange County rectory on more than one occasion, apparently convinced that the priests intended to campaign for Patterson. Davis said Dornan made “hysterical” statements, denouncing some bishops and politicians as Communists and attacking Patterson’s “moral character.”

Dornan described such critics as “left-wing” and pro-Patterson.

As a member of Congress, the frenetic Dornan moves through the hallways of Capitol Hill like a steamroller, booming out greetings and observations, attracting amused glances from passers-by. When his wife is with him, she generally trails several yards behind. He converses with her by shouting.

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No Touching

In interviews, Dornan shifts in and out of voices, mimicking himself or others as he recounts earlier events. When he discussed losing his temper with Downey, for example, his voice turned hard. Dornan said in an interview that he seized Downey by the tie only because Downey first grabbed his arm to speak to him.

“Nobody touches me in a hostile way,” Dornan said, narrowing his blue eyes, clenching his teeth and lowering his gravelly voice to a baritone.

Dornan assumed a similar demeanor as he described his fury at seeing an anti-war protester in 1971 wearing an American flag as a scarf. “I walked over and grabbed the guy’s flag from around his throat and shook it until the knot came off and pulled it off,” Dornan said. “I told him: ‘My dad earned three Purple Hearts for this flag.’ ”

He uses gestures to emphasize his words even in his quieter moments. Seated in his congressional office, where boxes are still unpacked and the walls bare, Dornan pulled out a 1980 photograph of Patterson, who went into Dornan’s former district in 1980 to help a Democrat who was trying--unsuccessfully--to unseat Dornan.

“And four years later, ‘Goodby Mr. Patterson,’ ” Dornan said, staring intently at the picture as he savored the irony of having vanquished a man who had tried to help beat him. “Fascinating.”

He drew an X with his forefinger over Patterson’s face before he put the picture away.

Hampered in Congress

Dornan’s effectiveness as a congressman is limited by his flamboyance and uneven temperament. Although he can be a forceful and persuasive speaker, other congressmen say he cannot easily hammer out compromises or make deals to win votes.

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Clearly, however, it is not the prosaic business of congressional deal-making that attracts Dornan. So far this session, he has involved himself with such matters as a bill aimed at penalizing foreign businesses that sell advanced technology to Communist regimes, a bill to control humanitarian aid to Vietnam and legislation to establish the civil rights of “preborn children.”

And, as an advocate of renewed U.S. aid for the anti-Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua, he went to Central America last week to prepare himself for the coming struggle in Congress. As his brother put it, the Garden Grove congressman is the kind of man who goes “to the sound of the guns.”

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