Robert K. Dornan Fires for Effect, and He Gets It : County’s Increasingly Influential Right-Wing Voice in Washington Glories in Keeping World’s Ills at Bay

The world is perpetually in motion behind Robert K. Dornan’s Irish blue eyes.

Nicaraguan contra fighters, Communist insurgents in the Philippines and the leering visage of Libyan Col. Moammar Kadafi compete madly for attention. World War II plays on reruns several times a day.

Then the swirl of thought takes shape. The blue eyes focus. Bob Dornan’s birthday screens on center stage--and the world plays on.

“Within a month of my 12th birthday, April 3, a month and five days, the war in Europe is over. So I was introduced to a world that was going to be a world of peace,” he explained over lunch in Washington.

“I thought there was never going to be another war. The atomic bomb was going to help dig a new canal. Where? I just thought of it, just now. Nicaragua. Nicaragua! A big, sea-level canal right through Lake Managua!”

He waited a moment for the impact, this new proof of the intricately linked nature of the things, to set in.

“Then Korea happened when I was a garbage boy at Hughes. This guy comes up to me and he says, a war has just started, the North Koreans have just attacked us in South Korea. I was 17 years old. And I said, my God, it’s over. There is no world of peace. We’re startin’ from scratch again.”

More than four decades later, as a United States congressman from a Southern California district best known for Disneyland, Dornan still seems to be leading the charge that began that day.

Since he moved south from his Santa Monica-area district to defeat five-term Democratic incumbent Jerry Patterson in 1984, Dornan has carved an unusual niche for himself.

He is an increasingly influential member of the Far Right, a man Vice President George Bush sought out for endorsement when seeking to solidify his conservative credentials for his possible upcoming presidential campaign.

But he is also a Republican who has stressed the importance of constituent services, a fiscal conservative who surprised local mayors by bringing home a $2.5-million grant for housing subsidies in a Garden Grove slum and another $200,000 to help poor Mexicans pushed out of Santa Ana’s barrios.

And, for television viewers, he is the man who recently called a Soviet commentator “a betraying little Jew,” and who once offered to trade himself for hostages being held by Muslim terrorists in Washington. Most notably, he is the man who referred to New York Democrat Thomas Downey as a “draft-dodging wimp” and grabbed for the congressman’s throat on the House floor, explaining later that he was “straightening” Downey’s tie.

“Ties were meant to be straightened,” wired the Santa Ana Police Department in what looked to be the beginning of a love affair between Dornan and his new-found district. Oddly enough, it is the only congressional district in Orange County with more Democrats than Republicans. More than a quarter of the residents are Latino, and more than 56,000 residents are living in poverty.

“When I first drove around this district, I was, yes, an outrageous carpetbagger,” said Dornan of his move to Orange County two years after a Democratic-sponsored redistricting plan left him with little hope of retaining his Los Angeles County seat.

‘I’m Your Kinda Guy’

“I almost look at it like Winston Churchill, being cut out by his opposition; he went looking for a constituency, and you know what he found? A coal mining constituency of blue-collar people, and he said, ‘Here I am, Little Lord Fauntleroy, lord of Blenheim Castle; I’m your kinda guy!’

“So I drove around . . . and I said, you notice something in this district? Vans. We have a van. Broncos. We got one. Campers. Water-ski boats--I’m buying another one, I’ve had one. Dirt bikes, that’s what I bought for my two sons. And I said--this is Americana! I love this district!”

Still, the lobby in Dornan’s office is as likely to be populated with Central American guerrillas and Liberian rebels as the mayor of Buena Park on a given afternoon. For Dornan, it’s all part of being central Orange County’s personal--some would say self-appointed--warrior in a world forever on the brink. It is a campaign that has left the rest of Washington blinking.

“People look at Bob Dornan as the kind of a guy who wakes up in the morning thinking about the difficulties of Mozambique and goes to bed at night wondering whether or not the U.S. is going to give too much away in the arms talks,” said Mike Johnson, chief of staff to House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois.

“He has the capacity of overwhelming you with his focus and his energy,” added Republican Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois. “He’s like a nuclear explosion that keeps going off.”

Dornan often has trouble keeping the ills of the world at bay when it’s time to talk about highway funds for the folks at home. His speeches in the district often lapse into tirades on abortion and the fate of America’s missing servicemen in Vietnam.

For the 53-year-old former TV talk show host-turned fighter pilot-turned congressman, it may be just a coincidence that he’s perpetually caught up in the major events of our time. And then again, it may not.

For instance, this business of his birthday. People perpetually misinterpret him when he points it out, he said. It doesn’t really mean anything. But it is nonetheless true, he said, that he was born on the same calendar date that Christ was crucified, Dornan explained. His 100th birthday will be the 2,000th anniversary of the Crucifixion.

“Look at this,” he suggested. “Roosevelt’s birthday is Jan. 30. Hitler was sworn in on Roosevelt’s birthday--the man that was to undo him, once he joined Churchill. And then, Roosevelt was sworn in on March 4--well, my mother was eight months pregnant then. And I was born April 3. So I was born 30 days into Roosevelt’s term.

“Now, I’m not being spooky about it, I’m just saying, within a month of Roosevelt--I’m born. He was within less than three months of Hitler, who was sworn in on Roosevelt’s birthday, and that starts it. The world really took off, as I know it, while I’m in my mother’s womb.”

It is two days after the American raid on terrorist targets in Libya. Dornan has spent the morning in a series of high-level meetings, first with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, then with a representative of the government of Philippines President Corazon Aquino, then with a contingent of Liberian citizens seeking help in stemming the abuses of their government.

Dornan is about to testify before a public works subcommittee on funding for a flood control project on the Santa Ana River when he is called to the phone. His brows furrow as he hears the news, then he hangs up quickly.

“I just got a call from my office that BBC has reported Kadafi was assassinated in a coup,” he announced. “If it’s true, that means Reagan is a man of action and a prince of history.”

As Orange County lobbyist Jim McConnell tries to herd Dornan into the hearing room for the flood control testimony, Dornan informs him that the Santa Ana River will have to wait, at least a minute or two. “I’m gonna go call BBC myself.”

Invented POW Bracelets

It’s not true, as it turns out, and Dornan eventually delivers an eloquent plea on behalf of the $1.1-billion project, the largest water project under consideration by Congress this year. Then it’s off to a basement screening room to review a secret film that purports to show evidence of live American soldiers left in Vietnam.

Dornan, who invented the original POW-MIA bracelets years ago as a talk show host in Los Angeles, can recite name, rank, circumstances of disappearance and every reported sighting of Americans thought potentially to be still alive in Southeast Asia. He traveled to Hanoi in February with a congressional delegation to press the Vietnamese government for a resolution of the problem.

“This is the smoking gun,” Dornan said as he raced down the hallway, into the elevator and up another corridor. “They’ve got film of Americans alive in Vietnam!”

“But you know,” he said, slowing for a moment, “smoking guns are always too good to be true. You always wait for that moment when the prosecutor stands up and says, ‘the state drops its case!’ or, conversely, the defense attorney says, ‘your honor, I quit, this guy did it, he’s a bum.’ It never happens that way.”

His voice trailed off. “But you know, my heart is almost pounding. Because I want it to be true. I so much want it to be true.”

“He is the most interesting political character I’ve ever met,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands).

“The California delegation, we used to meet almost weekly, and those sessions we’d usually have what was called the Dornan hour, which we reserved until the end of the meeting because otherwise the rest of the meeting wouldn’t take place,” he said.

“You ask Bob, what’s going on? You know, what’s your perspective this week? And he takes off, and you know, his parenthetical problems are going to be 45 minutes long. . . . The guy has a memory for facts and dates and times and places like very few people I’ve ever seen in my life . . . and in that connection, he pushes the genius level, without doubt.”

Barney’s Accusations

More often than not, the majority party in the House of Representatives doesn’t see it quite the same way.

Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, who angrily accused Dornan of being anti-Semitic when they appeared on a talk show together (Dornan referred to him as a New York liberal Democrat), recently told the Associated Press:

“I think there is a belligerence and an immoderation that doesn’t serve him well and doesn’t serve the process well.” Of the House’s 435 members, Frank added, Dornan “does not possess one of the 430 most tightly wrapped intellects.”

San Diego Democrat Jim Bates once refused to get on a plane for a long-planned trip to Israel when he learned that Dornan was going along.

”. . . I was particularly not in the mood to spend nine days with Bob Dornan in Israel,” Bates said. “Could you imagine being in a bus, hour after hour, driving through the desert sands and listening to Bob Dornan? I just didn’t think I could take it.”

Not that Dornan has gone out of his way to solicit the affections of the Democratic membership, whom he collectively accused recently of opposing defense appropriations “with your mouths dripping spleen and bile.”

It was by no means his only flamboyant House speech. There was the time he graphically described the Manson killers performing a Caesarean section on Sharon Tate, pointing out, in yet another testimonial against abortion, that “drugged out and dumb as these little psycho killers were, they knew that was a separate life in Sharon Tate’s womb.”

Sometimes, out there on the House floor, in the eye of a television camera beamed by cable to homes all over the nation, he just gets caught up in it all, Dornan explained.

“There are six, maybe 10 people who, when they’re talking, have everybody stopped with what they’re doing; the noise quiets down, without all that little polite tap-tap-tap gaveling, and the gallery comes forth. They say I’m one of them,” he added.

What that means for Dornan is a kind of power rarely seen in Congress.

“I think he communicates with the guy at the other end of the TV set who’s watching C-Span, when he convinces people that he believes in what he believes in,” said Brian O’Leary Bennett, Dornan’s chief of staff. “Remember, very few minds are changed on the floor of the House, but every time he’s on C-Span, we always get calls into the office, and hopefully, they’re also calling their congressman.”

“Every year,” Dornan reflected, “I think I’ll get less confrontational in the well. And then something will trigger me. I know that there are members that just can’t stand the sight of me . . . and then I know people who will say, Dornan’s mellowing. The aging process is setting in.”

All thoughts of mellowing are gone as Dornan is called to appear on Cable News Network’s “Crossfire” with former Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and United Nations Security Council Chairman Claude de Kemoularia, ambassador from France--the country that had, during that week, refused to allow U.S. planes to fly overhead on their way to Libya.

The opening credits are barely out of the way and Dornan is on the attack, eyes narrowed, teeth clenched.

“Mr. Eagleburger, let me go to you first: Did you really think that the French would come to our aid? Do they really owe us anything after two centuries of friendship, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Normandy, St. Lo, the liberation of Paris . . . did you really think, Larry, they would be at our side?”

Eagleburger allowed as how the French response really hadn’t surprised anyone.

“Well, wait just a second. Let me say, I was surprised and hurt,” Dornan countered. “My father’s blood was drained into French soil. He has three Purple Hearts from France. And for six years as an Air Force fighter pilot, I would have died for France if I had been called to defend it. . . . I feel personally insulted. Do you want to answer that one, Mr. Ambassador? I really think you did us dirty.”

“It’s not necessary for you to be so aggressive,” De Kemoularia suggested. “Mr. Representative of the Orange County of California, you are speaking to somebody whose wife’s mother was deported and killed in a concentration camp because she was hiding American pilots in her home.”

Dornan looked as if the ambassador had just kicked him in the stomach. “I did not know that,” he said, stung.

“You should not talk that way,” De Kemoularia declared.

“That’s why I said I would die for your country,” Dornan pointed out. But it is too late. The Frenchman has obviously hit where it hurts.

Buena Park City Manager Kevin O’Rourke is in the office with the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, which has proposed to open a halfway house for federal prisoners near Knott’s Berry Farm.

Dornan had already telephoned the prisons director the day before, pointing out the potential negative impact the facility would have on tourism. The director had come to announce that the bureau now plans to put the halfway house somewhere else.

It is the kind of thing a congressman might be expected to do for his district. It is typical of the level of constituent service that Jerry Patterson was known for--a record Dornan determined to beat when he stepped in, even as a conservative touting the Administration line on budget cutbacks.

When funding for new studies of potential flooding on the Santa Ana River was not included in a water projects appropriations bill passed out of the House last July, Dornan surprised Democrats and Republicans alike by voting for it anyway.

“I want to show my colleagues that even though important and vital interests in my own district were taken out . . . I support the projects that this committee in its wisdom deemed important. In diminishing dollars, someone is going to lose out, someone is going to have their area protected.”

Many local officials were incensed. But nearly a year later, when Dornan testified on behalf of the Santa Ana River project before an appropriations subcommittee in April, his vote had not been forgotten. Committee members said they were grateful for Dornan’s support last year, and with the entire Orange County delegation behind it, the project appeared certain to win at least partial funding.

Dornan again surprised some conservatives last year when he supported a measure to remove federal highway trust funds from the regular budget. The proposal had been opposed by the Administration because it would allow the funds to be spent on road projects, rather than remaining in the bank as a credit against the deficit.

Dornan voted for the measure at the behest of Orange County officials, badly in need of federal funding for the Santa Ana Freeway, and Long Beach Democrat Glenn M. Anderson, chairman of the surface transportation subcommittee.

Later--and not coincidentally--Dornan was successful in winning approval from the subcommittee for $900,000 in aid to the City of Anaheim to help ease traffic congestion near Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium.

City officials said Dornan set up meetings with high-level officials in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services to seek aid for the Buena Clinton slum in Garden Grove and redevelopment projects in Santa Ana.

“What Bob has done has been really using the leverage he’s got with the Administration awfully well,” said William H. Morgan, a lobbyist for the cities of Garden Grove and La Habra. “I really have to say that on the specific, project-related issues where we’ve asked for help, primarily on federal funding programs of one type or another, he has been very responsive and very helpful.”

Yet the Democratic majority of the House--the entity that ultimately controls policy--tends not to take Dornan very seriously, particularly on issues he holds most dear, like the bomber that earned him the nickname “B-1 Bob” as it went down to early defeat in the House.

“When Anderson had to go to bat with other senior committee members on the Anaheim project, eyebrows were raised,” confided one Public Works Committee staffer. “You know, it was, ‘Why do we want to do something for Dornan?’ ”

The TV is on at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters, just down the street from the Capitol, where the machinery is shifting into high gear for the election season ahead. Center screen is Bob Dornan, standing at the podium of the House of Representatives, holding up a picture of Kadafi standing side-by-side with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, their fists raised in salute.

He had been carrying the picture under his arm all week, waiting for this moment.

“Here’s Kadafi. Let me tell you what his combat ribbons are for,” Dornan declared. “This one here’s for little Natasha Simpson, dying in her father’s arms at the airport in Rome. This ribbon here is for Kenneth Ford--that’s a brand new one--for killing our Army sergeant at that disco in Berlin.

“Here’s a ribbon for little Dimitra Klug, who was blown out of the airplane with three other Americans, one of them pregnant. . . . On and on go his five rows, six across, of ribbons engaging in death and mayhem and destruction across this country. . . . “

Eventually, Dornan sat down and the bustle resumed at Democratic campaign headquarters. But when there was a sudden unexpected silence from the direction of the television set, heads turned, and there was Dornan--up on the podium again with the picture.

This time, he was just standing there, brows knit, pointing silently at each of the ribbons on Kadafi’s chest.

“See what I mean? The man is a joke,” said one committee staffer, who is preparing some of the ammunition either Democratic Assemblyman Richard Robinson or Superior Court Judge David O. Carter expect to use in the upcoming campaign against Dornan. The two officials are running against each other in the June 3 Democratic primary for the right to face Dornan in November.

Yet others believe that Dornan’s effectiveness lies precisely in his ability to translate global tragedy into the keenly individual: the names, dates and circumstances of the dead. He remembers the look on the father’s face when he learns of his soldier son’s death.

For Dornan, even the upcoming reelection campaign is a siege of large proportion, a battle to be fought for territory in central Orange County.

And he conceded that he faces tough adversaries in either Robinson, a former Marine and recipient of a bronze medal, or Carter, who was wounded in the Vietnam War.

“Carter was shot on April 16, 1968,” Dornan said. “I remember, it was my wife Sallie’s birthday; we were on the ‘Tempo’ show, and they brought out a big cake for Sallie and Bob Dornan on the ‘Tempo’ show. On that day, on the other side of the world, nine hours away, he is dying in a hospital--Judge Carter.

“I like Vietnam vets,” he added. “A lot. I like him and Dick for going over there, both Marines.”

Still, Dornan couldn’t resist temptation when it struck a few weeks ago in the lobby of the Sheraton-Grand Hotel in Washington. Spotting Robinson campaigning dangerously close to his home turf, Dornan paused only a moment.

Suddenly, Robinson was caught from behind in a bear hug from which there didn’t seem to be any escape. A minute later, Dornan had grabbed Robinson’s name tag and scrawled over it a friendly “Hi Dick. From Bob.”

“The next day on the floor,” Dornan recalled, happily recounting the tale, “Howard Berman walks up to me and he says, ‘Bob, you can’t believe what Robinson says, he says, “That Dornan is unflappable!” And I said, ‘You better believe it!’ ”

ROBERT K. DORNAN Age: 53 Family: Married to wife, Sallie, for 31 years; 5 children; 5 grandchildren. Time in Congress: 1976-82 (representing district in Los Angeles County); 1984-86 (representing 38th District). Orange County office: 12387 Lewis St., Suite 203, Garden Grove, Calif. 92640 (714) 971-9292 38TH DISTRICT AT A GLANCE Demographic Profile

Population 525,919 Republicans 40.6% Democrats 49.1% Declined to state and minor parties 10.3 Household income (mean) $22,021 Families with Income Above $50,000 / year 6,805 Population below poverty level 56,133 Asians/Pacific islanders 7% Spanish origin 28% Blacks 3% Whites 75% Others 1% Foreign born 112,535 Median age 27 Primary industry Durable Manufacturing Primary occupation Clerical Craft/Repair Assemblers Government employment 28,896 Federal contracts $0.9 (in billions, 1984) Households receiving: Social Security 29,473 Public Assistance 15,079 Population under 24 who have completed 4 or more years of college 32,933 Single-parent households 13,805 Six or more in household 16,104 live in rented housing 209,321 Live in owner- occupied housing 310,110

(Population totals more then 100% because official U.S. Census statistics include some persons in more than one category.)