‘Rising Star’ : White House Not on Nunn’s Agenda but . . .

Thirty years ago, freshmen at Georgia Tech endured an annual rite called the “cake race,” a five-mile run through the steamy Atlanta countryside with no apparent aim except to see who would last long enough to claim a cake at the end.

The 1956 freshman class included the state’s high school cross-country champion. But, as the survivors sweated toward the tape, the high school wonder is said to have glanced back to find a skinny 19-year-old, Samuel Augustus Nunn Jr., on his heels and gaining.

“Sam had no credentials for the race. He was kinda slue-footed; he sorta clopped along when he ran,” his cousin, George Nunn, says. “But, with a mile to go, he had willed himself into second place. And, at the end, he caught and passed him, and when he crossed the finish line he collapsed, almost unconscious.”

Even to those who have not heard the oft-repeated story, its ending is no surprise. The widely known determination of Sam Nunn, which enabled him to stretch an upset Senate victory in 1972 into his third term, has also led to his ranking as a “rising star” in the Democratic Party. And as he assumes this title, however perilous it may be, party strategists are already adding his name to the list of possible candidates for the White House in 1988.

Friends, family, colleagues and advisers call Nunn dogged and substantial, not flashy or superficial. They praise his readiness to pass up the political spotlight for the trench work that gets good laws made. They say his nose-in-book approach to the Senate, where he is ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, has made him Congress’ top military expert and more influential on many Pentagon issues than even the secretary of defense.

They say, and indeed he says, that only wild horses could drag him from that power base to the 1988 national elections, for which he already is being bandied about as a vice presidential candidate or even a distant prospect to succeed President Reagan himself.

Not on ‘My Agenda’

“Well, I’ve never had that ambition and I don’t now,” he says of the White House. “No one can say, I guess, once you get in a job like this and you’re involved in the political process constantly, that you’d just absolutely say no. . . . But I don’t have that on my agenda.”

Still, the prospects are obviously on his mind. Nunn has been known to muse about his political future as he walks the dirt road beside soybean fields and stately groves of pecan trees on the 2,491-acre showplace farm just outside Perry that he owns with his sister.

There are those who believe that his driven character will not allow him to stop at senator. “I think he’s interested,” says Claiborne Darden, the respected Atlanta pollster who has worked for Nunn campaigns.

The notion cannot be lightly dismissed. As senator, Nunn appears to conspicuously lack not just enemies, but even critics.

Nevertheless, friends and advisers alike say Nunn still must fill some gaps in his political career if he is to be as formidable a national candidate as he is in Georgia.

‘Quiet and Hard-Working’

“He’s Sam Nunn, the national military expert, the guy everybody expects to run Armed Services for the next 20 years. He got there by being quiet and working hard--and I think that’s what’ll disqualify him for national office,” says one source, who requested anonymity. Moreover, this expert says, “His positions are much too conservative for the Democratic Party.”

According to the political publication Congressional Quarterly, Nunn in 1985 voted with President Reagan on contested issues more than any other Democrat.

In 1984, the National Journal states, he voted more conservatively than 65% of senators on economic issues, 59% on social issues and 55% on foreign-policy issues. He supported school prayer, opposed abortion, opposed a nuclear freeze and supported aid to the Nicaraguan contra forces.

Nunn, addressing his voting record, contends that the Democratic Party is moving in his direction. As for the suggestion that his scope is too narrow, he believes that is exaggerated. Although “it’s true that I haven’t specialized in those other areas as much as defense,” Nunn noted, he is one of the most active senators in law enforcement issues, was an early supporter of tax overhaul and wrote important language in the 1985 farm legislation.

Indeed, his devotion to his job and his willingness to master complex topics have earned him wide respect among experts and colleagues. “He approaches all issues in depth and on his own,” political analyst Michael Barone, normally a dispassionate skeptic, writes of Nunn in the current edition of the respected Almanac of American Politics. “He is thoughtful, candid and never given to cheap shots; he respects authority but questions all assumptions.”

Nowhere is that more apparent than on military issues, where the accreted weight of Nunn’s knowledge and longevity have made his largely symbolic post on the Armed Services Committee into a fearsome weapon in its own right.

When the Senate was pondering the use of military aircraft against narcotics smugglers last month, for example, Nunn launched into a bitter statistical attack on the idea. Sealing the border to smugglers, he said, would require 80 new military bases, 800 helicopters, 7,400 military police and three times the worldwide number of AWACS radar-equipped aircraft.

“I can go on,” Nunn said. “It gets worse.” He didn’t have to. Other lawmakers, some even waving white handkerchiefs on the Senate floor, tabled the proposal by a 3-1 margin.

Clearly, Nunn is “the most knowledgeable congressional official about the realities of American military strategy and its geopolitical position in the world. He stands by himself,” says Robert Comer, a former undersecretary of defense now with the Rand Corp. in Washington.

Pushed Pentagon Reform

He and others give Nunn much credit for helping push through Congress recently the first overhaul of the U.S. military command since 1947, a massive reform measure that merges squabbling Pentagon units and gives new power to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And Nunn was widely praised a few years ago for pushing an amendment--unsuccessfully--that would have dramatically cut the U.S. military commitment in Europe without an increase in defense spending by America’s NATO allies. The rider stood little chance of passing, but it came as a dash of cold water to NATO countries, some of which have since begun shouldering more of the cost of their own defense.

On most defense issues, Nunn is more like a Goldwater than a Kennedy--a hawkish conservative, willing to spend on weaponry and manpower when the need can be shown.

But Nunn has hardly been a knee-jerk supporter of defense spending--he fought fiercely against construction of the B-1 bomber in 1981, for example--and some of his positions have been distinctly impolitic. He provided crucial opposition in 1978 to approval of President Jimmy Carter’s Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union.

His overall stress on military matters has only helped Nunn in Georgia, a state where the Pentagon is the biggest public spender and Lockheed Corp., the defense contractor, is among the largest private employers. The state has often had a political power on one or both of Congress’ military committees and, by happy coincidence, is peppered with a dozen defense bases, serving everything from submarines in Savannah to planes near Perry.

Could Become Chairman

The military-industrial machine, perhaps mindful that a net four-seat shift in the Senate next month would make Nunn chairman of the Armed Services Committee, somehow has found empty space right in his hometown for more men and buildings.

And near town, Warner Robins Air Force Base, a 500-man speck of an outpost after World War II, has swelled to about 50,000, or four times the civilian population of Perry itself. Northrop Corp., a major defense contractor, decided last month that Perry is the ideal site for a 1,200-employee factory that will manufacture something secret.

No one would imply that Nunn is responsible for all of this; Rep. Richard Ray (D-Ga.), a former Nunn aide who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, is from Perry too. But it is not surprising that none of it has hurt Nunn’s standing among Georgians.

Darden says Nunn is easily the most popular politician in the state’s history, and maybe even in the entire South’s. “His approval rating is higher by a significant shot than anybody we’ve ever done in Georgia, or the whole South, for that matter. A good politician needs 60%, or he’s in trouble. Seventy percent is awfully strong, and anything above that is ridiculous.

“Sam’s ridiculous.”

Nunn has come further than anyone expected, even though much was expected of him.

Father Was a Lawyer

He was born into a family of relative privilege in a town that, although small, had its own claim to political and business aristocracy. Perry was the crossroads on the main roads south and west, a manicured, genteel outpost of commerce and wealth. Sam Sr. was a lawyer, a one-time mayor of Perry, a prominent farmer, a top officer in the local savings and loan and a political contact for national figures ranging from former Rep. Carl Vinson, young Sam’s great-uncle, to former Sen. Herman E. Talmadge, both Georgia Democrats.

He produced a son with a passion for overachievement: a superior Eagle Scout at an early age, a star forward on the Perry High School state championship basketball team of 1956, a high school class officer.

The somewhat studious-looking Nunn also shared his father’s reserved personality, something that friends say hindered his early political career but that he has largely shed in the Senate. In person, Nunn is neither distant nor unpolished; he is an able speaker, an affable conversationalist, so well coiffed and attired that only a slight drawl suggests that he might ever have farmed soybeans.

But Darden sees a shortcoming that could hamper a bid by Nunn for national office. “At this time, he lacks the charisma necessary to be President,” he says. “He just doesn’t have that spark necessary to motivate people in the rest of the country yet.”

Many in Perry and elsewhere dispute that, saying a low-key, plain-spoken politician will be just what the country wants in 1988 after eight years of Hollywood glitter. They say those who have underestimated Sam Nunn, like those who sold Ronald Reagan short, have consistently been mistaken.

“Being the most popular politician in Georgia and winning a cake race isn’t the same as shooting for national office,” allows George Nunn, a Houston County Superior Court judge in Perry, where he and his cousin were born. However, he stresses: “I’ve always said that, with everything Sam got into, he never stopped till he got to the top.”