The nation’s first elected black governor has them guessing: Will he be a big-spending Liberal or a bridge-building ‘good old boy’? : The New Virginian

Making history is a roll of the dice and Virginia’s new governor, Lawrence Douglas Wilder, knows it. This elemental lesson rises like vapor from the swampy, treacherous waters of the Old Dominion’s politics, where the bones of losers are picked clean and dumped in the murky depths of oblivion.

Of course, obscurity is the least of Democrat Wilder’s worries at the moment. As the nation’s first elected black governor--chosen in a state that once was the heart and brain of the Confederacy--he has the bright aura of an electoral magician. By virtue of this uniqueness, Wilder, whose cachet includes being the grandson of slaves, has achieved overnight national prominence while many of his rivals and peers continue to splash fitfully in the gloom of media anonymity.

This day, for instance, Wilder--dressed in an immaculate blue pinstripe suit and recently minus his mustache--seems immensely telegenic, more than handsome enough to get a running start in public opinion polls. Moreover, he looks much younger than his 59 years and when he smiles or laughs--as he does often--another decade fades away, giving him the priceless political gift of youthfulness.

But--and there’s always a but , isn’t there?--from the perspective of the state capital, Wilder claims that his seemingly unbounded future is about as clear as the James River that roils muddily through this city of 220,000.

Yes, he says, slouching back in his chair, relaxed and cheerful in the small office of the Capitol that Thomas Jefferson built, people are pressing him to start a “Wilder national movement.” The subject came up in a meeting this very morning, he says, chuckling. Even so, the friend and political ally who broached the topic agreed that it’s a “trivial” matter, he says.

He has only been in office since Jan. 13, Wilder notes, and his four-year term stretches before him like unmapped territory.

Who can tell whether he’ll be on a mountain or a molehill by 1994?

“It’s just a question of where you are, what have you done, where is your impetus, what’s the stride, what’s the step, what is your motivation, what is available, and what’s possible,” he explains in the cadences of a veteran stump speaker. “I’ve always believed in the art of the possible. I believe there’s a difference between brave-heartedness and foolishness and I believe in whatever I’m going to do, if I don’t see success somewhere through the tunnel of that vision, I don’t even bother with it.”

These cautious words come from a politician who learned in 20 years of climbing to the top that personal metamorphosis and public perception are key to political survival--especially in Virginia, where the faintest whisper of radicalism or unorthodoxy can sound like a Guns N’ Roses concert. (A magazine writer observed during last year’s campaign that Virginia’s most liberal Democrats would be moderate Republicans anyplace else.)

Once seen as a black activist and outsider, Wilder, a flamboyant former criminal defense lawyer, state senator and lieutenant governor, transformed himself into, as one local attorney put it, “a good old boy” who built bridges to white colleagues instead of burning them. Throughout the campaign last fall, Wilder appealed to “the new Virginia mainstream . . . that group which looks forward rather than behind, that builds rather than destroys and brings people together, rather than to divide them.”

Much of his strategy, he says, was to combat the assumption that “any Democrat would be a big spender. And certainly, if you are a minority, as in my case, that I’d be more than just a big spender and that I’d be turning the keys of the jails over to the prisoners and things like that.”

Wilder’s most liberal position during the campaign was his pro-choice stand on abortion, an issue believed crucial in the close race. On the other hand, Wilder years ago reversed his opposition to the death penalty to project a tough-on-crime image.

Former Richmond Mayor Henry L. Marsh III, who roomed with Wilder at Howard University law school, believes that Wilder’s successful balancing act in a conservative state with a more than 80% white electorate will bring both symbolic and substantial rewards to blacks.

“Being governor of Virginia is like being emperor of the world,” says Marsh, who continues to serve on the City Council. “Doug’s service as governor is a way of overcoming a lot of historical resistance to blackness. If Doug does an outstanding job for all people, it breaks down a lot of barriers.”

Marsh concedes, however, “There are apprehensions among some blacks that we may not get much out of this except the symbolism.”

Perhaps Wilder’s most vociferous and longtime critic in the local black community is Sa’ad El-Amin, a radical lawyer. El-Amin--who concedes he is practically a minority of one in criticizing the governor--charges that Wilder, with his links to conservative Democrats such as Virginia’s U.S. Sen. Charles Robb, will be used to “sell” a rightward-shifting party to blacks on a national level. “The good old boys will have their cake and eat it too,” he says.

In general, though, the prevailing moods in the state range between euphoria and pleased surprise, Marsh says. “Some people feel sort of amazed that it’s working out and maybe this guy isn’t too bad after all.”

Everyone agrees that Wilder has never been afraid of taking a stand or applying pressure. Two oft-cited examples are his campaign to change the state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” because of the lyric “this ol’ darkie’s heart,” and his ultimately successful battle to make the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a state holiday. To win the holiday fight, Wilder agreed to a compromise that shared the King holiday with Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Nonetheless, insiders paint Wilder as an adroit behind-the-scenes worker with a stubborn streak that can drive opponents to distraction.

But now that he has won the governor’s chair--and by the narrow margin of fewer than 7,000 votes at that--Wilder believes that he must be doubly careful not to let the elation of victory lead him into the temptations of foolish pride.

“If I fail or say things that people could say, ‘Well, I told you so,’ it would set a lot of things back and that would be more detrimental to me in terms of what I had in mind than anything I know,” he says.

This attitude finds favor in an office not far from Wilder’s, that of A.L. Philpott, 33 years a member of the House of Delegates and Speaker of the House for 12. A white-haired, pipe-smoking former segregationist who drew the line at closing the state’s public schools during “massive resistance” to integration in the 1950s, Philpott gives Wilder grudging but sincere credit for being a smart politician.

The new governor is “a highly intelligent person who is unlikely to make any foolish mistakes,” Philpott says. In some quarters, Wilder was “expected to fall flat on his face” almost as soon as he was sworn in, Philpott continues, noting that Wilder has “disappointed” these expectations.

Philpott readily acknowledges that “Doug and I haven’t always been the best of friends.”

This turns out to be something of an understatement. Wilder and Philpott were once political enemies, so much so that Wilder threatened to work for Philpott’s defeat.

But it was Philpott, who has a record of getting himself in hot water for racial gaffes, who threw a 1985 breakfast to introduce Wilder, then running for lieutenant governor, to politicos on his home turf.

Five years later, Philpott is optimistic about what Wilder will do for the state. “I think it’s going to have a very positive effect on the political and social life of Virginia,” he says of Wilder’s governorship. He finally puts a match to the pipe he has been toying with. “Perhaps we can get rid of some of that image that we’re rednecks stuck in the 1820s.”

And yet Philpott apparently still can’t quite believe that Wilder outmatched everyone to become governor, an office more coveted and revered in Virginia than the Presidency of the United States.

He expected Marshall Coleman, Wilder’s Republican opponent, to win the election, he says, noting that many Democrats told him they were sitting out the election because they would not vote for a black man.

Consequently, Philpott says he did not give credence to widely publicized polls that showed Wilder winning by several percentage points, when, in fact, he squeaked into office. The polls were the subject of a post-election controversy over whether and why voters lie in opinion surveys about race.

“I didn’t believe it when we nominated him for lieutenant governor,” Philpott says. “I didn’t even believe it when we nominated him for governor.”

Philpott’s comment accents the tension between change and tradition--both good and bad--in this state of 6 million. The capital city itself seems to symbolize that tension.

While Virginians talk proudly of the state’s rapid growth and its attendant rush into modern times, to a Los Angeles resident, Richmond seems a city steeped in the past, a town of red brick buildings where the 19th and 18th centuries are enshrined and made palpable.

It’s almost impossible to walk down the street without rubbing against a plaque commemorating a historic house or skirting around a statue honoring a native son for greatness in battle or statesmanship.

In fact, this is a city of statues. One major street, Monument Avenue, is devoted to the display of sculpted likenesses of major Confederates. The only one not on a horse is Jefferson Davis, the luckless president of the secessionist states. Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J. E. B. Stuart tower over the politician in bronze meldings of men and horse flesh.

Not far away, there’s another telling measure of the veneration of the past. One of the city’s most expensive restaurants proudly occupies a former stable that supposedly sheltered Lee’s faithful mount, Traveller.

City Councilman Marsh says that the celebrations of Confederate heroes are generally accepted by local blacks, noting that the council recently appropriated money to refurbish the statues on Monument Avenue. Marsh is quick to point out, too, that Richmond contains its share of landmarks that are important to black people.

“There’s so much history in the air,” he says, gesturing outside his law offices to the surrounding neighborhood.

Though much less visible, these shards of black history were part of the consciousness he and Wilder shared as they grew up in a totally segregated city, Marsh says.

Chief among them is Richmond’s Jackson Ward area, a neighborhood that was a center of black “intellectual thought and innovation from Reconstruction to the 1920s,” he explains. The area contains the “oldest black insurance company in the country and the oldest black bank in the country,” he adds.

Jackson Ward also has at least one statue, a tribute to Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the famed tap dancer who was born in the neighborhood in 1878.

But Richmond’s chief shrine is the state Capitol itself, a 1785 building designed by Jefferson along the lines of a classical temple. Here, under the rotunda, stands Houdon’s famous statue of George Washington, object of a thousand school group tours. Here, too, is the home of the Virginia General Assembly, “the oldest legislative body in the Western hemisphere,” a local guidebook informs.

And it is with the living politicians of the Legislature that Wilder will have to work his magic if he is to move beyond the boundaries of the state.

In town for a 60-day session, legislators can usually be identified by the lack of attention they pay to the Capitol building’s artistic tributes to politicians of yore. Preoccupied by the business of the present, Virginia’s representatives hurry by the paintings and sculptures as if to say, “Those guys will never have to run for reelection again.”

The governor and Speaker Philpott claim that the session has gone well--despite the budget crunch that led Wilder to call for establishing a $200-million reserve against revenue shortfalls. Indeed, Wilder drew bipartisan praise last month for his fiscally tough State of the Commonwealth Address that promised no tax increases. One legislator told the Richmond News Leader, “The people in this state that were worried about a liberal governor have had their fears allayed.” (The 1990-92 $26-billion state budget is largely the work of Wilder’s predecessor. Virginia’s governors get only one crack at a budget they fully can call their own, the spending plan they concoct for their final two years in office.)

But Wilder and Philpott are fuming over a Feb. 1 News Leader article, based largely on anonymous sources, that characterized Wilder as getting a grade of “D . . . for disinvolvement” with the Legislature.

Wilder says he told one legislator quoted in the story, “If everything I’m going to say to you is going to be in the press, then let me write it out and give it to you and put it in the press.” He adds that in a speech to the local press he told reporters, “I always know exactly who that anonymous source is and I know exactly why they’re anonymous.”

Last week, Wilder--and his calls for fiscal austerity--again took jabs from the press with reports that his new Lincoln limousine costs well above the price of his predecessor’s official transportation, a Cadillac--$37,923 vs. $19,949. Wilder’s office blamed the difference on the rise in car prices and a drop in trade values. But, traditionally, Virginia’s governors get new cars.

The governor’s sensitivity to some publicity may stem from earlier media exposure of his warts. Since entering public life in 1969, Wilder has weathered a number of personal controversies. These include his apparently stormy 1978 divorce, late payment of property taxes, his former ownership of a run-down vacant house that neighbors contended was a public nuisance and a reprimand from the Virginia Supreme Court for procrastinating in a personal injury suit.

None of these matters, including a $52,000 property settlement won by his ex-wife, ever seriously damaged Wilder.

Marsh says his friend seems to share a “Teflon” political trait with another politician. “I think he possesses a Reagan-like quality of being able to overcome these kinds of obstacles.”

Moreover, Wilder demonstrated a capacity for candor in revealing interviews with biographer Donald P. Baker, chief of the Washington Post’s Richmond bureau. Among other things, in numerous long sessions with Baker, Korean war veteran Wilder recounted that one of 20 North Korean prisoners he had helped capture was killed by a fellow American soldier as the two escorted their charges into captivity. Wilder was awarded a bronze star in the action at Pork Chop Hill, which included throwing grenades into bunkers to drive the enemy out.

Baker says he still doesn’t know if the governor has read all of “Wilder: Hold Fast to Dreams,” published last fall. But Baker says Wilder had gotten an early copy to peruse “the bad chapters.”

The biography also paints a charming picture of Wilder growing up in modest but adequate circumstances in Richmond’s Church Hill neighborhood. Wilder is the next to youngest of eight children, and as a youngster, his favorite chore was chopping heads off chickens bound for the family table. Since then, he has come a long way financially. He is thought to be a millionaire, thanks to his legal skill and a sharp eye for real estate investments.

Wilder himself maintains that that all the skeletons in his closet have been exterminated. “I told the press the other day . . . that the only reason that anything hasn’t been printed about me is that people just didn’t know it,” he says.

Despite the embarrassments of the past and the current troubles of black politicians Marion Barry and Tom Bradley, Wilder says he willingly accepts the goldfish-bowl aspect of public life.

“It is in a bowl and I don’t think you should complain about it because you can get out of that bowl any time you want. . . . If you’re going to lead, you do what the tautology demands--you set forth, you move out,” he says. “You can’t afford to fall down to the extent that you say, ‘Well, why don’t you treat me like everybody else?’ I don’t think it’s a double standard and I don’t think its an invidious standard.”

On a less lofty level, Wilder says that his unmarried state makes him a target for social joshing. “I get chided about that every evening at some reception,” he says. “Someone will say, ‘Well who’s going to be the First Lady or hostess at the mansion?’ ” The social fate of Virginia is not in the balance, he adds, because “we have a mansion staff.”

His marital state could change, too, he suggests. “I’m not a confirmed bachelor. I just happen to be one,” he says.

Looking back from the vantage point of the governor’s office, Wilder takes pride in his life, all of it spent in Richmond except for stints of higher education and military service.

“You see some people who say, ‘I know him, he used to shine my shoes,’ ” he says, laughing again. “You see the next guy and he says, ‘Yeah, we were raised together and we’re very pleased.’ I think it means more to me to show what could happen in Richmond by being here. . . . I always believed that many of the greatest gains people would achieve would be right in their own back yard.”

Wilder’s son, Lawrence Douglas Wilder Jr., a lawyer in his father’s firm, says that as a parent the governor was “definitely stern but not unfair.” For himself and his two sisters, Wilder always insisted that schoolwork and chores took precedence over play. “He doesn’t tolerate fools lightly,” Wilder Jr. says.

Assessing his father, the son says: “He is his own man, period. It’s a constant about him. He is himself. He is very direct. He will say what’s on his mind, I don’t care who it is. . . . What you see is what you get.”

Back in the governor’s office, Wilder admits that his career has left him vulnerable in one area--guiding his son’s future. His remarks may also say something about the personal price of political life.

“I think he (Lawrence Jr.) has this latent desire to get involved in politics,” Wilder says. “I don’t know whether he should or not. I mean, if I were to run it for him, I think I would want him to just do well in terms of his law practice and live a more comfortable life.”

Wilder chuckles briefly. “I would never tell him that because I think he’s already got his mind set on something like that. How could I tell him: Don’t do it?”