Not Outgunned Yet : A Talk With the Senator who Went Against the Grain

Campaigning for reelection two years ago, U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini fired an M-16 assault rifle for the first time. He liked it.

And if his public duties didn’t saddle him with mind-numbing three-day trips to Estonia and other time-crunchers, DeConcini says he would once more go hunting deer and javelina, a type of wild pig.

In other words, the 53-year-old Democrat from Tucson seems to fit right in to the Arizona landscape, just the way Wyatt Earp once did.

But for some of his constituents and former supporters, DeConcini has strayed “off the reservation,” as one opponent put it. For them, he is a renegade, a betrayer of traditions and rights that stretch even further back than the gun-slinging days of the Wild West. By proposing a ban on 14 military-style semiautomatic firearms--like the one used in last year’s Stockton school massacre--they believe DeConcini, a conservative in a conservative state, joined a dangerous cabal of liberals bent on restricting the right to bear arms.

In retaliation, NRA members picketed DeConcini’s Phoenix office. Others made “nasty” phone calls and “some threats,” the senator says. A few mounted a petition drive to recall DeConcini. It failed, falling more than 100,000 signatures short of the number needed to force a recall election.

That’s not the only flank the low-key politician must worry about. The former prosecutor and son of an Arizona state Supreme Court judge is one of the “Keating Five,” the group of senators under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee for allegedly interfering with federal regulators on behalf of the failed Lincoln Savings & Loan of Irvine. As a result, in one state poll DeConcini’s dissatisfaction rating rose from 29% to 41% in a three-month period. He has vehemently maintained that he did no wrong in the Keating affair, one of several ethical scandals that have swept through Congress recently.

Acknowledging that the Keating affair has been a serious political blow, DeConcini portrays the vote on his gun ban as an example of the Senate standing up to a special-interest group.

“There’s no stronger special interest than the NRA and here were guys who said no,” he declares. “They took money from them, they’d been lobbied and they said no.”

After a $190,000 media campaign late last year and other damage-control tactics, DeConcini, an independently wealthy lawyer with extensive real estate holdings, may be bouncing back. An April poll showed that his ratings had “stabilized and started to move up” with a majority of voters giving DeConcini an excellent to fair rating, says aide Michael Crusa.

His biggest advantage, however, may simply be time. DeConcini doesn’t have to run for reelection until 1994 and he says he won’t decide whether to make the race for at least another year.

But Earl de Berge, research director of the Phoenix polling organization that took both the January and April surveys, notes that political circles in the state already are buzzing with talk of possible challengers to DeConcini in 1994. These rumblings are likely to remain muffled for a while. “I think everyone is waiting to see what the ethics committee does,” he explains.

De Berge also notes that the state’s other senator, Republican John McCain, has also been enmeshed in the savings and loan scandal, perhaps making both politicians vulnerable.

Even with the latest improvement, DeConcini’s numbers are “not a pretty picture” because of his still-high negative rating of 24%, de Berge says. Yet in a “routine” election, DeConcini probably would still be electable, despite the Keating affair, de Berge adds.

DeConcini’s assault-rifle ban, first proposed last year, passed the Senate late last month, albeit by one vote, 50-49.

Although the future of DeConcini’s measure--part of a larger anti-crime bill that has been held up by parliamentary maneuvering--is uncertain, the victory remains a moment to savor.

“I’ve been there for almost 14 years and (the NRA has) never been rolled once on the floor (of the Senate),” he says. “That’s the first time they’ve ever been beaten on the floor.”

But for the National Rifle Assn., the once unbeatable pro-gun lobby, it was a sort of Custer’s Last Stand, perhaps the most stunning in a series of recent defeats on both state and federal levels, including an assault rifle ban in California. Moreover, the NRA had once named DeConcini its legislator of the month for his unswerving support of the gun lobby. It also had endorsed him in his election bids and given him campaign money.

Obviously, something happened. But what? Was it a total political transformation, as the headlines might suggest? Or was it a case of a politician who ultimately discovered he couldn’t have it both ways--and opted for the risky road anyway?

Reliving his unexpected victory the other day, DeConcini plumped firmly for the latter, portraying himself as a man who broke reluctantly with former supporters and with his own long-held principles to advocate a limited gun ban.

Before he introduced Senate Bill 747 he had been “with the NRA on every damn issue they’ve ever had,” he says.

The senator is slouched in a chair of his resort hotel room, speaking dispassionately about an issue that has added to his already ample political troubles. This morning DeConcini seems utterly unflappable. That may have something to do with the fact that he and his wife Susan are celebrating the birth of their first grandchild. Later in the day, the DeConcinis plan to see the baby for the first time. When the senator mentions the savings and loan scandal or his new enemies in the gun lobby, he often chuckles and shakes his head as if bemused by the tortuous paths of politics.

“I didn’t just wake up one morning and say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll do something to tick off the NRA,’ ” he says. “I thought about it very clearly and I knew what I was getting into.”

While polls have found that 64% of Arizonans support his gun ban, DeConcini suspects that the long-term political fallout may hurt him. “I know the gun lobbyists and I know the NRA members here,” he explains. “They are single-issue people. They’re active and they’re not going to forget about this, whereas the people who like what I did are going to forget about it.”

This sentiment is echoed by NRA lobbyist David Conover who notes that the 50,000 association members in Arizona “are active and relatively hard-line” in their opposition to nearly all gun controls. “It’s a tough state to be in favor of gun regulation,” Conover says. While the NRA may work with DeConcini in the future, the group is unlikely to ever support him for reelection or turn to him for help, the lobbyist says. “All those things are going to be different now.”

Many in the NRA “feel I’ve betrayed them,” DeConcini concedes, even though he maintains that his measure was a compromise, conceived partly as an alternative to harsher restrictive measures by more liberal senators.

In fact, DeConcini says he sought to avoid a full-blown split with the NRA, negotiating with the group’s lobbyists to find common ground on the issue.

Shortly after the Stockton school killings last year, in which drifter James Purdy--armed with an AK-47 assault rifle--killed five children and wounded 29 others and a teacher, DeConcini recalls that the NRA came to him for help in fighting back calls for a national assault rifle ban.

“I think they were talking to all the members they had who were pro-NRA or pro the Second Amendment position,” he says, referring to the Bill of Rights provision regarding firearms. DeConcini says he rebuffed the approach, stressing that his views were shaped by the extensive use of assault weapons by drug dealers.

In the mid-1970s DeConcini, then Pima County prosecutor, was tapped to lead a statewide law enforcement drive against drugs, the beginning of his public affiliation with anti-drug efforts. In the early ‘80s, he was under 24-hour guard for a time because of a death threat he received after he “fingered” a Bolivian government minister who was mixed up in the drug trade. In the Senate he has introduced a number of bills to turn up the heat on drug dealers and has chaired the Senate Drug Enforcement Caucus. DeConcini also was asked by President Bush to become the country’s first “drug czar.”

From this perspective, DeConcini says he gradually came to believe that assault weapons in the hands of drug dealers were too dangerous to remain on the market.

“Those were the things that weighed on my mind to say I think it’s time that we try something, notwithstanding my own philosophy toward non-restriction of guns and knowing who I was taking on,” he says.

In the best of all possible worlds, he believes that “any gun restriction should be at the state level or local level.”

Expanding on this credo, DeConcini suddenly begins to sound like a true son of the West. He does not want “a bureaucracy like the FBI or the Treasury Department, non-elected people, being able to determine whether you have the right to have a gun,” he says emphatically. “And that includes semiautomatic rifles because I think that this is an invitation for someone to see your name there and say, ‘Oh I know (him). I remember that son of a gun. Well, I’m going to go check his financial background.’ ”

Indeed, DeConcini says he revised his gun-ban measure because the NRA objected to a provision that called for registration of semiautomatic versions of military rifles with the Treasury Department. He also limited the ban to three years because the NRA argued against a flat ban, the senator says.

Eventually, however, his patience and desire to keep fences mended wore out like an old pair of boots. “I got to the point where I got a little frustrated with them because they didn’t want to negotiate at all,” he says. “All they wanted was to chop it away.”

His last meetings with gun owners were as acrid as powder smoke.

“I finally got upset and then some of them threatened me with a recall in one of the last meetings I had with them here,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I can’t deal with you if that’s how you’re going to deal . . . I’m not here to deal under intimidation . . . You’re beating up on me and threatening recall and I don’t appreciate it.”

DeConcini still is miffed by the NRA’s tactics early on in the battle against his gun ban, although the national group did not officially back the recall attempt. He was particularly incensed by the “blatant lie” that his bill would ban “your standard 12-gauge shotgun.” Eventually, the NRA backed off, agreeing to “stop sending mail into your state condemning you by name,” he says.

In this rancorous atmosphere, DeConcini was uncertain that his measure stood even the whiff of a chance when it came up for the May 23 vote. But he was convinced that he was closer than his opponents would ever guess.

He credits the last-minute support of Republican John Warner of Virginia and Democrat Lloyd Bentsen of Texas for the bill’s passage.

And his account of Warner’s and Bentsen’s votes throws light on politics between senators:

“I had no necessary clout with Warner. I know him well and know he likes me, but I couldn’t go to him and say, ‘You know, John, what can I do to help your campaign or something’ and say, ‘Gee, will you help me?’ . . . Bentsen is another one. . . . Here he is, chairman of the finance committee . . . I don’t have anything that he wants necessarily. We’re good friends. We socialize. . . . He knew I wanted the bill but I couldn’t say, ‘I really need this. After all, I’ve done this for you.’ There was nothing there. And he just walked in on his own, came up to me and said to me, ‘You know you’re damn right. You’ve got a lot of guts and I really admire what you’re doing and I’m going to vote with you.’ ”

Observers of DeConcini’s career are well aware that the gun bill is not the first time the senator has shown a capacity for surprising behavior. Three years ago, he cast a key vote against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, a stand that irked those who saw support of Bork as a litmus test of true allegiance to conservatism. In his first term, DeConcini backed the Panama Canal Treaty, anathema to many conservatives, after gaining concessions from the Carter Administration.

DeConcini says he has grown used to being depicted “as a cautious, careful guy that often stays on the fence until the last minute and then, when I do something like Bork or the Panama Canal or (the gun control bill), they say, ‘Oh my God, what’s he doing?’ ”

Such reactions, he says, stem from a misreading of his character. “My way of operating is I don’t make quick decisions,” he explains. “I try to get the information and, sure, I’m subject to political pressure, but I try to think it out and get a lot of information before I make a decision.”

Despite his current problems, DeConcini says he continues to like being in the Senate. But he quickly adds, “I’ve got an ego and satisfaction that I want out of it. But I don’t have to have it. I never had to have it financially. I do it because I was raised that way--do it out of a sense of wanting to participate. I’m as political probably as anybody but I don’t make my decisions based on what am I going to be elected next time?”

He also says passage of the gun bill should muffle critics who argue he has lost clout in the Senate because of the savings and loan controversy.

But later, when asked, DeConcini returns almost eagerly to the potential pleasures awaiting him outside politics.

“I’ve got a lot of options,” he says. “I’m a native son here. My family’s been in the real estate business a long time. I own real estate, I like developing real estate. I like practicing law. . . . So, I’ve got a lot to do. And, you know, I think about that. I think about it with great joy sometimes.

“I’d like to be in La Jolla now. I have a home in La Jolla and I used to have a boat and probably when I--not retire--but when I get out of public life, I’ll spend some time in La Jolla and maybe buy a boat.”

Is he at peace with himself?

“Oh yeah, that’s one thing I am,” he replies. He adds that his personal code helps him maintain inner calm: “Do what you think is right and be honest with yourself and your God and your family and things will be OK, even in tough times when the ethics committee is looking at you.”

Then he laughs quietly.