Tsongas’ Days as Lobbyist Draw Attention : Politics: His clients have included several controversial firms and groups. He denies they have influenced his views.

Paul E. Tsongas owes his rise in the primary polls in part to his appeal as a plain-speaking critic of Democratic orthodoxy in a year when no candidate wants to be a Washington insider.

But the former U.S. senator from Massachusetts has also played the ultimate insider--as the Washington official-turned-lobbyist.

It is a role that he defends staunchly. It is also one that some critics--and his Democratic adversaries--are now trying to use against him.

Since he left the Senate in 1984, Tsongas has represented a list of corporations and institutions before various government agencies, and to members of Congress, including some of his former colleagues.

Among the clients have been such groups as the Sierra Club and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The list has also included real estate developers, those involved in constructing the controversial Iroquois natural gas pipeline; Norton Co., a Worcester, Mass., manufacturer that has been criticized for its environmental record; and Drexel Burnham Lambert, the fallen Wall Street junk-bond house.

These efforts increased Tsongas’ wealth between 1985 and 1991. Last year, his income from his law firm, Foley, Hoag & Eliot, was $225,000, says Barry White, the firm’s managing partner and Tsongas’ campaign chairman.

The former senator also makes about $120,000 a year sitting on the corporate boards of eight firms.

Tsongas explains his lobbying in the context of his fight against cancer, which led him to leave the Senate, after one term, in 1984. When he was told a lump in his groin was lymphoma, he realized that he did not have enough money to fully provide for his family’s future should he die, he said.

“When I left the Senate, I had never in my life made money,” said Tsongas, 51, who earlier was a two-term congressman and a Lowell, Mass., city councilman. “I had cancer; they told me I would not survive. I had a wife, I had three kids.

“Did I intend to make money? I sure did,” he said Thursday during a campaign swing through Concord, N.H. But he added: “The clients I took on were clients I believed in.”

Those he has turned away include Philippine dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. There are also others he will not identify who “had problems with their reputations and sort of wanted to get cleansed by having a lawyer like me,” he said.

He worked with Drexel Burnham Lambert in the mid-1980s, trying to sell the firm’s bond underwriting services to Massachusetts government officials. It was, Tsongas noted, before the company was accused of the massive securities law violations that would drive it into bankruptcy.

In 1988, Norton Co., one of the world’s largest producers of abrasives, was the fourth biggest polluter of Massachusetts’ air, according to EPA records. Tsongas, who is stressing his environmental record in his presidential campaign, says he worked with the company only to help them fend off a hostile takeover bid mounted in 1990 by a British concern.

According to lobbying records on file in the Senate, Tsongas was lobbying for proposals that would require hostile bidders to disclose more information, and in so doing help their target avoid a takeover.

The takeover battle ended when Norton agreed to be purchased by a French firm. In one three-month period of 1990, Tsongas received $4,320 from Norton, plus $276 in expenses, which included a one-day trip to Washington and taxi fare and parking expenses, which came to $28.

“Norton was a company that was being taken over, and we were trying to prevent that from happening,” Tsongas said. Regarding pollution, he said “every company is going to have some problems. But you have to have a viable business community.”

Tsongas has drawn criticism for his work over three years for the Iroquois Gas Transmission System, a pipeline project that last month began carrying natural gas from Alberta, Canada, to New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The pipeline was controversial because it hurt domestic gas producers and angered property owners and some local conservationists in places like Fairfield County, Conn., and Dutchess County, N.Y.

Anne-Marie Mueser, a longtime pipeline opponent who lives in Clinton, N.Y., contends that the pipeline project represents a “major inconsistency” for Tsongas because a third of it is owned by Canadian gas interests.

“Here’s a man preaching this patriotic economic message, and he’s been working for a foreign ownership,” she said.

Tsongas insists that the project was a model of its type. Natural gas, he says, is the cleanest energy source. The Iroquois project advanced the cause of conservation, he said, because the company divided $10 million among affected communities to enable them to buy property for use as open spaces in order to offset the pipeline’s impact.

Public records show Tsongas was paid $10,185 in 1990 for his work on behalf of the project. As part of the project, he lobbied his friend, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and others.

An aide from a rival campaign has in recent days encouraged reporters to write articles about how Tsongas’ lobbying activities have influenced his policy views.

Tsongas, a strong advocate of a capital gains tax cut, has worked for the National Venture Capital Assn., which endorses such a cut. His health care reform proposal, which calls for competition among health care providers to cut costs, would benefit insurers.

But Tsongas says he chooses clients because of his views, not the other way around. “The people who come to me share my view of the world,” he said. “I can pick and choose.”