COLUMN ONE : ‘St. Paul’ Against the Odds : Tsongas’ idea of an exciting evening is playing charades with his family. But, as in politics, he plays to win. Some see him as resolute, others as self-righteous.

Nature didn’t give him a pretty face or a stirring voice, but in 24 years of long-shot races Paul E. Tsongas has had one thing every politician needs: Luck.

In his first congressional campaign, during the Watergate trauma of 1974, his opponent was crushed under Richard M. Nixon’s fall. When Tsongas ran for the Senate in 1978, a leading primary opponent was sidelined in a car wreck, and the once-invincible incumbent, Sen. Edward Brooke, was embarrassed by a messy divorce.

And on Tuesday, this product of a mill town called Lowell, Mass., won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, which was expected to go to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton until controversies about Clinton’s past got in the way.

“The legend in Lowell is that unlucky things happen to people who run against me,” says Tsongas, who has won all six of his political campaigns.

His good fortune is only one of the unlikely elements in the career of a politician who has just survived the first critical test in his race for the nomination.

Paul Efthemios Tsongas, son of Greek immigrants, is an introspective homebody who yearns to live in the spotlight of the country’s most public job. He is an advocate of nuts-and-bolts economics, but says he was moved to run by an almost mystical experience he had as he struggled with cancer.

Tsongas is a self-effacing man, but also one who admits to a streak of self-righteousness that has prompted comparisons to his hapless political colleague, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988.

Tsongas boasts that he loves running against obstacles, and it is just as well: He faces plenty of them.

He must overcome a fizzless TV presence, his identity as “another Greek from Massachusetts” and his campaign’s relative lack of money and organization. He must lay to rest worries about his health as a man who, through a treatment considered experimental at the time, overcame a cancer that was considered incurable.

And, most important, he must convince the world that a mild-mannered, one-term senator is big enough and tough enough to walk on the world stage.

So far, he has managed to exploit liabilities as assets. His earnest truth-telling and lugubrious appearance has won him voter sympathy in a year of rare anger at flashy politicians. He has gotten good press, owing to his dramatic underdog story, candor, and wry humor overlooked by TV comics who joke about his dishwater-dullness.

But even as he was surging in New Hampshire, some experts were predicting that Tsongas’ greatest triumph would be his last. As the campaign moved on, separating him from his regional base and making him more reliant on the electronic coverage he finds so difficult, Tsongas would quickly be eclipsed, they said.

David Broder, the respected political columnist for the Washington Post, on television last week called Tsongas “the least energetic, the least charismatic politician I have ever seen.” On the eve of his election victory, the leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives were inviting other Democrats to enter the race.

A Quixotic Figure

Tsongas’ crusade was considered quixotic from April 30, when he became the first Democrat to announce against a President then receiving a daunting 91% favorable rating in opinion polls.

Average Democrats would resist his message, the analysts said: He was adamantly pro-business, calling for a capital gains tax cut and investment tax credits and dismissing the middle-class tax cut others believed would have wide political appeal.

He wanted a higher gasoline tax, and talked about capping federal expenditures to narrow the federal budget deficit. With this conservative economic agenda he coupled a liberal social platform that was staunchly behind the right to legal abortion and civil rights for minorities and homosexuals. He advocated a Jimmy Carter-style human rights policy abroad.

Some who had campaigned against him were not so quick to dismiss him. “People have underestimated Paul Tsongas throughout his career,” said Robert E. Waite, who was press secretary to Sen. Brooke in 1978.

He and others saw in Tsongas’ Senate race that year a foreshadowing of what happened in New Hampshire.

The two-term congressman who ran against Brooke in 1978 was taking on a formidable politician, the man Massachusetts residents were proud to have made the only black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Brooke’s poll ratings were often higher than those of the Kennedys. When Tsongas got into the race, the political Establishment yawned.

Three weeks after Tsongas declared, Brooke’s life began to unravel: He had lied about his wealth in divorce proceedings, it was disclosed.

The news brought in three other Democrats who were considered more formidable than Rep. Tsongas, who acknowledges he was “on all the wrong committees” on Capitol Hill. That June, Tsongas trailed the front-runners by 25 percentage points in the polls.

Tsongas’ campaign was steady, if plodding. He took the election, 55% to 45%, and went to the Senate as junior to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. The contrast between Tsongas’ ascetic style and Kennedy’s could hardly have been more striking. On his home turf, Tsongas is still sometimes mocked as “St. Paul.”

A Teetotaler

Tsongas has never smoked or used alcohol. He always seems to prefer the company of his wife, Nikola Sauvage Tsongas, and daughters Ashley, 17, Katina, 14, and Molly, 10, to anyone else. Profanity springs so rarely from his lips that when he said “hell” at a press conference last week, his hometown paper, the Lowell Sun, put it on Page 1.

During his 10 years in Washington, Tsongas says he gave not a single dinner party, although they provide important settings for transacting business in the capital. To the amazement of neighbors in Washington’s Cleveland Park district, official business was never so pressing that it kept him from walking his children to school.

His idea of an exciting evening is playing charades with the family. Tsongas plays to win and often uses obscure book titles as clues, his half sister, Vickie Peters, said.

In his 1984 book about his fight with cancer, “Heading Home,” Tsongas recalls how, in 1983, one of his supporters, Washington lobbyist Tom Boggs, bawled him out for so neglecting to socialize that he was becoming vulnerable in his expected reelection bid.

“Niki and I did not frequent the social circuit, and we knew it cost us,” Tsongas wrote.

During the New Hampshire campaign, his habit of spending time with his children gave rise to questions about his stamina and the lingering effects of his cancer.

He has a compulsive need to catalogue his feelings and thoughts, which are described in “Heading Home,” and “The Road From Here,” the 1980 book describing his conversion to a more conservative economic view. There is, too, his 84-page “Call to Economic Arms,” the manifesto of his current campaign that helped to force two of his rivals to put out their own position papers.

The pamphlet is deadly serious, about everything from recycling to the need for spirituality in national life. It is Tsongas’ certainty about his ideas that has led to criticism that he can be self-righteous.

“There’s a fine line between being resolute in your convictions and being pious,” he acknowledged on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday. “I can be a pain in the rear end.”

This campaign season, Tsongas has used his self-deprecating humor to disarm crowds that often come expecting a speaker who resembles Walter Mitty and speaks like a lecturer in cost accounting.

“I went into Massachusetts real estate in the late ‘80s,” he says, rolling his eyes. “That tells you how smart I am.”

Asked about his inevitable comparison to the tortoise in the fabled race with the hare, he responds: “Our media consultant has researched it, and we found no record of a tortoise with charisma. So that can’t be this campaign.”

Tsongas so relishes jokes at his own expense that it sometimes seems a peculiar sort of vanity. Last week, at a fund-raiser on his 51st birthday, he played a song by the Washington political-comedy group Capitol Steps that lampoons him as “a sleeping aid that doubled as a Democratic presidential contender.”

He played it for the audience--then went home and played it, over and over, for the family and friends.

Tsongas didn’t have much to laugh about in his early years in Lowell, the city on the Merrimack River 40 miles north of Boston where the industrial revolution first took root in America. By the time Tsongas’ family got there, it was rapidly deteriorating to little more than a collection of abandoned textile mills.

He is the son of conservative Republican parents who worked hard at a dry-cleaning business and required Paul to do the same. His father, Efthemios, was strict but raised his voice only when provoked--such as the time Paul asked why there was no union at Tsongas Cleaners, and when he asked for money to buy an Elvis Presley record.

“I come from a disadvantaged family,” Tsongas likes to joke. “Both my parents were Republicans.”

Chores such as bending hangers and, later, delivering clothing in a truck, kept him from extracurricular activities, except the a cappella choir, in high school.

‘Work Was Life’

“Work was life,” he recalls. He was a skinny kid who did well at school, had no interest in politics and is remembered by friends as having the usual interests: back-yard basketball, the Red Sox and the girls in the neighborhood.

He went to Dartmouth College in 1962 on scholarships and loans. After graduation, he spent two years in the Peace Corps in Wolisso, Ethiopia. Tsongas entered Yale Law School, then briefly went back to the Peace Corps before deciding one day, as he lay on a tropical beach, that he wanted to go into politics.

In 1969, at age 28, he ran for the Lowell City Council on a reform platform and--aided by the election-eve death of an opponent--won. The first day on the job, as he sat and swiveled in a city council chair, he realized how badly he had wanted to win.

That moment was “just sheer, unadulterated joy,” he recalls.

Tsongas campaigned on a clean-government slate again when he ran for Middlesex County commissioner in 1973. His good luck was with him. The Boston Globe published stories disclosing the incumbents’ corrupt patronage practices and wasteful spending. Once in the job, Tsongas worked to remove patronage from county government.

These days, Tsongas cites what he did for Lowell as a freshman congressman as proof of what he could do to rebuild the nation’s economy.

Tsongas and B. Joseph Tully, the veteran machine politician who was then Lowell’s city manager, threatened and cajoled local businessmen into putting up about $400 million toward the revitalization of Lowell’s rotted core. Tsongas’ seat on the House Banking Committee helped him bring in millions in federal money for the project, and through the National Park Service, the scarred mills became an elegant precinct of condominiums, museums and space for a growing technology industry.

Some detractors in his hometown say that Tsongas’ years on the city council and Middlesex County Commission also showed a moralistic and unbending aspect to his personality.

“There is a dark side,” said William Taupier, a former city manager who is now a real estate broker. In Tsongas’ view, he said, “his position is always moral, and if you oppose him, you must be immoral.”

One of Tsongas’ adversaries was Henry Mroz, the former Lowell superintendent of schools. Mroz said he and Tsongas clashed in 1983 over an abandoned school building that Mroz wanted reopened as a school and Tsongas wanted converted to a condominium.

Mroz prevailed, but Tsongas later helped field candidates to unseat Mroz, which was accomplished in 1990. “Once I had crossed his path, I was his enemy for life,” Mroz said.

One Lowell businessman, asked about Tsongas’ personal life, said he believes the candidate is “as clean as the Easter Bunny.” But, in a sign that all in Lowell don’t love him, he asked to remain unidentified, lest others in his circle find out he complimented Tsongas.

If Tsongas discomfited the old guard in Lowell, he also unsettled some of the Democratic faithful in 1980, when he underwent a political conversion that turned him against traditional Democratic Party economics.

Tsongas began his Senate career as a party-line liberal who got a perfect 100 grade from the Americans for Democratic Action. He got a rating of 12 from the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the business lobby.

During his years in the Senate his ADA rating slid to 75 and his chamber rating edged up to 38, as he became more convinced that the Democrats needed to do more to support business. He provoked the wrath of the United Auto Workers in 1979 by arguing for modifications of the Chrysler bailout legislation to freeze auto workers’ wages for three years.

The major shift came in 1980, when Tsongas told a surprised ADA convention that liberals should abandon their attachment to big government programs and give greater emphasis to stimulating the economy.

On the campaign trail these days, Tsongas pounds home his belief that government needs to look out for the interests of business. He uses a line that makes him seem more of a business booster than Herbert Hoover: “As President, my job will be to grow companies.” He promised a group in Boston last year that he would be “the best friend Wall Street has ever had.”

Tsongas points to his stands on social and rights issues, the environment and energy policy to verify his liberal credentials.

He sponsored the first gay-rights bill ever introduced in the Senate. He has promoted use of renewable and solar sources of energy. In the Senate, he forged compromises that led to passage of the 1980 Alaska Lands Act, which protected 104 million acres in that state from development.

Even more important than the economic conversion was the change that came over him in 1983, when his doctor told him that a lump in his groin was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer the doctor said “has never been cured.” Shaken, Tsongas decided to leave the Senate and move back to Lowell so he could spend more time with his family and make enough money to provide for them if he died. His term ended in January, 1985.

In August, 1986, he underwent a bone-marrow transplant at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute that required him to remain isolated in a room for 42 days. The treatment involves removing bone marrow cells and freezing them, then giving the patient heavy doses of radiation and chemicals that, essentially, halt the body’s immune function as they kill the cancerous cells--along with the rest of the patient’s bone marrow. Then, the previously removed marrow is re-injected to restore the body’s defenses.

Tsongas went into the germ-free room with books, art supplies and plans to learn another language, but he ended up painting only one picture and spent much of his time in contemplation.

No Recurrence

Since then, the disease has shown no sign of recurrence, and his doctors say he has a 90% chance of remaining cancer-free. They stop short of certifying that he has been cured; one of his doctors, George Canellos, recently said that predicting the course of the disease would be like trying to see through a thick fog.

Tsongas says the shock of learning he might die soon led him to a realization of the “transitory nature of life” and of the obligation of one generation to those that follow. It was that realization, he says, that prompted his decision to run for President.

Tsongas’ earnestness is on display as he describes this experience, his voice straining and cracking. Last week, he told an audience about watching sunlight dance in his daughter’s hair one afternoon just after he had been told of the diagnosis.

He was struck, he said, by how fleeting life is, and was led to the conclusion that each generation has a “blood obligation” to leave a better world for the next.

Tsongas told how his own mother had died when he was so young that he has no memory of her. As he faced cancer, he agonized over the question of why his mother did not survive, and he did.

“Why I’m here I don’t know, but I believe that my survival carries with it an obligation,” he said, noting that he has been given 3,053 days of life since he learned of his cancer. “These are not ordinary days, and I cannot treat them as such. There must be purpose in these days.”

The spiritual idea that he took away from his illness keeps sounding, again and again, in his campaign. In his victory speech Tuesday night, Tsongas talked about a need for “spirituality” in the country. “We are part of a spectrum--we are part of a continuum,” he said.

Although pollsters say there is as yet little sign that voters have been spooked over Tsongas’ cancer, it is expected to frighten some potential supporters. Tsongas says it will generate sympathy and respect that will make it a net plus, but aides for another campaign seem to believe otherwise: In the final days of the New Hampshire primary, they tried to focus reporters’ attention on it.

Tsongas has been attacked for arguing that the nation must rely on nuclear power for at least part of its energy supply. On a more personal level, he has been criticized for having gone through the “revolving door” when he left the Senate and lobbied for various groups and corporations between 1985 and 1991.

In New Hampshire, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey took after him for describing himself as an experienced businessman, when Tsongas was actually a lawyer-lobbyist and corporate director of firms such as the Boston Edison Co. utility, Wang Laboratories and Shawmut Bank.

Business Problems

Tsongas is correct when he claims a wide variety of business experience, but his track record as a business manager must be graded incomplete, at best, since none of his three start-up businesses has turned a profit.

Tsongas and an MIT professor were founders of a computer firm, Treasury Systems International. There proved to be no market for its product and it went bankrupt.

A second start-up, called Flexes, is trying to market a municipal garbage disposal and recycling system but has yet to land a major contract. Tsongas also has a real estate development business, which suffered in the real estate downturn. The firm was able to cover its debts, Tsongas says, only because his partner had outside resources.

As a director, Tsongas has been praised for his efforts at Boston Edison, a utility that had been criticized for weak management and sloppy security at its Pilgrim nuclear plant. Tsongas joined the board in 1985 and sponsored a study by a group of outsiders that helped bring about changes in management and procedures.

Tsongas joked recently that he has a hard time understanding the federal “yacht tax”--the 10% levy on the purchase price of some boats--because he cannot afford such a luxury. In fact, his personal net worth has risen sharply since he left the Senate.

He estimates he is worth between $1.1 million and $1.2 million. His handsome home in Lowell is valued at $280,000 and his Cape Cod residence is valued at $630,000. Last year, he earned $225,000 working as a lobbyist and lawyer for Foley, Hoag & Eliot in Boston; he received another $120,000 in director’s fees.

The net worth is based, he says, on an assumption that his stock in Flexes, the recycling firm, is worth $600,000. His wealth is clearly not liquid, since he was forced to borrow from daughter Ashley’s college fund to lend his campaign $47,000.

His Lowell house is an imposing frame Victorian, gray with white trim and large front porch. Inside, the look is lived in: The overstuffed living room sofa has done double duty as a scratching post for two overstuffed cats.

Admitting Mistakes

Despite the conventional wisdom about his arrogant streak, Tsongas does sometimes acknowledge his blunders. He insists he will shift his views in the face of a good argument.

In talking about how to pay for nationwide medical care one day in Hudson, N.H., he told the audience he had not shut the door on reform proposals that differed from his own. “I’m willing to be converted,” he said.

Tsongas’ sense of purpose for the next generation has meant that he tends not to become upset over what happens in the campaign, even when commentators joke about his candidacy. And he has needed a thick skin from the beginning. Early last year, he approached his friend and senior law partner, Barry White, to tell him he planned to run for President.

“Of what?” the perplexed White asked.

“Whenever I get mad at you people for not taking my candidacy seriously,” Tsongas told a panel of pundits on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” “I remember that my friends didn’t take it seriously either.”

These days, some of those attitudes may be changing.

Times staff writers Michael Ross, Ronald J. Ostrow and Paul Houston in Washington contributed to this story.

Long-Shot Candidate Pulls Away From the Pack

Tsongas’ Background

Born: Feb. 14, 1941, Lowell, Mass.

Education: Dartmouth College, BA, 1962; Yale University, LL.B., 1967

Military service: None.

Occupation: Lawyer.

Family: Married to Nikola Sauvage. Children: Ashley, 17, Katina, 14, Molly, 10.

Political career: Lowell City Council, 1969-1972; Middlesex County Commission, 1973-1975; U.S. House 1975-1979; U.S. Senate, 1979-1985.

Professional career: Chairman, Massachusetts Board of Regents of Higher Education, 1989-1991; partner, law firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot, 1985-1989 (now “associated with” the firm); private law practice 1971-1974; Mass. deputy assistant attorney general, 1969-1971.

Campaign Themes

Capital gains tax cut for long-term investments in securities.

Investment tax credits.

National industrial policy.

Relaxation of anti-trust laws to foster industrial competitiveness.

National health insurance program of “managed competition.”

Energy policy, relying on power from several sources, including nuclear.

Temporary cap on spending to help balance budget.

Support for abortion rights, civil rights, homosexual rights.

Capital punishment for “crimes against society.”