Henry Cisneros and the Politics of Ambivalence : The Great Latino Political Hope has twice chosen HUD over electoral politics. Where’s Henry’s Fire?

Henry G. Cisneros, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is standing in a muddy tent city in the San Fernando Valley, talking to a TV reporter. It is Week 2 of post-earthquake reality in Los Angeles, and the secretary has been in town for most of the aftershocks, doing what he clearly likes to do best: turn the wheels of Big Government. His sleeves are rolled up, his collar is open, and his hands are tucked inside the pockets of a khaki jacket. His sad eyes look intently into the television camera, and he speaks easily into the microphone.

On Jan. 17, it was Cisneros who broke the news of the earthquake to a still-sleeping President Clinton, jet-lagged from his whirlwind European tour. The HUD secretary had been in a Washington TV studio, waiting to do a Martin Luther King Jr. birthday segment on CBS’ “This Morning,” when Los Angeles shook. He phoned the White House and then delivered to the world Clinton’s first response to the disaster. The President “would immediately begin talking with the appropriate federal emergency officials and put them into action,” Cisneros said. Within hours, he and Transportation Secretary Federico Pena were dispatched to Southern California.

Since then, Cisneros has been all over quake-shattered L.A. He has confabbed with both of California’s senators, with Gov. Pete Wilson and L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan; wheeled and dealed to free up emergency HUD housing vouchers, toured South-Central and visited shelter after shelter. In English and Spanish, the language he had to relearn, he has chatted with quake victims standing in water lines and living out of their cars.

From a distance, the secretary looks every bit the classic politician, cruising for photo ops, mining every opportunity to meet and greet--running hard. But up close, in the glare of the TV lights, something is wrong with this picture.

Tonight, for instance, Cisneros has none of the calculated polish that burnishes most politicians. He’s wearing the same blue slacks he’s had on for a week (he packed in a hurry and has stayed longer than he planned), and there is neither a bodyguard nor an advance man in sight. Standing in front of the camera, he speaks in the form of public-service announcements, not flashy sound bites. Shelter is available, Cisneros says earnestly; take advantage of it. He is behaving like he’s doing a job, not campaigning for one.

This is a new Henry Cisneros. Just six years ago, he was the bright light in New West politics, a young, brainy fast-tracker with media flair. The four-term Latino mayor of San Antonio, some said, might even have White House potential. Then he bowed out of the political high life, an almost willing victim of his own tragedies. His third child, John Paul, had been born with a life-threatening congenital heart defect, and Cisneros had confessed, in a wrenching mea culpa, to an image-destroying extramarital affair. He retreated; it wasn’t until another Los Angeles calamity, the riots of 1992, and the political ascendance of Bill Clinton, that the tug toward public service overcame his acquired aversion to the spotlight.

Now, at 46, he’s back, but the transformation is startling. The country’s first Latino with presidential potential, a man whose charisma once outshone his ambition, has been reborn as a glorified civil servant. He has twice turned down chances to pursue a Texas Senate seat, an office he had a good chance of winning and one that would have thrust him back onto the fast track. Instead, he has chosen to run HUD, historically one of the lowest-profile and least-effective Cabinet agencies. The new Henry Cisneros seems to be an oxymoron: a politician who won’t run, a star turned bureaucrat. Where’s Henry’s fire?

“I BELIEVE AMERICA IS IN TROUBLE, AND I BELIEVE HUD IS AT THE CORE OF it.” From the confines of a coach-class airplane seat, Cisneros’ voice punctuates each word, his right hand slashing the air. “We’re dealing in an area that is our potential killer--gangs, the loss of our youth, central city problems, race and class divisions. And, in four years, I think I can do a lot about it.”

Cisneros is shuttling home to Washington after a short tour outside the Beltway, doing his duty as a Clinton Cabinet member. It is mid-November, and on this day, he has participated in the 15th anniversary celebration of the Mission Park housing development in Cambridge, appeared at two fund-raisers for Boston-area Rep. Martin T. Meehan (whose arm he twisted on behalf of the North American Free Trade Agreement), offered advice to the newly elected Boston Mayor Tom M. Menino, submitted to a grilling by the Boston Globe editorial staff and delivered a speech (to housing developers at the Urban Land Institute) and a pep talk (to his own Boston HUD troops). At 8 p.m., he’s still more than willing to discuss business, setting out what he hopes to accomplish in his return to public life and, not incidentally, defending his decision to take on HUD.

For more than a decade, urban problems have been escalating while HUD’s budget has been shrinking. Not surprisingly, it has become increasingly unable to serve its major purpose: housing the poor. In 1974, HUD had about 14 million units to shelter an estimated 8.9 million low-income households. By 1993, the number of HUD units had shrunk to about 10.6 million, while the number of households needing assistance had risen to 14.3 million. For fiscal 1994, HUD has a budget of nearly $25 billion (not counting $500 million in emergency earthquake relief money). Yet according to the General Accounting Office, the agency faces, among other bills coming due, $20 billion in immediate repairs on its housing stock.

The department has also been coping with a scarred reputation. In the 1980s, 11 high-level Reagan appointees--including three former undersecretaries and the executive assistant to Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr.--were indicted and convicted for influence peddling, and one private escrow agent was dubbed “Robin HUD” for embezzling an estimated $6 million in government funds. As one close friend of Cisneros put it, “HUD is not a steppingstone to anything other than an appearance before the grand jury.”

The Bush Administration made a clean sweep, appointing Jack Kemp to head the agency, but its moves to safeguard HUD from more corruption, and its basic bias against social welfare spending, only made matters worse when it came to yet another lingering problem: HUD has a bureaucracy so leaden that even where money has been appropriated, it’s difficult to get it spent.

“I have to get written permission from Washington just to drive the agency car from San Francisco to Sacramento,” says Art Agnos, former mayor of San Francisco and current western regional administrator for HUD. “Employee initiative is not encouraged here. You are rated for the number of times you pick up the ball without dropping it, not how many hits you’ve had.”

“I knew from the very beginning that there were serious management problems that could not be dealt with with Band-Aids,” Cisneros says. He was so eager to begin the daunting effort to make the department work that in February of last year he beat his friend, Vice President Al Gore, to the punch. Three weeks before the formation of Gore’s National Performance Review, known as “Reinventing Government,” Cisneros launched his own campaign called “Reinventing HUD.”

Cisneros’ reinvention scheme sounds like a New Age blend of the technocratic and the socially conscious. Instead of the typical organizational pyramid--CEO on top, the lowliest worker at the bottom--Cisneros says he wants to create “the right-side-up company,” where the most important person is the one who meets the public. “That’s a pretty damned interesting concept, you know,” he says.

He oversees 13,500 employees in 71 field offices at HUD, and Cisneros has asked all of them for suggestions on how to streamline the organization. He has also appointed a “management excellence team,” composed of 10 staffers, to act as a clearinghouse for bottom-up ideas. The first major change: Ten regional operations--bottlenecked intermediaries between field offices and Washington headquarters--will be eliminated.

Cisneros is not limiting HUD’s “reinvention” to the New Democrat ideal of efficiency in government, however. He is also pushing for philosophical renewal, a return to the liberal tenet that big government can work. On the shuttle from Boston, Cisneros runs through his top five priorities in wonkish style: neatly outlined and prioritized.

“Assisting the homeless,” he begins, snapping open his pinkie from a closed fist. “Improving public housing.” The ring finger pops out, and then two more fingers: “Expanding housing opportunities. Opening housing markets.” Finally, the thumb unbends. “And empowering communities.” Then, as if to indicate that his task is done, he slowly glides his open hand, palm downward, away from his body in an awkward, theatrical gesture.

Dramatic flourishes and reinvention claims notwithstanding, Cisneros’ priorities don’t seem all that different from his predecessor’s. Jack Kemp also spoke of assisting the homeless, improving public housing and expanding housing opportunities. But, says Cisneros, under Kemp’s watch, HUD only marked time. According to the conventional wisdom, the secretary, a contender for the top spot in the Republican Party, was Bushwhacked. “Jack Kemp worked in a Bush Administration that was thwarting every idea at every turn and was totally disengaged from a domestic agenda,” Cisneros says.

Kemp wasn’t even able to get his boss to sign a bill financing economic development zones, the secretary’s pet project, which would have offered businesses willing to locate in distressed urban areas a sizable reduction in capital gains tax. Perhaps Kemp’s biggest achievement, aside from restoring the agency to some measure of respectability after the corruption scandals, was to set in motion tenant ownership of public housing, making it possible for some of HUD’s clients to purchase the units they lived in.

Clinton--”a President who cares about a sense of community and a domestic agenda,” says Cisneros--ran for office promising to continue Kemp’s tenant ownership program. It is a measure of the weight Cisneros carries at the White House, as well as his differences with Kemp, that he discarded the program almost as soon as he was sworn in.

“I am generally laudatory of the job that Kemp did,” Cisneros says, “even beyond what is probably wise, considering he may be the Republican nominee in 1996. But it’s not realistic to think that large public-housing developments can be sold to people who live in them and saddle them with the deferred maintenance cost.” He insists that Kemp’s program was aimed at ultimately taking government out of the business of housing the poor, a responsibility that Cisneros says Washington can’t avoid.

At the same time, he insists, HUD has not abandoned the goal of tenant home ownership. The secretary rarely fails to mention it in his public appearances, and he knows the statistics of falling home ownership in the U.S. by heart. The agency, he says, is exploring other methods--making refurbished FHA repossessions available, using housing vouchers to cover not just rent but mortgage payments and creating no-down-payment government home loans.

Of all of HUD’s priorities, dealing with homelessness has consumed most of Cisneros’ attention. “I think there’s been an unspoken effort to hide the problem, to sweep it under the carpet as though it doesn’t exist,” he says. “But it’s a problem so large in our society that we can’t just simply hide it.”

Once again, his idea is to get the government more involved. To that end, Cisneros asked Congress in 1993 to make four amendments to his budget, dou bling the expenditure on homeless programs by shifting money from other projects. For 1995, the agency’s total appropriation could increase to $29.5 billion (one of only a handful of increases Clinton is asking for) and homeless expenditures could nearly double again, to $1.5 billion. With the money, Cisneros plans to step up a “continuum of care”--funding permanent housing, temporary shelters, job placement programs and mental-health and drug treatment for the homeless.

For all his emphasis on homelessness, Cisneros made his biggest splash in 1993 with priority No. 5, “empowering communities.” In September, he went into the town of Vidor, Tex., famous for its Ku Klux Klan connections, and personally took charge of a public housing project where black families had been harrassed and forced to leave. In January, HUD ordered armed guards to accompany blacks moving back into the Vidor projects. And Cisneros has also campaigned hard against home-loan redlining. With the cooperation of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, HUD and the Justice Department are setting up sting operations to target problem areas.

Such actions have earned him a reputation as the Clinton Administration’s chief defender of civil rights. “At one Cabinet meeting, I laid out what I thought ought to be the values of our joint community strategy,” Cisneros says. “These values included a commitment to reducing the spatial separations in American society: race, income and class. The President was very, very sympathetic. I was sitting right next to him, and I asked him: ‘Do you like it?’ And he said: ‘Do I like it? It’s what I ran for office to do.’ ”

The National Journal, in its November “Cabinet Scorecard,” cited Cisneros as one of the “emerging stars” on the Administration’s team--the President’s “Hispanic on the spot” and a “good soldier” on issues close to Clinton’s heart. He got high marks for assembling a first-rate team and for his hard stand on desegregation. Paul Leonard, of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a watchdog agency for the poor, credits his “effective agenda” and a “head on” approach.

Cisneros also has his share of critics. The National Journal knocked his “vague” message. Others say he can be long on symbolism and short on substance, and they talk about his first year at HUD as an exercise in headline grabbing--sleeping in a dilapidated subsidized housing development in New York; attending the funeral of a homeless District of Columbia woman who died at HUD’s front door. “Henry’s just like every other career politician who has never done anything else,” says Doug Harlan, a former political foe in Texas. “He’s always looking for the cheap way up.”

But for the most part, even among HUD’s jaded ranks, Cisneros seems to be working his old, charismatic magic. At Boston’s Tip O’Neill federal building, Cisneros walked in late to his meeting with northeastern HUD staffers. With rain dripping off his hair and suit, he had 20 minutes before his next engagement, and his audience was not feeling charitable. Cisneros was there to talk about “reinventing” their office and, ultimately, shutting down the regional operation.

He stood behind the podium for less than two minutes, just long enough to apologize for his tardiness, then swiftly moved off the platform to stand at the front of the first row. Yes, he said, his hands were tied--everyone had to absorb budget cuts. “Some of you may be reassigned,” he told the audience. “None of you will be losing your job involuntarily.” Then he hit his stride. “I want to get to the point where we are doing real things,” he said, “housing people who need housing, who ought to not be living in the squalid conditions they’re in. I want to fix that on our watch. At the end of this time, when you go to a cocktail party and people ask you where you work, you’ll say ‘I work at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development,’ instead of having to avert your eyes.”

It was vintage Cisneros, playing to a skeptical, then enamored, crowd. One employee stood up and said: “I am more encouraged than I’ve ever been. I’ve worked at HUD for 21 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever even seen a secretary.” The audience burst into loud applause, and Cisneros, his face suffused with a missionary glow, was off again into the New England rain.

IT IS A LITTLE IRONIC THAT Henry Cisneros is in charge of America’s housing. Throughout his years in Texas politics, first as a San Antonio City Council member, then as mayor, his record on housing was spotty, some would say dismal. In 1986, during Cisneros’ third term as mayor, a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities determined that San Antonio’s housing problems were among the worst in the nation. For 44% of the city’s poor, shelter was overpriced and woefully substandard, and in the years that Cisneros held office, the availability of low-cost units declined precipitously.

Cisneros admits that housing and many other “neighborhood” issues were a low priority for him as mayor. “I ran for office with a very clear agenda: jobs and economic development,” he says. “I believed that the best social program we could put together was a growing economy.” Cisneros worked to improve San Antonio’s infrastructure, including sewers and sidewalks, but his emphasis was on flashier projects: new office buildings, shopping centers, a biotech research park, a $125-million Sea World and the $186-million, 65,000-seat Alamodome. It amounted to a swift kick from small town status to city stature for San Antonio.

It was also just about the only “progressive” political platform that stood a chance in San Antonio. In 1981, when Cisneros ran for mayor, Latinos alone could not elect a candidate, despite their growing political clout. The conservatives who ran the town opposed change at every turn, which meant that not only Mexican Americans but also anyone with new ideas, including those who wanted to share in the ‘80s economic boom, were out of luck.

Cisneros turned out to be a winning coalition candidate for San Antonio’s shut-out factions. For Anglo yuppies, there were his impeccable credentials: advanced degrees in urban planning and public administration from Harvard’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government and George Washington University, a stint as a White House Fellow and as an assistant to Elliot Richardson, Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. He ran for and won a seat on the San Antonio City Council in 1975, at the ripe old age of 27, under the banner of the Good Government League, a slate representing the city’s pro-business moderates.

For Latinos, Cisneros was one of their own, son of George, a military civil servant, and Elvira Cisneros. He grew up on Monterey Street (“a Norman Rockwell experience,” says Cisneros, “except that (everyone) had brown faces”); he skipped fourth grade at Catholic school and made good at Texas A&M; and beyond. He could comfortably shoulder the aspirations of the well-off and the less affluent in the Mexican American community, even if he did have to refresh his Spanish.

He was by no means a radical. “I always viewed Henry Cisneros as very capable and very committed,” says Ernesto Cortes, who founded Communities Organized for Public Service, a highly touted neighborhood-issues group. “But I knew he was not going to identify totally with the have-nots. No one has ever defined Henry Cisneros as an activist.”

Cortes often found himself at odds with Cisneros’ development policies. COPS successfully battled Cisneros’ efforts to construct a nuclear power plant outside San Antonio in the early 1980s but lost the fight over the Alamodome, which many San Antonian critics consider more a monument to Cisneros’ ego than a boon to their city.

Cortes can criticize the man he calls “a worthy adversary and a good friend,” but he won’t lay the blame for San Antonio’s housing woes on Cisneros. “It’s because of 100 years of neglect,” he says. Paul Leonard at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities agrees. “The main reason for San Antonio’s low-income housing problem is that San Antonio has a much higher proportion of low-income people than most cities,” he says.

Still, Cisneros says that if he were to do it over again, he would have made housing a top priority. “If I had stayed longer--and, under normal circumstances, I would have liked to have stayed 10 or 12 years instead of eight,” he says--”I would have started to build that social platform based on the accomplishments on the economic front.”

But circumstances surrounding Cisneros’ final years as mayor of San Antonio were definitely not normal, at least not for a Catholic Mexican American in a socially conservative city.

Until 1987, Cisneros had what looked like a charmed life. His home number and address were listed in the phone book, and reporters often stopped by his house on West Houston Street (the same house where his grandparents had lived) without an appointment. His personal life, with his wife, Mary Alice--they met when they were teen-agers--and his two daughters, Teresa Angelica and Mercedes Christina (then 16 and 12), was an open book. He was elected in 1981 and then breezed through three reelection landslides. A fifth term seemed a certainty, and he was seriously considering running for governor or senator. But his personal and political fortunes began to unravel.

On June 10, 1987, the day before Cisneros turned 40, his son, John Paul, named in honor of the Pope, was born with a serious heart defect. He wasn’t expected to survive childhood. John Paul was the boy all of San Antonio knew Cisneros had longed for. The family was devastated.

There were other whispers as well. The 39-year-old wife of a wealthy local jeweler, who had been working on Cisneros’ possible run for the Texas governorship or the U.S. Senate, was said to be much more to the mayor than just his political fund-raiser. When a local newspaper columnist wrote obliquely about his knowledge of an extramarital affair involving an unnamed, well-known public figure, the whole city knew he was talking about Henry. Perhaps because the strain of keeping secrets was alien to Cisneros, or because his guilt was weighing too heavily on him, he finally admitted his deep love for the woman. “I guess human beings just aren’t made of plastic and wiring and metal; they are made of flesh and blood and feelings,” Cisneros said.

During the height of the rumors, he had announced that he would not run for the Texas governorship or the U.S. Senate. Nor would he seek reelection as mayor. The only thing that mattered to the tortured Cisneros now was his family. Mary Alice soon filed for divorce. But Catholic San Antonio--or rather, Mexican San Antonio--somehow saved the marriage. According to the Washington Post, Cisneros received hundreds of letters, some in support, some vitriolic, from his loyal constituents. Many offered the same advice: Don’t let tu hijito die. Por Dios , fix your marriage.

ON A PLUMP COUCH IN their new, rented house in Washington, Cisneros and 6-year-old John Paul are engaged in a minor battle of wills. Mary Alice has just served a chicken dinner, and now she and Cisneros are trying to talk to a reporter while John Paul--” mijo “ is what his father always calls him--vies for their attention. When order is restored, Cisneros works his way through the story of his life. Even with dozens of photographs chronicling his political career decorating the room, he manages to be convincing when he says that, after 1989, he had no plans to return to public life.

“For the first time, I was beginning to have some of the security associated with income,” he points out. As mayor of San Antonio, Cisneros was paid only $58 a week plus expenses; he supplemented this with speaking fees around the country. “I can’t begin to tell you how tight things were.”

After he left office, he started earning an income in the multiple six figures from television and radio programs, corporate lecturing, board memberships and his investment firm, the Cisneros Asset Management Co.--which handled investments for government, colleges and labor unions. “It was going to really amount to something. So I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be involved in politics at all.”

Not that he had abandoned that world completely. Cisneros stayed in touch with Latino political organizations, and in 1991, he organized a conference of 300 Mexican-American leaders and the new president of Mexico, his old Harvard classmate Carlos Salinas de Gortari. He also indulged in another kind of armchair politics. Late at night, he immersed himself in one civilization or another, reading everything he could get his hands on. He investigated ancient Greece, the Aztecs, China, Mesopotamia, the British Empire. It is a habit that continues: “I study the accumulated effect of culture,” Cisneros says. “It gives me a whole different take on humankind and our place in it.”

The way he tells it, it was a crisis in American civilization that drew him back to politics. When the Los Angeles riots broke out in April, 1992, he telephoned his friend Mayor Tom Bradley, a condolence call of sorts, he says. He ended up having a long conversation with City Councilman Mike Hernandez. “He told me, ‘This thing has the potential of going into a black and Latino thing. I don’t know how bad it’s going to be, but we may need your help.’ I was there by 5 o’clock the next day.”

When Cisneros arrived at Burbank airport, he was picked up by Bradley staffers and given a tour of the city. It was a bit of an epiphany. “The sky was orange. It was like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ” he remembers. “It was unbelievable, man. If Mayor Bradley (had) said: ‘Henry, drop what you’re doing, sever your business relationships. I want you to be deputy mayor of Los Angeles and help us work this out,’ I’d have done it.”

Bradley didn’t ask, but Cisneros’ political juices had begun to flow again. Then when his friend, actor Edward James Olmos, led several hundred broom-toting Angelenos on a mediagenic cleanup after the violence had subsided, Cisneros made up his mind that, like Olmos, he too had to act. “I don’t know where Eddie got this idea, but it was bril liant,” Cisneros says excitedly, exaggerating the emphasis as he always does when he wants to make an important point. “It was Gandhi-esque. To take a symbol that people would understand, a broom . . . a clean sweep. Because when you’re cleaning up, it’s over, you’re not tearing down anymore. It was just bril liant. That’s when I knew that I would put what I was doing on the back burner.”

Cisneros returned to San Antonio and turned up the heat; as campaign senior adviser, he immersed himself in Bill Clinton’s presidential run. He started out barely knowing the governor of Arkansas--they had met on several occasions--but he became one of the Clinton camp’s busiest pitchmen.

In late October of 1992, when Clinton’s victory was a near certainty, Cisneros was asked by Warren Christopher to join the transition team. Christopher told him,”You better think hard, because he’s going to ask you to be on his Cabinet.” Within days, Cisneros was mentioned in news stories as a likely appointee for either transportation or commerce. Finally, Christopher called to ask what Cisneros wanted.

“Warren, I’ve thought about this,” Cisneros remembers saying. He’d just spent a few days mulling his revelation in L.A. “I don’t know what the President is thinking. I don’t know whether he really wants me. But if I were to go in, I think I’d like it to be at HUD.”

Then things got complicated. Clinton agreed that Cisneros was the man for HUD, but Texas Gov. Ann Richards wanted Cisneros to accept appointment to Lloyd Bentsen’s Senate seat (Bentsen had been tapped by the new President for the Treasury Department). Cisneros, in the middle of a political tug of war, spent long days on the phone and torturous nights pondering the choice on his own. In the end, he decided against diving back into the political fray headfirst. He declined the offer to be the third Latino senator in U.S. history and instead chose HUD, a comeback path of least resistance. If Richards had appointed him to the Senate, he explained, he would have faced a special election for the seat later in the year, around the time that John Paul was scheduled for open-heart surgery. His family obligations, he said, came first.

John Paul’s operation was a success, and at about the same time, Cisneros’ political resolve was once again tested. The Senate seat he had turned down was won by Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican. But in 1994, it would be up for grabs again in the general election, and three separate private polls taken in October showed that Cisneros could beat any contender for the Democratic nomination. Hutchison, meanwhile, was in trouble, facing charges, of which she was later found innocent, that she had used public employees and state-owned computers for campaign purposes.

Vice President Gore reportedly told Cisneros that the opportunity was too good to pass up. Clinton, nervously eyeing a possible Republican majority in the Senate in 1994, wasn’t standing in his way. And once again Ann Richards begged her pal to run for the seat she had all but gift-wrapped for him. Latino leaders throughout the country urged Cisneros to enter the race, anxious to see one of their own elected to the Senate. Even Mary Alice wanted her husband to run.

In mid-November, Cisneros said: “I have my own internal calculations as to how the elections would play out, and I’m not the best candidate.” He was concerned about money: $5 million was a lot to raise so quickly. And there was concern that Hutchison could be exonerated and politically boosted by her claims that she was the victim of a Democratic vendetta. But Cisneros agreed to meet with his Texas supporters in December. “For a couple of days, I listened to friends who laid out various scenarios. But,” he claims, “I never seriously entertained the notion.” On Dec. 14, Cisneros announced that he would stick with HUD.

Doug Harlan, the old San Antonio Republican foe, isn’t surprised that Cisneros did not run for the Senate. Even as he was winning reelection by landslides, Harlan says, he always acted as if he were going to lose. “He’s a scaredy cat,” Harlan says. “He has very little confidence in his electoral ability.”

“I guess it’s a little too close to all the bulls- - - with the girl,” admits a Cisneros political ally back in Texas. “He’s got a beast out there he’s not dealing with.”

Cisneros assiduously avoids responding to such speculation. He says it was political smarts, not cowardice, that made him say no.

So what is Cisneros’ political future? In Texas, there is a deja vu quality to the talk--it might as well be the heady ‘80s again. At the December meeting, a 1996 run for Phil Gramm’s Senate seat was openly discussed. So was a run for the governorship in 1998. But one possibility that used to be on Cisneros’ list (although he has publicly denied it), reportedly no longer comes up: the White House.

“Hopefully, someday it will be possible to see a Latino or a Latina become President,” he says for the record. “But I’m not that person. I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen in my lifetime.”

His supporters are not so sure. Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, says that Cisneros probably has a better chance than any other Latino to land in the White House. “He needs ratification at the polls,” says Yzaguirre. “He needs it for political reasons and for his own personal self-confidence.”

Intellectually, Cisneros acknowledges what a win at the polls means, and he recognizes that every time he runs away from electoral office, he also runs away from the big prize. “You don’t have power when you’re reporting to one person, even if it’s the President,” he says, sounding like a man with second thoughts. “There’s more power in the people sending me and my being responsible to them.”

But the new Cisneros is nothing if not indecisive. He claims not to know if he will remain in politics, much less take another electoral plunge. “I don’t have a sense of what is the next thing I can do,” he says quickly, as though he’s been asked the question a million times. “But I’m not the slightest bit worried. I’ve never failed to provide for my family, and in one fashion or another--it may be teaching, it might be in business, it might be in writing, or it might even be in politics--I will.”

WHEN HENRY CISNEROS was a student at Texas A&M; in the 1960s, he learned, he says, “the most important lesson in my life.” It started with a guy named Al Tijerina.

Cisneros was a freshman, a member of the ROTC Corps of Cadets, and Tijerina, a senior of Mexican descent from San Angelo, Tex., was one of his unit leaders. He was also Cisneros’ chosen role model. “All of us, even those who came from the most conservative, segregated, discriminatory backgrounds in Texas, were in awe of Al Tijerina,” Cisneros says. “He was seen as the highest you can attain. I remember deciding, ‘I can do this. I can do this.’ ”

And over the course of the next four years, Cisneros did do it. He rose through the ROTC ranks, won awards, got elected to class office and ultimately headed out of Texas for Harvard, Washington and beyond. But it was what happened at Texas A&M;, Cisneros says, that made all the difference: “I’ve never had such a clear experience of setting out to try something very hard and achieving it. I never stopped to wonder what it would have meant for my personality if I had failed.”

The meritocracy of ROTC, and the way accomplishment evened the playing field at Texas A&M;, is what sticks in Cisneros’ mind. “You were promoted, you were rewarded, and you had the respect of your peers, strictly speaking, on three criteria: What are your grades? What is your performance in the cadet corps? And what is your performance on the athletic teams? My (high school) classmates, Mexicanos who were better than me at grades, went to other universities where they were judged by other criteria: what fraternity you belonged to, who your father was or how you fit into the hierarchy of the Texas power structure. They all, it seems to me, came away with the (feeling) that society had put them in their place.”

These days, the place Cisneros has chosen for himself may have something in common with the meritocracy he cherished at Texas A&M.; As secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he can tell himself that it is substance, not image, that got him there and keeps him there--to a place where the challenges are specific and success measurable. A place where he can do well and do good .

“Bill Clinton gave me a chance I thought I’d never have,” Cisneros says. “I enjoy what I’m doing. I feel a real commitment to it. The earthquake bore that out. (I could have been) down in Texas campaigning for a Senate race instead of trying to make a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of people.”

Later, in an unguarded moment, he underlines the point one more time. “Did you ever see the movie ‘The Mission’?” he asks. “Remember Robert De Niro, when they load him down?”In the film, De Niro’s character enacts a brutal penance, carrying a heavy load like a punished pack animal to a mountaintop Jesuit monastery.

“He refuses to let anyone help him,” Cisneros explains. “And only when he gets to the top can he just completely relax, have peace. He’s absolved himself. Sometimes that’s how I feel.”