The Return of the Colonel : Oliver North’s Contempt for Congress Brought Him Notoriety, and in a Year When Many Voters Share That Scorn, It May Just Win Him a Senate Seat

Fifty-five days ahead of him, 13,000 miles behind him, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, USMC (Ret.), steps out of a motor home nicknamed Rolling Thunder and walks toward his next audience. For today’s performance, North is not the decorated Marine colonel on trial for intentionally deceiving Congress. He’s not the Reagan insider who orchestrated a covert gun-running operation to the Nicaraguan rebels from his tiny office a few steps from the West Wing. Today’s Oliver North is just a Virginia businessman who thinks taxes are too high. And, come Nov. 8, if the voters of the Old Dominion will have him, he’d like to represent their interests in the United States Senate.

By the way, call him Ollie.

North brings to this gathering in front of the colonial Loudoun County Courthouse all the trappings of a successful Virginia businessman: the gray-flecked hair, the Burberry tie and crisp white dress shirt (sleeves rolled up, candidate style), black stitched cowboy boots. His gait is a little stiff, not surprising for a man injured first in a devastating car crash and later in the jungles of the DMZ when he took grenade fragments to the hand and leg while trying to clear out North Vietnamese army units.

But on this September morning, as North surprises the crowd from behind, he is momentarily awkward and self-conscious. There is a flash of insecurity that recalls, for the briefest moment, the Senate Caucus Room in July, 1987, when a youthful 43-year-old Marine did his Jimmy Stewart best to convince a nation to embrace his sometimes lonely, secret war against the communist bear.

From the back of the crowd, numbering about 100, chanting begins--”OL-LIE! OL-OLIE!”--and a lopsided smile starts to crack across North’s face. Northern Virginia, with its suburban D.C. pockets of liberalism, can be dicey territory for North. But here in Leesburg, the site of a bloody Union defeat on nearby bluffs above the Potomac River, he is in solid conservative territory. And he’s among neighbors: His $1.17-million, 194-acre farmhouse estate, named Narnia after the fantasy land in C.S. Lewis’ children’s books, is just over the county line.

The autograph pen comes out, the hand begins the politician’s shake, and within a few minutes North is standing next to a bronzed statue of Gen. George C. Marshall urging his followers to “create a new generation of leadership”--starting with him. “Some of this is blatant self-interest,” he accedes, with a Reagan-like nod of the head, “because I am also a Loudoun County businessman, and the law officers in Loudoun County wear the armor that my company makes there in Sterling, Va. It has saved the lives of law officers all over America. The employees there are mostly minorities, they are mostly people who otherwise wouldn’t have a job. But they do have a job because we have a free-enterprise system that allows them to go out and work and get the blessed dignity of an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work.”

But not for long. Not if President Clinton and his cronies, foremost among them Democratic opponent Sen. Charles S. Robb, continue to tax and regulate businesses to death. Not if they can continue their “wrongheaded” foreign policy and attacks on the U.S. Constitution. “I ask you for your prayers,” North calls out to the crowd of well-dressed white professionals and housewives. “Professional pundits tell me all the time you can’t talk about the power of prayer in modern elections. We shall see, friends. We . . . shall . . . see.”

After that warm-up, North confidently plunges into the crowd; he’s been on the campaign trail since January, and before that he was a regular among conservative groups that paid upward of $25,000 to fawn over him. The back-pats and photo ops are interrupted when the local Statehouse delegate introduces North to one voter who still isn’t convinced: Kathy Adcock, Republican mother of two young boys. With an accent as soft as the Virginia horizon, Adcock tells North that she is concerned about “whether the controversy between you and Congress is going to pose any problems in your ability to work with Congress.”

Through long eyelashes, North fixes his gaze on her and delivers a vigorous, single-minded defense of his campaign that goes on for several minutes, as aides and fans try to divert his attention. “I’m not going to be passive. I’m going to be the most energetic United States senator you have ever seen, and that’s how you build a consensus.” Finally, he turns away, apparently thinking he’s charmed another convert. If so, he’s wrong. “I agree with what he says” about the issues, Adcock tells me. But because he sees Congress as the enemy, “I just don’t think he can do it.”

Fifteen minutes later, North is inside the local hangout across the street, Leesburg Restaurant, shaking hands with mostly awe-struck patrons. An attorney who looks to be in his 60s sits on a counter bar stool, in front of the bell-jarred doughnuts, sipping his coffee and pointedly minding his own business when North makes the mistake of patting him on the back and soliciting his vote.

“Well,” the man drawls thickly. “I’m sorry, I’m not going to vote for you.”

“Is that right?” asks North, hands on his hips, body coiled for the rebound. “Which one you gonna vote for?”

“I’m going to vote for Mr. Robb,” he answers as North’s supporters let out a low-level “o-o-o-o!”

“It’s America,” says North, waving down his supporters. “He’s allowed to do that.”

“For a while,” responds the attorney. “Once you get in, you’ll try to change that.”

“I wouldn’t try to change that. I ah--”

That dig catches North off-balance. By now, he should move on. But North has never been known as a quitter. He presses on with the cocksureness of a man experienced in talking his way past enemy lines.

“Let me just ask you one thing: Are your taxes high enough?”

The attorney firmly disputes North’s assertion that the Clinton Administration raised his taxes before he brings up what’s really on his mind.

“You’re lucky to be out,” the attorney hisses. “You shouldn’t be running around here running for office. The place you should be is looking through the bars.” He holds his fists tight against his heavy jowls to mimic prison bars.

North’s jaw tightens. “I’ll tell you something, sir. I will put my credibility and my integrity up against anybody who’s there today and anybody who’s running. Because my motive is in saving the lives of other people.”

“You didn’t save other people. What you did was you trashed the Constitution.”

“Well,” North closes dismissively, “I believe in supporting the Constitution.” And turning away to a friendly supporter, he begins again with an energetic “How ya doing?”

*

Ollie North is the hero of his own life story, a story that pollsters say has earned him the adulation of about one-quarter of Virginia’s voters and the scorn of nearly half. “Some people have portrayed our family as unusually patriotic,” he writes of his childhood in his best-selling book “Under Fire.” “My own 3d Squad would comment that I was very brave. . . . But it wasn’t bravery that pushed me to act,” he continues in the next installment, “One More Mission.” He is, in this story, a man who pushed his Marines too hard, who always works too much, who is too dedicated to the cause of liberty and freedom. His stock line about the Iran-Contra affair is that he made some mistakes, but he did it to “save lives.”

Now, in Act III of a story that has already moved from courageous Marine to courageous statesman for the Reagan White House, North is trying to launch a career as courageous politician--out to save Congress from itself. To do so, he has transformed himself into the true son of that modern-day Republican hero, Ronald Reagan. Even the plot feels eerily familiar: North as the gap-toothed innocent waging a red-white-and-blue crusade against an entrenched and powerful liberal elite.

In many ways, the comparison works, though the Reagan he’s emulating is more the combative cowboy of the 1970s than the avuncular old man who left office in 1988. North has the same aw-shucks demeanor--right down to the ranch-hand garb in his TV spots--and a penchant for telling a story that sometimes stretches fact. He wears a self-proclaimed label as family man, man of prayer and patriot on his rolled-up sleeve. He describes a Norman Rockwell childhood and wonders aloud why we can’t turn the pages back. His campaign video uses a similar glib shorthand to describe the supposed dangers of a “radical” left: With its strung-together shots of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Jane Fonda, it harks back to the GOP circa 1980 (just substitute Jimmy Carter for Clinton).

North even displays a Reagan-esque awkwardness on racial issues. The media lunged at him for comments supporting the display of the Confederate flag, a symbol of slavery to much of the South’s African-American community. Other comments go unnoticed. North says he wants to reach out to black voters left in the lurch by the withdrawal of black former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who had been running for the Senate as an independent. But at his Leesburg campaign stop, North praised Wilder as a man who “made it before the era of quotas and all that.”

And like Reagan, North is a fierce partisan. When U.S. troops recently poured into the Persian Gulf, he asserted that Clinton’s military was too weak to fend off an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, raising questions about North’s patriotism. He later backed off, but insisted that “Bill Clinton is not my commander in chief.”

In a year when Republicans might gain a majority in the House for the first time since the mid-1950s, and stand a better-than-even chance of capturing the Senate after losing it in 1986, North’s campaign is the perfect expression of the anti-incumbent mood sweeping the country. In an August national survey by GOP pollster Frank Luntz, 44% of respondents considered the government an obstacle to “achieving the American dream.” In this year’s congressional races, that anger has led to tight contests for such lords of liberalism as Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Pennsylvania Sen. Harris Wofford and House Speaker Thomas S. Foley of Washington. At the state level, Democratic stalwarts such as New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Texas Gov. Ann Richards are fighting for their political lives.

With his “get-the-government-the-heck-outta-there” message, North hopes to surf that conservative populist sentiment straight into Room 493 of the Russell Senate Office Building. North’s election to a body he calls “the imperial Congress” would be the ultimate flip-off from a frustrated electorate to a smug political Establishment. “This guy sends an in-your-face message to official Washington at a time when public esteem for political institutions is very, very low,” says Mark Rozell, political science professor at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va. What better way to drive home voter anger at government than to elect someone like North, who, after all, is the person official Washington least respects?

If only it were that simple. With 45% of Virginia voters expressing a negative opinion of North, according to Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research, he is one of the most polarizing political figures in the state’s history. Divisions that deep are relatively new to a state that prefers its politicians to exhibit all the personality of a dead fish. “North,” says Alan Secrest, who has polled Virginia voters on behalf of Democratic House candidates, “stands out like a sore thumb in the panoply of Virginia political figures. But then, so does Chuck Robb.”

That’s Charles S. Robb, (the C.S. stands for “Clinton Supporter,” North likes to joke.) Former leading light of Virginia’s Democratic politics. Upstanding former Marine who served combat duty in Vietnam. Married to L.B.J.’s daughter Lynda Bird Johnson. So popular was he as governor that “in 1985 he would have won near-unanimously if Virginia allowed consecutive terms,” according to the Almanac of American Politics. When he was elected to the Senate in 1988, there was talk that he (not Bill Clinton) would be the figure to create a winning center-right coalition in the Democratic Party. His fall from grace was swift and ugly. During the past few years, Robb has answered rumors of extramarital affairs and attendance at drug parties with responses so tortuous he’s become the butt of jokes among supporters as well as detractors. (His assertion that he “hadn’t slept with anyone” other than his wife led to ribald speculation about his preferred sexual activities.)

On top of that, Robb’s campaign for reelection has been notable for what it lacks. He has raised only a fraction of North’s war chest and isn’t nearly as visible on the campaign trail, a problem his aides attribute to a heavy Senate schedule. Robb appears to be banking heavily on a round of TV spots to run in the last weeks of the campaign.

All this should make the senator an easy target for North, but this is Virginia, home to chief architects of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. North’s celebrity status actually carries him further in other parts of the country: A June U.S. News & World Report poll found that 45% of Americans have a favorable opinion of North, in contrast to 37% with a negative opinion. Virginia may be one of the most conservative states in the Union, home to national religious-right organizations and a wide variety of residents with military ties. But it is also one that turns a cold shoulder to anyone perceived to be messing with America’s historical traditions.

Or with its democratic system of checks and balances. Many voters have not forgotten that as a junior official in the White House’s National Security Council, North skirted congressional prohibitions on involvement in Nicaragua’s civil war by funneling millions of dollars to the Contras. Who in the White House knew what when--and to what extent North was acting under orders--is still a matter of contention. But this much is clear: In 1989, he was convicted of misleading members of Congress about his activities, shredding documents to hide evidence and accepting a gratuity in the form of a $13,800 security gate from a businessman who profited from the gun-runs. (North said he needed the gate to protect his family against terrorists.) A federal appeals court later reversed one conviction and set aside the others because of concerns that his five days of testimony before Congress, for which he was given immunity from prosecution, had prevented him from getting a fair trial.

North has also admitted to being involved in selling arms to Iranian intermediaries in return for using their influence to release American hostages held by Middle East terrorists. Three hostages were released, but three more were taken, suggesting the validity of the stated U.S. policy that negotiating with terrorists only puts American lives at risk.

North’s “I-made-mistakes-to-save-lives” response to these charges is part of the myth he has constructed around himself. If he acted unwisely, he did it in answering to a higher calling, not succumbing to personal weakness, like Robb or even President Clinton. His ads portray him as a war hero who saved the lives of his men. And at campaign stops, this is the line North relishes repeating: “I’ve never broken a commitment.”

*

I am standing in the shadow of a 20-foot rubber duck. A band in the background is doing a passable imitation of the Marshall Tucker Band. And North press aide Dan McLagan, blue-jeaned veteran of campaigns for former President George Bush and other major candidates, is telling me that he works for the “most honest, believable, trustworthy candidate I’ve ever seen.”

North never sought out the wealth and fame accorded him after the Iran-Contra hearings, McLagan notes. “He was put $9 million in debt. It ended his career as a Marine officer, which is all he ever wanted to do. Just because he persevered, the media seems to be upset about that, like they didn’t bury him deep enough.”

In the world of good and evil that Ollie North has bisected for himself, the media clearly fall into the latter. “The people are a lot nicer, and the press is just as vicious as I always expected it to be,” North says in reflecting on his first campaign. On the stump, he gets plenty of laughs at the expense of the New York Crimes, the Washington Compost, the Nasty Broadcasting Company. He elicits the same rounds of hearty guffaws when he attacks the “potentates of pork” in Congress.

Oliver North’s appeal stands as a testament to the success of Republican strategists who for years have longed to transform deeply rooted American populist sentiments against the rich and big business into populism that opposes big government and the liberal media. To his supporters at the Fredericksburg park this Saturday afternoon, North is the little guy who stood up to the faceless, corrupt machine and almost got crushed. He captures their own feelings of helplessness, of being cut out of the political system, the press, even decisions in their own schools and workplaces. Questions about the Iran-Contra affair elicit responses with an underlying message of: Let’s not be naive, we know how the real world works--The little guy always gets screwed.

“A lonely lieutenant colonel taking the whole fall for a big incident like that?” asks a skeptical Mitchell Wood, as he shifts his 4-year-old son’s weight around on top of his shoulders. “That didn’t seem to cut it with me. I work for a Marine base. I’m a civilian worker there. I see what happens to the little guy. If something happens, you ain’t gonna see the upper management go down the tunnel. Lt. Col. North was at the bottom of the ladder. No general had to go into those hearings. The President didn’t even have to show up.”

As North makes his way through this crowd, there’s a lot of give-and-take between him and people like Woods. Many of his fans speak forcefully of church and prayer. “God love ya, ‘preciate that,” he’ll respond to offers of encouragement. According to supporters here and elsewhere, Virginia churches play a strong role in turning out voters to North events.

North, a former Catholic who now belongs to an evangelical Episcopalian church, was born again in the early 1970s after a near-divorce and an emotional breakdown that left him hospitalized for 22 days in Bethesda Naval Hospital. After a back injury, North recalls in his first book, a friend and Marine superior cured him with the power of prayer. Since then North--who still admits to working long hours that leave little family time--has found God and renewed appreciation for his family. He routinely calls his wife, Betsy, his “best friend” and always reminds himself that his four children, ranging in age from 12 to 25, are “on loan from God.”

Robb, though, wants to portray him as a less-than-holy crusader, calling his opponent someone who “has had real problems with the truth.” This accusation hits home harder than most political mud-slinging because a number of North’s former colleagues have also expressed concerns recently about his credibility. Gen. Colin L. Powell, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been quoted saying he wouldn’t feel “comfortable” with North in the Senate. Former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane has publicly branded North a liar. U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a Contra supporter, told Reader’s Digest that North “told lies and got away with it.” A number of stories North has told, featuring his alleged personal access to important figures such as Reagan and the late CIA Director William J. Casey, have been challenged. North has responded by saying that different people recall events differently.

Ben Bradlee Jr.’s biography, “Guts and Glory,” presents North as a Marine combat officer, and later a training instructor at Quantico, who had a flair for the dramatics and knew how to tell superiors what they wanted to hear. One retired Marine described his former colleague to Bradlee as “a mile wide and an inch deep . . . Ollie liked the limelight--he liked briefing (generals).” His superiors, on the other hand, recall a gung-ho, can-do officer who got the job done without a lot of fuss.

That’s the Ollie North the crowd today wants to see as they await the upcoming rubber duck race on Fredericksburg’s Rappahannock River, an annual GOP fund-raiser. “He was an excellent Marine. He did his job,” Kathy Zimmerman says in the clipped tones of a military wife. “He knew how to follow orders. He did what was right.”

Her friend chimes in: “He’s an American hero.”

If his Marine’s code of honor has appeal, North’s image as a conservative martyr crushed by an “imperial Congress” and “hostile media” takes him even further nationally. After his 1987 appearance before Congress, North collected enough money from around the country to cover a $9-million legal fee and then some. His national fund-raising machine remains formidable: With the help of out-of-state events and direct-mail appeals, North raised more than $8 million for his campaign by last June, and since then he continues to mine a list of donors to bring in millions more.

But he remains a divisive figure even within his own political party. Last spring, when North was narrowly nominated, some Republicans couldn’t forgive a man who laid the blame for Iran-Contra squarely at the foot of his popular commander-in-chief, asserting in his book that Reagan knew all. Reagan himself earlier this year responded with a letter to former Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada, complaining that he was getting “pretty steamed” after hearing North’s version of events.

Foremost among North’s Republican critics is Virginia’s other senator, John Warner, better known nationally as Elizabeth Taylor husband No. 7. Warner endorsed the alternative Republican candidate in this race, Marshall Coleman, who is running as an independent. Coleman, a former lieutenant governor who has the clean good looks of a local TV anchor, has a tiny paid staff and a fraction of North’s money. Still, by early October he has moved up in the polls from the single digits to about 18%, and he insists he’ll continue his campaign because Virginians deserve a better choice. At a campaign stop at the foot of the Shenandoah Mountains, he seemed a lonely figure as he ducked into a restaurant to shake hands, two aides at his side. “I think North abused his oath of office and abused the public office he served in,” Coleman says. “That is what is keeping most Virginians from supporting him.”

Maybe so. But as autumn wore on, the prospect of capturing control of the Senate proved too mouth-watering for most Republicans to stay away from North for long. One by one, key GOP figures have come home to roost in North’s nest: Bush, Laxalt, former Reagan Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and former Reagan Chief of Staff James A. Baker III. But probably the most symbolic show of support came from Washington’s quintessential insider, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, who initially expressed public doubts about endorsing North but campaigned with him last month.

North bristles at press accounts portraying Dole’s endorsement as less than enthusiastic--another example, he says, of how the hostile media won’t give him a break. But he acknowledges that Dole’s support “is probably as much political as it was personal. He’s a guy who really wants to get a Republican majority. He knows I’m a partisan. I’m not trying to marry Bob Dole, I just want him to be majority leader.”

As the Republican boat tips toward North, Warner may find himself out in the cold. Privately, some Republicans are accusing Warner of betraying the party at a critical point in history. Suggesting that the heat is on, Warner campaigned for Coleman one week in September; by the next week, his press secretary said he didn’t have time for a brief interview about the race.

Even with the support among big-name Republicans, North will need all the Reagan-esque charm he can muster to expand his support beyond his hard-core base of 25%-30% and top Robb in next month’s vote. Wilder, the more lively former governor, dropped out of the race in mid-September, leaving Robb and North neck-and-neck in a campaign almost as depressing to Virginians as Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial race, when voters had to choose between a man twice acquitted of racketeering charges and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. “I hate like heck to see Virginia compared to Louisiana,” complains political science professor Rozell. “This state has such a sense of history. It’s disturbing to have elections like this.”

Back in Leesburg, I’d asked North how often he encounters voters who react strongly against him. “Oh, I’d say one out of every couple hundred or so,” he responds, looking intently for another open restaurant to descend upon. “It’s politics. If people have a thin skin . . . I don’t know if you noticed, but sitting on our dashboard is the state bird of Texas, the armadillo.”

North likes to remind his voters that his “hometown” is San Antonio, Tex. It goes over well in this Southern border state, like the cowboy boots and the trace of accent. But it’s all part of the Ollie myth. North was born in San Antonio. He grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. He hasn’t lived in Texas since he was 2.

Three days after the Fredericksburg visit, Rolling Thunder is barreling down the two-lane highways of Virginia’s Southside, which runs along the state’s border with North Carolina. “You’ve got to see North campaign in southern Virginia,” a Republican friend exhorted me. “Down there, they throw themselves across the railroad tracks for him.”

Not quite. But the enthusiasm is palpable. “North came here two years ago,” recalls Sylvia McLaughlin, editor of the News & Record in South Boston, a red-brick industrial town of textile mills and wood-processing plants about 70 miles southeast of Roanoke. “People who wouldn’t pay $5 for a school fund-raiser paid $25 a plate to see him! He got a standing ovation.”

At this end of the state, where the accents churn as thick as peanut soup, North has left behind the security car that normally tails him. Instead, his blue and white motor home leads a procession of reporters and local officials scurrying behind in their own cars. Midway through the morning, Rolling Thunder pulls to the side of the road and North wades into a field of droopy-eared tobacco leaves so that the local paper can take his picture with the farm’s owner. The photographer asks for North’s autograph.

This is conservative country; nearby Prince Edwards’ County is where Sen. Harry Flood Byrd Jr. shut down the public schools in 1957 rather than obey a federal court desegregation order. But it’s also still tied to its partisan roots and sent a tobacco Democrat, Lewis F. Payne, to Congress three times in a row.

We pass by peanut farms and pine forests and tobacco fields, through communities so small the mail is delivered by a federal car. The food stores on the highways outside tiny Chase City are fronted by ‘50s-era gas pumps and still have names like Whitten Bros. and Stone’s General Store--not 7-Eleven. The main drag of another town, South Hill, is pockmarked by econo-motels and fast-food chains, but the locals still prefer to swap gossip at Brian’s Steakhouse, where the waitress calls her customers “shug” and delivers a hearty breakfast for a buck-fifty.

In a South Hill parking lot, North warms up his autograph hand while he wades through a sea of fishing caps and Wrangler jeans. Already this year, he has signed T-shirts and shoes, bumper stickers and baby packs, books and photos. At a county fair last summer he signed a pig. This morning, a World War II veteran hands him his hat--USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay, 1945. If you don’t have a special memento for his signature, North will pull out his own specialized autograph card. Turning it sideways, his left hand awkwardly pulling the letters upward, he traces a friendly but dramatic “Ollie.” In his books, he often inscribes the Marine motto semper fi , “always faithful.”

When the crush subsides, North looks up and says, seemingly to no one in particular, “Is there a pickup?” And within seconds, his efficient, hiply dressed young aides have cleared a pathway to a truck; North’s boots lift him onto the tailgate and he starts talking. “Can’t hear!” someone calls from the back. “Well, fill in,” North says, waving the crowd forward. “This isn’t church. We’re not going to take up a collection.” Everyone laughs appreciatively and the bond is sealed.

North’s stump speech isn’t innovative. Cut taxes, cut big government, impose term limits, throw out the liberals who want to destroy our military. At times, when he seems to have run out of things to say, his thoughts start sounding like political cliches (“millstone of debt,” “rising tide of red ink”) linked together only by strings of non sequiturs.

Even with this crowd, though, North doesn’t mention the words abortion or guns . There’s no point in handing over any ammo to the enemy as he tries to broaden his base. Instead, he talks in a strange kind of code, decrying the Clinton Administration for altering the First Amendment “so that certain people can’t gather in front of certain buildings” (read: the Justice Department’s enforcement of prohibitions on abortion-clinic blockades). He adds to that the assertion that Clinton is revising the Second Amendment “so that certain things that look a certain way can no longer be purchased by certain people” (read: the ban on assault weapons contained in the crime bill just signed by the President).

North’s appeal is less in what he says than how he says it. He’s been called charismatic. Actually, it’s more accurate to call this mysterious aura his humanity. He has an honest rapport with “folks,” as he calls them, that is stronger even than his considerable TV appeal. He can be one of the guys with veterans, swapping places and battle dates as if they were baseball cards. He can be the earnest son, telling an elderly woman that her Social Security pay raises are a “vested entitlement” owed to “folks like you and my mom.” And, as someone who has been vigorously stumping for other Republican candidates in Virginia for three years, he knows his local politics inside and out. He talks rural routes and water rights with the ease of a born-and-bred Virginian. Today in South Hill, Mary Davidson, a bookkeeper and former kindergarten teacher, wants to test that commitment.

“At work I have the picture he sent me of his wife and family and dog. I like him. There’s no b---s--- about him,” Davidson tells me. “But that pipeline thang. That’s the only thang. They want to steal water from our lake! I’m gonna vote for him if he will stay out of that.” Davidson is referring to a pipeline that threatens to divert water from a nearby recreational lake and ship it off to the growing metropolitan area of Virginia Beach. But she’s too nervous to ask the colonel; he is, after all, a national celebrity. So I offer to raise it for her as North makes his way through the adoring crowd.

“I think the federal government ought to get the dickens out of it and make sure the governor does the right thing by the people at both ends,” he tells Davidson without missing a beat, “to make sure the landowners in the periphery and the sportsmen that use it won’t be hurt by it. We sure don’t need the federal government negotiating--they couldn’t even solve a baseball strike.”

As far as Mary Davidson is concerned, Ollie North has just hit a home run. She’s satisfied, thrilled even, with his answer. As North moves on, Davidson whispers to me in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m just glad he didn’t wear his suit-coat. He needs to be casual ‘round these parts.”

It’s days before former President Jimmy Carter’s peaceful agreement with the Haitian military junta, and war is in the air as President Clinton readies the U.S. military for an invasion of the Caribbean island. On the campaign trail, North has begun his exhortation that “Clinton’s poll numbers are not worth one drop of American blood.”

On this day, North, who stoked the civil war in Nicaragua and helped push the American invasion of tiny Grenada despite the objections of the administration of the American medical school there, is telling me there is “no rational justification” for an invasion of Haiti. “If American lives are at risk, if American vital interests are at risk. . . . But this isn’t Grenada. There is no comparison. We had 804 medical students. I know, I was there. It just doesn’t make sense. If you want to bring about a democratic solution in a place like Haiti, you don’t need 20,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.”

What would he do about Haiti as a U.S. senator? “I would have demanded hearings. And we’ll have a (Republican) majority up there and we ought to have hearings.”

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted Haitian leader that Clinton wants to return to power, is no friend of the American right. So the first part of North’s answer comes as no surprise. The second part, however, where he highlights the importance of congressional oversight in matters of war, is more than a little jarring to hear, given North’s history.

But before the candidate has the opportunity to answer any more questions, the voice of an elderly woman suddenly fills the air. “I’m a praying person,” she calls out as she walks to her car, gray hair in a neat bun, eyes avoiding direct contact with North. “And let me tell you, I’m going to pray: God, save us from Ollie North!”

As she settles into her station wagon, its rear bumper just inches from North’s right calf, an aide interrupts the candidate. “Let’s get out of here,” the aide says, “before she gets the wrong idea.”

Quickly and efficiently, he ushers North across the parking lot and they retreat into the privacy of Rolling Thunder, confident they’re on the road to Washington.