Sunday profile : One Voice, Many Channels : Although he doesn’t hold an elected office, Hugh Hewitt is involved in Orange County politics through his radio and TV work, through books and columns and, now, as a Wilson appointee to the regional AQMD board.

The folks on the cul-de-sac know Betsy better than Hugh. She’s the one who’s at home most. She bakes brownies for a neighbor frazzled from a kitchen remodel. She shares sunny waves with friends from the helm of her van. She loans her Phillips CQ screwdriver to the other wives of unhandymen.

“So, have you got a husband tonight?” her Irvine neighbors will ask in jest.

That’s because they know her husband, Hugh Hewitt, is as busy these days as Colin Powell’s book agent.

TV show host. Radio personality. Lawyer to builders. Law professor. Columnist. Air-quality regulator.

Hewitt is a vocal conservative--graduate of the Reagan Administration, friend of the late Richard M. Nixon--frequently embroiled in Orange County politics from the cool distance of the sidelines.

He co-hosts a weekly TV talk show on KCET and hosted a weekly three-hour radio show on KFI-AM until resigning last weekCQ 9/17. He is Gov. Pete Wilson’s newest appointee to the mighty South Coast Air Quality Management District. A lawyer by trade, profession, starting this month he is also a law professor at Chapman University in Orange.

And, in a project that will bring him national exposure, Hewitt will host an upcoming PBS show, [date is below], “Searching for God in America.” He will write and edit a book by the same name that publishers, he says, think will rival William Bennett’s best-selling “Book ofVirtues.”

“We often tease Betsy,” friend and longtime neighbor Sharon Hufstader CQ says in a Carolina drawl, “that we realize she will probably have to move, once Hugh runs for President.”

Hewitt may have no designs on the White House, but he is certainly among the most recognizable voices of conservative politics in Southern California.

When Orange County was casting about for a temporary CEO to run the bankrupt government, the conservative Lincoln Club suggested Hewitt to the Board of Supervisors as a candidate.

Hewitt said he spoke with some of the supervisors because he felt he could offer “a clear theory of how government ought to operate.” He withdrew his candidacy early on, though, when support appeared to be leaning elsewhere.

Hewitt has worn many labels in his 39 years, but never the one that says “elected.”

Some insiders say Hewitt has accumulated enough political chits and horsepower after just five years in Orange County to run for state office if he felt like it. He says he doesn’t.

Fans of his free-lance punditry see him as a Republican renaissance man: reasonable, erudite, informed. Critics see him as a rightist troglodyte: an inflexible ideologue echoing the rhetoric of big-spending--but unsuccessful--Senate candidate Mike Huffington.

If not elected office, what does Hugh Hewitt want?

For starters, he wants privacy. He initially refused to be interviewed for this story, quoting 18th-Century lexicographer and author Samuel Johnson: “No man takes my measure but my tailor.” Hewitt, with stand-up comic timing, added: “And I don’t have a tailor.”

He considers himself a journalist, which may be a matter of semantics.

“I am absolutely a part of the elite media,” he says, but many would argue he’s strictly an opinion maker. He pens hard-edged columns dressing down tax-and-spend politics, sometimes for the very media outfits--including the Los Angeles Times--that he thumps as liberal knee-jerks.

*

After criticizing the profile format as a highly subjective form of journalism and lambasting several Times reporters he has encountered in his many enterprises, Hewitt reluctantly agreed to talk. There would be conditions. They included limited discussion of his private life. There would be no talk of relationships beyond parents, friends and spouse, no answers to questions about childhood mischief and girlfriends and did he ever inhale.

“That is of no consequence,” he says. “Hundreds of times I’ve been asked those questions. I neither ask them nor allow myself to answer them.”

*

The sleek new law offices of Hewitt & McGuire are housed in twin ebony towers rising from the crossroads of Jamboree and MacArthur boulevards in Newport Beach. Ten stories below the windows of his suite is the San Joaquin Marsh, among the most coveted of the county’s wetlands. It is not known to be a habitat of the threatened gnatcatcher, which lives on land Hewitt’s clients fought to build on. But it’s close enough for the tiny songbirds to fly by.

Avowed liberal Mark Petracca, a UC Irvine associate political science professor who disagrees with Hewitt on most issues, has to cackle about Hewitt’s office vista. “Now he can shoot whatever gnatcatchers remain out his own window!”

Hewitt doesn’t seem bothered by the barbs of his left-leaning friends, of which there are a startling number. They may hate his political stands, but many liberals admire and like him. Some of his best friends, in fact.

Take Mark Gearan, until last month the spokesman for the most powerful Democrat in the world. Gearan, the new director of the Peace Corps, led White House communications for President Bill Clinton until late August.

Gearan marvels, thinking back on their undergrad days. He was working for his liberal Massachusetts congressman, Richard F. Drinan, a Jesuit priest who had been the first member of Congress to draft legislation calling for Nixon’s impeachment.

“I met Hugh right after Nixon resigned, when he was among a small minority of people who were defending the Nixon Administration,” Gearan says. “From Day One, we disagreed. Some things we could appreciate in each other’s perspective, but I had never met such a young conservative. I’ve tried, with obvious limited success, to persuade him on many issues, but I just think he’s severely misguided in his views. But it has provided robust dinner conversation.”

Flying out on Air Force One with Clinton to attend Nixon’s funeral in Yorba Linda last year, Gearan said, he mused at how his path has crossed with that of his old pal, who had been director of the Nixon Library & Birthplace when it opened.

“I’ve gone through his move to California for Nixon, my working on the [Michael S.] Dukakis campaign and the Clinton campaign. And it’s an interesting dynamic where your closest friend says, ‘I hope for you that Clinton wins, but for the country I hope he doesn’t.’ ”

Asked what he sees for his friend down the road, Gearan thinks before answering. “I just think he wants to make a difference in society. I could foresee a future that has no political office. I think he is committed to making a difference in ways that are different, whether an appointment by the governor, instructing young minds, a discourse on TV. . . . As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, he wants to be involved in the action and passion of our times. That sums Hugh up; I’ve seen that in him over the past 20 years.”

*

Conversation with Hewitt is generally about ideas and challenging them. You almost always know how Hewitt thinks, friends say, but he is more circumspect about how he feels.

Close up, Hewitt looks younger than his graying hair suggests on the TV screen.

During a 3 1/2-hour interview with a reporter he didn’t really want to talk to, for a story he’d rather was not written, Hewitt is thoughtful and breaks only once, to brew a fresh pot of coffee.

His choices in life have been shaped not only by intellectual study and hard work, he says, but by glorious luck and timing.

The youngest of three sons, Hewitt was born and raised in Warren, Ohio, a “wonderful little industrial town.” It was in this Catholic stronghold, with a population then of about 100,000, that he attended parochial schools.

His father, a Presbyterian, practices insurance defense law; his mother, a Roman Catholic, was a registered nurse before retiring to have her brood.

“Phenomenally bad at sports,” Hewitt says, he was drawn instead to the speech and debate teams at Kennedy High School. In those areas, he admits, he did superbly.

He was accepted at Yale, Cornell and other universities, but followed his brother to Harvard, where the only thing he’d decided upon arrival in 1973 was that he would not major in science, as his brother had.

The family is largely apolitical, registered Republicans who faithfully vote but never get involved personally, he says. One brother, a toxicologist involved in scientific research, follows issues that concern his field; the other brother, a banker, is indifferent to politics.

*

Yet, by the time Watergate hearings were tightening the noose around Nixon in 1973 and Hewitt was off to college, his conservative ideology was cementing.

“Intellectually, I was already, not so much pro-Nixon as I was, first and foremost, an anti-Communist and always have been,” he says, adding that he got that from reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident who was exiled after writing critically of his country’s prison camps. “That’s my political and ideological compass.”

In college, Hewitt began supporting individual political candidates whose ideology seemed attuned to his own.

“I was not active in a single political partisan campaign until my freshman year at Harvard, when it was recommended that one way to experience politics was to involve yourself in a campaign. And I worked in a campaign for a guy who lost,” Hewitt says.

He stuffed envelopes and walked precincts for Paul Cronin, an incumbent whom Hewitt supported as a Yankee conservative--”which is not a Ronald Reagan Republican by any means”--who lost to Democrat Paul Tsongas in the post-Watergate sweep of Republicans from Congress.

Hewitt next, and more fervently, worked for Gerald R. Ford’s presidential campaign, acting as state youth director for Massachusetts. Ford’s odds of winning were so minuscule in the state, though, that he didn’t bother campaigning there.

“Our only significant contribution was we managed to get a few hundred people up to a New Hampshire rally, which was a contested state,” Hewitt says.

Still, it was his first brush with a man who would become President.

*

Hewitt thinks his life has had its share of breaks. Some speak to the perks of attending an Ivy League school and the connections it can deliver.

Neoconservative Bill Kristol, for example, a hot commodity in Washington circles who recently launched a national magazine called Weekly Standard, read and critiqued Hewitt’s senior thesis at Harvard.

After completing his undergraduate degree in 1978 but failing to get accepted at the law schools of his choice--University of Michigan and Harvard, among them--Hewitt was adrift with no real plan.

One day while walking along a Cambridge street, Hewitt ran into a classmate, Ed Mansfield, son of a legendary Harvard political philosophy professor who leads one of the premier intellectual schools of conservative thought.

That chance meeting led to a job as a researcher for Nixon’s son-in-law, David Eisenhower, who was writing a book about his war-hero-President grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hewitt packed up his car and drove to San Clemente to work on the project.

Working out of the former Western White House, Hewitt spent the next eight months helping research “Eisenhower at War,” an epic book on World War II.

In February 1979, Hewitt began what proved to be a defining relationship in his life. He spent hours every day with Richard Nixon at a time when he began emerging from the dark period after his 1974 resignation. Hewitt became research assistant to Nixon on his book “Real War,” which was scheduled to be published in time to influence the 1980 presidential election.

Living in a tiny San Clemente apartment, shopping with his bachelor grocery list at Albertsons, Hewitt began making political connections in the county in which he would eventually settle.

Some new friends mentioned that “a real comer” named Pete Wilson was speaking at a fund-raiser in San Diego that Hewitt he ought to check it out. There, at the Wilson for Mayor event, Hewitt met his future wife, Betsy. She was attending for social reasons more than anything, Hewitt said, but the couple today like to thank Wilson for “13 years of happy marriage.”

*

When Nixon moved back to New York to finish his book, Hewitt moved there as well. Betsy took a job in Washington, D.C., managing some of the scads of trade groups in town. Hewitt quickly realized he would never be a New Yorker.

But he was very fond of his boss, who thanked Hewitt in the book’s foreword.

“Fortuna, fortuna, fortuna, “ Hewitt said of his “sheer luck that I was able to work with a great man in history at close quarters.”

After that, Hewitt decided to give law school another shot and was accepted to the University of Michigan. He graduated with honors in 1983.

In his first job out of law school, Hewitt was hired as a law clerk to Roger Robb of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But when Robb suffered a stroke, Hewitt found himself working for several other judges.

Those other judges? Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robert H. Bork, Kenneth W. Starr, J. Skelly Wright, Spotswood Robinson III and George E. MacKinnon. All are prominent legal heavyweights, the first two now U.S. Supreme Court justices.

His second job out of law school was as a special assistant to Atty. Gen. William French Smith, who was Ronald Reagan’s personal adviser and who became a mentor to Hewitt.

The young attorney spent the next six and a half years ascending jobs in the Reagan Administration--working in several agencies.

His loyalty to Nixon paid off time and again, Hewitt said.

“The Nixon influence on my life cannot be overstated. It was always beneficial to have worked for him.”

When Nixon next tapped Hewitt on the shoulder, it was to head construction and opening of his $22-million Yorba Linda presidential library. Hewitt left his post as deputy director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to accept the job in Orange County.

*

Many Nixon loyalists still rave about Hewitt’s shepherding of the library opening in 1990, which was attended by all the living Chiefs of State.

But it was during that time that Hewitt committed a widely publicized gaffe. It forced Nixon to make a public clarification and inflamed Hewitt’s disdain for most journalists.

Hewitt made what he describes as a “throwaway” remark at the conclusion of a Times interview. When asked about access to the library’s papers, he responded that the likes of Watergate reporter Bob Woodward would not get in.

Hewitt recalls Nixon simply saying with a sigh, “Hugh, waddya doing? You know that’s not how I feel.’ ”

When Hewitt returned a short time later to private legal practice full time, some reporters speculated that his controversial remark cost him the library job. Library spokesman Kevin Cartwright dismisses this. He said Hewitt always intended to turn the job over to present library director John Taylor. It was for that reason, Cartwright said, that while still at the library, Hewitt had taken the part-time job at the law offices of Pettis, Tester, Kruse & Krinsky.

The firm was formed by the first group of attorneys from the California mega-firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to peel off from the mother ship.

Hewitt focused on land use and federal environmental law.

“He brought in a very large number of clients very quickly,” says former partner Bruce A. Tester. “Clients tend to like him a lot. He has great confidence, a great sense of humor; he works hard, and he cares about his clients,”

Hewitt’s most prominent case was representing the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California’s Endangered Species Committee, which was battling for building rights on private land designated as gnatcatcher habitat.

*

It was, ironically, the tiny gnatcatcher that helped give Hewitt unfettered media platforms for dispensing his opinions.

Someone at KFI 640, the Los Angeles-based talk radio station, overheard Hewitt speaking at a press conference about the gnatcatcher battles. “They thought I sounded like I knew what I was talking about,” Hewitt says with a shrug.

They put him on the air as host of a call-in show.

“The voice of reason,” as he called himself on the air, had most recently been heard Sundays from 9 p.m. to midnight. His conservative politics--friends view him as much Libertarian as Republican--and market economics are especially appealing to Orange County listeners, whose concerns seemed seldom to be addressed on L.A.-based talk shows.

Arbitron ratings for the past three months show the highest listener count during Hewitt’s third hour, which he has recently devoted to his newest passion, religion and spirituality.

By the fall of 1991, Hewitt was not only drawing thousands of listeners to his radio show but also was a co-host on “Life & Times,” a public-affairs program produced by PBS affiliate KCET in Los Angeles. The Emmy-winning show was designed to bring well-read but divergent commentators to debate the issues of the day: Hewitt is the show’s designated conservative voice.

Ratings for the show have risen steadily since it was launched--a station spokeswoman says it attracts an average weekly audience of nearly half a million.

Another co-host of “Life & Times,” Kerman Maddox, a liberal Los Angeles City College District political science professor who is African American and lives in the Crenshaw District, says he and Hewitt are polar opposites.

Still, Maddox is quite fond of Hewitt.

Racism, he said, is the ugliest subject on earth. “Most people I can’t talk to about race; it’s just too sensitive. I can talk to Hugh about race.”

When he is running errands in his district neighborhood, Maddox adds, Hewitt is the co-host that people most often ask about.

“They’ll say, ‘What is the deal with him? Where does he get off?’ I think it’s because he is very different from most of the people in my area in terms of thoughts and beliefs and the foundations of how they came to them.”

A sampler of Hewitt’s views: He opposes affirmative-action programs; opposed Measure R, the failed Orange County sales tax hike; opposed Wilson-backed Proposition 187 to outlaw most public aid for non-residents (he dislikes initiatives), and favors abortion rights but would deny juvenile access without parental or judicial consent.

Hewitt’s intense interest in “people’s faith lives,” made him a natural choice to host “Searching for God in America,” said KCET station manager Stephen Kulczycki, co-producer of the show. The eight-part series will air on 315 PBS stations in fall 1996.

Already Hewitt has gone to Atlanta to interview the Dalai Lama, who just completed a brief U.S. visit. Writings on religion by great thinkers, the transcripts of the show and Hewitt’s commentary will comprise the accompanying “Searching for God” book that is due to which publisher in about 90 days.

To give himself more time for the twin projects, Hewitt says, he decided to give up his weekly radio show, which he announced on the air last Sunday.

The book will be his second: Straight out of college he wrote “First Principles: A Primer of Ideas for the College-Bound Student.”

Hewitt has also written regularly for a variety of local and national publications.

Among them is O.C. Metropolitan, a biweekly magazine. Hewitt got his column there after a former editor asked Orange County Republican Party Chairman Thomas A. Fuentes for his first choice for a conservative pundit.

Friends say his columns are hipper than one would expect for such conservative views. But “he’s definitely pop-culturally challenged,” says Bill Lobdell, a friend and editor of the Daily Pilot newspaper. Lobdell adds: “He’s kind of stuck in the ‘60s musically. The Beach Boys, Joan Baez. . . . We had to tell him who the Cranberries are.”

With no shortage of media outlets, Hewitt says he responds very little to reporters’ comments and inquiries. “If I have something to say, I will either say it on my radio show or my television show or my columns. I have learned that lesson over and over again, but I’m really convinced of it now.”

At one point, in a bit of bravado that astonished Hewitt’s opponents on the gnatcatcher issue, he gained entry to a press conference they were holding by wearing press credentials. When asked about the blending of his roles as lawyer and broadcaster, he all but yawns, explaining that he had no other choice given his lack of an invite to the media event to tell his side.

As if he needed more exposure.

By the time Hewitt and nine other lawyers set up a new firm two years ago, he was already packing political freight.

“He is known because of his radio and TV shows,” says former law partner Tester, “and he came out of significant jobs in Washington, D.C., and was already well-known and wired with local Republicans.”

Tester laughs slightly. “You also can’t forget the corrolary: You always want to be on the good side of people with their own TV and radio shows.”

*

Hewitt may ultimately have the most far-reaching impact on Southern California as one of 12 members of the region’s AQMD, the smog-busting agency with authority to regulate all industry in its jurisdiction. The board governs Orange, L.A. and parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties in its mission to have the region comply with the federal Clean Air Act.

Which means he will help dictate what 12 million Southern Californians breathe.

Hewitt’s appointment followed years of his scathing attacks on the board and its staff. He wrote in an August 1992, National Review commentary that “the number one killer of business in California is the AQMD,” which is so powerful as to have “nearly dictatorial authority over four Southern California counties.”

He criticized the board’s “lethargy” and blamed it on members not being elected. He called it “a monstrous example of that growing phenomenon, the administrative state, under which we trade self-government for being ruled by self-aggrandizing managers.”

That would be none other than James Lents, executive officer of the AQMD, whom Hewitt described in the article as “straight out of Eastern European Central Casting-earnest, dour, technocratically confident.”

Of the board he is now a member of, Hewitt said: “They are expertly managed. The perks and prestige are great, and the regulations numbingly complex. The rubber stamp gets a workout.”

Lents demurs from verbal retaliation, saying that he gets along rather well with Hewitt although their views often differ. Lents has, however, said his biggest concern is whether the seond phase of an aggressive program called RECLAIM will pass next March. Backers of RECLAIM worry that some of the newer conservatives on the board will view the plan as too expensive to business.

Proponents of this most radical air cleanup plan in the country say that dire measures are needed to clean up the worst air quality in the nation and that clean air is good for business in the long term.

Hewitt says he hasn’t decided his position on what will possibly be the biggest vote in his four-year AQMD term.

RECLAIM requires dramatic reduction in smog-causing chemicals within 15 years in order to remain in compliance with federal laws. It is also a plan that may cost companies considerably in either more expensive approaches or researching alternative chemicals.

Its merits and shortcomings will fuel much debate in the coming months. Hewitt’s voice is expected to be among the loudest.

*

Those who share airspace with Hewitt on his Irvine cul-de-sac don’t always see eye-to-eye with him politically. But that doesn’t keep them from liking him.

Sharon Hufstader, who says her environmental views veer from Hewitt’s, says she is proud to have him as a neighbor. He’s a person she would call on in an emergency without hesitation.

Some time back, a kid in the neighborhood discovered a woman floating face down in the community hot tub and hollered for help. Hewitt raced to the fenced area and hopped the locked gate, landing badly and breaking his foot. Still, he helped pull the woman--who survived--from the water. “We were quite impressed in the neighborhood that he would sacrifice his foot to save someone,” Hufstader said.

But run for office?

Hewitt insists he has more influence by commenting on what others do.

If he were to run, say, for U.S. Senate--a scenario floated by a few locals--his time would not be his own, Hewitt says.

An elected official has to travel too much, he says. Besides, with his present schedule, he manages to see 60 movies a year--even if he has to catch them during the noon hour.

How could he still do that and run for office?