COLUMN ONE : Not Quite Ozzie and Harriet : Their home lives buck traditional images, but Dole, Gramm, Alexander and Buchanan represent the reality of the American family at a time when America is rethinking what the family ought to be.

Bob Dole divorced Phyllis a long time ago. But Phyllis (who married a rancher from Kansas, then wed her old high school sweetheart when the rancher died) says she’s always liked Bob’s second wife, Elizabeth.

Bob and Phyllis’ daughter, Robin, considers Elizabeth one of her best friends and has brunch with them every Sunday in Washington when she can. Phyllis still drops in occasionally on Bob’s two sisters, and Bob always makes it a point to phone Phyllis’ mother in New Hampshire several times a year.

Phil Gramm, whose mother was married five times, is divorced from his first wife, Sharon. But Sharon says she’s never held a grudge. Phil’s the godfather of the son she had with her new husband, which apparently was Sharon’s way of saying she didn’t mind that Phil came out of their breakup with the house in Texas, the furniture, the Ford LTD station wagon and the two St. Bernards.

Forty years ago, a nation looking at Adlai E. Stevenson III’s campaign for the presidency wondered if a divorced man could be elected. Nowadays, we well may wonder if there is anyone left who isn’t divorced. And what are they trying to hide?

In today’s political families, kids rebel, stay out late, march in controversial political rallies. Wives have careers, sometimes as powerful as those of their husbands. Dads wonder if they’re missing out by working so much. Ex-wives show up at fund-raisers.

In 1995, as Dole, Gramm, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander and TV commentator Patrick J. Buchanan battle for the Republican presidential nomination, theirs may not be precisely the kinds of families traditionally scripted to go to the White House. Yet they represent the reality of a time when the nation is no longer sure of how a family ought to look.

Indeed, voters who once embraced the First Family as their own version of royalty might now react with suspicion if the Pennsylvania Avenue address books and photo albums weren’t as marked-over as the rest of the country’s.

“Once we accepted Bill and Hillary Clinton on ’60 Minutes’ more or less admitting to past marital mistakes and having patched it up, I think there’s a level of sophistication now that unless we’re hit over the head with it in the most egregious way . . . the sanctity of marriage and sexual mores is less important than it used to be,” says Barbara Kellerman, a historian who has written several books on the American presidency and presidential families.

“I really think we’re beyond that, just as we’re beyond saying someone like Newt Gingrich or Bob Dole can’t talk about family values because they themselves had a divorce.”

At the same time, each of these four men aiming at the nation’s top job seems to have fashioned a comfortable and loving place that speaks for some of the best of what American families are becoming.

Gramm’s first marriage didn’t work out, but he was captivated on sight with the young economics graduate who would become his second wife and announced to his colleagues half an hour after he met her that he planned to marry her. Twenty-five years later, Gramm still calls his wife from the office every day, and she says he never ends a telephone conversation with his two sons, both away at college, without saying, “I love you.”

Buchanan, married for 25 years to a former Richard Nixon aide, has dinner and a movie with his brothers and sisters a few times a month and still counts his family as the defining force in his life. He had his audience in tears when he delivered his parents’ eulogies.

Dole and his wife celebrate their birthdays each year, a week apart, by hosting a party for a roomful of underprivileged teenagers. They consider these kinds of charitable ministries part of their family business, maybe because they don’t have a large nuclear family themselves. The way they see it, building the extended family is a way of nation building.

In many ways, says Alexander, it takes a lot more than a single family to raise a child. He remembers that from his childhood back in Maryville, Tenn.

“The general strategy of good neighborhoods and strong families is to keep the kids busy, and keep ‘em out of trouble,” he says. “So it wasn’t just my mother and my dad. It was the nosy neighbors and the algebra teacher and the scout troop that met every Monday night and took us hiking every weekend, and the church we got dragged to three or four times a week, whether we wanted to go or not. There was a whole conspiracy of forces to keep us busy and to remind us to learn the difference between right and wrong.”

In a country that is steadily turning back to religion as a way to find new roots, Buchanan’s Catholicism was a vital part of his growing up and has served as one of the leading passions of his life. Alexander attributes much of his world view to his Presbyterian upbringing and Dole takes time out each Sunday, usually accompanied by his daughter, to go to the Methodist church.

And in a party that has staked its legislative agenda on the rebuilding of the American family, all four men support many of the core family values issues upon which the conservative plank is based. Most support limits on welfare benefits for recipients able to work; most would require unwed teenage mothers to live with parents if possible and attend school as a condition of receiving welfare (though Alexander and Buchanan would leave those issues up to the states); all support voluntary prayer or a moment of silence in public schools; all are in favor of some increased limits on abortion.

Gramm, in a speech earlier this year, said he looks out across America and sees “Norman Rockwell paintings everywhere, in the fabric of our families and in our country.” What Rockwell is this, he is asked, when your own mother was married five times, your parents were divorced a few months after you were born (although they later remarried), when your own first marriage failed?

Gramm’s response: he’s talking about the family of America. He says it’s about the kind of opportunity a country offers its children to grow up and do well, like he did, like his wife, Wendy, did. He likes to point out that Wendy is the granddaughter of a Korean indentured servant who came to America and worked in the sugar cane fields. She went on to regulate the commodities market.

“Some people might say that’s idealistic, but we have a right to dream great dreams if we’re Americans,” Gramm says. “I have confidence in America. I think that if we provide the environment through a limited government where families make more decisions and government makes fewer decisions, if we change government programs to eliminate the incentives for illegitimacy and for irresponsible behavior, if we hold people accountable for what they do through our criminal justice system, I am confident that the basic values and virtues of our people will reemerge.”

CHAPTER ONE / The Doles

These stories start with young men who hadn’t had much of a chance yet to figure out what their great dreams were going to be, much less who they were going to talk into going along for the big ride.

For Dole, now 72, it started in 1948 in the cafeteria of the Army hospital in Michigan where he was nearing the end of a 39-month recuperation from the devastating war injury he’d received in Italy. Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist from New Hampshire, was sitting with a few of her friends when a tall, lanky guy with one arm in a splint walked in. “Who’s that?” she wanted to know.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that they met officially, at an Officers Club dance. Dole called her a couple of days later for coffee. A month-and-a-half later, they were engaged, and a month-and-a-half after that, they were married.

Phyllis, Dole’s friends say, wasn’t the kind of girl who’d feel sorry for him, or make apologies for his bad arm. She berated him when he dropped something and pushed him to finish his physical therapy exercises on his own.

When Dole enrolled in the law program at Washburn Municipal University in Topeka, Kansas, Phyllis went to work at the nearby Center for the Blind to pay their rent at the Senate Apartments. Because he couldn’t take notes, Dole would tape his lectures and then painstakingly write them out at night, Phyllis staying extra quiet so he could hear.

The Doles kept trying to have a child, but couldn’t. Frustrated, the couple started adoption proceedings in 1954, and then suddenly found out that Phyllis was pregnant. Dole, she says, “was real excited. He really wanted to have that child.”

When, after eight years as county attorney, Dole ran for Congress, Phyllis sewed elaborate, flouncy skirts for his “Dolls for Dole” campaigners. Looking back on it, she doesn’t exactly remember how they decided to get into politics. “I don’t think I thought any thing about it,” she says. “It was what he wanted to do. You know, we didn’t really discuss, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ He wanted to do it, he did it.”

The family moved back to Washington and at first made the long commute back to Kansas every year after Congress adjourned: Phyllis driving, Robin and some friends in the back, the dog way in the back.

They ended up staying in Washington all year, buying a five-bedroom home in suburban Virginia with a brook behind it, and on the other side of the brook, the sports field at Robin’s school. Phyllis joined the congressional wives club.

Dole spent more time at the office. The year he became Republican national chairman, it was even worse: all day at the Senate, a fund-raiser or two in the evening, then flying out over the weekend for a campaign meeting some where, then back to the office. It got so he’d get home so late and leave so early, he moved into the bedroom in the basement so he wouldn’t bother anyone when he came home.

“Particularly the last year, I don’t think we had dinner together more than a few times,” Phyllis says.

When Robin wanted her ears pierced, she laid out all the reasons why it was a good idea and left a memo for her father. At the end of it was a box for yes and a box for no. “He put a third one in and said, ‘Maybe, let’s talk about it,”’ Robin recalls.

Still, Dole made time for his daughter whenever he could. Shortly after the ear piercing debate, he took Robin and her cousin to Portugal, Spain and Italy. They went to the bullfights and ordered room service in a fancy hotel. The girls were delighted. When Robin was 16, Dole took her out on the Dulles Expressway and taught her to drive.

Robin adored him, still does. She tells the story of how when the Beatles were making one of their early U.S. trips, Dole, not realizing what a huge phenomenon they were, wrote to the British embassy and asked if the Beatles could come and have lunch with Robin and her friends at the House dining room.

“They unfortunately couldn’t come, and I was so disappointed,” she says. “As a typical daughter, I thought, ‘Oh, my father’s invited the Beatles for lunch, of course they’re going to come!’ I told all my friends about it.”

That last year, when Dole was Republican chairman, friends say even on the few occasions when the Doles were together, they weren’t getting along. “Their life together was just hell. They were at each other’s throats all the time,” recalls one. Phyllis’ friends from New Hampshire saw not the lively, charming man she had brought home to meet her family but a brooding, quiet man one of them described as “the dark prince.”

Phyllis just remembers that Dole wasn’t around anymore. And then he came home one night and said, “I want out.” She talked him into waiting a few months until after Robin’s high school graduation in 1972. They attended separately.

Looking back, Phyllis recalls Robin asking her why she and Dole didn’t sleep in the same room, the way her friends’ parents did. It had seemed perfectly natural at the time, Dole not wanting to wake everybody when he came home and all. “I said, well, your dad’s so busy, he doesn’t want to wake us up,” she says.

“You know, it was a gradual thing. He got busier and busier and busier. I think I was probably very stupid not to see it coming. And I don’t know what his reasons were or anything. He just said, ‘I want out.’ And that was the end of it. I was so stunned. And then he moved out. You know how you feel is, ‘What did I do wrong?’ ”

Phyllis, now 70, later married a GOP activist from Kansas. He died three years later. Then, at her class reunion in New Hampshire, she saw her high school sweetheart, also recently widowed. Sparks flew. They got married soon after and moved to Topeka, where Phyllis had always felt more at home.

As a 49-year-old arrival on the singles scene, Dole stayed pretty much to himself, didn’t have time for much else. One day, Elizabeth Hanford, a 36-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer working for the Office on Consumer Affairs, was dispatched to Capitol Hill to meet with Dole on some pending consumer legislation.

“He had been on the Senate floor, so he came in from a side door, and I remember looking up and thinking, ‘My goodness, that’s an attractive man,’ ” she recalls. “He told me [later] he wrote my name on his blotter.”

They ran into each other a few times after that, at the Republican committee office in Washington and at the national convention in Miami. A few weeks after that, Dole telephoned. They talked for about 40 minutes, discovering a wide variety of common interests and acquaintances, and then Dole hung up.

He called again soon, and they talked a long while again, “and he said, ‘Maybe we could have dinner sometime.’ And I said, ‘That’d be nice.’ And then he hung up.” She was nonplused. What did it take to get a date with this guy? “It wasn’t till the third time when he asked me out. But I kind of liked that. It told me he was a little shy.”

As Dole’s 1974 reelection campaign unfolded--an uphill struggle on the heels of Richard Nixon’s resignation--Dole found himself calling Elizabeth from towns all over the country, waiting till the end of a hard day to go back to the motel and hash it out with her. Sometimes, it would be 1 or 2 a.m. But it was comforting. Dole said it gave him something to look forward to at day’s end.

By then, Elizabeth had been named to the Federal Trade Commission and had a busy schedule of her own. She was away in Japan on election night. When she came home to Washington, she found a bottle of champagne and a dozen red roses. On Dec. 6, 1975, they were married at the National Cathedral.

They wound up staying in Dole’s bachelor pad at the Watergate. Today, it’s very convenient: eight minutes from Red Cross headquarters, where Elizabeth is national president--she’s taken a year’s leave of absence--12 minutes from the Senate. Dole complains that “the dog has more closet space than I do,” but neither seems inclined to move.

They see Robin, now a 41-year-old government relations specialist for Century 21, on several weekends a month.

But children of their own, says Elizabeth, “are something that we felt if it happened, that’d be great, and if not, it’s fine, because both of us feel passionate about what we’re doing. You have a chance to help a lot of children as secretary of labor,” she says, referring to the cabinet post she held in the George Bush administration. “So my view has always been that my role in life may well be to make a difference for a lot of kids that way, which I enjoy very much. So we just feel that whatever happens is fine.”

CHAPTER TWO / The Gramms

Phil Gramm was 19 and was going to night school at the University of Georgia when he met fellow student Sharon Kinney. They married in 1963, and as Gramm went on through graduate school, Sharon got a job teaching high school. They moved into a trailer.

After Gramm finished his doctorate in economics, Sharon followed him to his first teaching job at Texas A&M;, but things soured quickly. Within two years, she filed for divorce. Working now at the Department of Education in Washington, she doesn’t want to talk about what went wrong.

“Our marriage was something between us, and I don’t want to put it in the papers. I will say this: He was a good man then and he’s a good man now,” she says. “The thing that I valued about Phil was that he stood for something. That’s one of the things we had in common. What you see is what you get.”

It was less than a year later that Gramm saw the doctoral dissertation of brilliant young Wendy Lee. He was so impressed by her analysis of the impact of married women in the labor force that he asked to join the faculty team that was going up to interview her and other teaching candidates in New York.

It was the winter of 1969. “After the interview was over, they ushered me out to usher in another candidate, so Phil walks out and holds up my coat and says, ‘As a single member of the faculty, I’d be especially interested in having you come to Texas A&M;,’ ” Wendy, now 50, recalls. “I turned around and said, ‘Yuck!’ ”

But Gramm, it seems, grows on you. Once she got to A&M;, Wendy was impressed to see him coaching a Boys Club football team. She was also enamored of the huge St. Bernard dogs that followed him wherever he went. Here was a man she could make a family with.

“He’s a funny guy,” she says. “He’s charming, and I liked him. I think that overcame his intitial impression. His point is he may not make a good first impression, but he wears well. And that’s true.”

Wendy continued teaching. They managed to time the delivery of their two children to the summer recesses: Marshall Kenneth, 22, named after the founder of neoclassic economics, Alfred Marshall, and Gramm’s father Kenneth; and Jefferson Phillip, 20, after Thomas Jefferson and Gramm.

The family moved to Washington with Gramm’s election to the House in 1978. Wendy began the first in a series of high-profile economic jobs, with the Federal Trade Commission, at Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, then taking over as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission until 1993.

Gramm’s career was also on an upward curve. On Aug. 23, 1983, only seven months after leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican, Gramm got a call from then-Sen. John Tower (R-Texas), who told him he wasn’t going to run again. Gramm called Wendy. “When the kids get home, do not let them go anywhere,” he said dramatically. “We have an important decision to make.”

Wendy waited for him to gather the family around the table and make his proposal with a flourish but after he finished, she punched a hole in his carefully constructed melodrama. “Of course you’re going to run,” she said.

That next year, Gramm for the first time was facing a statewide constituency, some of whom might not like the fact that his wife was not only a powerful Washington economist, but a Korean-American. Gramm took a barrage of criticism from the Asian-American community in Texas for a TV commercial showing the back of Wendy’s head and his sons with baseball caps pulled over their eyes. Both Gramms denied that she was being given a low profile, and she has been prominent in campaigns since.

“When I take her advice, I do well. She is my best friend, my best advisor,” he said on TV earlier this year. “People have asked me is the country ready for an Asian-American in the White House. It’s up to them. But if I had to choose between Wendy and being president, I’d take her. I think I can have both.”

The Gramms in Washington have held on to the same Texas informality that made their home near Texas A&M; renowned for backyard barbecues and swim parties. Wendy often Rollerblades to work. Entertaining is casual. “He comes in and takes off his coat and tie and shoes and has a drink, and Wendy is usually barefooted,”says Jerry Birdwell, a family friend.

“The boys were always either watching TV or out playing basketball, and then they some times were roughnecking in the house and Phil’d have to tell them to quit. It was always really hard for us to feel like he was a senator.”

At home, Wendy says, Phil, now 53, played the biggest part in their sons’ lives during most of the years they were growing up: taking them whitewater rafting in the Grand Canyon, fishing in Alaska, or hunting and fishing many weekends closer to home.

Though the Gramms gave up on public schools after their oldest son reached the third grade, they still had to help the boys adapt to the increasingly violent nature of the community around them. The boys’ eighth-grade science teacher was shot and killed, and then one of Jeff’s best friends was killed in a random shooting in his front yard.

Her husband, Wendy says, was gravely upset after one of the boys’ friends died in a car accident. He was anguished about what to say. “What Phil kept saying was this was a life-altering event for a family,” she says.

Both boys have gone away to college. Marshall is a graduate student in economics, Jeff a philosophy major. Gramm phones them regularly, wanting to know what courses they’re planning to take next semester, what tests are coming up, what kind of questions were on the last test. His constant “I love you’s” on the phone, with the boys and with his wife, at first were a source of discomfort for Wendy.

“This is something that for me took a little getting used to. I come from a culture that’s not that demonstrative, when it comes to saying very personal things like that,” Wendy says. “But I think there’s something to be said for having somebody who loves you and loves you unconditionally.”

CHAPTER THREE / The Alexanders

Lamar Alexander always had a reputation for dating the best-looking women at Vanderbilt University, few of them particularly seriously. It wasn’t until after college, when Alexander was working in Washington, that he met the woman he wanted to settle down with.

He says it was Honey Buhler’s red shorts, as she came sliding into first base at his feet, that propelled him into the marriage that has lasted almost 27 years. “The slide, plus her bright red shorts, sent me reeling,” Alexander recalls.

She was working for Texas Sen. Tower and playing on the staff softball team. Alexander was on Tennessee Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr.’s team.

The rest was history. Alexander began his professional march from Tennessee statehouse to the presidency of the University of Tennessee and the U.S. secretary of education under George Bush. The couple had four children, Drew, now 25; Leslee, 23; Kathryn, 21; and Will, 17. The old family photos often show Honey standing around a campaign office with a baby on her hip.

Alexander, known for campaigning by walking around Tennessee, spent his children’s youth struggling to make sure it would be normal, or at least as normal as life in a governor’s mansion can be.

Alexander, now 55, would make the state troopers ride in another car while he drove youngest son Will to school. Even with his own schedule portioned into 15-minute increments, he blocked out whole sections of family time at the beginning of the year.

Mealtimes as often as possible were spent with everyone around the dining table. “It’s the most incredible thing when you sit around the dinner table with them,” says Molly Pratt, a longtime family friend. “They have this really interesting conversation and dialogue . . . . They’ll talk about anything. They can start out a conversation about what did you do at school today, and it’ll turn into a national debate about some thing.”

It was around one such dinner table, near the end of his years as governor, when Alexander began to realize he wasn’t as much a part of the conversation as he used to be. He looked one night and noticed that all four children’s chairs were turned down the other direction, toward their mother.

Then there was the essay daughter Leslee wrote in 1987 to try to get admission to the New Hampshire boarding school where her rebellious older brother Drew had been sent. She was just 14. “I characterize my father as an egret, standing on one leg and viewing the world. Although powerful in government, he is withdrawn in family life,” she wrote.

“It was a remarkable thing for a little girl of that age to write,” he says. “And I thought it was about right, in family matters . . . I think it was an honest view of my preoccupation with other things.”

“Honey finally said one night, ‘We have to get out of here,’ ” he says. “She meant we’ve got to get out of this environment we’ve been in for about the last 12 years. Which was most of the time we’d been married. The whole time our children had been growing up, I’d been preoccupied with teachers unions and road programs and getting elected governor, and we hadn’t spent as much time together as a family, and she meant that we needed to get in an entirely different environment for a while, and come together as a family.”

They did. Without a clear next political step after his term as governor anyway, Alexander capitalized on the career lag to pack the family off to Australia for a six-month vacation. It was the farthest the family figured it could go where everybody still spoke English.

In his book on the trip--which allowed him to write off some of the expenses--Alexander writes that the biggest adventure was discovering his own family again.

“I realized that back home in America, each of us had been in orbit, a planet in a family solar system, each now and then passing by another family member close enough to have some sort of relationship, but usually glad to speed on past at a safe distance and avoid the entanglements, conflicts, responsibilities and anguish that also can accompany the joy of close relationships.”

Even after coming home, there were trials. Drew, the oldest, be came a Deadhead, growing his hair long, playing the guitar and following the Grateful Dead around the country, prompting pointed arguments with his father. Leslee, a blossoming environmentalist with ill-disguised contempt for some of her father’s politics, frequently stayed out until the wee hours.

“He used to laugh at me when Leslee would stay out more than half the night, you know, past her curfew, and I would wake up and realize she wasn’t home, so I’d sit up and pace the floor, have a cup of coffee, and get really angry with her,” says Honey, 50. “And he’d say, ‘It’s all right, Honey, she’ll be home in a little while. Back to sleep.’ He just never was worried about her like I was. He just had confidence in her.”

The Alexanders all gathered at a recent Thanksgiving for a quiet retreat. Alexander told them he was thinking of running for president.

“Drew said he was 100% for it,” Alexander recalls. “Leslee said she thought she might move to another country. Kathryn said why are you running and what would you hope to accomplish? And Will, who was then about 13 or 14, said, do they have big-screen television?”

CHAPTER FOUR / The Buchanans

Everybody knew that Mom was going to be a tough act to follow. Pat Buchanan makes no secret of the fact he believes he had the perfect childhood, the product of perfect parents, in a time when America itself was more perfect.

His idea of womanhood was forged by Catherine Elizabeth Buchanan, a nurse who married and eventually gave up her career to raise two girls and seven boys in a family whose saga has become the raison d’etre for many of Buchanan’s ideas of what it means to be an American, a conservative and a Catholic.

“The real liberators of American women were not feminist noisemakers,” he later wrote. “They were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer, the garbage disposal and frozen food.” All of these conveniences gave Mom more time for reading, Sunday School teaching and volunteer work, he suggests.

So it comes as something of a surprise to see Buchanan, some 40 years later, married to a woman whose first love was politics, not the kitchen.

Shelly Ann Scarney, now 57, was any where but over a brownie pan when she and Buchanan met. She was a veteran of Richard Nixon’s staff, traveling with him when he ran for president in 1960 and ‘68, and spending six years in the Nixon White House through the dwindling days of Watergate scandal.

They met while Shelly was working for Nixon in New York in 1967. She and Pat, who got a job on Nixon’s communications staff, would frequently wind up taking cabs together.

“They’d ride the cab, and Pat would get out of the car, and he’d say, ‘Take it easy.’ That’s his favorite expression in walking away, ‘Take it easy,’ ” says his brother, Tom Buchanan. “He never asked her out till later. I think he liked her, he was obviously physically attracted to her, they were both conservative, and she’s a very classy person.”

What finally clicked between them isn’t clear. Buchanan, like Dole, would not comment for this series of articles.

Shelly and Pat married and moved into a large house in McLean, Va., a place friends call Tara because of its big pillars.

They were never able to have children, and not even Buchanan’s brothers have felt comfortable talking to him about why. Buchanan was asked in a recent public TV interview whether he might better be able to understand the problems of families if he had children.

“Well, I think there’s no question about that,” he replied. “That’s a very valid observation. Unfortunately and regrettably, we do not. But I come from a very large family of eight brothers and sisters, and we’ve had a lot of normal troubles that large families have and they’ve had in their families.”

His sister and campaign manager, Angela, says Pat and Shelly have accepted the fact they cannot have children.

“I spoke to Shelly about it, and she made me aware that she wasn’t going to be able to have children, and we talked about adoption, and they just felt that this was a decision by the Lord that they weren’t going to have children, and they were going to abide by it,” she says. “As Pat says, he accepted the hand that the Lord dealt him.”

Shelly has channeled the time and energy she might have spent with children back toward Pat to what friends and family say is an extraordinary degree. “They always seem to me to be, you know, one person,” said longtime Buchanan friend Bill Gavin.

“Shelly has always been extraordinarily involved in his work,” added family friend William Schulz, managing editor of Reader’s Digest. “When he was doing his TV and column and speeches, he didn’t have any staff outside of Shelly. She was just indispensable in terms of doing research for him, doing scheduling.”

Once a year, like clockwork, the couple takes a week’s vacation at the shore--usually Rehoboth Beach near the Maryland-Delaware line, although Pat used to love to visit Nixon in Key Biscayne, Fla.

The Buchanans frequently host political soirees at their home, inviting Republican notables in to meet friends, co-workers and family members for elegant parties and lots of heated political banter.

“It’s a little bit more formal, because they’ve got the money to bring in some catering, which is nice,” said Brian Buchanan, one of Pat’s brothers. “When it’s just the family, it’s nothing super elaborate. We’ll all gather in the living room and have a buffet-style dinner and eat in the living room, have some beers.”

Even though their parents are dead, the Buchanan clan remains extremely close.

“It was a very happy home, a very secure home, we all knew we were very much loved by our parents, and we had a strong loyalty to each other,” said Kathleen Connolly, Pat’s younger sister. “We enjoy each other’s company. We prefer, actually, the company of each other. In fact, many friends have said when the Buchanans get together at a party, they don’t need anybody else.”

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.

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About This Series

In these group portraits, The Times examines turning points and touchstones in the lives of Republicans seeking the White House.

* Sunday: Growing up: The boys who would be president, and the places that shaped them.

* Monday: Coming at the ‘60s from another direction: Civil rights, Vietnam and political choices.

* Today: Marriage and family: Norman Rockwell visions vs. today’s realities.

* Wednesday: Life after Reagan: Rivals seek to claim the mantle.

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MARRIAGE AND FAMILY / The Other Candidates

How marriage and family ties have influenced the other Republican candidates:

Robert K. Dornan / Congressman

Married: 40 years to the former Sallie Hansen.

Children: Robin Marie Griffin, Robert Dornan Jr., Theresa Anne Cobban, Mark Douglas Dornan and Kathleen Regina Penn.

“I would not be in this race; I would not be in Congress if family was not the center of my life. . . . My dad, three weeks before he died at the age of 83, said: ‘Bobby, make your passion count for something. We are only here a short period.’

“I am not the candidate of the Fortune 500, 1,000 or 2,000. But I don’t demonize them. I grew up in Beverly Hills and my father never gave me a dime after my 13th birthday. I worked every summer and almost every weekend of my life.

****

Steve Forbes / Magazine publisher

Married: 24 years to the former Sabina Beekman.

Children: Five daughters: twins Sabina and Roberta, 22; Catherine, 19; Moira, 16; and Elizabeth, 8.

“I think, when you raise children, if you didn’t know before, you certainly learn the basic silliness of trying to do social engineering. You have the same parents, same house, and yet the kids have very distinct, different interests and personalities. . . . You learn, too, that you can have influence when they get older but you certainly have no control over them.”

****

Alan Keyes / Former State Department official

Married: 14 years to Jocelyn Marcel Keyes.

Children: Francis, 12; Maya, 9; and Andrew, 6.

“We have got to restore the priority and support and privileged position of the marriage-based two-parent family. We have got to restore the foundations of this country’s moral life.” [My wife is] a wonderful lady. She’s a wonderful mother. She’s also somebody who’s very practical. She has no interest whatsoever in politics and she puts her family above everything. She works in the home.” If she were to become First Lady, Keyes said his wife’s priorities would be “taking care of her children and her husband.”

****

Richard G. Lugar / Senator

Married: 39 years to Charlene Smeltzer.

Children: Mark, Robert, John, David.

“I believe that it is extremely important to find a marriage partner with whom you plan to live for the rest of your life, and to think through with that partner the obligations of being the very best parents and grandparents you can be . . . My interest in the way the world is, and the way I would like for it to be, is governed by the legacy I hope to give to my children.”

Researched by GEBE MARTINEZ, MARIA L. LA GANGA and BOB SIPCHEN / Los Angeles Times

Sources: Interviews with The Times and others, including PBS series “The Challengers ‘96” campaign speeches and literature.