Lungren’s Political Path Chosen Early

He is a lawyer who never liked law firms. He was a privileged child who grew a distaste for the pursuit of money. He has a showman’s ego and a heartfelt mission to do public service.

It is hardly surprising that Daniel Edward Lungren would choose politics as the vehicle to express the values learned in his youth.

It satisfies the humanitarian calling he felt from his Roman Catholic schooling and from the charitable father he idolized. And its doors opened wide, with personal escorts provided by some of America’s political nobility.

Richard Nixon was a family friend nearly 20 years before he won the White House. George Deukmejian, a future California governor, was a hometown Long Beach lawyer when the Lungren family aided his first steps into politics.

Today, the baby boomer groomed by an earlier generation is the Republican Party’s best hope for keeping control of the California governor’s office.

Few are surprised. In fact, his candidacy has seemed inevitable for at least a decade. It is the natural next step for an ambitious Nixon campaign aide turned lawyer turned congressman turned state attorney general.

Lungren, 52, is a high achiever who sets ambitious goals for himself and often reaches them. Yet those who know him personally and politically say he is not a risk taker. His feet are always planted one in front of the other.

Sometimes the steps in between--such as launching a campaign for governor--can be sizable. But Lungren has been watching others take such big steps since he was a child.

“You could tell the people who were going places and who were not--he was clearly going places,” said Steve Frank, who in 1968 helped the college-age Lungren organize the California Youth for Nixon.

“There was a maturity, an ability to get along with people and, quite honestly, there was also connections,” added Frank. “The cumulative [effect] of that was that this guy could go somewhere if he wanted to.”

Nixon, of course, won that 1968 race and went to Washington. Lungren went too.

It was a high time for a 22-year-old Notre Dame graduate. That summer, he married Barbara Koll, known as Bobbi. The newlyweds packed their Ford Mustang and headed to the other coast.

Dan was a Senate aide on Capitol Hill while attending Georgetown Law School. Bobbi had a clerical job at the White House. Their lives buzzed with politics. Who they saw. What issues and strategies were percolating. They had box seats to the action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“One day my wife called me and she said, ‘I just saw him,’ ” Lungren said recently, recalling his first days in Washington.

“I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘Elvis!’ So there’s that famous story of Elvis visiting the president. And my wife saw him.”

Part Nixon, Part Elvis

To understand Lungren is to know the significance of a meeting like that. Lungren is thought of today as something like a Nixon with a bit of Elvis thrown in.

He has a taste for In-N-Out hamburgers; his aides are required to carry a map of all the chain’s locations whenever the state attorney general is on the road. His campaign World Wide Web page has a computer link to one at Presley’s Memphis, Tenn., home, Graceland. And to the astonishment of many witnesses, Lungren has performed as lead singer in a rock group he calls Elvis and the Lawmen.

One Saturday night at the 1996 state Republican convention, Lungren hopped on stage wearing sunglasses. He tugged his collar up, grabbed the microphone and--with the backup of a uniformed police band--belted out a sour “Jailhouse Rock.”

“Dan can get serious at the drop of a hat, serious as a heart attack,” said Ted Furlow, a childhood friend who ran Lungren’s first congressional campaign. “But he is not that stiff, stodgy guy. He is at heart a practical joker.”

But even Lungren’s friends see a different face on his official persona.

He has Nixon’s bedrock conservatism and his suspicion of liberal conspiracies--especially in the media. Sometimes he seems to take things too seriously. Like Nixon, he can look like the type who might wear wingtips to walk the beach.

So he is a fun target for critics. They know they’ll get a rise out of him. Like the time in 1996 when the “Doonesbury” comic strip ridiculed Lungren’s battle with a San Francisco cannabis club.

Within hours, there was a news conference: Lungren versus Zonker, the cartoon hippie. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a laughing matter,” the state attorney general solemnly said.

Lungren is also a fighter who shared Nixon’s sense that politics can be a gladiator sport.

In 1988, Sacramento Democrats sidetracked Lungren’s career when they rejected him as the nominee to fill a vacancy in the office of state treasurer.

Lungren had come out of 10 years in Congress with the clear look of a rising Republican star. Gov. Deukmejian, the family friend who had already given appointments to Lungren’s father and two brothers, was now trying to give the congressman a statewide office that could be a helpful platform for a possible governor run.

Democrats decided to head it off.

Lungren already had a well-earned reputation as a conservative. He was a consistent vote to cut social spending and build up the military. He staunchly opposed abortion rights. Democrats also zeroed in on racial issues, since Lungren opposed reparations to Japanese families interned during World War II and sanctions against South Africa.

“What we fear in your record is that . . . in every tough question, just about, the fiscal conservatism takes precedence over social responsibilities that we also have,” state Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti told Lungren in the hearings.

Lungren found the lawmakers’ portrayal of him as a rich, racist, right-wing extremist so harsh that he regretted inviting his parents and his 13-year-old daughter Kelly to watch “that travesty.”

Lungren supporters countered with examples of a productive congressman who had a good working relationship with liberal Democrats.

They described his hallmark achievement in Washington--a seven-year effort to pass a landmark immigration bill that faced tough Republican opposition. For the first time, the U.S. would grant amnesty to immigrants who entered the country illegally and impose sanctions on employers hiring undocumented workers.

“He is quite conservative,” liberal Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to the Sacramento legislators. “But we’ve also agreed on some very important issues because of his essential belief in fairness,”

Unbowed after three days of hearings, Lungren chose for his concluding statement to read a Teddy Roosevelt quotation that was also a Nixon favorite.

“It is not the critic that counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,” Lungren defiantly testified. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”

The failed treasurer appointment notwithstanding, Lungren was glad to be back in California. His three children had grown up in Washington and he had always wanted them to know the state of his youth.

Catholic Education, Love of Family

Lungren was the second of seven children--three boys, four girls--in a household that taught respect for authority and tradition, appreciation of family and a bit of roughhousing.

Television watching was discouraged, except when everyone gathered on Sunday nights for the Walt Disney and Ed Sullivan shows. Each family member had assigned chores, and discipline could mean double duty. Talking back to Mother could get your mouth washed out with soap.

At Catholic schools, education was both academic and religious. Lungren was an acolyte, which meant sometimes getting out of school to attend a special event, like a funeral.

John Lungren Sr., the family patriarch, inspired a devotion in his children that remains a primary motivation for son Dan. “My dad is the person I admire most,” Lungren says.

A World War II military surgeon and Purple Heart recipient, John Lungren landed at Normandy shortly after the invasion, although he shared few battlefield stories with his family.

After the war, Lungren Sr. moved to Long Beach and opened a private medical practice. Soon after, he and his wife became friends with Pat and Richard Nixon through the Junior League Associates. From then on, in every election between 1952 and 1968, Lungren traveled with Nixon as his campaign physician.

Unswayed by Own Generation

The years in which Dan Lungren came of age were a tumultuous time for the nation but, by his account, not for him. He was disillusioned with the seemingly misguided protests of his generation against the establishment he aspired to join.

Young Lungren was a passionate anti-communist in those days who thought the war in Vietnam was necessary to halt an evil expansion. Like others, he complained the U.S. was not doing enough to win.

Yet Lungren describes almost dispassionately his own absence from the war. He said he expected to serve in the military after his student deferment expired in 1968. Draft selections were made by lottery then, and Lungren was No. 160 in a year when they accepted those up to 195.

But Lungren was made ineligible for the draft when he was categorized 4F--a designation for physical impairment. In his case, the injury was knee damage, requiring a pair of surgeries, from a high school football accident.

“It’s like anything else in life--you take it as it comes,” he said. “You go to law school, and if your number comes up, it comes up. That’s the way it was. . . . Sometime thereafter I got this [4F]. . . . I assumed they did that because they looked at my condition and they said we have so many more people who don’t have that condition that we’ll put them in. I never knew why. And I never appealed.”

Instead of going to war, Lungren went to Georgetown, graduating in 1971 and returning to California shortly after Nixon’s 1972 reelection.

Lungren ran for Congress in 1976 and lost. He got condolence calls from Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Two years later, he tried again and won.

Although his years in Congress were marked by achievement, Lungren’s two terms as attorney general have not been so decorated.

On the campaign trail today, he boasts about dramatic drops in the state’s crime rate during his tenure as California’s top cop. And his ads feature his pride in implementing the death penalty. But his office has been caught in several high-profile controversies that are also certain to be raised by his rivals.

Lungren, for example, supported a popular ban on assault weapons. But once in office, he was criticized by law enforcement leaders for blunting the impact of the legislation by failing to enforce it.

Conservatives complained that Lungren’s office was not aggressive enough in pressing the court case for Proposition 187, the ballot measure to end public benefits for illegal immigrants. The measure passed more than three years ago but only recently cleared the first federal district court.

Finally, Lungren balked for more than three years at joining other states in trying to recover public medical costs from tobacco companies. California joined the legal action last June, the 37th state to do so.

Some friends wonder whether Lungren was changed--or hardened--by the Democratic buzz saw that sidetracked his political fortunes in 1988. It was an exposure to raw politics unlike he had ever experienced in Washington.

And there was a high personal cost.

In contrast to Lungren’s comfortable childhood, money has always been an issue for him, his wife and their three children. In Congress, he took sandwiches to work and drove the same 1971 Chevrolet he bought in his last year at Georgetown. Now, he had given up his House seat, moved his family to Sacramento and landed there without a job.

“It was a difficult time, I will tell you,” he recalls. “When I was involved in taekwondo, I found out that if someone were to hit me, my response was usually not to back down. I was not always the aggressor, but once hit, I was the aggressor. So . . . there was a sense that I was not going to let the suckers get away with it.”

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Profile: Dan Lungren

Political Party: Republican

Born: September 22, 1946, Long Beach

Residence: Sacramento

Education: Bachelor’s degree, Notre Dame University, 1964; law degree, Georgetown University, 1971.

Family: Married in 1968 to Barbara (Bobbi) Lungren. Three children, Jeff, 25; Kelly, 23; Kathleen, 21.

Background: Aide to U.S. Sens. George Murphy of California, 1969-70, and Bill Brock of Tenn., 1971; Private atty., 1972-1978; elected to Congress from Long Beach, 1978 to 1988; Private atty., 1988-1990; state attorney general, 1990-present.

Career Highlights: Upset an incumbent Democrat to win a House seat. Sheparded an omnibus crime bill in 1984 and a landmark immigration law in 1986 that included amnesty for many illegal immigrants and possible sanctions for employers. In 1990, won narrow election for California attorney general. His tenure has been marked by a sharp drop in the state’s crime rate. But it is also clouded by his controversial handling of a ban on assault weapons and litigation against tobacco companies.

Strategy: Hopes a strong economy will persuade voters not to change 16 years of Republican control in the governor’s office. As the state’s top cop, is taking credit for promoting tough sentencing laws that have driven down crime rates.

Quote: “When I was a kid growing up in California, I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world. I had the best place to live. I had a strong family, I had a religious faith, I had a strong education system. What I’d like to see is what I saw when I was a kid, for every kid in California.”