Speaker-Designate’s Tenure Has Potential for Surprise

Twice during his congressional career he has almost come to blows with political opponents. Another time, he was admonished for appearing on the House floor wearing a bulbous red nose and clown makeup to demonstrate his scorn for what he considered a foolish bill. And if you cross Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, he might make you pay, as even his own GOP colleagues have discovered.

Livingston, 55, is the man his fellow Republicans are set to select today as speaker of the House, making him third in line of presidential succession. And it appears that in turning to him in hopes of a little peace and quiet, the GOP may be in for some surprises.

The Republicans, blaming their electoral setbacks this month on outgoing Speaker Newt Gingrich, say they are ready for a more pragmatic, lower-profile manager who will avoid confrontational tactics. Livingston, the new GOP consensus holds, is the kind of practical compromiser the times demand.

“He’s the right speaker for this Congress,” says Ed Gillespie, a political strategist and former aide to House Republican leaders. “What the members want is a traditional speaker . . . someone who gets them in and out on a regular basis.”

Yet the record of Livingston’s life, including more than 20 years in Congress, suggests he may be a more unpredictable and potentially turbulent character than such sentiments imply. In dozens of interviews with friends, colleagues, family members and political operatives here and in Louisiana, Livingston emerges as a strong-willed, mercurial figure who is anything but bland.

For one thing, while he shuns ideological cloud-spinning and is normally courteous and unpretentious, he struggles with a scalding temper and an impulse for over-the-top behavior that have caused him problems.

One can write off as youthful high jinks his teenage brush with the law, when he and a high school buddy went on a spree stealing golf-course flags. The same for his hard-drinking fraternity days at Tulane University in New Orleans, which were marked by frequent scrapes with school officials and an episode in which Livingston covered his gangly, 6-foot-4-inch frame with silver paint.

“Just like ‘Animal House,’ ” recalls John Bolles, a New Orleans lawyer and friend from those days. “The fraternity against the school. The school against the fraternity. Us against the world. Anything for a laugh.”

But while Livingston, the product of a broken home and the father of three sons and a daughter, has clearly mellowed, the core of his temperament appears unchanged.

Viewers Took ‘Parody’ Seriously

One of his best-remembered outbursts occurred during the 1995 government shutdown, when Livingston took to the podium and delivered a ranting, arm-waving speech. Livingston insists he was offering a parody of his fellow conservatives’ unbending determination not to compromise with President Clinton. But his address was broadcast around the country, and most viewers took it seriously.

“You looked like a raving lunatic,” he later confessed his own mother told him.

Livingston insists that as speaker, he will try even harder to smooth his rough edges.

But perhaps equally important, he seems to have a vision of Congress that harkens back to the days when powerful leaders cut deals on behalf of powerful interests and punished colleagues who did not go along.

It’s a system that might transform the often-stalemated present-day Congress. But the “traditional speaker” was more than a congenial traffic manager who helped members get “in and out on time.”

Such leaders played an insider’s game that is the antithesis of what most recently elected House Republicans have stood for. How far Livingston will go in trying to return to such a system, how the fractious GOP House delegation might react and what controversies it could spark in today’s scandal-hungry Capitol all remain to be seen.

His own legislative maneuvers vividly illustrate how he operates--and what pitfalls may await him.

Livingston, chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee since 1995, has long supported--and has been richly supported by--the oil and gas industry, major defense contractors and local industries in his New Orleans-area district. He has steered federal installations and multimillion-dollar contracts to the city, and fattened the defense budget beyond even the Pentagon’s requests.

This spring, as he helped guide an emergency bill through a House-Senate conference to assist tornado victims and support U.S. troops in the Middle East, the measure suddenly sprouted language protecting oil companies from paying higher royalties for petroleum pumped from federal land. The bill also gained a provision thwarting Clinton administration efforts to change national policy on organ transplants. The latter was inserted at the behest of Louisiana State University officials, who feared a national approach to using available organs might hurt local transplant programs.

In the legislative rush, neither provision attracted much notice. Under different circumstances, either could blossom into a furor.

So could Livingston’s old-fashioned penchant for punishing those who cross him. He is admired as a conciliator who looks on politics as the art of the possible and lets all points of view be heard. But once he’s done a deal, Livingston does not welcome opposition, especially within GOP ranks.

He summarily booted Rep. Mark W. Neumann (R-Wis.) off the Appropriations Committee for leading a successful revolt against one of Livingston’s patented compromises on defense spending--and made the ejection stick despite protests from Neumann’s conservative comrades.

Neumann, who is leaving Congress after losing a Senate bid this year, sings Livingston’s praises today. But how other House members, or the public, might react to such tactics in the future is a question.

Family Roots in N.Y. Aristocracy

Robert Linlithgow Livingston is descended from an aristocratic New York family. His namesake signed the Declaration of Independence, administered the first presidential oath of office to George Washington and later, as Thomas Jefferson’s ambassador to France, helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.

But Rep. Livingston is cut from the ragged end of that once-lustrous bolt of cloth.

His father was an alcoholic. He abandoned his family when Robert was about 6 years old, leaving his mother, Dorothy Billet, now 77, to raise two children in straitened circumstances.

Robert--only political friends call him Bob and his best buddies call him “Doc,” as in “Dr. Livingston, I presume”--was born in Colorado Springs, Colo., his mother’s hometown. Eventually, his family moved to New Orleans.

When his mother was deserted by her husband, she found a job in the insurance department of Avondale Shipyard. “Very few women worked in those days,” says Billet, who remarried and still lives in New Orleans. “I got a job I loved.”

Money was tight and Robert worked from the time he was 14. His first job: cleaning cages at the zoo in New Orleans. He often jokes about shoveling up after the elephants, but Rusty Barkerding, 57, who grew up on the same street as Livingston and worked with him at the zoo, say they actually worried more about cleaning the aviary.

“That was a lot more hazardous because the birds were up above you,” says Barkerding, a New Orleans businessman.

His mother got her son a scholarship to St. Martin’s Protestant Episcopal School. He was lanky for his age and slow to grow into his body. Waterboy for the football team, he is remembered as an indifferent student.

“He was just a typical boy that pulled pranks and did things,” his mother says. She adds: “One thing he showed as a child was tremendous concentration.”

It’s a trait that endured; today, friends and associates describe Livingston as a workaholic, and he himself tends to cite hard work, rather than intellectual brilliance, as his strength.

Bolles, the Tulane classmate who now is managing partner of a New Orleans law firm, has known Livingston since 1955, when they both attended St. Martin. On a typical Friday night, they went to parties, drank beer, headed to a teen club that had a band, “this being New Orleans,” Bolles says.

In high school, Livingston scraped up money for an old car. “He wasn’t a very good driver. He almost took my arm off once in a wreck,” Bolles says. Bolles and other friends say driving remains something of a challenge for Livingston.

“He doesn’t know how to drive a golf cart either,” Bolles says, describing how in Washington a few years ago, Livingston got tangled up with the controls of a cart and ended up in a lake with a broken wrist.

The first two years of Livingston’s life at Tulane followed the pattern of high school: partying and pranks at the “Deke” house, with part-time jobs as a welder at the Avondale shipyard.

“Pianos out windows, motorcycles up stairs. I’ve seen that with my eyes. Dumped a vat of stuff on the faculty advisor one time,” Bolles says.

In Livingston’s sophomore year, he began to turn a corner. He took a leave from college and joined the Navy. His mother worried that he might never go back to school, but serving in uniform from 1961 to 1963 gave him a new focus and maturity.

So positive did Livingston consider the experience that he later pushed going into the service as a solution for his own sons. “He thought the military was the remedy any time we screwed up,” says David Livingston, 26, noting that his brother, Richard, 29, spent three years in the Army.

Back at Tulane, Livingston accelerated his studies to get a bachelor’s degree and a law degree in four years. He also met and married his wife, Bonnie, in 1965.

Fresh from law school, Livingston tried private practice but found it boring. Prosecuting criminal cases turned out to suit him better, and Livingston made a name for himself by winning convictions in organized crime and other high-profile cases.

He had always had an eye on politics, though. His mother had been active in helping the modern-day Louisiana Republican Party take root. In 1976, her son decided to try for Congress in the 1st District, which covered the new, prosperous and overwhelmingly white suburbs around Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans.

It was an open seat, and Livingston made a strong showing but fell short. Within a year, however, the winner, a Democrat, was facing fraud charges and had to resign his seat. The subsequent special election went to Livingston by a solid margin, and he has never been seriously challenged since.

Many who know Livingston believe his drive to achieve springs from a reaction to his father’s shortcomings. As a young man, he visited his father, then living in Spain, in what might have been a reconciliation. It did not work out. Livingston returned ahead of schedule.

“Later, he let it be known he wasn’t going to end up like his father,” his mother says.

Active Role in Sons’ Lives

Today, Livingston’s own children remember that though he worked long hours, he pursued a busy lifestyle outside the office--earning a black belt in Tae Kwon Do--and took an active role in their lives.

Son David recalls a summer when his dad wanted him to work, but he preferred hanging out with friends at night and sleeping past noon every day at the family’s home in suburban Virginia. The father put an end to that.

“Instead of waking me up quietly, he came in my room and poured a pitcher of ice water on my head,” David said, laughing.

At the Capitol, like most prudent congressmen, Livingston focused on the needs of his home base, which meant jobs and federal contracts for the New Orleans area. Over the years, that effort paid off prodigiously.

His priorities have included funding for a major computer research project steered to the University of New Orleans; the Naval Reserve Force, which is headquartered in New Orleans; and the next generation of the Navy’s amphibious transport ship, which is being designed at Avondale, now one of his major campaign contributors.

Though a budget-cutting hawk in most cases, Livingston has showered federal dollars on everything from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office to local hospitals, airports and river and harbor projects.

New Orleans business leaders say he has also been responsive to their concerns about federal regulations and other issues.

Carroll Suggs, an executive at Petroleum Helicopters, a New Orleans firm in which Livingston once invested, says, “As a federally regulated company, he has been really instrumental in helping out.”

Suggs praises the congressman for helping the company deal with the Federal Aviation Administration and lobbying for tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, which make up many of the firm’s clients.

Livingston’s voting record is consistently conservative.

He has backed banning partial-birth abortions, repealing the assault weapons ban and aiding Nicaraguan Contras. He co-sponsored legislation to establish English as the nation’s official language and bills to repeal the estate tax, abolish the tax code and demolish the Energy and Commerce departments.

The tension between Livingston’s pragmatism and the passionate character of his conservative beliefs is reflected in his relationship with Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), the ranking minority member on the Appropriations Committee. Last year, the two men and their families spent 10 days together in Alaska, hiking and getting to know one another.

Yet Livingston almost came to blows with Obey, a liberal, during a heated committee debate some years ago. “We almost threw over the card table and did the old saloon trick,” Livingston said with a laugh, insisting both are calmer now.

Perhaps, but his second near dust-up came only three years ago, during a protracted dispute over farm policy with then-Rep. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), at the time chairman of the Agriculture Committee. Livingston opened a meeting of the two groups by telling Roberts, now a U.S. senator, “Some son of a bitch on your staff has been saying bad stuff about my staff in the press, and I’m tired of it.”

Roberts’ top aide indignantly confronted Livingston, but the two were quickly separated.

Now, with a legislative agenda crowded with issues as politically sensitive as Social Security reform, education and taxes, Livingston is likely to find consensus harder to achieve than it was when the challenge was just cutting dollar deals on the appropriations panel.

“Bob came up through the old system. . . . He is a creature of the old culture,” says Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). “He has got a lot of friends” among Democrats.

In today’s climate, House Republicans count that a virtue. But the political climate in Washington is subject to periodic shifts, and how Livingston manages himself when the changes come is what many will be watching.

As the speaker-designate himself is fond of saying, “It’s a tough business--politics is not easy. This is not patty-cake.”

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Interest Group Ratings

A pragmatist in approach, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.) has a voting record that reflects staunch conservatism in philosophy. Here are ratings he received from three different interest groups, based on votes he cast this year on issues they follow:

* Americans for Democratic Action (which generally promotes a liberal agenda): 0%

* American Conservative Union (which generally promotes a conservative agenda): 96%

* League of Conservation Voters (which tracks environmental issues): 8%

Compiled by Times researcher Tricia Ford