Jim Rogan: Hero or Villain?

James E. Rogan has wedged his 6-foot-1 frame into a phone booth between the men’s room and a kitchenette in a House office building. The air stinks of stale cigar smoke and there’s no place to sit. But who cares? His 20 minutes in this cramped closet will be rewarded handsomely.

On the other end of the line is radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy, broadcasting live to a syndicated audience of hard-right Clinton haters. They have found themselves a new poster boy--the two-term Glendale Republican who helped prosecute the president and might lose his House seat because of it.

“Let’s pick up the challenge and support Jim Rogan. . . ,” Liddy roars. “And don’t think just a couple of bucks won’t help.”

From the ashes of impeachment has risen an icon. In the tradition of former Iran-Contra figure Oliver North, Rogan has sprung from relative obscurity to headliner du jour on the conservative banquet circuit. The party faithful stampede to shake his hand. At the California state GOP convention this year, he got more standing ovations than seven candidates for president.

He has tapped a vein in the conservative movement and it’s a gusher, raising $1 million-plus since the impeachment case ended, his list of donors swelling from 3,000 to 20,000 with checks pouring in from around the nation.

But if the zeal with which he prosecuted Clinton made him a hero to some, it made him a villain to others. DreamWorks SKG mogul David Geffen committed unlimited “time and money and effort” to send him packing. “There is no question,” says Washington political analyst Charlie Cook, that Rogan “is the top targeted GOP incumbent in the country.”

He already was vulnerable in a district transformed by years of demographic change from a predominantly white, Republican stronghold to an ethnically diverse, Democratic opportunity. His performance in the Senate trial served to kick a political hornet’s nest at home, making him appear out of step with a constituency--not to mention a nation--that wanted impeachment to end.

“He put himself on the Democratic radar screen” during Clinton’s trial, said Erik Smith, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Impeachment galvanized national attention around this race.”

Pundits agree he’s in trouble, facing what could be the most closely watched House race in the country--a voter referendum on impeachment. State Sen. Adam Schiff of Pasadena, a well-funded Democrat, has surfaced as his likely opponent. A former federal prosecutor, Schiff is regarded as a tenacious yet thoughtful lawmaker and already enjoys strong name recognition in the 27th Congressional District.

Which is why we find Rogan in the phone booth, all smiles as he tells listeners where to send checks.

At 41, there are few things Rogan enjoys more than a good fight. Maybe it’s because he’s had so many. He has been in a battle ever since a San Francisco cocktail waitress named Alice Kleupfer conceived him out of wedlock in 1956. The man who came to perform the abortion got all the way to the living room before she changed her mind.

A high school dropout, Rogan may be the only member of Congress ever to work as a bouncer in an X-rated theater, just one chapter in an early life that was an unlikely combination of promise and delinquency.

He was a political junkie at age 8, a confirmed Democrat by 13. By 14 he was cutting class and smoking pot. At 15, he was kicked out of school, settling for a sheepskin from Mr. Nakato’s bartending academy.

Hardly the conventional path of a man who would become a gang prosecutor, a municipal judge, state assemblyman and key player in the century’s most famous political trial.

But just when you think you know him, you don’t. Like a carnival hall of mirrors, there’s a different Jim Rogan wherever you look.

Christian Coalition Rates Him A-Plus

He wears Price Club suits and ties his ties in an aristocratic Windsor knot. He is an opponent of legal abortion but campaigns for Republicans for abortion rights. He eats steamed vegetables and drinks a Diet Coke for lunch, then packs away three Kit Kat bars for dessert. The Christian Coalition gives his voting record an A-plus, but you won’t catch him in church every Sunday.

His childhood could not be more at odds with his straight-arrow image--he grew up unsupervised in blue-collar sections of the Bay Area, reared by a string of family members who took him in when his mother did not.

He was born James Edward Barone, the son of a bartender who wouldn’t marry his mother. He lived with his grandfather, a longshoreman whose idea of a good time was watching Gillette’s “Friday Night at the Fights” with a cigarette in one hand and his grandson in his lap.

The old man died when Rogan was 7. By then, Rogan’s mother had married an alcoholic who gave his stepson his name, but not his acceptance. His grandmother raised him until she died, then a great aunt until she died. He joined his mother when she was single with three children; Rogan, then about 12, made four.

Theirs was an East Bay neighborhood of absentee parents and children who roamed the streets. Alice Rogan worked two jobs and collected welfare. “Jimmy” cooked and took care of his brothers and sister. In between, he cut school, campaigned for Democrats and sneaked into political rallies to collect the buttons.

Politics was his obsession and his distraction, although even he can’t explain why. From the time he was little, he wanted to run for Congress. Maybe it was destiny--the other bartender at the watering hole where his mother met his father went on to become state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco). Almost four decades later, in the mid-1990s, he and Rogan would serve in the Assembly together.

“He was a political junkie, a Democrat,” said Burton, a solid liberal still puzzled by Rogan’s midlife political conversion. “And then, like Paul from Tarsis, he got hit by lightning, fell on his ass and became a right-wing Republican.”

The same semester that Rogan earned all Fs except one D, he could be found on the junior high school quad, stringy blond hair to his collar, trying to make Democrats of classmates too young to vote. Politics seemed to provide the structure his family life could not. Even today, his mind is an encyclopedia of political trivia, but he can’t remember how old he was when his mother was jailed for welfare fraud. He doesn’t recall who cared for the family the 30 days she was gone; he figures he did.

‘Like a Father to Other Kids’

“I worked 14 to 16 hours a day and Jim was like a father to the other kids,” recalls his mother, who still lives in the Bay Area. “I did a lot of things I regret.”

Grades failing, the mission of his adolescence was to get his picture taken with every Democratic giant he could get next to. The result hangs on the walls of his congressional office--a Forrest Gump-like panorama of a pesky kid with chipped teeth and a cardigan sweater, posing with the likes of former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and legendary Louisianan Hale Boggs, days before the House majority leader perished in an Alaska plane crash.

Suspended once too often, Rogan was sent to a continuation school he said was “for pregnant girls and bad boys.” Some kids threatened to stab him the first day. He left after two weeks and never went back. No one bothered looking.

“Getting kicked out of school was my wake-up call. I saw all the things I had assumed for my life falling away,” Rogan said from his Washington office, every square inch of wall and table space cluttered with political keepsakes. “I wasn’t a bad kid; I was an unsupervised kid.”

Throughout his chaotic childhood, he said, he clung to one core belief--that someday he could be president. Then he found himself nearly 17, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and scrubbing toilets.

Suddenly, he shifted gears. Learning that California’s community college system required only that an applicant be 18, he waited for his birthday and enrolled, never bothering to finish high school. Once on track, he zoomed on to UC Berkeley and UCLA Law School, studying for his law degree under the red lamps of the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, where he tended bar at night with a .38-caliber strapped to his ankle.

That combination of book-smart and streetwise persists today. Rogan’s friends call it texture; his foes call it distortion.

“He is the rare Republican conservative who understands what it’s like to be poor,” said Clint Bolick, a Rogan childhood friend and litigation director at the Institute for Justice, a conservative law firm. “Picture George Bush or Bob Dole in the inner city and it’s not a comfortable fit. But Jim can talk constitutional law with [conservative scholar Robert] Bork or slug down beer with a sheet metal worker, all with no false airs.”

His political conversion came when he was a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, putting away one thug knowing full well there were 100 more still on the streets. He embraced the conservative philosophy, deciding, he said, that “people can do more for themselves than government can do for them.”

Announcing his political rebirth in a wordy column he submitted to the Glendale News Press, he deserted the Democratic Party on Nov. 7, 1988, as abruptly as he had renounced his reckless youth.

Rivals scoff that Rogan uses his roots for political advantage--wrapping himself in the cloak of his working-class past, then voting like a country-club Republican.

“No one denies he can be a very affable and charming fellow,” said Parke Skelton, a Democratic consultant who has run campaigns against Rogan. “He’s just an ideologue on the fringes of his party and way out of step with his district.”

His voting record is decidedly conservative on a range of issues, including abortion, tax cuts, school vouchers, organized labor, the environment. Yet he does not consider himself unyielding. (“I’m conservative,” he likes to say, “but I’m not stupid.”)

In politics and in life, he forgives and forgets: The stepfather who rejected him, now a recovered alcoholic, was best man at Rogan’s wedding (to a dental hygienist he met in an elevator). His mother is a doting grandmother. On his desk is a picture of the president he worked to convict, holding Rogan’s 6-year-old twin girls.

“He does not come across as a hard-core right-winger,” said GOP strategist Allan Hoffenblum. “There are those in politics who won’t shake hands with somebody who disagrees with them. Rogan’s not like that.”

But Barry Gordon, the Democrat Rogan defeated by a scant 4 percentage points in 1998, derides him as “a very deceptive politician.”

“It was hard for me to convince the voters that he was anything but a moderate because of his demeanor,” Gordon concedes. “His next opponent is not going to have that problem,” he added, citing the polarizing impact of impeachment in a district that takes in all of La Canada and La Crescenta and parts of Burbank and Pasadena.

Schiff, the likely Democratic challenger, is already on the case.

“When people talked about Jim Rogan’s record before as being to the right of [Sen.] Jesse Helms, people did not believe it,” Schiff said. ‘But then they turned on their television sets and saw this angry, bitter Jim Rogan, and it has caused a lot of moderates to have second thoughts.”

Indeed, Rogan’s zest as accuser stood out among the House managers. More passionately than his colleagues, he went in for the kill, skewering the errant president and brusquely dismissing charges that Republicans, in effect, were seeking to nullify Clinton’s 1996 reelection.

“If the president is guilty of acts justifying impeachment, then he, not the Congress, will have overturned the election,” Rogan boomed. “He will have acted not as a constitutional representative, but as a monarch, subversive of, or above, the law.”

Advisors warned him he would alienate Democrats at home and imperil his seat. As he finished his remarks, Rogan seemed to revel in that prospect.

“The pundits keep telling me that my stand on this issue puts my political fortunes in jeopardy. So be it. That revelation produces from me no flinching. There is a simple reason why: I know that in life dreams come and dreams go. But conscience is forever.”

Rogan has rarely shrunk from risk: not now, not the day he drove to his last community college final in a 1965 Pontiac Le Mans with the engine on fire. Like the smoldering Pontiac, most of his gambles have not exploded in his face.

This one might.

Prosecuted Highly Publicized Case

The man had downed 10 beers, climbed into his car and killed two mothers and two children in Glendale. The 1990 case was one of the year’s most highly publicized local trials and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jim Rogan was prosecutor. He planned to make his closing argument without uttering a word. It was a gamble the jury might see as cheap histrionics. Rogan’s boss warned against it.

Opening his briefcase, a nervous Rogan took out a can of Budweiser, locked his elbows on his hips to keep his hands from shaking and poured until 10 glasses and 10 empty cans stood in an incriminating row on the rail of the jury box. He looked at the accused, at the survivors, at the jury, snapped his fingers and sat down.

The verdict came back in less than 45 minutes: guilty on all counts. The performance was written up in Trial Excellence magazine. His appointment as a municipal judge followed a few months later.

In his recollection of the story, Rogan was trying to say he’s an inveterate risk-taker--the risk at that moment being a 2000 Senate run against Dianne Feinstein, the popular Democratic incumbent. Clearly, he was dying to take the plunge--just like in that courtroom 10 years ago. “Just like pouring those beers,” he said.

A decent showing against Feinstein--even if he lost--would prime him for statewide office in 2002. That might be a better bet than trying to keep his House seat.

A few days later, Rogan attended the California Republican Assembly convention near his old Bay Area stomping grounds.

The conservative crowd roared “Run, Rogan, Run!” drowning out his introduction.

The next day, Rogan flew home to Virginia, heady from political adoration, to find his daughters, Claire and Dana, giddy at the sight of him. Their mother had nabbed them trying to climb out a window to visit the Capitol and “bring home Daddy.”

He says he felt caught between the political call of the wild that has tugged since boyhood and the vow to be the father he never had. A Senate campaign would have meant raising $25,000 a day for 18 months; he would never be home. A day later, before he had time to change his mind, Rogan bowed out.

Now he has to worry about keeping his current job. Democrat Schiff has already raised more than $500,000, a sizable chunk of it from the entertainment industry. And some see the outcome as a foregone conclusion.

“If we nominated Francis the Mule, he could beat Rogan,” one Democratic operative snorted.

“He’ll need an oxygen tank to survive,” another chortled.

Other Democrats, noting Rogan’s resiliency and ability to work a room, are less presumptuous.

“It’s going to be a very tough race. I think we have a great chance of taking the seat, but we’re going to have to work for it,” said Julio Ramirez, a political consultant who lives in the district.

Rogan has cast himself as the target of a wounded president’s fury. (Not a bad strategy, if the swelling Rogan war chest is any indication.)

“Bill Clinton . . . wants to crush me and throw me out of Congress as part of his personal crusade of revenge. . . . One thing Bill Clinton will learn is that I never take the easy way out,” the congressman declared in a recent campaign letter.

“And I never run from a fight.”