Bill Bradley: A Man Often Putting Mind Over Matters

It was the simplest of political chores, a no-brainer. All Bill Bradley had to do was wade into a crowd of shoppers and troll for votes. But little in his fading campaign for the presidency, little in his outsized life, has come simply.

Inching his way through the crowded aisles in a suburban New Hampshire mall weeks before that state’s primary, Bradley noticed a mannequin done up in a black evening dress. As news photographers snapped away, he suddenly approached the dummy and extended his arm.

“Hi,” Bradley said in the same subdued monotone he uses on voters. “How are you? Are you going to speak to me?”

It was Bradley’s droll take on the wearying impositions he has endured in his quixotic bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Stepping out of his candidate’s skin for an instant, his mocking play on a hoary political ritual is emblematic of a man acutely aware of his every move. He has called his year on the road a “joyous journey,” but Bradley is on constant guard against the compromises that chip at him, intellectualizing a process that most politicians accept as rote.

As a teenager, he was renowned for deconstructing the arc of a basketball hook shot. As a three-term senator from New Jersey, he brooded over his minutest political actions. Bradley came to his insurgent presidential campaign, the crowning phase of a storied life, steeped in years of preparation and intent on blazing his own unconventional trail.

People have prophesied a stellar future since the days that Princeton basketball teammates teased him as “Mr. President.” All his life, in dank school gymnasiums along the Mississippi River flatlands, on the scuffed parquet floors of urban arenas, in the well of the U.S. Senate, William Warren Bradley has been dogged by great expectations.

Bradley has fulfilled most of those prospects. At 56, he is a cerebral, deliberative figure with a writer’s eye for observing the world around him and a contrarian’s penchant for going against the grain. He has been an envied Missouri teenager, an Ivy League role model, Rhodes scholar and New York Knick legend, a deft author and a national political presence with a devoted following of Wall Street financiers and Digital Age entrepreneurs.

Liberated by a whiff of mortality--his wife’s bout with breast cancer and the deaths of his parents--and lessons learned in the near-loss of his Senate seat in 1990, Bradley says he is now finally able to operate on instinct, not intellect.

After a lifelong ambivalence about his fame, he finally felt emancipated to run for the nation’s highest office. For a few months late last year, his “sense of where you are,” the celebrated court instinct that once stoked his basketball prowess, seemed to transfer to the political arena. Bradley knocked his rival, Al Gore, off stride with a well-financed guerrilla operation and dictated the early pace of the Democratic campaign.

“You have to be willing to go with the spontaneity of the moment,” Bradley explained in the euphoria after one of his few sharp debate performances. “That’s the whole premise of this campaign. If you can go out and tell people what you believe and be yourself, you can win.”

But what has become painfully apparent in the weeks of drift since a devastating loss in Iowa and a narrower defeat in New Hampshire is how much Bill Bradley may have wounded his campaign by being himself.

He has been slow to respond to Gore’s surgical lacerations of his proposals. He was leaden in most of the debates and inconsistent as a campaigner. All are characteristics, say some who watched him over the years, that first surfaced during the pressurized 1990 Senate campaign that Bradley insists freed him to compete for the presidency.

“The 1990 race was clearly a sign of weakness, but it looks like he took the wrong lessons from it,” said Susan Estrich, a sympathizer who managed Michael S. Dukakis’ abortive 1988 Democratic presidential run and recently urged Bradley to exit the race. “In politics, the past is always prelude.”

In the weeks since the debacles of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Bradley campaign has shuttled aimlessly across the political landscape like an airborne Flying Dutchman. Aloft, Bradley is a solitary figure, shrouded inside a plaid wool afghan as he hunches over sheaths of position papers.

At campaign stops, he is often out of sync, stepping on applause lines, baffling receptive crowds. He might emerge raging and fiery, hair strands askew and face reddened, pillorying Gore for ethical lapses and below-the-belt insinuations. But the distant Bradley soon returns, sometimes in the same speech, peering out remotely over his half-glasses.

As far back as November, some Bradley aides and close friends urged him to strike at Gore in a disciplined, consistent fashion. They wanted him to lance at Gore’s perceived Achilles’ heel: his borderline campaign finance abuses during the 1996 presidential race. Bradley was reluctant to abandon the high moral ground. “Yeah, I know, I know,” he told one intimate who warned that he was losing steam in the days before the Iowa loss. But Bradley kept to his private, inscrutable timeline.

By last week’s raucous Harlem debate with Gore, Bradley was finally on offense. He landed verbal punches, but his focus wavered so often he seemed in danger of provoking the Apollo Theatre’s infamous hook. He sputtered while Gore looked on in amused condescension. He sighed loudly. He warned about Gore’s campaign finance liabilities yet shrunk when asked to judge the vice president’s character.

Down by double digits in polls in almost every upcoming primary state, Bradley is making a last stand in Washington state. Aides hope a show of strength in a nonbinding primary Tuesday will provide a wave of momentum. The odds are no worse than anywhere else.

Bradley’s social circles of pals, relatives, old teammates, staffers and political allies are all disheartened by his slow fade. “It’s demoralizing, because we all know what he’s capable of,” said Tom Singer, a San Francisco psychiatrist and friend of three decades.

They are at a loss to match the ineffectual figure on the campaign trail with the disciplined, gangly banker’s kid who emerged from the riverside factory town of Crystal City, Mo., 40 years ago and set the world on fire.

“For some reason,” said Singer, “the real Bill Bradley just isn’t getting through.”

One Parent Reticent, the Other an Extrovert

Before he became the pride of his hometown, even before he picked up a basketball, Bill Bradley was driven by two distinct yet inseparable sensibilities.

Susie Bradley, his mother, was an extrovert who wanted her son to experience the world as if plunging into a rushing stream. “Susie wasn’t a stage mother,” said her sister, Hardeman Bond. “But she did want Bill to be a gentleman and to take advantage of what was around him.”

Early on, it meant piano lessons. But it became experiencing life through osmosis, a trait he never lost, whether hiking to a remote North Dakota reservation with fellow Knick Phil Jackson to glimpse Native American life or huddling with Dukakis before a presidential debate in 1988 to witness a candidate’s high-tension hell.

Bradley’s father, Warren, was less outwardly demanding. The owner of the town’s sole bank was so hobbled by spinal arthritis that his son had to tie his shoes, a haunting memory Bradley conjures up repeatedly in calling for national medical coverage for the uninsured.

The son inherited his father’s reticence, a trait valued in a small town. But over the long haul of the presidential campaign, that insular bent may have helped curdle Bradley’s relations with the press and public.

He touts a campaign based on candor. But Bradley expects aides to be tight-lipped about strategy and stay on-message. And there have been strained moments when he ignored voters’ handshakes in Des Moines and icily dismissed questioners at a Manchester, N.H., college. Despite a shared emphasis on authenticity, Bradley’s “abstract aloofness,” notes Democratic consultant Geoff Garin, “is a world away” from John McCain’s open, freewheeling campaign style.

Bradley also showed an early “sensitivity,” his aunt recalls, to those less fortunate. Near St. Louis, Crystal City had a small minority population. Alex Maul, a black worker at his father’s bank, Bradley recalled, was “an important person early in my life.” Maul erected the first basketball hoop in Bradley’s backyard and confided about the daily slights suffered by local blacks.

Concern about poverty and racial injustice would become the great constant of Bradley’s adult life. When a New Hampshire woman told him last month that her son had apologized for catching strep throat because they had no medical coverage, he wept publicly.

Basketball became a passion at age 9 and by high school, an obsession. Bradley practiced for hours on end, stuffing lead weights in his sneakers to toughen his coltish legs. His court exploits brought out the entire town. “It was a privilege to see him play,” says lifelong friend Carol Cunningham.

Recruited by 70 colleges, he first decided on Duke, then abruptly switched to Princeton after learning about its legion of Rhodes scholars. It was a defining moment, Bradley says, for a youth “always imagining a wider world.”

The adjustment threw him. A decent student with middling aptitude test scores, Bradley was overwhelmed by the tough freshman course load. “He was competing against kids who had come out of prep school and was floundering,” recalls Donald Roth, a Princeton teammate.

Bradley boned up for hours in the library. He graduated with honors, willing “himself into a self-made intellectual,” Roth said. He carried his study habits into the Senate, mastering subjects such as tax law and water rights by marathon reading sessions.

A phenomenon who scored 2,503 points in three years, he was named one of the five greatest college hoop stars by Sports Illustrated. Bradley was expected to turn pro at graduation, but he had his own willful agenda, telling a stunned Roth one day at lunch that he was off to Oxford. “I thought he was nuts,” Roth said. “But he had already Bradley-cized the whole situation and was thinking five steps ahead of the rest of us.”

Two years at Oxford broadened his academic bent. But idly shooting baskets in a British gym, Bradley pined for the heat of court action. He returned to sign with the Knicks and was quickly dubbed “Dollar Bill” for his hefty contract.

While riots ravaged northern cities in the late 1960s, Bradley tutored in Harlem clinics and bonded with black teammates. Knick guard Earl “the Pearl” Monroe recalls when “three [white] guys tried to get in a fight with me on the road. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. Bill noticed on the plane and we talked about it. He understood exactly what was going on. I’ve never forgotten that.”

The Vietnam War’s passions eluded Bradley. “Civil rights was more important to him,” said Stanford professor Dan Okimoto, his Princeton roommate. He was draft age, but like many athletes, nimbly avoided service by joining the reserves. He opposed the conflict, but he did not speak out until the 1970s, though he once slipped out with fellow Knick Dave DeBusschere to an anti-war rally in Cincinnati.

Retiring as a Knick in 1977, Bradley decided on public service as his next chapter, intent on wielding his “well-knowness” to run for office. The few politicos he knew counseled starting small with a state race in Missouri. Bradley preferred an outside game. He would run for the Senate in New Jersey.

Popping in one day at the office of Gerald Breslin, the chairman of the Bergen County Democratic Party, Bradley broached his plans. He was clearly a novice, but Breslin perked up at the idea of a Knicks hero atop his ticket. The question was whether “he could be a quick study,” Breslin recalls. Making the rounds of political clubs, Breslin noticed how people flocked to Bradley with dollar bills to sign.

“He spoke a little, not a lot of complete sentences, but that didn’t matter,” Breslin recalls. “They liked him.”

Staying Out of Senate Spotlight for Most Part

Bill Bradley was a polished performer by the time he looked toward his third term in 1990. He had mastered the Senate’s pecking order but mostly kept to the sidelines, burrowing into arcana such as the Soviet economy and Third World debt.

He shepherded through the hard-fought 1986 tax bill. But even on civil rights, though he voted dependably, Bradley was only out front during outrages such as the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles Police Department officers, angrily drumming his pencil on a lectern for each whack of the police baton.

He shunned horse-trading, in contrast to former Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, who tactfully says Bradley had a “more thoughtful style than I did.” Some Senate colleagues saw his earnestness as sanctimony. New Jersey reporters who once viewed him as a fresh face called him “St. Bill.”

But after a landslide reelection in 1984, the year of the “Reagan revolution,” Bradley’s New Jersey support seemed deep and wide. He was one of two rising Democratic stars who prepped Dukakis for his debates with George Bush. The other was Bill Clinton. “We all knew why they were there,” Estrich said.

He hewed to his trademark discretion, but as his 1990 Senate race neared, his desire for the presidency was palpable. He toured the country raising funds, building a $12-million war chest.

But with one eye cocked toward the White House, he underestimated his Republican opponent, Christine Todd Whitman, now New Jersey’s governor. William Palatucci, her campaign manager, said one Bradley advisor “told me point-blank Bradley would decide what the issues were, not Christine.”

The campaign’s dominant theme turned out to be a $2.8-billion state tax increase rammed through by the state’s Democratic governor, Jim Florio, a Bradley ally. As New Jersey residents reacted with fury, Whitman demanded that Bradley take a stand on taxes. He kept insisting it was a state matter.

Bradley admits his loyalty to Florio wounded him, as did an overreliance on advisors who did not know him well. But Palatucci and even some 1990 Bradley aides look back and see portents of his current collapse.

“It was intellectual arrogance,” Palatucci said. “He’s happy to talk about issues he thinks are important, but when the ground shifts beneath him, he doesn’t know how to react. It happened with Christie then and Gore’s done the same thing to him.”

In debates, he appeared rigid and cornered, unable to parry Whitman’s thrusts on the tax hike. Anita Dunn, Bradley’s current communications director, played Whitman in one mock debate before the election. Just as Whitman later riled Bradley in the actual event, Dunn kept needling him on the tax hike until “I could see I was getting under his skin.”

On election night, Bradley won by 3 percentage points. The near-loss toppled him into a funk that lasted weeks. Over the course of his last term, a series of personal crises made him withdraw further. His wife, the German-born Ernestine Schlant, a former flight attendant who is now an accomplished historian, was stricken with breast cancer. It is now in remission. He was shocked by the suicides of two Princeton friends. And then, one after another, his parents died.

Bradley nursed his wife and coped by writing, using journals he wrote as he campaigned for Clinton in 1992 to narrate an affecting memoir, “Time Present, Time Past.” The “realization that things aren’t forever,” he said, helped propel him to quit the Senate in 1996 and again crisscross the nation for two years until he decided at last to run for the presidency.

The old Bill Bradley, the perfectionist who “wanted everything to be perfect, perfect, perfect,” is now a changed man, he says.

His fight was always uphill against a vice president bolstered with his party’s blessing and a glowing economy. Gore was willing to do what it took to firm up his wanting public image--changing his wardrobe, going on the attack--but Bradley, for better or worse, has remained quintessentially Bradley, quietly passionate in a way that people seem unable to appreciate.

Stumping for a turnaround in Washington state, Bradley will not dwell on what could have been. “Yesterday’s game,” he says. But all along, he has been fatalistic about the possibility that this might not be his year.

“I feel like if the country wants me, I’m ready to serve,” he said. “I’m doing it in a certain way so that if the country does want me, it will be an opportunity for some transformation. If it doesn’t, I move on.”

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Profile:

William W. Bradley Jr.

* Born: July 28, 1943, in Crystal City, Mo., the only child of late banker Warren and schoolteacher Susie Bradley

* Residence: Montclair, N.J.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in American history, Princeton University, 1965. Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, 1966 to 1967.

* Career highlights: Professional basketball player, New York Knicks, 1967 to 1977. Air Force Reserve, 1967 to 1978. U.S. senator from New Jersey, 1978 to 1996. Author and lecturer, 1996 to present. Wrote “Values of the Game” (1998), “Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir” (1996), “The Fair Tax” (1982) and “Life on the Run” (1976).

* Family: Married Ernestine Schlant, professor of German and comparative literature, in 1974; one daughter, one stepdaughter.

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Times staff writers Matea Gold and Janet Wilson contributed to this story.