The Democrats: It's Tsongas -- With a T

By Robert Ajemian/Boston

Paul Tsongas has a sad, hurt look. On the podium he is a limp performer who often slurs and swallows his words. Afterward he has to brace himself for insinuating questions about another Greek politician from Massachusetts, the tattered Michael Dukakis. On top of all that, Tsongas must assure voters he has really licked the cancer that led him to retire from the U.S. Senate seven years ago. Why on earth is this man running for President?

All his political life, Tsongas, now 50, has taken people by surprise. He is an odd politician. On the surface he is almost mushy. He rarely loses his temper or even raises his voice. So it is something of a shock to discover that underneath, Tsongas (pronounced song-us) is highly opinionated and hard as nails. What you see is not what you get.

In 1978 he dared to challenge Edward Brooke, the country's only black Senator, and beat him. Two years later, he flabbergasted the ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action by telling the organization its brand of liberalism was dead. In 1984 he suddenly walked away from the Senate. He wanted to be home with his family while undergoing cancer treatment. Two months ago, Tsongas sprang yet another shock. Out of the blue, he became the first -- and so far only -- Democrat to declare for President. Right in character, he announced his candidacy at the height of George Bush's popularity.

His goal is to sound an emergency alarm. America is sinking into economic peril, warns Tsongas. In the new ruthless international marketplace, American products are not selling. The country's manufacturing base is shot, jobs are disappearing by the thousands, our standard of living is eroding. The result: the very fabric of America's social order is under threat. "The larger dangers are here, not in Iraq," says the candidate.

Calling himself the economic Paul Revere, Tsongas says American business must be better nurtured, workers must be better trained, companies must be urged to think of long-term development rather than quick profits. Furthermore, Tsongas charges, the Republican mania for free markets is dangerously out of date. Today foreign governments keenly nourish their own private industries. "American companies," says Tsongas, "need the U.S. government as a full partner."

Tsongas is even harder on his own party. Americans simply do not trust Democrats to run the economy, he declares. "For Democrats to insist that they are pro-jobs and also antibusiness is obsolete," the candidate repeats at every stop. His solution: Democrats must stop bashing business. Says Tsongas: "Democrats have been famous for dividing the pie fairly. Now there's no pie left. So Democrats must learn how to produce wealth." Businessmen, he tells his listeners, badly need a capital-gains-tax reduction, tax credits for new investments, the elimination of quarterly reports that encourage short- term thinking. Last winter Tsongas spent two months writing an encyclopedic, 85-page treatise that is the core of his campaign. The title of his book: A Call to Economic Arms.

Supply-siders excluded, many economists applaud the Tsongas message, though some fear he is kindling economic nationalism. A number of union leaders consider Tsongas a turncoat, even though his voting record over the years has been prolabor. Democratic elders are warily assessing public reaction. Potential presidential candidates, such as Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, are already sniping at Tsongas. Instead of more tax breaks for greedy businessmen, they complain, why not more of them for the middle class? Tsongas labels such criticism myopic. Only business can bake a bigger pie.

Audiences in Iowa, where the first nominating caucuses will take place next February, have rarely heard a Democratic candidate utter such heretical words. Many bob their heads in approval. If Tsongas seems bland, his words are not. Ten years ago, he explains, he made similar speeches but no one listened. "There are moments in history when ideas catch fire," Tsongas says. "Back then I lit a match and nothing happened. Now gasoline is all over the floor." His own liberal voting record takes much of the sting out of the blunt talk.

Aloof and sometimes quirky, Tsongas is a man who wastes scant time on political heartiness. "He gives little feedback," says one of his top aides. Escaping political orthodoxy appeals to him. The higher a person's standing, staff members say, the more likely Tsongas is to ignore him. He is incapable of rudeness, but there are glints of social defiance in his nature. In nine years in Washington, Tsongas says, he never held a dinner party. The Senator needs few people aside from his wife, Niki, and three daughters, Ashley, 17, Katina, 13, and Molly, 9. He is fanatically devoted to his family. "Otherwise," says a longtime member of his staff, "it's almost like he exists alone."

There is a moralistic streak in Tsongas. His speeches are apt to include denunciations against those "who ought to be ashamed of themselves." In conversation, his comments, no matter how calmly uttered, can have a know-it- all ring. He is sometimes referred to behind his back as St. Paul. Still, he does not close off argument and is willing to change his mind. Unlike most Democrats, he supports nuclear power. His conversion occurred after experts convinced him of the lasting, dire effects of oil and coal on the environment.

Tsongas and Dukakis keep a friendly distance. After Dukakis appointed him chairman of the state board of regents, Tsongas publicly criticized the Governor's education cuts. Dukakis was startled. The two men are mostly unalike. Tsongas has an easy sense of humor and is far less stiff around people. His ready quips are regularly turned on himself. Often he tells audiences he is thinking of becoming a Swede. Tsongas rarely holds grudges. When staffers urge him to retaliate against renegers, he usually waves them off.

How the man from Lowell picked up such vast self-confidence is a mystery he is at a loss to explain. His youth, Tsongas remembers, was mostly not a happy one. He never knew his mother, who suffered from tuberculosis and lived in a sanatorium. One day young Paul, age 4, was driven to see her. A ghostly figure, Katina Tsongas, gazed down from an upstairs window and waved to her son. He never saw her again. She died when Paul and his twin sister, Thaleia, were seven. A grandmother, whom the children soon called Ma, took her place.

Thin and small, socially unsure, the young Tsongas spent most of his free hours toiling in his father's dry cleaning store. There he bent wire into countless coat hangers and served behind the counter. "Paul was introverted," Thaleia recalls. "His identity comes from within himself."

At Dartmouth College, his narrow life continued. "I wasn't up to joining a fraternity," he recalls. Instead he fixed his mind on an impossible goal: he would win a swimming letter. Tsongas practiced maniacally. His senior year he got a varsity letter. It was his first real success.

After graduation in 1962, Tsongas joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in an Ethiopian village. The experience, he says, was the most compelling of his life. "For the first time ever," says Tsongas, "people liked me." He taught at a rural school, helped students build a dormitory, raced his horse on the village's main street. Then at Yale Law School, Tsongas remembers, he was miserable all over again. The change from village life to law libraries somehow depressed him. The Yale years, Tsongas says, were the unhappiest period of his life.

He returned home to Lowell, its red brick textile mills having long ago deteriorated, to practice law. In 1969 he ran for the city council and won. Elected as a reformer, he began to show a more forceful side. Soon he was bucking the city's seedy political hierarchy, whose members openly ridiculed him. Tsongas discovered the abuse did not intimidate him. Gradually he won respect. Elected to Congress, he helped secure large sums of government money that spurred Lowell's dramatic revival.

He jostled some. Former city manager Bill Taupier remembers the Senator sticking his nose into everything. "Things had to be his way," says Taupier. But by then little could dim the Tsongas luster. He was riding high. In Washington he was a member of the Senate's prestigious Foreign Relations Committee. In Lowell he was the city's first citizen.

One September morning in 1983, his life stopped in its tracks. Showering, Tsongas discovered a lump in his groin. It was diagnosed as lymphoma. Even though that kind of cancer is normally responsive to treatment, Tsongas decided to leave the Senate.

In 1986 his doctor, Tak Takvorian, proposed a radical new bone-marrow transplant. Five percent of his bone marrow was withdrawn by needle, purged of cancer cells and frozen. Tsongas remembers the day his doctor appeared holding the good marrow in a test tube. There was his life, Tsongas thought, pressed into a tube. What if the doctor dropped it? The cleansed marrow was reintroduced into his body. In an isolated room at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Tsongas waited six weeks for the result. The transplant worked.

Today Tsongas measures time from that September morning in the shower. The first day of each month he enters the elapsed time into his calendar. This June he reached 2,804 days. Doctors say there is little likelihood the cancer will return. Politically, the issue is far from settled.

Free of cancer, his economic themes set into a book, Tsongas gathered his family in the early part of the year and told them he wanted to run. No other Democrat, he was convinced, would risk the unpopular economic argument that had to be made. But if a single member of his family objected, Tsongas would drop the idea. His wife, a vibrant woman with a law practice of her own, urged him to do it. She would help. His daughters agreed.

Now Tsongas sits on the long wooden porch of his Victorian house in Lowell. At ease in a red sports shirt and running shoes, he seems oddly disengaged from his enormous undertaking. His mind turns to the campaign. "Where are the rest of them?" he asks about rival Democratic candidates. "Here I am, a has- been, all alone." Public argument will help him become better known. What about the lack of political flair? Tsongas is asked. "I have obvious problems," he says. But Tsongas does not invest much concern in the dynamics of leadership. He believes politics is driven by ideas, not style. Nor do the organizational needs of a campaign hold his interest. Tsongas delegates broadly. With a certain satisfaction, he says he doesn't even know the people who are running his state campaigns in California and Iowa.

It is late at night, and Tsongas sits alone in his living room. His golden retriever, Martha, is asleep by the front door. Tsongas is asked if he thinks much about actually being President. He answers yes, he has even thought about a Vice President and certain Cabinet members. Then Tsongas stops and makes a point. "I'm not running to be President," he says of his quest. "I'm running to spread this message."

It is a curious distinction. Somehow Tsongas has managed to disconnect ambitions that have always seemed inseparable. For the moment, the message is what really matters. Either his ideas are vital to the country, Tsongas says, or he will go down in flames. Until that becomes clearer, he will stay resolved. "I must not do what Democrats usually do," he says, "and bend to special interests. I am the message. If I bend, I have no message."