Senator Finally Gets Attention : Wilson Catches Spotlight in Gurney Ride to Senate

WASHINGTON —  From Ward 5 East at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Sen. Pete Wilson was calling the shots.

Around noon Thursday, he OKd the ambulance to stand by. About 8 p.m. his press staff started tipping off the media that Wilson, recovering from an emergency appendectomy, would be wheeled into the Capitol for a crucial budget vote.

Nothing was left to chance. About 1 a.m., when Wilson arrived at the Capitol steps on a gurney, his aides had photographers staked out nearby.

It was a classic sample of the kind of schoolboy excitement Wilson and his aides have shown ever since they first arrived here 2 1/2 years ago. Thanks to a ruptured appendix, Wilson finally had caught the national media’s eye.

Only weeks before on a balmy spring evening in the nation’s capital, Wilson had been telling an interviewer about his zest for being a senator and grousing about how little media attention he has been getting.

The breezes were thick with the scent of cherry blossoms and the former Yale English literature major seemed as bursting with life as the night around him.

He was leaning back in a chair, relaxed, his senatorial blue suit barely mussed, his slight frame dwarfed by the high-ceiling architecture of the Hart Senate Office Building. The talk was about the pace of Washington, about the privileges and vagaries of power, about the fickle press and his future plans, about how he loves doing business in “this intellectual candy shop” called the U.S. Senate.

At one point, the talk turned to Wilson’s political future. What about the vice presidency? “Yes, of course,” Wilson answered without hesitation, then added, somewhat reverently: “If I conclude my public service career in the Senate, I would feel that I’ve been privileged.”

“He’s died and gone to heaven back here,” Wilson’s Chief of Staff Bob White said of the former San Diego mayor, the man who tried twice to be governor but settled for a Senate race against former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. in 1982.

Others second White’s observation about Wilson, but with a different spin.

“The joke in Washington is that two politicians disappeared after California’s 1982 Senate race--one was Jerry Brown and the other was Pete Wilson,” quipped one longtime Washington political analyst, who preferred not to be named. “Pete Wilson is invisible in Washington. No major legislation, no major speeches, no major anything. . . . “

Evaluations Differ

Some call Wilson drab and ineffective; some call him a Reagan rubber stamp; others call him a workhorse for his state.

From a Republican colleague, Sen. William S. Cohen of Maine, comes restrained praise. “I think Pete Wilson is someone who holds strong convictions and expresses them with quiet competence,” said Cohen, who serves with Wilson on the Armed Services Committee and dines with him socially. “He informs without offending. . . . You know, you don’t have to be charismatic to gain respect for your judgment.”

Cohen said people who complain that Wilson is lackluster ought to consider how he got elected. “If Californians are looking for someone like Jerry Brown in Pete Wilson, they won’t find him. Re member, the people of California said they didn’t want Jerry Brown.”

Wilson gets mixed reviews from the Democratic side of the aisle:

- California’s senior senator, Alan Cranston, paid Wilson a compliment of sorts when he said Wilson reminds him of himself in his first few years in Washington. “He’s not rigid. He’s not dogmatic. He doesn’t try to grab every issue in sight. He works hard. He is a serious senator,” said Cranston, who has co-sponsored a number of measures with his Republican counterpart from the Golden State.

- “He plays between the 40-yard lines,” said Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), “and basically it’s the people who play between the 40-yard lines who wind up making the decisions around here.”

- “He’s a decent enough fellow but not impressive,” said another Senate Democrat who has observed Wilson closely in committee sessions and spoke on the condition that his name not be used.

Peter Barton Wilson, 51 is still just “Pete” in the U.S. Senate--5 feet, 11 inches tall, 150 pounds and graying sideburns. With his dapper clothes and Phi Beta Kappa wife, he’s a white wine and Mercedes-Benz kind of man, who walks to work from a chic town house in an “in” neighborhood on Capitol Hill. He’s a bona fide yuppie senator.

Gayle Wilson, 41, the senator’s attractive blonde wife, was chairman of a recent Senate Wives’ Club lunch for First Lady Nancy Reagan. She’s a former Junior League president from San Diego and one-time pre-med student at Stanford who is the mother of a college-age son and a 16-year-old son who lives with his father. Wilson describes his wife of two years, who was featured on the cover of Washington Dossier magazine during inaugural week, as “a great girl.”

Once he insisted that he would rather be governor than a senator because “the legislative responsibility does not intrigue me nearly as much as the executive.” Well now it does, he says.

Learning Spanish

He is learning Spanish so he can better talk with Mexican officials on economic matters; sometimes he is on the Senate floor at 1 a.m. pushing some road bill or another; more and more these days, he and his socialite wife are familiar faces on the Washington party scene.

One ambition drives him. He wants to hang onto his job. It is consuming him on Capitol Hill, on first-class flights from Washington and late at night in his Senate office. He does not want, he says, to become the fourth junior senator in a row to be bounced out of office by California voters after only one term.

“He’s not going to be perceived as just another goofy California senator like ‘Sleepy Sam’ (Hayakawa) or ‘Playboy John’ (Tunney) or ‘Song and Dance Man George’ (Murphy),” said Otto Bos, Wilson’s $60,000-a-year media aide, who will move back to California soon so he can begin fashioning a Wilson “presence” in California before the 1988 election.

Added Wilson, unsmilingly, etching each word into the air: “I intend to break the jinx on this seat.”

So, the press releases appear to be getting more frequent, and Bos is heading for California.

“You not only have to do a good job, you have to make sure that people know you have done it,” Wilson complained. “We find we’re doing an awful lot of good things and a lot of people don’t know about it, including people who should. “

At one point in the interview before he knew his appendix would thrust him onto Page 1, Wilson let out an angry burst of frustration at the media’s taste for what he called the “man-bites-dog situation”:

“A freshman can make news if he does something that is out of the usual. I mean there’s no mystery about how to be on the ‘NBC Nightly News.’ If I were to go out and denounce Ronald Reagan as a charlatan, well, by God, I bet I’d make news. I bet I’d be on the evening news. . . . “

Bos plans to exhibit a repackaged Pete Wilson before the the 1988 reelection campaign. “Pete had a blank canvas when he came to Washington, and he’s filled it quite nicely,” Bos explained. “Now we’ve got to see that it’s hung in a better spot in California.”

The new “canvas” features a more conservative, hawkish Wilson, one who has kicked the moderate posture he took with him to the Senate in 1983. And it apparently will be a more lively, looser Wilson. Already he is trying out a new repertoire of jokes and one-liners designed to pierce his stolid carapace.

Wilson’s political future is not guaranteed, despite his boast that he has “the highest approval rating (70% in the March, 1985, Field Poll) of anyone who has held this seat since Hiram Johnson.” Although his name recognition and favorable rating in California have climbed since 1982, there still are pockets of soft support for the San Diegan, especially in the northern part of the state. And 30% of the state’s voters, according to the Field Poll, still do not know who Pete Wilson is. More know actor Charlton Heston and San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. The latter is a possible Wilson challenger in 1988.

Wilson has been a good, solid Republican who has toed the party line on almost every Senate vote. According to Congressional Quarterly, Wilson supported President Reagan 78% of the time during 1984, the Republican position 90% of the time, and conservative coalition positions 86% of the time. He has supported military aid to the contras in Nicaragua, as well as prayer time in schools and tuition tax credits for private education. He opposed federal financing for abortions.

“In some cases, he has even gone beyond Reagan,” said Paul Wyrick, director of the ultraconservative political action group Committee for a Free Congress.

Only rarely has Wilson publicly differed with the President, as he did when he spoke out against the mining of the Nicaraguan harbors and the visit to the cemetery at Bitburg, West Germany. Recently, Wilson criticized the Reagan Administration for trade policies that hurt California agriculture.

Wags on Capitol Hill have dubbed California’s junior senator “Pork-Barrel Pete” and “Press-Release Pete” for all the home state dams, roads, land acquisitions and military hardware he has promoted and the blizzard of mail that his office pours out to the media.

Wilson bristles at the monikers. “Some of the ones accusing me of pork-barreling are the same ones who accuse me of being ineffective, which I think is a little inconsistent,” he said with a sarcastic chuckle. “When you vote for a strong defense, you’re also voting for the employment of literally hundreds of thousands of Californians, a fact to which I am not indifferent. What it means is our national security interest coincides with our self-interest.”

Along with his efforts on behalf of defense contractors, Wilson was a key figure last year in a compromise that increased from seven to 12 the number of TV stations that any one communication firm can own, providing the firm cornered no more than 25% of the national market with the increase. This move also was aimed at curtailing the power of the networks.

Wilson also has become a “champion”--to use the word of Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America--of the movie industry for opposing the three major television networks in a fight over control of the $1-billion TV rerun market.

The senator’s personal lobbying of Federal Communications Commission members on behalf of the movie industry is sharply criticized by Chip Shooshan, a consultant to the networks.

Shooshan--former lawyer for a House subcommittee on telecommunications--said that by lobbying commissioners in their offices, Wilson “may have crossed the lines of propriety between Congress and the FCC.”

“He’s not Jack Valenti; he’s a U.S. senator who votes on FCC appropriations. . . . It’s unique in my recollection,” Shooshan told The Times.

“I’m unimpressed,” Wilson said, when told of Shooshan’s criticisms. “The FCC is not the only agency I lobbied, nor will it be. A legislator should do his job.”

Wilson’s efforts for the movie industry earned him a $200,000 “thank you” last month when MCA Inc. (Universal Studios) Chairman Lew Wasserman, a longtime Democrat, hosted a political fund-raising party of top studio executives in his Beverly Hills mansion for Wilson.

Wilson’s other major effort since coming to Washington was his work on a compromise wilderness land bill worked out with Cranston. The compromise ended a bitter five-year struggle--appeasing timber interests by scaling back a House bill from 2.4-million acres to 1.8-million acres and gaining environmental support with Wilson’s idea to protect the wild Tuolomne River. Wilson’s role won him high praise in liberal circles.

But Rep. Richard H. Lehman (D-Sanger), skeptical about Wilson’s environmentalist credentials, is waiting to see how Wilson votes when another chunk of wilderness acreage involving Bureau of Land Management land comes up for action shortly. (Wilson said he does not know yet how he will vote on the Bureau of Land Management acreage.)

Special Interest Complaints

The wilderness bill, plus Wilson’s continued support of a moratorium on offshore oil drilling along much of the California coast, caused some grousing among special-interest groups--including timber, oil and agriculture--that supported his candidacy in 1982.

“Pete is really something of an enigma,” complained Art Spaulding, general manager of the Western Oil and Gas Assn. “We regarded him as a devout Republican . . . but he really has been arbitrary when it comes to offshore operations.”

Bos expects to be in place in California shortly to begin selling Wilson to the voters. But in the meantime, the senator already is on the hustings, pushing an image of himself as part legislative drone, part social butterfly, part stand-up comic.

One of Wilson’s three one-term predecessors, John Tunney, sums it up this way: “I think Pete’s looked at the political landscape, looked at those senators who did well and those who did not, and decided a non-controversial low profile is the best way to go.”

During a round of parties and dinners over Easter vacation, Wilson began to resemble a kind of political-stump Johnny Carson as he opened each appearance with a long monologue of snappy one-liners and pithy rejoinders.

There was the one about “Sgt. Jones,” a Camp Pendleton Marine faced with missing his own wedding because he had been denied liberty.

Wilson recalls the call from the mother of the bride:

“ ‘You’re on the Armed Services Committee, for God’s sake DO something!’ (Wilson gets a laugh as he screeches, in a mock-female voice.) A leave is finally arranged for the sergeant, but the day after the wedding, my secretary hands me a telegram: ‘Dear Sen. Wilson, Next time mind your own damn business. Sgt. Jones.’ ”

$1.2 Million From 2 Parties

Raising political money does not seem to be a problem for Wilson. Over the Easter break, he collected $1.2 million at two parties--one at Wasserman’s house for the movie moguls, the other a $1,000-a-plate dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel attended by 850 people. Wilson’s reelection bank account now stands at about $1.5 million, and he says he plans to raise another $8 million to $9 million by 1988.

Along with collecting money over the Easter break, Wilson also held two subcommittee hearings for his home state audiences--one at Ft. Ord to examine the status of military housing and another in Fresno, probing the imbalance-of-trade dilemma faced by California farmers.

The Fresno hearing was tinged with controversy. Wilson’s staff nearly succeeded in barring American Agricultural Movement leader Wayne Meyer, an almond grower from Sutter County, from testifying. It was only after Meyer complained to reporters of the freeze-out that the senator added him to the hearing roster.

More than a third of the witnesses--six of 16 agriculture officials and growers seeking a freer trade policy for their produce--turned up later at a Fresno home for a cocktail to plan a large Wilson fund-raiser in June.

“It’s a simple fact of life that those who are active as spokesmen for their (agricultural) associations are the same ones who are actively involved in politics,” Wilson explained.

After Fresno, it was on to Bakersfield then to Anaheim where he was paid $2,000 for attending a Saturday night cocktail buffet where appliance dealers and their spouses lined up to have their picture taken with the U.S. senator.

Wilson collected $21,780 in honorariums in 1984 and $69,500 in 1983 before the Senate capped the speaking fees at 30% of a senator’s salary--$21,780 for 1984. “It’s a way you can supplement your income,” Wilson said.