Insiders know L.A. attorney Mickey Kantor, but his name’s no household word. That could change soon--he’s Bill Clinton’s national campaign chairman. : Into the Limelight

Los Angeles is burning. Pillars of smoke rise from the city like biblical portents. But inside his ninth-floor West L.A. law office, Mickey Kantor puts the riot aside--temporarily--to talk about his good friend, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton. It doesn’t take long to see that Kantor is a man with a mission, that he has embarked this year on what may be the culmination of his life in politics.

“If Bill Clinton could meet every person in America, there’s no doubt he’d be President of the United States,” the Clinton national campaign chairman says with conviction that borders on fervor. “There’s just no doubt about it.”

A slight, dark-haired man with big hands, Kantor’s physique hints that he once was a shortstop on the Vanderbilt University baseball team. Like a shortstop, he seldom sits still, moving and shifting behind his desk as if he might need to spring up and snag a line drive at any moment. At 52, he remains a rough-and-tumble athlete, a friend says, noting that in their last encounter on a basketball court, he broke Kantor’s glasses.

That friend, Occidental College professor Derek Shearer, reports that politics has taken a toll on Kantor’s passion for sports; he has not been able to go to a Dodger game this year. Shearer, a senior Clinton adviser, and others portray Kantor as a man devoted to family, an essentially private man who turns away evening phone calls to help his 9-year-old daughter, Alix, with her multiplication tables.

But on this busy day, Kantor interrupts the interview once or twice to take a call, including one from L.A. Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner. The conversation is off the record, not that it matters since Kantor’s utterances are either monosyllabic or cryptic.

The phone calls are yet another clue. Here is a man most people have never heard of. But the people who make headlines every day, the movers and shakers, the big cheeses, know Mickey Kantor. They call on him to take their cases, run their campaigns, put them in the history books.

When he wants to, Kantor also can pick up the phone and get things done. Last weekend, Kantor phoned supermarket chain executives asking them to assure food deliveries to riot-torn areas of Los Angeles, Shearer says.

Never before, however, has Kantor come as close to the national spotlight in his own right. While his higher profile probably was inevitable, his reputation as a cool head in hot times drew him into the campaign full time--or nearly so--much earlier than planned.

Practically speaking, Kantor presides over the freewheeling morning conference calls where daily Clinton tactics are hammered out by operatives throughout the country. The calls will end sometime this summer when the campaign establishes a national headquarters and Kantor moves to the as-yet-unnamed location to officially become a full-time chairman.

By all accounts, Kantor’s chief role is to make sure decisions are made, either by himself or someone else. Several sources--not all friendly--say Clinton’s trust in Kantor’s advice is near total and that he is one of the very few who can say “no” to the candidate. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Kantor is older than nearly everyone else on the campaign, including Clinton.

Kantor went from figurehead to generalissimo during the New Hampshire primary. Campaign watchers credit him with a major role in resurrecting the Arkansas governor’s White House hopes after a media firestorm over self-declared mistress Gennifer Flowers. He arrived on the scene when the situation was much bleaker and many thought Clinton would be forced out of the race. Clinton finished second in New Hampshire and claimed a moral victory as “the comeback kid.”

“I thought my only role was to be as calm and as quiet and as supportive as possible and make sure decisions were made, and by making decisions allow Bill Clinton go out and campaign unfettered by worries of what comes next,” he says.

Kantor says he’s “bemused” by the controversies that have snared Clinton since the beginning of the year. On paper, Clinton is the “perfect Democratic presidential candidate,” he argues. He hopes the recent Pennsylvania primary, in which Clinton’s voter ratings for trustworthiness showed a dramatic upturn, signal better times for his candidate.

Partly, he thinks Clinton is a victim of the times.

“He worked hard, did well, played by the rules. Bill Clinton should be the role model for the next generation and unfortunately he’s (viewed as) just the opposite,” Kantor says.

The esteem is mutual. In a statement this week, Clinton says he has “come to rely more and more on (Kantor’s) judgment and assistance. . . . He’s always calm and he’s always thinking about the big picture.”

Part of the big picture, of course, is California. L.A. political consultant Joseph Cerrell notes that the state can supply 20% of the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency and that Kantor serves Clinton’s interests here well. Another big-picture item, says Cerrell, is picking Clinton’s running mate: “My understanding is that no matter how small the group is, Mickey Kantor will be in the room.”

And, if Clinton wins the presidency, say Kantor’s friends and other more detached observers, Kantor’s campaign performance could make him the country’s next attorney general or White House chief of staff.

It’s not as if Kantor had been hiding under a rock until now.

Punch his name into a computer and the machine spews out nearly 200 references in magazines and newspapers, stretching back nearly a decade. Turns out Kantor is frequently snagged by writers in search of a comment on political trends. Generally, his remarks appear deep in the body of stories, far from the limelight’s fickle beam.

That electronic search also picks up the public traces of private hurt.

Kantor’s first wife died in the 1978 PSA jet crash in San Diego. Four years ago, a son died along with three friends in a fiery Santa Monica auto crash.

While he readily bares his heart regarding Bill Clinton, Kantor steers away from his own personal sorrows:

“It’s hard for me and I don’t like to talk about it. Whatever things I’ve been through, you just deal with them. I don’t mean to minimize them but a lot of people have tragedies in their lives.”

Kantor is also frequently mentioned for his corporate legal skills, including work on behalf of Lockheed, Santa Fe Railroad and Occidental Petroleum. One visible proof of his legal clout: In January his name was added to the politically influential firm where he practices. It is now called Manatt, Phelps, Phillips & Kantor.

Not mentioned but well known in certain circles is the fact that Nashville, Tenn., native Kantor began his career as a poverty lawyer, concentrating on the rights of migrant farm workers, first in Florida, then throughout the country.

“I can’t overestimate what an effect that’s had on my life,” he says. “It became clear in Florida as you filed suits and the laborious process you have to go through and the delays you faced . . . that political action was absolutely critical, that you had to empower people . . .”

As a teen-ager, Kantor was deeply affected by the early Civil Rights movement. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision, Kantor says his father lost his job with the Nashville school board because “he had the temerity to believe that the law of the land should be followed . . . I was 15 years old and it was almost like a wake-up call.”

Today, Kantor frequently is cited in a public-service capacity, most recently as a member of the Christopher Commission, the body charged with recommending reforms for the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King beating. But he seems equally proud of his role in founding the L.A. Conservation Corps, designed to instill discipline and high standards in urban teen-agers.

As the L.A. riot reached its peak, Kantor worried that the country had been asleep regarding race relations since the turmoil of the 1960s.

“The minority community is thoroughly alienated . . . ,” he says. “Republicans and Democrats should shoulder the blame here. We’re all to blame and none of us are to blame. . . . It’s almost like we’ve been, in a sense, Rip Van Winkle. We’ve got to wake up. . . . Who are we as a people?”

In the wake of the riot, Kantor hopes that Clinton’s message--”that you cannot have a free society without responsibility” and “you can’t have individual responsibility without real (economic) opportunity”--will play well with voters.

Kantor has sharpened his instincts by working in Democratic campaigns for the political equivalent of forever.

He is a veteran of California electoral battles stretching back to the 1970s when he came to the state to work in one of U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s campaigns. Since then his campaign stripes include key positions with former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown and 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale, as well as participating in a host of local and state elections.

But after Mondale’s overwhelming 1984 defeat by Ronald Reagan, Kantor says he told his wife, former NBC correspondent Heidi Schulman, that he was ready to retire from big-time politics.

“I told Heidi that I wasn’t going to do this any more, it’s just too tough,” he recalls. “It really is. You get to an age you can’t do it. I said, ‘Unless Bill runs. If Bill runs, that’s the one last thing I want.’ ”

It is when he talks about Clinton that the controlled, detached Kantor persona slips to reveal a man who is still passionate about politics and issues. The two have known each other for 14 years, having met through Clinton’s wife, Hillary, with whom Kantor served on the board of the Legal Services Corp. during the Carter Administration.

Kantor was bowled over from the start.

“In meeting these two, it was stunning,” he says, “their commitment, the thoughtful way they went through the process of trying to work with the people of Arkansas, what they were trying to do.”

The relationship blossomed into a lasting friendship with reciprocal visits.

Without hearing Kantor’s voice, it is difficult to catch the full flavor of Kantor’s evangelical enthusiasm for candidate Clinton. His comments are long and cadenced, almost liturgical, pronounced in an accent not all that different from the candidate’s. Still, some of Kantor’s stump-speaking zeal comes through.

Here he is explaining why he wants Clinton’s moving van at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.:

“The American people, I think, are thoroughly disgusted with the logjam in Washington. We have had 12 years of this Reagan-Bush Administration, who believe you can divide and conquer, that you can continue to create a wealthy class of individuals in this country to the detriment of the middle class and create more poor people and you won’t have to pay the piper, that we can run up these huge deficits without building for the future with no money into R and D, or little money into capital expenditures, no money into training and the future of the country. And it doesn’t work and it’s shown. And we’re going to pay a very heavy price for it. And that’s why this is so important for Bill Clinton to win this, to begin to build for the future, to begin to invest in people, to begin to deal with these problems.”

Kantor can also be sharp-tongued and scornful, especially when discussing the candidacies of President George Bush and Texas wild card Ross Perot.

“We’ve got a millionaire President and a billionaire independent candidate,” Kantor says. “And Bill Clinton. I think one of his major assets is a 1986 Pontiac. This is not a person who is motivated by money.”

Nor is Kantor shy about where he stands on two controversial California personalities, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and last-ditch Democratic candidate Jerry Brown.

He believes “Chief Gates should have left when he said he was going to leave in April” so that the city would have had a new police chief before the verdicts in the Rodney King beating.

Although a few political insiders say privately that Kantor is too concerned about being well-liked, the campaign chairman made a dramatic public break with Brown.

The flash point came at a Chicago campaign debate earlier this year during which Brown charged that Hillary Clinton’s law firm had benefited from state business directed to it by her governor husband.

Kantor stepped forward and accused his old political ally of “giving hypocrisy a bad name.”

Reflecting on that break, Kantor says, “Until Chicago I wouldn’t say anything because I thought it was probably not the civilized and civil and gracious thing to do.”

Still, Kantor concedes that Brown, whose father, Pat, also served as governor, might win the California primary: “The fact is no one’s ever come close even to beating a Brown in a Democratic primary in the state of California, ever.”

But it won’t do Brown much good, he says, asserting that Clinton will take enough delegates in other states on June 2 to “be well over the top” for the nomination.

In the legal arena, Kantor is widely respected as a negotiator, bringing together parties with apparently irreconcilable differences. Several sources praise Kantor as a man of honor: “His word is gold,” says one.

But politics is a rough-and-tumble game, and Kantor knows that he’ll probably take some hard shots in coming months.

Such talk is already available. Off-the-record.

Privately, some express reservations about Kantor’s mixing politics and corporate law. Two sources wondered if Kantor is vulnerable to conflict-of-interest charges because he has lobbied City Hall on behalf of corporate clients while remaining close to L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley. Ironically, Kantor the attorney represented Bradley in 1989 against conflict-of-interest charges.

Kantor himself admits that such a danger exists. But he maintains that his record is clean and that he is sensitive to both the substance and appearance of conflict:

“There’s always potential conflict when you’re as active as a lot of lawyers are in this town, or any other town are. And I’m certainly one of them . . . You’ve got to learn to take the heat.”

He seems somewhat proud that his firm dropped Continental Airlines as a client “when they went into bankruptcy, we thought, merely to break a union contract.” Kantor also says he turned down “a major agricultural interest” because it was “adverse” to the United Farm Workers union.

“I hope I’ve retained some standards in life,” he concludes.

“That doesn’t make me a hero. But I hope that I’ve retained some level of base-line philosophical consistency that you don’t cross . . . I’ve been very lucky. I’ve made a very good living. I’ve clearly exceeded every expectation that I would have had in Nashville when I was growing up . . . If people don’t agree with what some of my clients have done or what I’ve done that’s their right.”