Maverick Senator Survives Purge Hatfield Votes With His Heart, Maintains Respect Of His Party

It was a warning, pure and simple. Step down as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee or face a move to be forced out.

Beyond refusing to relinquish his chairman’s gavel, Sen. Mark Hatfield had an unusual response to Sen. Connie Mack, the Florida Republican who came Tuesday morning to warn Hatfield that he would seek the ouster. Hatfield thanked him. Not for the message, but for the courtesy of a personal visit.

“I don’t hold rancor in my heart,” he said afterward.

Hatfield’s grace, congeniality, dignity may make him seem like a quaint relic amid a conservative revolution peopled by those who use words like “liar” or “bitch” or “traitor” to describe their opponents.

But they help explain why the 72-year-old Oregon Republican has survived, even prospered in a world where he always has been like an eccentric uncle. Odd, but still family.

They help explain why a moderate who opposed the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, military spending and now the balanced budget amendment, continues to be respected, admired and welcomed by fellow Republicans. Why they entrusted him with the chairmanship of the committee with control over all discretionary federal spending. Why they refused Wednesday afternoon to punish him after his vote against the budget amendment helped kill it.

And they help explain why a man with a lengthy list of ethical questions still is called St. Mark by colleagues.

With his political party swirling around him this week, Hatfield was a picture of soft-spoken serenity. Some of that stems from his deeply held religious conviction. A regular at Capitol prayer breakfasts, Hatfield has written three books on the role of a Christian in politics.

Some of his calm also stems from the fact that Hatfield has been in the eye of the storm before.

As governor of Oregon in the 1960s, he once cast the only dissenting vote on a National Governors Association resolution that supported the Vietnam War. As Appropriations Committee chairman in the early 1980s, he openly ridiculed President Reagan’s proposed Star Wars missile-defense system, asking Democrats to help him stop “this madness.”

He was the only senator who opposed both the resolution authorizing the Persian Gulf War and the alternative resolution to toughen economic sanctions against Iraq. “They do not offer us the alternative of peace,” he said.

His abhorrence of war is deeply held. As a naval officer, Hatfield was a member of the first American military unit to visit Hiroshima a month after it was leveled by the atomic bomb.

“He’s made his career by being a maverick,” said James Moore, a political scientist at the University of Portland. “He has consistently taken big stands that have not been popular with his constituents.”

Like many Republicans, many of his views are buttressed by his personal religious beliefs. But his convictions differ from those that drive Christian conservatives. He believes, for example, that the Congress should cut defense spending and use the money to help the poor, both 180 degrees from today’s GOP agenda.

He opposes abortion, a position favored by conservatives, but opposes the death penalty. He also supported legislation to ban desecration of the American flag.

Hatfield voted for a balanced budget amendment once, in 1982. Afterward, he called it a mistake he would never repeat. When it came up in 1986 and 1994, he voted against it.

If Hatfield’s devotion to his princi ples in the face of intense opposition has won him praise, his devotion to his financial well-being has won him a series of investigations and questions about his ethics.

His son received a full scholarship to the University of South Carolina at roughly the same time his committee approved a $16 million grant to the school. He also failed to disclose gifts of art and travel from the former university president. Hatfield said he did not know the gifts were valuable enough to warrant disclosure and denied influencing the grant.

His daughter was one of four students admitted to the Oregon Health Sciences University under a special policy ordered by the school president. Hatfield had helped the school get nearly $100 million in federal grants during the 1980s. He said he told school officials he did not want special treatment for his daughter.

His wife received $55,000 for decorating and real estate services from a businessman while Hatfield tried to help the businessman win approval for a $15 billion African pipeline deal. After it was revealed, Hatfield donated the money to charity.

He also failed to disclose $55,000 in gifts, including several from a lobbyist who had sought Hatfield’s help.

Hatfield is in his 44th year in politics and entering the final two years of his fifth term in the Senate. Sometime before election day 1996, Republican leaders will bring up the amendment again. Hatfield said he did not yet know whether he will run for a sixth term then, but did know where he would stand on the amendment. Solidly in the maverick camp.