Sunday, October 26, 2003

By James O'Toole, Post-Gazette Politics Editor

After a flirtation some years ago with contact lenses, Dick Thornburgh has returned to the same horn-rimmed glasses that stared out of the now-yellowing newspaper pages that made his reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor.

	"Where the Evidence Leads" By Dick Thornburgh University of Pittsburgh Press ($35) Post-Gazette Book and Author Evening On Nov. 6, Dick Thornburgh joins fellow authors Gail Collins ("America's Women") and Wil Haygood ("In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr.") for the Post-Gazette Book and Author Evening sponsored by the Junior League of Pittsburgh. Held at the Carnegie Music Hall, the event includes a reception at 6:30 p.m. and author presentations at 7:30. Tickets are $35, with a $10 student ticket for the author segment only. To order, call 412-394-3353, noon to 5:30 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. On the Net, visit www.proartstickets.org.

Through most of four decades in public life, those sober spectacles, worn with an unvarying wardrobe of conservative sack suits, reinforced the no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma'am image that accompanied Thornburgh from Grant Street to the White House Cabinet Room.

But anyone who ever watched the former governor at a Harrisburg Gridiron performance, or, more recently, in a surreally hilarious appearance on HBO's "Da Ali G Show," has seen another side to Thornburgh.

He is a ham. Belying that stern image is a sense of fun and an often self-deprecatory brand of humor.

In varying proportions -- and at times the reader may wish for more of the latter and less of the former -- both sides of the former prosecutor are found in the pages of his autobiography.

The volume recounts a largely unplanned journey through life with stops as a vaguely civic-minded but unfocused young lawyer, a crusading prosecutor, a successful two-term governor, an often-praised and sometimes embattled attorney general, failed U.S. Senate candidate, United Nations official and Washington talking head.

It offers an insider's insight on key chapters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and national history.

Thornburgh's work is short on kiss-and-tell gossip. He doesn't waste space settling old scores, although he doesn't strain to conceal his disdain for former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu.

Instead, this is, largely, his lawyerly brief on the public record. But it is an often fascinating record. Thornburgh has had an eventful, often dramatic life, professionally and personally.

The drama is epitomized by his vivid recitation of the events of March 1979, when, just weeks after taking the oath of office, he was confronted by the threat of a meltdown at Three Mile Island, the Susquehanna River nuclear plant whose giant cooling towers are just over the horizon from the capitol in Harrisburg.

Thrust upon the rookie governor were questions and decisions that no public official in history had faced. With a tight group of advisers he dubbed his "ad-hocracy," he had a crash course in physics, public relations and disaster management.

By most accounts, he and his fledgling administration passed this unforeseeable test with high marks, earning a stature and a measure of public confidence that enhanced their clout in dealing with more prosaic issues over the subsequent eight years.

While TMI was an unprecedented event, Thornburgh was involved in other issues that were also the stuff of drama. One that is, unaccountably, far less gripping in the retelling involves an investigation that helped make Thornburgh's name as a classic rackets-busting prosecutor.

It involved his pursuit of Robert Duggan, a former Allegheny County district attorney.

The story had elements that would beg the imagination of a John Grisham. Duggan, a fellow Republican who, like Thornburgh, traveled in the highest levels of the Pittsburgh establishment, was suspected of taking payoffs from numbers writers.

Thornburgh's U.S. attorney's office was intent on establishing that Duggan's wealth exceeded the means of his public salary or private law practice. One conceivable source of income that they sought to rule out was Duggan's relationship with a Mellon heiress, Cordelia Scaife May.

Before the FBI could interview her, however, she and Duggan were suddenly married, thus giving her protection from testifying against him.

Thornburgh's office had managed to convict a Duggan subordinate, Sam Ferraro, the former chief of his racket squad, for accepting payoffs. For a time the trail stopped at Ferraro, who refused to testify against his former boss. Eventually, however, the detective relented, setting the stage for an indictment of Duggan.

The day before Duggan was to be charged, he was found dead on his estate. He apparently had shot himself with his 12-gauge shotgun.

Thornburgh calls this "dreadful news," and notes, "It did not take long for conspiracy theories to surface over the circumstances of Duggan's death ... . No evidence came to light, however, to indicate that his death was anything other than a suicide."

Thornburgh, the writer, then hurries on to description of other prosecutions, leaving the reader hungering for more reflection, more insights into his personal reaction to this extraordinary melodrama.

While his media image was a positive one during his Pennsylvania years, he notes ruefully that his press relationship was more mixed during his time as head of the U.S. Justice Department during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Thornburgh's accounts of those years bog down with rebuttals of news stories that the reader may not have read, much less remembered.

Among the high points was his role in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The landmark legislation was close to his heart because of his experience in rearing a son who suffered serious brain injuries in the automobile crash that took the life of his first wife.

"A crowd of some 4,000, most with disability of one kind or other, gathered in the bright sunlight of the South Lawn of the White House to share a moment of true achievement," he recalls. "The day was a high point of my achievement as attorney general, and I will never forget the celebration of what columnist David Broder called 'arguably the most significant civil rights and social policy legislation to become law in more than a decade.' "

Less positive memories came from his experience on the Domestic Policy Council, a supposed counterpart to the National Security Council largely emasculated by Sununu and other White House aides, and Bush's preoccupation with foreign affairs.

While Thornburgh is clearly proud of his record, he is often refreshingly candid about mistakes and setbacks. He confesses to "my biggest blunder," the inept handling of a controversy over leaks involving an investigation of former U.S. Rep. Bill Gray and to his "dismal failure" in mustering support for a wholesale revision of federal criminal laws.

He is starkly critical of his own performance and that of his campaign team in the 1991 U.S. Senate election when he was not only upset, but upset in a landslide, by Democrat Harris Wofford.

He expresses grudging admiration at the political agility of the Democratic campaign quarterbacks, James Carville and Paul Begala. And he invokes a quote from Richard Nixon in an overall assessment of a race that he had been persuaded to enter: "A reluctant candidate is always a lousy candidate."

After the Senate race, Thornburgh accepted Bush's request to serve as undersecretary general of the United Nations, a brief, fascinating but frustrating interlude in which he labored to impose a management shakeup on an entrenched bureaucracy.

This buttoned-down public servant is relatively reticent in describing the personal and emotional aspects of his varied life. But one element that shines through his understated prose is his love for his second wife, Ginny, and his pride in her work for the disabled.

At one point, he recounts how, in a private audience with Pope John Paul II, she sowed the seeds for an ecumenical 1992 conference on disabilities at the Vatican.

"Quite an accomplishment for a Presbyterian," he notes.

Thornburgh began his political career as a relatively liberal Republican. In 1968, in a letter to the editor published in this newspaper, he voiced concern that the "radical right" was taking over his party. That ideological tension never went away.

Thornburgh writes that, "Following my 1991 Senate campaign, my involvement in Republican politics dwindled considerably. While I campaigned successfully for several GOP candidates, a younger and more conservative group was coming to the fore. Those of us who had campaigned and governed as fiscal conservatives and social moderates were becoming scarce."

The most public part of Thornburgh's career is over, but he is not in retirement. He practices law in Washington and has cultivated an avocation as a television commentator. His numerous appearances in connection with the O.J. Simpson case and the Clinton impeachment led to an occasional stint as substitute host for Larry King on CNN.

Last year, a New York court appointed him as special examiner for the complex, multibillion-dollar WorldCom bankruptcy.

"So began another challenging adventure," he notes, "which is ongoing as I write."

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