July 5, 2000
A GROWING AMBITION A special report.
Behind the Lazio Smile Lies a Deliberate and Pragmatic Substance
By DAN BARRY
Will Waldron for The New York Times
Rick A. Lazio eagerly replaced Rudolph W. Giuliani in the Senate
race. He campaigned on Tuesday with his wife, Patricia, in
Argyle, N.Y.
THE 2000 CAMPAIGN
Tall and lanky, with a voice that occasionally cracks and a
forelock that resists conformity. All in all, he presents himself
as the perfect young man to escort your daughter to the junior
prom: he would obey the speed limit, attempt nothing more than a
peck on the cheek, and studiously avoid the rum raisin ice cream
for dessert.
But Rick A. Lazio is 42 years old, not 18. Despite the gee-whiz
air about him, he is old enough to have a wife, two daughters and
a weekend beach house; eight years as a Republican congressman;
and the brash self-confidence to square off against Hillary
Rodham Clinton in New York's high-wattage race for the United
States Senate.
Advisers have warned Mrs. Clinton that in many ways, Mr. Lazio
presents more of a challenge than Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the
putative candidate he so gleefully replaced two months ago. He
has a palpable ambition that infuses him with energy, a gift for
negotiation, and that rare ability, shared by her husband, to
connect with a savvy lobbyist in Washington and some teenager
working a pizza oven in his native Long Island.
Above all, they say, he is a nice guy, with little in his
personal life to titillate the curious and suspicious. He rarely
socializes and spends most of his free time with his family.
Sherwood L. Boehlert, a Republican congressman from Utica, N.Y.,
and his wife were recently watching a televised scene from a
political rally that showed an aide gripping Mr. Lazio by the arm
and leading him off stage.
The candidate broke loose, Mr. Boehlert recalled, went back to
take the hand of his wife, Patricia, and walked away with her by
his side.
"That was very important to my wife," he said. "I'll tell you,
that was a heady position he was in. And yet he stops, grabs his
wife's hand and walks off together. That's not manufactured.
That's real."
But those who know him say that a certain calculation lurks
behind his smile. He promotes himself in a way that unnerves
colleagues. He is well-known for waiting until the last moment to
cast his vote; while supporters say it reflects a deliberate
approach to lawmaking, detractors say it shows a penchant for
pandering to the Republican leadership.
Then there is the question of the Lazio ideology. Although
considered to be a moderate Republican, his positions, from gun
control to abortion, can seem oh-so-carefully nuanced. Peter T.
King, an outspoken Republican colleague from Long Island, said he
doubted whether Mr. Lazio was guided by any particular
philosophy.
"He's basically a facilitator, a mediator, a fine-tuner," Mr.
King said. "He tries to make things work a little better, but
it's not out of any real ideological base."
Lloyd Braun, the co-chairman of ABC Entertainment Television
Group, said he had a different take on his former college
roommate, a man he loves and teases "like a brother." For all his
boyish qualities, he said, Mrs. Clinton's opponent is as
hard-driven as they come -- and "very, very pragmatic."
LAZIO THEN Enrico Lazio, top, in his high school yearbook, with
his father, Anthony, above, after his father's stroke.
Early Lessons in Responsibility
Rick Lazio inherited that pragmatism from his father, Anthony
Lazio, who worked long hours in the automotive parts store he
owned, then spent many nights making contacts through the local
Kiwanis club and the Suffolk County Republican clique. The lesson
imparted was that little comes to those who relax.
He had met his wife in the mid-1950's when he serendipitously
stepped on the foot of Olive Christensen, the daughter of Danish
immigrants living in Brooklyn. "It must be a family thing," Rick
Lazio joked, referring to his own lip-splitting stumble at a
recent Memorial Day parade.
Both were veterans of World War II, single parents -- he was a
widower with one daughter, and she was divorced, with two
daughters -- and rabid Brooklyn Dodgers fans, which prompted a
romantic trip to Ebbets Field that eventually led to marriage.
They settled down in a small Cape-Cod house in middle-class West
Islip on Long Island's South Shore. It was just a few miles east
of Lindenhurst, where his Sicilian parents, a seamstress and a
man who dabbled with unsuccessful inventions, ran a dress shop
out of their house on Montauk Highway.
In March 1958, the couple had their first child together: Enrico
Anthony Lazio, named after his paternal grandfather. Mr. Lazio
later joked that when his teachers conducted roll call -- "Mary,
Jane, Paul, Bill, Enrico!" -- other children would look to see
"who's the new exchange student."
He was the baby in the family, doted on by his parents and three
older sisters. To hear Mr. Lazio tell it, his childhood was
normal and healthy, but hardly a free ride. Yes, his family owned
a beach house on Fire Island. Yes, he played Little League and
collected stacks of baseball cards. Yes, they installed a
floodlight over his basketball hoop so that he could mimic Walt
Frazier late into the night.
But he never received an allowance, he said. Instead, his father
made him earn spending money by stocking shelves and sweeping the
floor at the family store.
The younger Lazio also played down his father's role in politics.
"He would be one of the guys who would put the signs up and carry
the petitions," he said. "And then when you had some sort of
visiting bigwig come into town, he'd be the guy who would be
asked to go pick him up at the airport and bring him in."
But Edwin M. Schwenk, the Suffolk County Republican chairman from
1967 to 1977, remembered Tony Lazio as playing a significant
role. The party paid Mr. Lazio about $26,000 a year, he said, to
coordinate elaborate fund-raising dinners that often included a
formal program and a three-tier dais.
"He made everybody think that Suffolk County was important, and
he convinced them to come, including the vice president, Spiro
Agnew," Mr. Schwenk said, adding: "And he wasn't bashful about
telling me what a good job he did."
The younger Lazio minimized the role of politics in his
childhood, saying he did little more than attend a few rallies.
As for Republican patronage, he said, his father would help
friends secure summer jobs on the public beach, but his son's
assignments would be "the lousiest": hauling garbage or working
on the mosquito-control unit.
About this time, his future political opponent, Mrs. Clinton, was
a young lawyer working for the House Judiciary Committee. Her
task: preparing for the impeachment of one of the Lazio family's
heroes, President Nixon.
Vincent Laforet/The New York Times
LAZIO NOW Top, Lazio with his wife, Patricia, and their daughters, Kelsey,
left, and Molly, after he announced his United States Senate candidacy on
May 20.
Choosing His Causes
The West Islip High School yearbook in the bicentennial year 1976
includes a photograph of a grinning graduate named Enrico Lazio
sporting a striking white bow tie. His listed accomplishments
included membership in the Coin and Stamp Club and something
called the Leaders Club.
"The Leaders Club was like a group of people that were picked to
-- what did we do? -- we sort of led," Mr. Lazio said, laughing
and cringing simultaneously.
He was not the kind of teenager to sneak a six-pack of Schmidt's
beer down to the Babylon docks; nor was his high school's coin
club likely to rumble with rowdy numismatists from, say, Bay
Shore High School. He followed the Mets, hung out in friends'
basements, spent time clamming off the Fire Island shores.
That fall, he began to attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie,
N.Y., which had begun to admit men only seven years earlier.
Vassar retains a whiff of its upper-crust past to this day;
afternoon tea is still served under gold chandeliers in the Rose
Parlor.
Mr. Lazio said he chose Vassar because it was relatively close to
home, had a small-school feel and offered him some latitude in
choosing course work. The disproportionate women-to-men ratio, he
added, "certainly wasn't a negative."
There he was, a political science major in Lacoste shirts and
Top-Siders, dressed like a preppy but not a true preppy, more
interested in Tom Seaver than in Mary McCarthy, a wide-eyed
product of what he later called a "lily-white middle-class
background."
At some point he tried marijuana, he said, but those who knew him
then say he was hardly one to join others in beginning their
weekends with Thursday-night pitchers of beer. He and his friends
spent most of their time competing in cutthroat games of Risk,
basketball and all-around teasing, but he was neither the
sharpest-tongued nor the most athletically gifted.
"You could easily give him a pass and it would hit him in the
head," Mr. Braun, his former roommate, said.
The conservative kid from West Islip gradually revealed himself
on the liberal-leaning campus. He was the campus coordinator for
Youth for Ford -- "a pretty small group of volunteers, as you can
imagine," he said -- fought for more student input in faculty
evaluations and lost in the election for senior class president.
"Did I think perhaps one day I would run for public office?" he
said. "Yeah, I thought that."
Such aspirations were obvious to those around him. "Lazio was
always understanding of the things you cannot do if you want to
have a career in politics," said Michael Naso, another former
roommate. "He was conservative in his actions because he knew
where he was going."
When talk turned to national politics, Mr. Lazio passionately
argued that Nixon had been railroaded. But he would not immerse
himself in some stickier issues, as when many on campus erupted
in protest over the college's investments with banks that did
business with the apartheid government of South Africa.
"Rick was not on the map for any of that," said Dimitri Cruz, a
graduate who was active in campus politics. "In that sense, Rick
chooses very carefully when to present himself, when to express
his views, when to assert himself."
For all the appearance of being focused, Mr. Lazio was more than
a little distracted. In late 1978, his father suffered a severe
stroke from which he would never fully recover; doctors told the
family that Tony Lazio would never get out of bed, and would
probably remain in a vegetative state.
The prognosis failed to account for the determination of a man
who eventually willed himself to walk a few steps with a cane,
Mr. Lazio said, recalling, "He pushed it as hard as anyone could
imagine."
College friends recall visiting the Lazio house to spend time at
the nearby beaches and to help their friend with his father,
assisting him in his physical therapy and using flash cards to
help him regain his speech -- Tony Lazio was so affected by the
stroke that only family members seemed to understand him.
<cont.in Part II>
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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