Washington -- For once, Phil Gramm is silent. His piercing, blue eyes go blank behind rimless lenses. His hands rest on his Senate desk.
He is pondering the central mystery of his career: How is it that so many people, his rivals and sometimes even his allies, have underestimated him?
"They're not too smart," he finally replies with a hearty guffaw, flashing a row of razor-sharp incisors.
This morning, the 52-year-old Republican, perhaps the most formidable politician to emerge from Texas since Lyndon B. Johnson, will become the first candidate to formally enter the 1996 presidential race. He's still in single digits in the polls. But at this early stage of the nomination contest, Sen. Phil Gramm is the biggest threat to the GOP front-runner, Sen. Bob Dole.
It's not terribly difficult to see why so many have sold Mr. Gramm short. He's got a down-home drawl as thick as sorghum, the backwoods syrup of his native Georgia.
Tall, balding and bespectacled, he hunches his shoulders and cranes his neck in a way that appears positively turtle-like. He looks and sounds, it's been said, like the crew chief of a stock car team, not a statesman.
And, of course, there's his politics. He's so far to the right, such an improbable national politician, that the people over at the White House are practically drooling to get him as their opponent next year. Which is pretty much the way Democrats once regarded another crazy ol' right-winger, Ronald Reagan.
Like Mr. Reagan, Phil Gramm has a gift for communicating, for couching ideas in ways that connect with average people, a way of turning his life story -- of a lousy student who became a college professor, then a congressman, then a senator, and now a presidential candidate -- into something that almost sounds like the American Dream.
As it turns out, Mr. Gramm's 81-year-old mama, of whom you may hear much in months to come, raised a very shrewd son, one who is only too glad to play along with his detractors.
"The real question," Mr. Gramm likes to say, "is whether someone as ugly as I am -- or someone as conservative as I am -- could be elected."
A more relevant question might be: Who, or what, can stop Phil Gramm?
Since the days of LBJ, there have been few American politicians more driven, more relentless -- some would say more ruthless -- in the pursuit of power than William Philip Gramm.
Seeking the presidency
He insists he can't remember when he first wanted to be president, but he's been working at it openly for years. And with a high- tech campaign and a fearsome fund-raising machine, he's leaving as little as possible to chance.
When he promises, as he often does, to campaign for president "like I'm running for county sheriff" in New Hampshire or Iowa, he means it. He boasts of meeting more than 160,000 people in the past four years -- and has the names, places and dates in his data base to prove it.
"He's the smartest guy I've ever known to run for president," says Charles Black, a longtime adviser who also plotted strategy for Mr. Reagan, George Bush and Jack Kemp. "He has the best habits: discipline, organization, fire in the belly and focus."
Mr. Gramm first came to national prominence as a leading "boll weevil" Democrat, the conservative Southern congressmen who helped Mr. Reagan take a whack out of taxes and spending in the early 1980s.
In 1983, having discovered that Mr. Gramm was a White House mole in their midst, the House Democratic leadership, in its wisdom, threw him off the prestigious Budget Committee. He responded by resigning from Congress and, despite doubts from some Reagan political advisers, running for his old seat as a Republican. Before Texas Democrats could get their act together, the race was over and party-switching Phil Gramm was now a GOP phenom.
The next year, when he leapfrogged more senior Republicans to run for the seat of retiring Sen. John Tower, the naysayers were out in force again.
"They said he was too conservative, or had a mean streak, or he was a redneck that the suburbanites wouldn't like," recalls Mr. Black.
In the end, Mr. Gramm won easily, and has never been seriously challenged in Texas again. But the way he went about that 1984 race still sticks in the minds of many.
Radio attacks
His Democratic opponent was Lloyd Doggett, a liberal state senator, whose campaign had received $500 raised by a group of homosexual men at a male strip joint in San Antonio. Mr. Doggett was not at the event or aware of the source of the contribution, but Mr. Gramm chose to make it the focal point of the race, filling the airwaves for weeks with an ad attacking the contribution.
"He just clobbered us. We were knocked down," says Paul Begala, a Doggett adviser that year, when the Reagan re-election landslide swept Texas by almost a 2-to-1 margin. "He could have said, 'I wrote the Reagan tax cut.' He didn't need to run a vicious, ruthless campaign to win. But he did."
Over the years, Mr. Gramm's unabashed free-market conservatism has made him a favorite of wealthy businessmen and of special-interest groups like the National Rifle Association, which have showered his campaigns with millions in contributions. But most of the money has come from donors of $200 or less, conservative givers and regular Republicans and fans of talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who recently gushed over the air to Mr. Gramm that he was "happy to be on your team."
Claiming to be the real conservative in the GOP race, Mr. Gramm says he wants less government, more freedom, lower taxes, balanced budgets.
"One thing I have in common with Ronald Reagan, and it's very important," he says, "I know who I am and I know what I believe, and I know why I believe it." That, he adds, is "the difference between Bill Clinton and me."
Similar roots
And clearly there are differences between Mr. Gramm and the man he'd like to replace. But at the same time, their complex personal histories share some intriguing similarities -- their lower-middle-class roots in the South of the 1940s, their draft records during the Vietnam era, the women they married, even some controversial real estate dealings during the go-go S&L; years.
Mr. Gramm was born during World War II at an Army hospital in Georgia, the product of a sometimes shaky marriage between Kenneth Gramm, a 40-year-old drill sergeant from Troy, N.Y., and Florence Marie Scroggins, the 28-year-old daughter of an Alabama sharecropper. It was the third marriage for each -- Mrs. Gramm had two sons from her first marriage; her husband, a daughter from his.
At the time, the family lived in a public housing project in Phenix City, Ala. His parents divorced fairly soon after Phil arrived, then remarried before he was 3, just before his father suffered a serious heart attack and the first of a series of strokes. His father later spent half of each year in a veterans hospital, 40 miles from the family's Columbus, Ga., home. He died when Phil was 15.
Family members have described his relationship with his father as an important factor in his life, but it is his mother, like that of so many politicians, who appears to have been the most prominent influence.
Like a good country songwriter, Mr. Gramm often mentions mama in his campaign speeches. These days, he uses her to illustrate his proposal for welfare reform. He would lower the minimum wage, to $2.50 an hour if need be to put welfare mothers to work in the private sector, adding government money to help lift them out of poverty.
"When my mama worked in a cotton mill for $28 a week," he says, "she made more than a nominal wage. She earned self-respect."
Government help
Critics have been quick to point out that it was a government program that helped Mrs. Gramm turn her son around at a crucial juncture. An indifferent student -- he suspects he may be dyslexic -- he flunked third grade and had to attend summer school to avoid repeating seventh and ninth grades. He seemed to be going nowhere.
After her husband died, Mrs. Gramm -- who like Bill Clinton's mother worked many years as a nurse -- used GI insurance from the War Orphans Act to send her son to Georgia Military Academy in Atlanta. The government insurance also helped pay his college tuition at the University of Georgia, where he was awarded a National Defense Education Act scholarship that helped finance his doctoral studies.
Later Mr. Gramm taught economics, at Texas A&M; University, the state-supported school in College Station where he is staging his announcement ceremony today. It was there he married his second wife, Wendy Lee, a fellow economist who is as conservative as her husband. (His first marriage lasted six years and ended in divorce in 1969.)
Like Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Gramm is a Wellesley College graduate with a high-powered resume. She worked in the Reagan budget office and chaired a major regulatory body, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Today she sits on a number of corporate boards, including State Farm Insurance and Iowa Beef Processors, a big employer in the first caucus state.
The Hawaiian-born granddaughter of Korean immigrants, Mrs. Gramm would be the first Asian- American in the White House, a vivid symbol of the growing diversity of the U.S. population.
Mr. Gramm calls her his "best friend" and "best adviser." He'd rely on her, he says, to help him make presidential decisions.
But Mrs. Gramm, clearly mindful of the traps laid for Mrs. Clinton, brushes off any notion of a co-presidency.
"He's the one who wants the job," says Mrs. Gramm, 50, who Rollerbladed 350 miles across Maryland last summer and still fits her childhood nickname of "Bubbles." "I've retired."
The Gramms' two sons, Marshall, 21, and Jeff, 19, were pre-schoolers when Mr. Gramm won election to Congress in 1978. He's been there ever since.
"I've had lots of jobs. No poor person has ever hired me in my life," Mr. Gramm said last month, underscoring his belief that the best way of promoting job growth is to keep the government's hand out of the pockets of taxpaying Americans.
Paychecks from Uncle Sam
But his own paychecks, critics note, have always come from the government, except for jobs he held during college years and some outside consulting in his spare time at Texas A&M; -- a strange history for one whose political creed is slashing the size and scope of the federal government.
"He is the embodiment of everything he attacks," says Mr. Begala, a Clinton political adviser. "He has never drawn a breath that the taxpayers didn't subsidize."
Mr. Gramm dismisses this as "totally fraudulent criticism. . . . Is somebody asking me to apologize because on July 8, 1942, my dad was at Fort Benning, Ga., and I was born in a military hospital?" He says he's proud of the scholarship he won, "based on merit." And while some of the programs he personally benefited from suffered cuts under the Gramm-Rudman deficit law he wrote, he says he never singled out any of those programs for reductions.
His foes see a similar lack of consistency in Mr. Gramm's decision to stay out of the armed services in the Vietnam era. A military hawk, he has criticized Democratic politicians, including President Clinton, for avoiding military service. But during the peak years of the Vietnam buildup, Mr. Gramm sought draft deferments, first as a graduate student and then, for "civilian occupation," as an associate economics professor at Texas A&M.;
Mr. Gramm says that, while he supported the war effort, it didn't "make sense" for him to enlist or submit to the draft.
"The difference between Bill Clinton and me is I wasn't out protesting against the war, either in this country or anywhere else," he said in a recent TV interview. "It is true I could have quit my job at Texas A&M; and joined the Army. I didn't. But being
from a military family, I never saw, if I had joined the Army, that I would have gone to Vietnam. I would have been working in some library or some research institute in the Army. I thought what I was doing at Texas A&M; was important."
Eastern Shore home
Also like Mr. Clinton, whose Whitewater land investment is the subject of an independent counsel's investigation, Mr. Gramm had some controversial real estate dealings during the 1980s, including a second home he and his wife built on 36 acres near the mouth of the Honga River on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
To finish the house, Mr. Gramm contacted a Dallas developer, who arranged to have workmen flown to Maryland from Texas and housed in local motels for several months. The developer, Jerry D. Stiles, who picked up $54,000 of the Gramm project's cost, sought the senator's help two years later in dealing with federal regulators who were investigating the failure of savings and loan institutions operated by Mr. Stiles.
Government watchdog groups called it an illegal gift to Mr. Gramm, a member of the Senate Committee which oversaw the S&L; bailout. But Mr. Gramm obtained a Senate Ethics Committee opinion in 1990 stating that he didn't have to pay the builder for the full cost of his house.
Mr. Gramm says his Senate office made only routine referrals to federal regulators on behalf of Mr. Stiles, who was convicted last year on unrelated bribery charges in connection with the collapse of one of his savings and loans. It failed at a cost to taxpayers of more than $110 million.
"You can't act more ethically than I did," Mr. Gramm says today. "It's impossible."
Dr. Deficit
As his candidacy takes off, Mr. Gramm's excitement is palpable. He may be a cold, heartless Dr. Deficit, but these days, on the campaign trail, he can be as lighthearted as he is wired.
"I gave you my card. Will I be hearing from you?" Donald Jordan, an eager supporter, asks Mr. Gramm, after listening to him at a Republican dinner in Chelmsford, Mass.
Without breaking stride, the senator grabs Mr. Jordan's hand and shoots back, "You give me your card, you'll be hearing from me for the rest of your life!"
His detractors, meantime, are adding up all the reasons his presidential hopes are doomed to failure: He's too nasty. He's too strident. He's too new to the game to succeed.
Among the skeptics is Jack DeVore, a longtime adviser to Lloyd Bentsen, the first man Phil Gramm ever ran against, and the last man to defeat him. After predicting that Mr. Gramm would self-destruct as a presidential candidate, Mr. DeVore stops and laughs at himself. "I was determined," he says, "not to underestimate Gramm again."