Hitting the Middle Octaves

A few nights ago, Georgia's Sam Nunn rushed from the supersecret Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on the Iran fiasco to a Washington dinner party. His excited table partners waited between sips of wine for him to begin to blab (as 99 out of every 100 members of Congress are wont to do), to divulge savory tidbits with the salad about the notorious swashbuckler Oliver North, to float with the coffee dark hints of world-tilting plots yet unexposed.

None came. The Senator spoke knowingly and graciously through dinner, but he did not even reveal what Colonel North was wearing. Nor will he. There is an iron discipline beneath the rounded Georgia verbs that Nunn uses so precisely. He is as stern a critic as any fellow Democrat of Ronald Reagan's performances these days, but he has not called on the President to fire anybody in the White House ("That's up to the President"). When asked by a reporter if Reagan's staff had been coaching the President to lie to the press and the American people, Nunn stopped the squalid inquiry: "I would not associate myself with that remark." Time after time as his comment was sought, Sam Nunn thought first and foremost of the nation: "We all have a stake in the credibility of the President, whether we are Democrats or Republicans. I'm hoping that credibility will be restored as quickly as possible."

Amidst the screeching and bellowing of the past two weeks, Nunn has sought and held the reassuring middle octaves. In a torrent of pent-up partisan glee released by a major Reagan failure, he has refused to prophesy the end of Reaganism or the fall of the Western Alliance. "The Republic survives almost anything we do inside the Beltway," he chuckles.

The ultimate irony in this unsettled season in the Federal City is that Sam Nunn has probably gained more ground as a presidential prospect during this crisis than any other Democrat. He had a long way to go, since he is virtually unrecognized in the country, but achieving honorable stature in the power plays along the Potomac does finally seep into the national consciousness.

There is about Nunn an echo from a more stable and responsible past in the U.S. Senate. Senators Walter George and Richard Russell were friends of his family's, and they moved in and out of his boyhood, heroes on that far-off Washington stage that beckoned him. The legendary Congressman Carl Vinson was Nunn's great-uncle. Along with a taste for basketball and politics, Nunn absorbed dignity, calm and concern, and always, from the frequent family tribunes, a "keen sense of America."

"They were all loyal Democrats," remembers Nunn of those political giants. "But they all felt a political party was only a means to the end--a better America."

Sam Nunn's broad desk is in a corner of the Dirksen Building, and the Capitol dome looms through one of his picture windows. In the next Congress Nunn will be chairman of the Armed Services Committee. That is no small achievement for a 48-year-old from Perry, Ga. (pop. 9,453). For 16 years the powerful post was held by the patriarch Richard Russell.

Back then when the U.S. got into trouble and Truman or Ike or Kennedy asked for help, Russell would gather up his 6-ft. frame, stick a forefinger into his somber vest and amble down those dim corridors to see if he could help his country. Everybody watching felt better when he arrived. There is something like that happening now to Senator Nunn. He trails a sense of reason and equilibrium on his journeys through the old Capitol's halls.

This Wednesday Nunn and 200 or so Democrats will climb aboard Amtrak's train the Colonial and head for Williamsburg, Va., and a three-day session of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate young Democrats that he helped found. They might capture the heart of the rehabilitating Democratic Party, and time will soon tell if Sam Nunn can go right on down the line.