Campaign Portrait

By Alessandra Stanley/Wilmington

When Pierre Samuel du Pont IV told his father that he wanted to go to law school, Pierre Samuel du Pont III was baffled. Du Ponts, after all, did not become lawyers, they hired them. Twelve years later, after du Pont had finished law school and fulfilled his filial obligation by working in the family business -- the country's largest chemical company -- he went back to his father. He was restless: one of his more memorable company tasks was assessing whether du Pont should manufacture peanut butter and jelly in an aerosol can. He wanted to try his hand at politics. "I was on track to become a senior executive at 63, and I was only 30," explains du Pont.

Twenty years later, Pete du Pont's ambitions are again being met with incredulity. Surely, when the former Republican Governor of Delaware called a press conference last September in the Hotel du Pont and announced that he was running for President, he had to be kidding. When even the urbane Robert Dole contrasts his plebeian Kansas roots with the preppie background of the front runner, George Bush, a du Pont of Delaware hasn't got a chance. What skeptics do not understand is that, in his own mind, Pete du Pont is a self-made man, one who rebelled against his family tradition by going to law school and then into politics.

Du Pont, 52, insists that his heavyweight name has no real bearing on his campaign. It is an irresistible angle for journalists, he admits, and the patrician roman numeral provides an easy stereotype. Du Pont is astute enough to ban reporters from his elegant home near Wilmington and his sprawling summer house in Maine, but he knows he cannot really bury his privileged background. "I am what I am. I can't change it, so I don't worry about it."

In a political climate in which most candidates are searching their souls for a persona that voters can trust, du Pont stands apart. He considers the obsession with "character" and the media's ceaseless quest for revealing personal anecdotes slightly silly. To his closest aides, du Pont's unapologetic approach is not mysterious. "He doesn't need this," says his longtime aide Glenn Kenton, campaign chairman. "He knows he could do a good job as President, but he can live without it."

Pete du Pont hopes to distinguish himself as an iconoclast, a free-market conservative boldly willing to question sacrosanct social programs that his better-known rivals fear to address. He wants his ideas to speak for themselves, and loudly enough to drown out the murmurs about his patrimony. He has selected five issues that he believes can excite the electorate. It took the methodical du Pont two years to research and hone his message, and he has now compressed it neatly onto a single 3-in. by 5-in. card that he keeps in his breast pocket. Dispensing with the usual homilies about preserving the family farm, du Pont brashly advocates abolishing farm subsidies within five years. Worried about the cost of the baby boom's retirement, he proposes a private alternative to Social Security modeled after IRA accounts. To make public schools more competitive, he wants parents to be able to enroll their children anywhere, regardless of district lines. He also advocates testing students for drugs. He particularly wants to replace welfare with a mandatory jobs program. He calls these proposals "damn right" issues because when stated simply, they make the average voter say just that.

He is the first to admit he had to be provocative. Running as just another loyal Reaganaut with a good record as Governor would have doomed him to obscurity. A take-it-or-leave-it strategy also suits his temperament. In New Hampshire a visiting Nebraskan startled an audience of lawyers by challenging du Pont's farm policy, stuttering earnestly about the plan's heartlessness toward indebted family farmers. Du Pont nodded after the first few words, his fingers crooked thoughtfully over his lips, barely hiding a smile. He was still grinning as he crisply interrupted, "Your facts are wrong; your premise is wrong; only your emotions are correct." He explained why farmers are more hurt than helped by price supports, but the audience mainly remembered his bold rebuke. They enjoyed it almost as much as he did.

Du Pont inherited his stage presence from his mother, a dignified grande dame of Delaware with a taste for amateur theatrics. Du Pont does not look the least bit theatrical. Tall, angular, sporting hornrimmed glasses and impeccably tailored pinstripe suits, he looks like a recruiting poster for the East Coast establishment. He is not stuffy. His long, horsey face dissolves easily into concentric smile lines. His playful manner disarms strangers and emboldens his younger staffers to call him "the Duper." His lack of pretension mellows his upper-class mien and helps soften his rather harsh economic proposals. Delivering his stump speech from memory in a slightly high-pitched singsong, his voice is more in the neighborhood of Mr. Rogers than of the archetypal TV snob Thurston Howell III. Unlike Bush, he manages to sound sincere, not condescending.

Many candidates dwell on America as the land of opportunity and highlight their own immigrant roots. So does du Pont. He describes his ancestors as a "band of scraggly immigrants," though they were actually very well- connected Protestant noblemen who fled France in 1799 to escape the terrors of the French Revolution. He explains they arrived in America "without a home and speaking no English," then links them seamlessly with a Vietnamese boat person who was class valedictorian this spring at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Off the podium, du Pont is less comfortable discussing his background. He likes to recount vignettes from the campaign trail, not anecdotes about his boyhood summers sailing off Fishers Island. Even at parties, he politely and deftly turns the conversation toward others. "He doesn't take himself too seriously and does everything with a light touch," says a former chief of staff, Bill Manning. "But you learned to respect his privacy. Even his closest aides didn't become part of the family."

His wife and children have never heard him raise his voice. No one has ever heard him swear. "Even the best skippers stamp up and down and scream," says Andrew Anderson-Bell, a longtime racing partner, "but Pete always kept his cool and behaved like a gentleman." Du Pont dabbles as a Sunday painter, yet his artwork does not provide a release for subterranean passions -- his landscapes are composed of straight lines, patterns and geometric shapes. So is the modern brick-and-glass house called Patterns that he built on his father's estate. He is an engineer by training, temperament and breeding -- even his doodles are all straight lines and edges.

Planning to follow family tradition, du Pont majored in engineering at Princeton and there met his future wife Elise, a finely chiseled Bryn Mawr student and Philadelphia heiress with bloodlines as imposing as his own. Du Pont retains fond memories of the cutthroat competition of Harvard Law School but only dim memories of what he calls his "very conventional" life before then. While at Princeton, he had a blind date with Vassar Student Jane Fonda but cannot remember what they did.

Elected to Congress in 1970, he served as a middle-of-the-road Republican. But the pace on Capitol Hill did not suit him. His father raised him with a strong work ethic, albeit one tinged with noblesse oblige. As Governor he finally found a handson job he had to work hard to get, enjoyed and was good at.

One of his worst political crises occurred in 1977, his first year as Governor. Determined to cut state spending, he vetoed the legislature's budget. Those were impassioned, partisan days; the morning of the vote, one Democrat opened the session by praying, "May the nays be forgiven." When du Pont lost, his aides were distraught and defiant. Not the Governor. "He was very, very quiet," recalls Nathan Hayward III, a second cousin who was then head of Delaware's economic development office. Du Pont shifted to a more conciliatory approach that eventually won over the legislature and even labor.

By the time he left office, Delaware's unemployment rate had dropped to 7% from a high of 13%, the top income tax rate had fallen from nearly 20% to 9%, and new businesses flooded the state. The experience converted du Pont to the supplyside philosophy of lower taxes and a strong free-market approach to the economy.

While du Pont was Governor, his wife startled Delaware's voters and her husband's family by commuting to law school in Philadelphia, juggling classes with her duties as first lady and mother of four. Outwardly, Pete and Elise du Pont seem like opposites -- he relaxed and playful, she rather cool and proper. Their friends contend that deep down, they are very much alike. Both are efficient, highly organized and quietly but fiercely competitive. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1984 with a combative but haughty campaign. (One columnist, in a wicked play on her name, dubbed her "Elite Bouffant.") She has taken a leave from her real estate business to campaign for her husband, but insists that she will not "merely be a dutiful wife." Within the confines of Delaware's upper class, the two-career du Ponts are rebels.

As a dynasty, the du Ponts are different from the Kennedys, Roosevelts or Rockefellers. In their 188-year history in America, very few du Ponts have pursued elective office. Public service -- or, as du Pont describes it, "giving something back" -- was expressed through quiet philanthropy. Today, Delaware's du Pont plants are liberally matched with du Pont libraries, museums and foundations. If one trait unites the 2,000 far-flung du Pont descendants, it is their sober quest for privacy. They have spent two centuries perfecting their seclusion from the prying public.

For all his affability, Pete du Pont is no exception. When he decided to run for President, he told aides that he had only four rules: "No debt, no PAC money, no family, no house." Du Pont did not want reporters interviewing him at Patterns or in Maine, counting the servants and priceless antiques. He has always shielded his four children from the political spotlight. His son Ben, 22, an engineer at the du Pont company, had to beg his father to be allowed to campaign part-time.

Few candidates hesitate to go into debt in pursuit of the presidency. But du Pont abhors debt. Because the family fortune has been splintered over seven generations, he is not quite so rich as his name suggests; he says his worth is about $7 million. He lives well within his means, managing all his own investments, frugally watching the bills. His aides affectionately describe him as "tight." To rephrase Hemingway: The rich are different from you and me; they spend less money.

Asked to assess his past, du Pont is helpless. There are no traumatic childhood memories, few personal crises in his charmed adult life. When pressed for a formative experience, du Pont harks back to his three years in the late 1950s as a Navy maintenance officer at the Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine. His duties included keeping the runways free of snow, and he obligingly strains to find some germ of leadership in those days.

"I had a lot of responsibility at a young age," he says pensively. "I made a lot of decisions out there. You know, which plow and which shift to bring on and what to do . . ." His wife Elise is at his side and, sensing that the conversation is getting pretty silly, brings it to a close. "Isn't this getting terribly psychoanalytic?" she dryly interjects. Du Pont leans back, relieved. He is too well bred to say so, but if endless soul-searching is what it takes to be President, then he doesn't want the job.