Campaign Portrait

By WALTER SHAPIRO

"You must have been a beautiful baby."

Hard to believe, but Paul Simon was, and his mother saved the yellowed newspaper clipping to prove it. Simon, then three, was voted the "prettiest boy baby" by his hometown paper, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, in 1932.

"But, baby, look at you now."

Not even Hans Christian Andersen could invent a presidential candidate as ugly-duckling as Simon: floppy earlobes, horn-rimmed glasses, a putty-like face and a bow tie. Yet the rumble-voiced Illinois Senator has magically emerged as a swan in the Democratic race, partly by playing on his rumpled lack of glamour. Staring into the camera at the end of the first Democratic debate in July, he intoned, "If you want a slick packaged product, I'm not your candidate. If you want someone who levels with you, who you can trust, I am your candidate." Something in that simple Simon sermon resonated with Democratic voters: authenticity in an age of image.

But there is a message that goes with the lack of packaging, one that appeals to a loyal segment of the Democratic Party weary of constant neo- identity crises. In late 1949, when Simon became eligible to vote, he wrote a column for the tiny weekly newspaper in Illinois that he published, explaining why he had become a Democrat. The year before, he had endorsed Republican Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman. His change of heart, the youthful Simon explained, came because he preferred the Democrats' commitment to "world peace" and "genuine world free trade" and faulted the Republicans for their backsliding on "civil rights" and their antilabor sentiments symbolized by the Taft-Hartley Act. The same thoughts and phrases echo in his speeches today. What distinguishes him in the current campaign is that, from his bow tie to his emphasis on creating jobs, Simon, 58, has remained faithful to Truman and to bedrock Democratic Party values.

The somewhat surprising result is that this first-term Senator from downstate Illinois, a college dropout whose education came as a crusading small-town newspaper editor, is suddenly no longer viewed as a presidential ego-tripper, the 1988 version of Alan Cranston. At least for the moment, he is running with Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt and Jesse Jackson at the front of the Democratic pack.

More than almost any other contemporary politician, Simon has left a paper trail of his philosophical career. For nearly 40 years, he has written weekly newspaper columns. Odd as it may seem in an as-told-to era, he has also written eleven books, banging them out on an ancient Royal typewriter that he inherited from his parents. Jeanne Simon, his wife, speculates that the books may be Simon's way of compensating for his lack of a college degree. "I think Paul in his writings is saying, 'I know what I'm doing,' " she explains. The range of book topics captures Simon's eclectic enthusiasms: an insightful chronicle of Abraham Lincoln's years in the Illinois legislature; a critique of Americans' disinterest in learning foreign languages; and a 1967 primer, written with Jeanne, a Roman Catholic, titled Protestant-Catholic Marriages Can Succeed. Several of his books capture Simon's earnest belief in self- improvement. A 1986 guide for young people, Beginnings, recommends these antidotes for loneliness: "walk through three stores . . . write a poem . . . take a shower."

This can-do optimism is a trait that Simon inherited from his father Martin, who died of leukemia in 1969. Martin and Ruth Simon were Lutheran missionaries in China before Martin accepted a pastorate in Eugene a month prior to the birth of their oldest son Paul in 1928. In the early 1930s, the Simons began publishing religious pamphlets out of their home, as well as a monthly magazine called the Christian Parent. Ruth Simon recalls, "When we went into business, we didn't have a dime of our own." A monthly treat was a Sunday after-church lunch at the Rex Cafe in downtown Eugene, where Paul and his younger brother Arthur would order chicken a la king for 35 cents.

Martin wanted his sons to go into the ministry, an ambition that Arthur later fulfilled. But Paul's dreams were shaped by reading the autobiography of William Allen White, the publisher of the Emporia (Kans.) Gazette. "In grade school," Arthur says, "Paul began talking about owning a weekly newspaper and going into politics." To this day, Simon remains a devout Lutheran layman.

In quest of a more central location for their business, the Simons moved to Highland, Ill., some 35 miles from St. Louis, in 1946. Paul enrolled at Dana College, a Lutheran school in Blair, Neb. He was a little more than a year short of graduation when his parents discovered that the weekly paper in nearby Troy, Ill., was about to fold. With the help of a $3,600 loan guaranteed by the local Lions Club, Paul Simon, 19, was the publisher and owner of the Troy Tribune. "I wanted to be the Walter Lippmann of my generation," he explains, "and this looked better than writing obituaries."

With a circulation of about 1,000, the Tribune was a sleepy small-town weekly -- until its boy editor stumbled on punchboard gambling in Madison County. With the impetuousness of youth, Simon unearthed a daisy chain of gambling and prostitution operating under the protection of local officials. A typical issue of the Tribune would combine an angry front-page editorial decrying gambling with an earnest column by the editor ("Trojan Thoughts") singing the praises of church camps.

Simon spent the Korean War as an Army private in West Germany, interrogating East German defectors. A diary he briefly kept during this period tends toward the prosaic: "Attended Easter Service in downtown Stuttgart. Went away very much uninspired." Back in Troy, he mounted an uphill campaign for state representative in 1954 "to show that you could beat the system." By dint of his innate friendliness and the hard work of shaking 30,000 hands, he succeeded.

As a reform legislator in a machine-dominated state, Simon found life in Springfield lonely, until a few like-minded colleagues were elected in 1956. One of them was Jeanne Hurley, a liberal Democratic lawyer from the Chicago suburb of Wilmette. "Long before Paul and I fell in love," she recalls, "we were working together as colleagues." Simon proposed on their second date. This being the 1950s, Hurley reconciled herself to giving up her legislative seat, though even today one can hear hints of regret over abandoning her dream of becoming a judge. Their respective religions were a more serious problem -- for the parents. Martin Simon was initially opposed to the match. At one point, his son asked, "Dad, if I married the worst drunk in the county and she was a Lutheran, then would it be all right?"

Paul and Jeanne Simon were married in 1960, and their daughter Sheila, now a lawyer, was born eleven months later. Over the next several years Jeanne had five miscarriages; the family adopted their son Martin, now a photographer. She has accepted that her husband, for all his other accomplishments, will never earn a college degree. Jeanne remembers mentioning the credentials problem to Martin Simon in the mid-1960s, only to be told gruffly, "Paul's doing fine without it."

Elected to the state senate in 1962, Simon remained stubbornly resistant to the "money talks" morality of the legislature. In a gesture that he considers the most courageous act of his political career, he finally went public with his complaints in an article in Harper's titled "The Illinois Legislature: A Study in Corruption." Along with a legislative colleague, Anthony Scariano, now an Illinois judge, Simon followed up by testifying to no avail before an Illinois crime commission. "As a result, we were pariahs," Scariano recalls. Simon developed a bleeding ulcer. The only good thing to come out of it, Jeanne Simon says, is that on his doctor's orders the abstemious Simon began drinking a glass of wine with dinner.

Amid a Republican landslide in 1968, Simon was elected Lieutenant Governor under Republican Richard Ogilvie and thus became the top Democrat in the state. In his bid to become Governor four years later, he won the endorsement of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. It was a rare miscalculation for Simon: not only did this marriage of convenience sully his reform reputation, but the Daley machine failed to deliver. He was upended by Maverick Dan Walker in the primary.

Scars from that race lingered, even as Simon won a House seat in 1974. What haunted him was his failure to respond directly to Walker's charges. "I learned that if your opponent takes out after you, you take out after him," he says. If anything, Simon erred the other way in his 1984 upset of three- term Senator Charles Percy: he was too aggressive. As David Axelrod, who was and still is a top Simon campaign adviser, puts it, "When he lashed out against Percy, there was no question that some of that anger was lingering anger about 1972."

His nearly three years in the Senate have been uneventful; the soft-spoken Simon is universally well liked by his colleagues, but even while on the Judiciary Committee during the Robert Bork hearings, he did little to claim public notice. He is very much a loner, acting as his own chief speechwriter and counsel. His presidential race began almost by accident. He endorsed Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers, and then belatedly jumped into the fray in May after Bumpers joined the ranks of Democratic sideliners.

To each campaign there is a season, and as Dukakis sizzled in the summer, so has Simon flowered in the fall. The New Republic plastered his image on the cover, along with the Warholian legend, "Paul Simon, your 15 minutes have arrived." Joseph Biden's top Iowa lieutenants endorsed him. The latest New York Times-CBS poll showed Simon jumping into first place among Democrats in Iowa, with 16% support. New York Governor Mario Cuomo tossed an unexpected garland in Simon's direction last week, pronouncing that he looks "strong" and that "I feel great, great empathy with him."

There remains, to be sure, a certain implausibility about Simon as the eventual nominee. Image is part of the problem; unfashionable bow ties and horn-rims can captivate a limited number of anti-chic contrarians, but they can make a candidate seem quirky to others. So is ideology; Simon's dovish rhetoric seems unlikely to play well in the South, even though Iowa voters respond to applause lines like "I think the choice is the arms race or the human race." Simon may confound liberal orthodoxy by his support of a balanced-budget amendment, but the centerpiece of his domestic agenda remains an almost nostalgic $8 billion public jobs program, modeled after Franklin Roosevelt's WPA. There is a lingering suspicion that Democratic voters are just flirting with Simon before they pledge their troth to a more conventionally marriageable candidate. As a top strategist to a Democratic rival puts it, "There is a distinct limit to how much his support can grow."

Indeed, the basis for Simon's current appeal is the very thing that could % prove his undoing: his frequent claims that "more than any other candidate I have demonstrated that I am willing to do what's unpopular." His sartorial and ideological independence, along with his fealty to the old-time Democratic religion, can do little more than grant him his 15 minutes of celebrity. To become President, he must make sure that these go-it-alone traits do not begin to seem like studied eccentricity, wearisome piety and philosophical quaintness.