Bill McCollum: Parallel lives

They are both Florida boys who showed an interest in Florida politics. Student body presidents in high school. Members of the Key Club. Graduates of law school. Members of the U.S. House in the 1980s. And now, Bill Nelson and Bill McCollum want the same U.S. Senate seat.

By ADAM C. SMITH

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 22, 2000

BROOKSVILLE -- Entering their senior year, most of Hernando High's Class of '62 occupied themselves with 25-cent movies at the Dixie Theater and the prospects for the football team. Young Bill McCollum, president of the class and of the Key Club, had bigger things on his mind.

He was busy corresponding with J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee about communist infiltration of America's youth. Brooksville High's principal wouldn't let him show a controversial film about the red menace, and McCollum needed their help persuading the school to reconsider.

"But if the film is not worthy and is considered un-American, we certainly do not want to show it," McCollum wrote.

Four decades have done nothing to dim McCollum's intensity. Now a veteran congressman from Orlando's suburbs vying to become Florida's next U.S. senator, he is very much the same studious, clean-cut high schooler who carried a briefcase everywhere and showed more interest in student government and reading Thomas Jefferson's works than dating or throwing around a football.

Indeed, the McCollum campaign is a celebration of straight-arrow nerdiness in the era of Slick Willie.

He looks a lot like a grown-up version of Ernie on My Three Sons, and peppers his conversations with expressions like "heck" and "for gosh sakes." He often talks about integrity on the campaign trail.

"You may not always agree with me," he says, "but you'll always know where I stand. And that's on principle."

If you're unfamiliar with McCollum's 20-year congressional career, you may be familiar with his role as of one of the most ardent impeachment managers trying to oust President Clinton from office.

He was the only House manager willing to explain precisely and publicly how the president committed perjury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton, McCollum declared, lied about "touching her breasts and genitalia." (Republican House staffers secretly dubbed McCollum "Mr. Genitalia.")

Other House managers were loath to publicly dissect and attack lies about sex. To McCollum, a lie is a lie. "I do give Bill McCollum credit for having the courage of his convictions -- silly as they were," said U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., McCollum's ideological polar opposite.

Admirers and critics alike stipulate this: McCollum is smarter than many colleagues in the House, and usually better prepared. Where other members fade safely into the background, McCollum eagerly hurls himself into complex policy questions or polarizing debates.

That has created a lengthy record for critics to paint the 56-year-old lawyer as an extremist out of step with most Floridians: McCollum leading the charge against restricting assault weapons; McCollum avidly embracing the concept of unleashing a killer fungus to curb marijuana production; McCollum ardently defending Oliver North during the Iran-Contra controversy; McCollum pushing legislation to allow banks and financial companies to share consumers' personal credit and health records; McCollum lambasting Janet Reno for her handling of Waco; McCollum supporting most every proposed abortion restriction to come before him.

But to understand the earnest congressman from Longwood, you have to look beyond his lengthy congressional record. To understand the source of his rock solid convictions, you have to go to Brooksville.

A conservative even on college campus

Ira William McCollum Jr. grew up in the shadow of a towering figure known around Brooksville as the Colonel. The title for Clyde Lockhart, McCollum's courtly and fiercely intellectual maternal grandfather, came not from any military background, but for his imposing manner and dress. He looked like Colonel Sanders: white suit, white hair, walking stick.

Like the rest of Florida at the time, Brooksville was solidly Democrat -- but not McCollum's home. Lockhart was one of a handful of Republicans in the community, and a passionate student of the Constitution. McCollum's dad, Ira, remembers family dinners spent talking about Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson being one of the most dangerous threats to America.

As an only child whose mother died of brain cancer when he was 6, McCollum was largely raised by his grandparents. Lockhart, a stern man with a rigid sense of right and wrong, scared the wits out of many of McCollum's childhood friends. McCollum idolized him, devouring the literary and philosophical classics his grandfather pushed on him.

"Bill and the Colonel were like two peas in a pod," former McCollum schoolmate Judy Whitehead recounted, remembering the common sight of young Bill and his grandfather, always formally dressed, walking in virtual lock step through downtown. "Bill was so focused and so disciplined, you always knew he was going to make something of himself."

Don Varne lived near McCollum and remembers neighborhood football games where McCollum watched from the sidelines in his starched white shirt, shorts and knee socks. "The plastic pocket protector? That was Bill," Varne recalled. "He was kind of a book club guy, very regimented. There was nothing malicious about him, and you knew he would be successful at what he did. If you were looking for someone groomed to be a conservative politician, Bill would be it."

McCollum insists that his grandfather didn't want him to go into politics, and that he had no plans to do so until the late 1970s. Still, his interest was apparent early, as he threw himself into student government and the International Key Club, a Kiwanis student service group that is supposed to mold future leaders.

McCollum was lieutenant governor in the Florida Key Club early in high school, in fact, while Bill Nelson was International Key Club president. McCollum once spent the night under Nelson's piano in Melbourne during a Key Club outing, and still has one of Nelson's Key Club speeches neatly tucked into a scrapbook.

McCollum brought his conservative political bent with him to the University of Florida, where he was an undergraduate and law school student from 1962 to 1968. At a time when Republicans were virtually unheard of in Florida, McCollum helped found a campus conservative club and an alternative newspaper, The Florida Conservative.

"It was very unusual then for somebody to be so interested in party politics. I think I had never met a Republican before him," said Bill McBride, who attended University of Florida Law School with McCollum and is now a prominent Democratic contributor and managing partner of the Holland & Knight law firm.

McBride speaks with genuine admiration for McCollum's integrity and earnestness, despite sharp disagreement with his politics. McCollum eventually was elected president of Blue Key, which was unusual for students not connected to fraternities.

"His persona and dog-mindedness were very evident then. If you were to have told me in 1963 or 1964 that there would (eventually) be a strong Republican Party in Florida, I would have told you that Bill McCollum would be one of the important Republicans," McBride said.

McCollum recounted with delight one of his early bouts of political activism. In 1963, students were to vote on whether the student government should affiliate with a group called the National Student Association. Most students paid little attention.

But McCollum concluded that the NSA was leftist, and blanketed the campus with fliers denouncing the affiliation. "They never knew what hit them," he proudly recalled of NSA's overwhelming defeat.

The flier asserted that the NSA had an "extreme liberal" agenda and brainwashed delegates at its conventions. "One panel discussion consisted of Negros who had participated in a sit-in movement," McCollum's flier noted.

McCollum drew wide praise for his leadership in organizing student lectures. He wanted to bring more diverse views to the student body and worked to raise awareness of controversial issues facing America.

Lectures he proposed in 1964: Is a government-controlled Medicare program necessary? Is there an internal threat of communism in the U.S.? Should the United States withdraw from the United Nations? The Civil Rights Bill -- Is It Right or Wrong? (He suggested inviting representatives from the NAACP and segregationist White Citizens Council to discuss the issue).

McCollum received a deferment from Vietnam so he could finish law school, and entered active duty in the Navy in 1969, serving as a military lawyer in the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps.

The man who later carved a reputation as one of the toughest tough-on-crime lawmakers often played defense attorney. Several times, he said, he fought against dishonorable discharges for soldiers found to be homosexual.

At the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois, McCollum one evening walked into the officer's club and spotted a great pair of legs in a "cute little red miniskirt." The legs belonged to Ingrid Seebohm, a Red Cross worker who is today his wife of 29 years. The McCollums have three grown sons, and Ingrid lately spends much of her time on the Senate campaign.

A focus on national, international issues

Nobody had heard of Bill McCollum in 1979, let alone figured he had any shot at winning a congressional seat. At the time, he was an Orlando attorney specializing in insurance defense, and heading the Seminole County Republican Committee.

McCollum viewed Richard Kelly, the six-year Republican incumbent from Pasco County, as arrogant, disconnected and vulnerable. He proved to be right on the vulnerability, especially when early in the race Kelly was implicated in Abscam, the FBI sting that targeted members of Congress with bribes from rich Arabs.

With a grass-roots campaign of sign-waving, marathon precinct walks and phone banks, McCollum beat a crowded field of Republicans and went on to win the general election. His platform included congressional term limits, opposition to affirmative action, reinstatement of the draft and opposition to abortion.

In Washington, McCollum quickly stood out as a thoughtful hard-worker, willing to burrow into some of the toughest legislative issues.

During 10 terms, never facing formidable opposition, McCollum tended to focus more on national and international matters than issues more directly affecting his district. During the 1980s, he focused much of his energy trying to bolster the Contras in Nicaragua and the government of El Salvador. He and his staff frequently flew to Central America.

Serving on the Judiciary and Banking committees, he become an authority on crime and terrorism and laid down a consistently pro-business record often attacked by consumer groups.

The Public Campaign, a campaign finance reform advocacy group, in 1998 awarded him its first "Golden Leash Award," for receiving generous contributions from banking and credit card companies and promoting "special favors for his "cash constituents' at the expense of his real constituents back home."

Although his Democratic opponent for the Senate, Bill Nelson, portrays McCollum as a consistent partisan extremist, his record often shows more nuance than that.

Early in his career, for instance, McCollum led the charge to prevent the Legal Services Corp., which provides legal help to the poor, from filing class-action lawsuits. But more recently, McCollum quietly fended off efforts by the GOP leadership to eliminate Legal Services funding.

"Bill had (House Majority Leader) Dick Armey in fits over that," recalled former Republican House member Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who served on the Judiciary Committee with McCollum. "Bill is very tactical and methodical in understanding the process and where the pressure points are to direct an outcome. He was instrumental in stopping what the majority leader wanted."

McCollum has never managed to achieve his ambitions for leadership in the House. He ran hard to become Republican whip in 1994, wooing votes by spending more than $1-million from his own campaign war chest on others' congressional campaigns. In the end, Tom DeLay of Texas won the spot, and McCollum finished a distant third in the three-man race, winning only 28 of 227 votes in the House Republican caucus.

A sense of humor, a ready temper

Now Bill McCollum is the underdog in the Senate race, feverishly campaigning to introduce himself to Florida as a principled, mainstream politician. He had strongly considered running for statewide office before but backed off. Today, he is struggling to fend off the better-known Nelson and Democrats' attacks that he's a mean-spirited ideologue.

As a campaigner, McCollum blends into crowds, rarely introduces himself to strangers and struggles to rouse crowds listening to his stump speeches.

But contrary to the caricature drawn by critics, he is not humorless. He is friendly, polite and laughs easily. He also has a temper.

After a heated 1995 National Public Radio interview where McCollum was trashed by term-limits advocate Paul Jacob, a TV camera caught McCollum shouting at Jacob and angrily jabbing him in the chest. This summer, McCollum sounded livid after a conference call his staff placed to the St. Petersburg Times failed to go through properly.

"Those crackers don't know how to use the phone," he screamed from Washington, unaware he could be heard at the Times. It wasn't clear to whom he was referring.

McCollum has sought to soften his image on the campaign trail, touting his support for the environment, for smaller class sizes, and for a federal hate crimes law. But the heart of this race, he contends, is a question of whether voters want a candidate who will fight big government or someone like Nelson who embraces it.

McCollum's underlying message comes straight from the Colonel back in Brooksville.

"I think he'd be very proud," he said.

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