State: Bill Nelson: 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 SHELBY OPPEL

CHIPLEY -- Three hundred people on their feet and clapping. Five North Florida sheriffs, arms folded in approval. His daughter's voice over a loudspeaker, booming out the song she wrote especially for this campaign.

All for U.S. Senate candidate Bill Nelson, at a September campaign rally.

What a difference a decade makes.

Ten years ago this month, Nelson was headed straight into his first political defeat, a crushing, high-profile loss to fellow Democrat Lawton Chiles in the primary race to be Florida's governor.

Now, 16 days before voters choose a new U.S. senator, Nelson, 58, is leading in polls, endorsements and money to spend against his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum of Longwood.

After 1990, Nelson wondered whether he would ever again aim so high. Or so he says now, volunteering the answer before the question is asked. Yet his moves since -- in public and private -- have not been those of an accidental politician.

Even Nelson seems to acknowledge the calculations that now have him vying for the only job in Florida politics on par with the one he lost.

"You can tell a lot about where a fella is going," he told the agricultural center crowd in the Panhandle town of Chipley, "by where a fella has been."

A difficult political defeat from which to bounce back

The morning after Chiles clobbered him in the 1990 primary, Nelson, then 48, stood on a busy roadside in his hometown of Melbourne in Brevard County, waving a sign that said, "Thank you."

Chiles, the popular former U.S. senator known as "Walkin' Lawton" for his 1970 campaign trek across Florida, had won the state by a more than 2-1 ratio. But Brevard County had stuck by Nelson.

Hours later, Nelson boarded a plane to Tallahassee, where he endorsed Chiles against incumbent Republican Gov. Bob Martinez.

As difficult as that morning was, Nelson supporters say, the day of Chiles' surprise entry into the race was worse. Chiles had committed to staying out of the race but changed his mind at the urging of Democrats who doubted Nelson, the Democratic front-runner, could unseat Martinez in the general election.

Chiles' change of heart just six months before the primary hurt Nelson personally, not just politically, because he considered the elder statesman a friend. Unfortunately for Nelson, the state's voters considered Chiles an icon.

Though Chiles told Nelson his decision before going public, even the timing of the announcement stung. Inside the new state Capitol building at a previously scheduled news conference, Nelson was unveiling a plan to limit campaign spending and expand the state's Government in the Sunshine Law.

At the same time, across a plaza at the old Capitol, Chiles' supporters could be heard cheering his arrival into the race at a last-minute rally, recalled Don Pride, who worked on Nelson's campaign.

"I do think it was devastating to (Nelson), because the last thing in the world he dreamed was that his opponent would be Lawton Chiles. That was a complete shock . . . that was the 800-pound gorilla," said Charlie Whitehead, a former state Democratic Party chairman who supported Nelson's gubernatorial bid.

Nelson moved into attack mode, pushed by Chiles' entry, as well as the "empty suit" label pasted on him by Republicans and relayed statewide by a notorious Florida Trend magazine cover.

But Nelson's attempts to paint Chiles, then 60, as too old for the job, and to tar him with allegations of financial improprieties, didn't convince voters.

Supporters recalled that Nelson took the loss with characteristic stoicism.

"Naturally, I was disappointed because that was what my calling was. My calling is public service," Nelson said recently. "I had no idea after the governor's race that I would ever be back in public service. It was not something I dwelled on. I just decided that if I was handed a lemon, I was going to make lemonade."

Nelson's wife and campaign partner, Grace, offered a more painful version. As her husband endorsed Chiles in Tallahassee, Mrs. Nelson watched the TV coverage in her nightgown at their Melbourne home, crying through his speech.

"It was sort of a death for us," Mrs. Nelson, 52, told PBS this fall. "A death of a dream."

A farm boy who raked in club presidencies

Nelson was born in Miami but moved at age 6 to Melbourne, where his family owned thousands of acres along the east coast. His father's father started Melbourne's first real estate development firm, Nelson says.

Nelson, an only child, attended public schools and raised cattle as a boy, eventually selling the herd for $10,000 he put toward college expenses.

By his senior year, Nelson was so much the student leader that teachers called him "Governor" and the principal gave him an office at Melbourne High School. Like his opponent McCollum, he was student body president, and he was also state president of the 4-H Club of Florida and international president of the Key Club.

Before he left Melbourne to attend the University of Florida, Nelson convened a meeting at his home to line up political support, said Charlie Edwards, a Fort Myers attorney and classmate of Nelson and McCollum.

"Bill organized his own campaign for (freshman class) president even before he set foot on campus," recounted Edwards.

After two years in Gainesville, Nelson worried politics was distracting him from his studies. He transferred to Yale University and repeated his sophomore year, graduating in 1965.

Nelson took his ailing mother, Nannie Merle, to live with him while he attended University of Virginia Law School. She died of Lou Gehrig's disease after his second year, when Nelson was 24. His father, Clarence, had died from a heart attack 10 years earlier.

After two years in the Army, Nelson began practicing law back in Melbourne. Soon after, at a Key Club convention in Jacksonville, Nelson met his wife on the arm of another man.

Bruce Smathers, Nelson's roommate at Yale and the son of former U.S. Sen. George Smathers, attended the event with Grace Cavert, the 23-year-old daughter of a prominent Jacksonville paper manufacturer. Smathers thought his two friends might like each other. They were engaged seven months later, married in 10.

"I would've married him the next day if he had asked me," Mrs. Nelson said.

Within months, she was campaigning with him as he sought a seat in the Florida House, where he served from 1972 to 1978. In 1978, he was elected to Congress to represent a Republican district that includes Brevard County, home to the Kennedy Space Center, and most of Indian River and Osceola counties.

The highlight of an otherwise unremarkable 12-year congressional career came in 1986, when Nelson's unending support of the national space program helped him win a trip on the space shuttle Columbia. He was the second congressman to take what critics derided as the ultimate free ride.

"Oh, what a beautiful home we have," Nelson told students at J.R. Arnold High School in Panama City Beach last month, remembering the view of Earth from space. "It's a blue and white ball."

The space shuttle trip became part of the Nelson biography. He co-authored a book about it. He rarely failed to mention it as he readied his next step: from Congress to the Governor's Mansion.

The Chiles defeat halted his political career.

Temporarily.

A political opening overseeing insurance

After the 1990 defeatin the governor's race, the Nelsons returned to their home on the Indian River near Melbourne. Their children, Billy Jr. and Nan Ellen, were entering high school. The time off from politics, while involuntary, was "a blessing" that allowed Nelson to "re-engage" with his family, he says.

He opened a branch of an Orlando law firm in Melbourne, recruiting clients among the space companies on Cape Canaveral. He kept his name in the public eye by writing occasional columns for Florida newspapers and tackled a list of political biographies.

In 1992, he won a fellowship at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he led a study group on the moderate to conservative politician known as the "New Democrat." In Congress, Nelson was an early member of the Democratic Leadership Council that became synonymous with the term. Its most famous chairman, Bill Clinton, was poised that fall to win the presidency.

"I find that I'm a better public servant when I am focused on my intellectual side to complement my political side," Nelson said.

Such earnestness is a Nelson trademark. He doesn't smoke and rarely drinks alcohol, sipping bottled water and snacking on bananas between stump speeches. He maintains a lean physique, 5 feet 11 and 160 pounds, with regular 4-mile runs. On campaign trips, he uses computer-printed flash cards ("5:15 p.m.: Freshen up at Holiday Inn-Select") to help keep on schedule.

Nelson and his wife share a deep Christian faith, and gave a Bible as a wedding present to a former campaign aide. Their children arrived in Tallahassee this weekend to join the campaign: Nan Ellen, 23, an aspiring songwriter and singer in Nashville, Tenn., and Billy Jr., 24, who studies business management at Covenant College in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Although Nelson's formal baritone and strait-laced demeanor have brought him some ridicule in political circles, it was he who laughed loudest at a reporter's imitation of him during a recent campaign trip. "With cynical, more reserved people . . . Bill wears himself so much on his sleeve, there's always that perception: Is this guy for real?" said Smathers, Nelson's Yale roommate.

"He really is. He believes in public service. He believes it is the highest calling," Smathers said.

Four years after losing to Chiles, another opportunity opened up. It wasn't in the Governor's Mansion -- Chiles was running for re-election -- nor in the U.S. Senate. Incumbents Bob Graham and Connie Mack weren't going anywhere.

It was the Cabinet post of state insurance commissioner, left open by Republican Tom Gallagher's departure to run for governor. The only problem was, Nelson had no background in the industry.

"The main thing I needed to do was find out something about insurance," Nelson said.

Two years earlier, Hurricane Andrew had devastated the state insurance market, and as insurance commissioner, Nelson worked to restore it. He led well-publicized assaults on insurance companies that discriminated against African-American customers and fought foreign insurers with Florida ties that refused to honor the claims of Holocaust survivors.

Weeks before his re-election in 1998, Nelson weathered criticism that his department had been lax in investigating sexual harassment complaints brought by several female employees. Nelson was not implicated in any of the allegations.

Nelson says his battles against insurance companies have made the past six years the toughest of his career. But it was also a perfect platform from which to market himself as a friend of consumers, and to potential voters.

This time around, Nelson says, he is a more relaxed campaigner, more humble and appreciative of his supporters. By any measure, it has been an easier ride.

Now, it's Nelson who has the statewide name recognition. McCollum, his opponent, is a lesser-known congressman without the legendary stature of Chiles, who died in 1998.

The turnaround has emboldened Nelson to invoke his old rival, along with Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, as models for the socially moderate but fiscally conservative senator he says he will be if elected Nov. 7.

Graham, who has campaigned on Nelson's behalf, encourages the comparison.

"I am not at all surprised," the elder senator said, "that he came back again."

- Times staff writer Adam C. Smith contributed to this report.

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