"Just One of the Guys And Quite a Bit More"

By Evan Thomas

A blend of feminist ideals and feminine ways

CONVENTION. The U.S. House of Representatives is a male domain. Deals are cut between pickup basketball games in the House gym, and legislative strategy is still crafted over cigars and bourbon in musty cloakrooms. Only 22 of the 435 House members are female, and they are regarded warily by the Capitol's male denizens. Women in Congress must not whine, they must not pout and they most certainly must never cry. They must overcome all the stereotypes that many Congressmen, like some other males, have not yet shed about the opposite and allegedly weaker sex.

Geraldine Ferraro has made her way in this male preserve by being both feminine and feminist. Her hair is frosted blond, she wears stockings and makeup, and she loves to shop. When she needs to, she can flirt. But she is also tough and resilient, a shrewd back-room operator. She is, says fellow New York Congressman Joseph Addabbo, the paunchy, balding Chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, "just one of the guys."

Ferraro must now prove her ability to operate successfully in the even more daunting arena of national politics. She will have to convince men everywhere, and women as well, that she is equipped to do what only men have done before: run the nation. She will expose herself to relentless public scrutiny with little more than wit and common sense to shield her.

Fate and gender, not her resume, put Ferraro on the ticket. Only two House members have been elected Vice President this century: John Sherman in 1908 and John Nance Garner in 1932. A third, Gerald Ford, was appointed to the office in 1973 after Spiro Agnew's resignation. Congressman William Miller went down with the Goldwater ticket in 1964. As Ferraro concedes, "Obviously, if I were not a woman I would not be discussed." Yet throughout her career, she has shown the ability to perform jobs that, on paper at least, she was not prepared for. As a Queens housewife with a night-school law degree, she became an effective prosecutor in the gritty criminal courts of Queens. A congressional neophyte, she became a quintessential Capitol Hill insider. She has pulled herself up with intelligence, immense drive, directness and engaging freshness--and by carefully playing according to the rules.

Ferraro is in many ways an old-fashioned poll. When she came to Congress in 1978, she did not take to the floor to make feminist speeches but instead worked the back halls, carefully cultivating her male elders by performing small chores and favors. She became a disciple of Speaker Tip O'Neill. "She has been a regular since the day she arrived," says O'Neill approvingly. The Speaker rewarded her with House plums, making her a member of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, Secretary to the House Democratic Caucus and, in 1983, a member of the powerful Budget Committee.

Ferraro became effective by using the same techniques as her male colleagues. She wheedled, cajoled and bargained. She was assertive, but not too much so. She recognized, in her own words, that "a woman can't be too pushy, or she's called a shrew." Says Budget Committee Member Leon Panetta: "She is able to sense where the boys are going and go with them. She's not a Bella Abzug type." Tony Coelho, Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, finds Ferraro has "an inner serenity to her, an inner peace." Says he: "She isn't a threat. She is not a feminist with wounds."

Budget Committee Chairman James Jones recalls that Ferraro diligently attended every meeting of the panel when this year's budget resolution was being hammered out. "She listens before she talks," says Jones. "On whatever areas were special to her she spoke her mind. She won more than she lost." Then she used her ties to the New York delegation and Women's Caucus to help pass the package. "She is a team player in that she helps build coalitions to pass whatever budget we develop."

Ferraro does have a temper and is not afraid to be blunt. "But I've never seen her lose control," says Panetta. "She can roll with it. She gets mad, but she doesn't stalk out of the room." Ferraro's patience was tested repeatedly last month when she chaired the Democratic Platform Committee hearings. A parade of witnesses loudly demanded party backing for their pet causes. One who sparred with Ferraro was Democratic National Committeewoman Billie Carr of Houston. She notes that afterward, Ferraro came to her and said, "Let's have a drink and talk about it." Says Carr: "I've worked with a lot of men in politics, and many would consider you against them if you opposed them in any way. But she cared enough to talk about it, to be open-minded."

Ferraro is not without detractors, quite often Republicans. "She is very smart but very directed," says G.O.P. Congresswoman Bobbi Fiedler. "She is too partisan. She will not talk to anyone outside her party. Women in Congress tend to be goal-or issue-oriented, but Ferraro fits perfectly in the male-dominated club. God help anyone who gets in her way."

Ferraro unabashedly plays the pork-barrel, vote-swapping congressional game. As a member of the Public Works Committee, she managed to get water tunnels and roads built in her district. Queens has few cows, but she voted for dairy supports to help out farm-district Congressmen; she later received a $2,000 contribution from the political-action committee of a Missouri-based dairy cooperative. To win points in her conservative, mostly blue-collar district (the title credits of All in the Family were filmed there), she voted against mandatory busing to achieve desegregation and for tuition tax credits for parochial schools. On most other issues, she is squarely in the liberal Democratic mainstream (see box).

Ferraro has little use for the "new ideas" of the neoliberals. "She's not a Gary Hart 'let-me-describe-the-future' Democrat," says Democratic Congressman James Shannon of Massachusetts. Many of the younger Democrats on the Budget Committee have come to realize that entitlement programs must be cut to reduce the deficit. Not Ferraro. "She is very tough on not touching them," says Panetta. In stormy Budget Committee meetings, she resists any attempt to cut cost of living adjustments for the elderly, Government workers, veterans.

In short, Ferraro is a New Deal Democrat with a good seasoning of traditional family values. Like Walter Mondale, she thrives on schmoozing, gladhanding, doing favors. Her zest for politicking suggests that she will be a sturdy campaigner this summer and fall. But she also shares some of Mondale's political liabilities. The television camera may treat her unkindly, as it does Mondale, though for a different reason. Mondale often comes across on the tube as wooden and buttoned up. Ferraro can be animated, but her edgy, fast-talking style is hot for the cool medium. Her Queens accent might set some teeth to grinding. Her tendency to shoot from the lip could produce gaffes in a national campaign.

When it comes to using TV, Ferraro is a curious throwback. Many new-style politicos in both parties disdain routine congressional chores, trying instead to make their reputations--and win votes--over the tube. Everyday in the House, blow-dried young Congressmen rise to give mini-stump speeches that are carried on cable TV and often picked up at home by local news shows. "Ferraro is no photo-op type," says Christopher Matthews, an aide to O'Neill.

Speaking on the House floor, however, is not just a matter of showmanship. Serious and hard questions, from U.S. intervention abroad to civil rights at home, are aired and debated. Ferraro rarely participates. Indeed, some House members say that she has spent too much time advancing her career and not enough grappling with national issues. "The real question is going to be her depth," predicts a colleague. "Frankly, she is not one who can take to the floor and speak to any issue."

Her lack of experience is most glaring on foreign policy. Usually she follows the party leadership. In her first year, when she finally did enter a foreign policy debate--over Turkish intervention in Cyprus--it was chiefly to please a large Greek constituency back in Astoria, Queens. Caught up in the moment, she cried, "We've got to get those Turkeys out!" As her words rang through the House chamber, she dissolved in nervous giggles and had to ask the chair for an extension of time to compose herself and go on. With an eye to conservatives at home, she has consistently opposed large cuts in the military. When Carter favored a mobile MX missile, she voted for it; when Reagan backed a silo-based MX, she voted against it. In the past year, as her political ambition widened, she has tried to plug the gaps in her knowledge, visiting Central America and the Middle East. In a remark that revealed both her naivete and directness, she once exclaimed: "I didn't know what the West Bank was until I got there. It's so teeny!"

Ferraro is suspect among some feminists, who find her insufficiently zealous about their cause. She badly shook feminist leaders when she told the press that the Equal Rights Amendment should not be specifically included in the Democratic platform. Characteristically, she recovered quickly. She left messages at the offices of feminist leaders: "Don't talk to any reporter until you talk to me." With some fast and earnest footwork, she was able to calm the sisterhood. Politically, Ferraro probably benefits from putting some distance between her and organized feminists. But actually, her feminism is quite strong. Indeed, it is her deepest conviction. Her flashes of political independence, even courage, are usually in the cause of women's rights.

A Roman Catholic from a heavily Catholic district, Ferraro, like most of her constituents, opposes abortion. But she considers it a matter of individual choice, and she has been brave about defending the right to choose. Her most stirring House speech came over an amendment to loosen restrictions on federal funds for abortion. Ferraro supported the amendment particularly because it would help pay for abortions for poor women who had been raped. "I ask you to be personal about this vote," she told a hushed chamber, "because no crime is as personal as rape. I ask you if your wife or sister or daughter were raped and became pregnant, would you not give her the right to make her own decision?"

For all her one-of-the-boys demeanor, Ferraro does not forgive sexists. In 1981, House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski vetoed Ferraro for a seat on his powerful committee. "Rosty is not exactly what you'd call an enlightened male," explains a committee member. Ferraro was furious. A few weeks later, when Rostenkowski came by her seat to ask for her vote on a minor tax matter, Ferraro looked at him coldly and slowly shook her head.

Ferraro does not let anyone push her around. Three years ago, when a taxi driver at Washington National Airport tried to double her up with another passenger and then insisted that he did not know the way to Capitol Hill, Ferraro marched down to the D.C. hack bureau and had the cabby's license pulled. When Eastern Air Lines denied her a credit card, even though she was a member of the Aviation Subcommittee on Public Works, she announced this fact in a speech to the embarrassment of an Eastern Air Lines lobbyist who was sitting in the audience. (She got her card forthwith.)

On the surface, Ferraro's rise is, as Mondale said, a "classic" American success story. She was named after a brother, Gerard, who died at age three in a car crash as he slept on his mother's lap. Her father doted on her, showering her with dolls and affection. "I was given everything because my father felt I had brought Gerard back to life," she says.

The idyl ended with her father's death, of a heart attack, when Geraldine was eight. For a year she was so devastated that she was anemic and unable to attend school. Her father had been a restaurateur and owner of a dime store in Newburgh, N.Y., but when he died, her mother was forced to move to a small apartment in The Bronx and go to work crocheting beads on dresses. She scrimped to send Ferraro to an expensive Roman Catholic girls' school, Marymount, in Tarrytown, N.Y., and then Marymount Manhattan College. Ferraro recalls that her mother went without meat for months so her daughter, like her rich classmates, could have graduation dress from Lord & Taylor.

Ferraro wanted to be a doctor but became a teacher instead "because women did not become doctors in the '50s." Bored with teaching second grade, she began attending Fordham Law School at night. A fellow student complained to her, "You know, you're taking a man's place." "Yeah, I know," she replied, with not a little pleasure. When she graduated and married John Zaccaro (see box), she told him she was keeping her maiden name--to "honor my mother." For years she gave her mother a slice of her legal fees.

Women were not welcome in Wall Street law firms in 1960, so she became a housewife, occasionally helping her husband at his real estate office. When her three children were older, Queens District Attorney Nicholas Ferraro, her cousin, hired her as a Prosecutor.

She handled cases of child abuse, rape and domestic violence. At night she would lie awake, unable to forget the brutalities that occupied her during the day. The work turned her from a "small-c conservative to a Liberal." It made her more sympathetic to the underclass she prosecuted. It also drained her emotionally.

Like many local lawyers trying to build a practice, Ferraro had done some Democratic club work on the side, getting to know her working-class neighborhood and the local pols. When Queens Congressman James Delaney decided to retire in 1978, Ferraro ran for his seat. She thought she had earned the backing of local party leaders, but they spurned a woman. Sweltering in summer heat, she stood on street curbs begging passerby to sign her petition to get on the ballot.

Ferraro ran hard that fall, and has never slowed down. She won by 10% in 1978, 17% in '80 and 53% in '82. She settled into a wearing routine: half the week on Capitol Hill, the other half in her district. She seemed to relish the unglamorous venues of politics, the smoky Knights of Columbus halls, where she fended off questions about abortion, the street corners where the elderly gather to gossip and worry about their Social Security and Medicare checks.

Her family endured with good humor and pride. They did not feel neglected. Though her district is mostly blue-collar, Ferraro lives in an upper-middle-class enclave in Forest Hills. Her husband's successful real estate business helps pay for a winter retreat in St. Croix and a summer house on Fire Island. For the children (Laura, 18, about to enter Brown; John Jr., 20, a student at Middlebury College, and Donna, 22, a Financial Analyst on Wall Street) there were expensive educations. A full-time housekeeper does the cooking and cleaning. When a photographer asked Ferraro to pose in her kitchen, her daughter Laura joked, "Are you sure you could find it, Mom?" Ferraro declined the photo opportunity.

Ferraro is delighted that her children have advantages she never had. She boasts about my "beautiful banker daughter" Donna. She still makes time to go shopping for clothes with her daughters, as on a recent Saturday morning. She fretted about getting mobbed in the dressing room, having to answer questions "in my Bermudas and bra," but swallowed her dignity and went anyway. Only one person--a neighbor--recognized her. "It was weird," she said, sounding slightly disappointed.

Such anonymity is over. Cameras and reporters will trail her everywhere, questioning and judging. She will be tested constantly on her ability to perform. Inevitably, political image polishers will urge her to sound more statesmanlike, to control her brashness, to sand down her New York edges. She will become a little more homogenized, a little less original. More "vice-presidential." She may even start sounding like Walter Mondale.

Too much polishing would be unfortunate. Her appeal is in her genuineness and humanity. In the House, Congressmen forgive her occasional shrillness because she is being herself and not someone else. In winning at a man's game, she has managed to retain a naturalness and warmth. If she is to add to the ticket--and enlarge politics itself--it will be not because she was able to transform herself into another Walter Mondale but because she was able to be at once a national politician and a woman. --By Evan Thomas.

Reported by John F. Stacks with Ferraro and Neil MacNeil/San Francisco

With reporting by John F. Stacks, Neil MacNeil