Editor's note: This profile was originally published in 1993 in the Sunday Journal's Rhode Islander Magazine.

More than any other Republican in modern Rhode Island history, Senator John H. Chafee has prospered in the minority. A liberal in a conservative party, he often casts a swing vote on key legislation.

By JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

THE ADMONITIONS of the father, seven years dead, still echo down the decades in the ears of the son, who will turn 71 next month.

Plain and hard as a plow blade, sometimes as harsh, they are acted on by the son, who passes them down in his turn.

A wry smile softens the planes of the face of John Sharpe Chafee's son. He sets his jaw, dips a shoulder as if to undertake a burden, makes his voice gravelly to mock the gravity in the words.

Get an early start. Men who built this country got an early start.

After an early start and long toil, John Hubbard Chafee is still at work, with congenital good cheer, on the building of his legacy.

Some grounds once marked by pithy sayings have shifted. Some favorite old political foundries have gone to rust.

Where weapons-making once forged livelihoods by the thousands, old warriors are asked to abet in the beating of swords into plowshares. Chafee's last great exertion at pumping submarine-building work into Rhode Island was a public and personal failure.

Where Republicans drew power for 12 years from a friendly White House, even moderates like Chafee are expected to lock arms now and block every thrust by the new Democratic president.

Where an earlier generation invested faith in the system that governed it, today's citizenry is corroded with a suspicion of its leaders. As Chafee readies for his 1994 run for his fourth and final Senate term, his poll ratings, for example, are among his lowest ever.

By chance and a career's worth of choices, Chafee finds himself eking out a legacy from the stingy soil on which he first thrived as a young state representative from Warwick: the political minority.

Chafee is one of half a dozen senators inhabiting a no-man's-land at the Republican Party's left edge whose votes can swing the fate of any given issue.

At some risk back home in Democratic Rhode Island, Chafee can join Senate Republicans to grind a bill to death by filibuster. At some risk to his party standing, Chafee can help Democrats win on terms he negotiates.

In the early tests of his shaky status as a potential power broker in the Bill Clinton era, Chafee has worked both angles. But he has yet to prove himself a master in a role that demands much subtlety, cunning, and persuasive power.

Now, a great opportunity is upon him as Republican point man in a task of epic stakes: A radical retooling of American health care.

DRIVING TO WORK this summer from his home in McLean, Virginia, Chafee reflects on his work in the Senate in the context of his early career and his upbringing, with special note of his father, a toolmaking executive whose adages, to Chafee, are tools for living.

In the office where he works hangs the citation Chafee's father received from the government of France for service in 1917 as an ambulance driver in "la guerre pour le droit."

The son joined his own generation's war for justice, World War II, taking along the tools fashioned in the wrestling matches of his school days. "You're out there alone, nobody to cover for you while you rest," he says of the sport. "Everything you do is yourself." That built the nerve he took with him to the Marines and to combat with another man in Guadalcanal and Okinawa. "Well, I can do this," he reasoned.

He fought again in Korea. Working as a lawyer in Providence, Chafee says, was "not very exciting so I didn't mind" being called back to active duty to command a rifle company in Korea.

In his memoir of the Korean conflict, The Coldest War, writer James Brady, a young lieutenant in Chafee's command in 1951, describes his commander as a jaunty figure with a splendid mustache and a "wolf's lope." Brave, terse, tireless, chipper, Captain Chafee had a coldness in him, buffed to a hard polish and useful in combat.

Such attributes have created a politician who, more than any in modern Rhode Island history, has prospered in the minority. Just as he relished the challenge of wrestling from the bottom, disadvantaged position, Chafee seems to thrive under political pressure.

When outgunned as a young House minority leader from Warwick in a legislature thick with profligate Democrats, you scrap every inch of the way, not bartering for the crumbs of public-works projects.

Not that Chafee has anything against the against the public-works pork barrel. He still takes credit for building the Newport Bridge during his tenure as Rhode Island governor, even though his successor, Frank Licht, cut the ribbon.

It was Chafee's call for a state income tax during the 1968 gubernatorial campaign that led to his loss to Licht after three terms as governor. But the defeat has paid unexpected dividends. Licht, as governor, went on to enact the the son, whose youngest child, Georgia Nassikas, is now the mother of the senator's infant grandchild Alexandra Nassikas.

"Because he was a wonderful . . . a wonderful sounding board. I mean, I wouldn't ask him, 'Should we go forward with an income tax?' But moral problems: 'What's the right thing to do?' "

He weighs his next thought at a traffic light across from the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial. The light turns green.

"When I lost the governorship in sixty-eight," he says, "and our daughter Tribbie was killed in a horseback-riding accident and we'd lost a baby just a few months earlier, our whole family was just in distressed condition."

At that point, President-elect Richard M. Nixon's Defense Secretary-designate, Melvin R. Laird, asked Chafee to become Secretary of the Navy.

"I really agonized over that," Chafee says. It would mean leaving the family behind in Rhode Island for a time, while he immersed himself in the work of running a Navy at war.

Virginia Chafee was, at best, ambivalent about uprooting the bruised family from hearth and home. She and her husband polled their five children, from boarding-school to grammar-school age. "They were unanimously against it and I was just perplexed about whether this was the right thing to do," recalls the senator.

Chafee's father, however, told him to take the job. "He said, 'Go to it. Oh, there'll be some difficulties. But this will be a wonderful experience in your life.' "

Chafee grits his voice with his father's 25-year-old advice: " 'Take the job. Get the kids down there and get them squared away.' "

This was the view of work passed from father to son: Work nourishes. Work soothes. Work enobles, dignifies, heals.

The Navy experience also enlarged Chafee's earlier view of war from the foxhole. He soon became disillusioned with the deployment of the Navy's power in the guerrilla theater of Vietnam.

"Warships parading up and down the coast" lost their glamour, he says, when their long-distance shells wound up destroying villages and killing friendly forces with little gain against the enemy.

Chafee also cites political lessons gained during his reign as Secretary of the Navy. He learned his place in a pecking order among barons like House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mendel Rivers, who always promoted his bases in Charleston, South Carolina.

Only one response was suitable: "Yes, Mr. Chairman."

At the same time, Chafee says, "I raised hell" inside the Navy if rivals threatened Rhode Island's bases, as Nixon scaled back defense spending to pay for domestic programs.

In his losing campaign for the Senate in 1972, Chafee sought to link incumbent Claiborne Pell with anti-Nixon policies that would cost Rhode Island thousands of Navy jobs. After his victory, Nixon went on to cut the Rhode Island bases. Chafee has often speculated that, as a senator, he might have persuaded his White House patron to spare them.

When Chafee finally got to the Senate (replacing Senator John O. Pastore in 1976), he made a beeline for the Environment and Public Works Committee, best known for the greenery under its jurisdiction but best loved by senators for its bacon.

In his first term, Chafee worked for months to nurse through the approval for a new Providence federal building that had been on the drawing board for years.

At a crucial point in the process, Representative Harold "Bizz" Johnson, one of the old bulls of the House, took hostage a potful of public-works projects, which included the federal building that was slated for Westminster Street in downtown Providence.

As a ransom, Johnson demanded a new courthouse in his hometown of Redding, California. The courts didn't need it; the public servants there didn't want it; one legislator tagged it "Bizz Johnson's $16-million gold watch."

Chafee swallowed hard and paid with his vote. The evening that the deal was sealed, he poured himself a glass of sour mash and telephoned the Rhode Island media to spread the good news. Later, when he was asked to account for his part in a classic pork-barrel deal, Chafee answered, "If that's the price of the Providence federal building, that's the price of the Providence federal building."

WHEN President Ronald Reagan, in 1980, ushered in Republican Senate control for the first time in a generation, great opportunities arose to bring home the bacon.

Chafee overcame strong reluctance to support Reagan's regime of deep tax cuts during an unprecedented peacetime military buildup. Where he did resist, Chafee didn't get personal.

Also, Chafee went along with Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr.'s quest for a larger, 600-ship Navy, despite passionately opposing Lehman's plan to take more old battleships out of mothballs.

Once he lost that battle, however, Chafee wasted no time in entering Rhode Island into Lehman's well-hyped national home-port contest. If Narragansett Bay was chosen for a battleship station, it would mean jobs for Rhode Island, Chafee said, and sailors for "our Rhode Island girls." He cheerfully bashed the Democratic Garrahy administration's "hogwash" concern that the battleship might be a pig in a poke. (Garrahy's concern was well-founded: Staten Island went on to win Lehman's contest, but 10 years later, last spring, the base was closed before it even opened.)

In 1983, after the battleship New Jersey shelled Lebanon, Chafee was quick to excoriate the "colonial mindset" behind the action. But when 243 Marines died in the retaliatory terrorist car-bombing of their Beirut barracks, no words of blame crossed Chafee's lips.

Nor did Chafee call Lehman names for penalizing Electric Boat cost overruns by holding back new submarine-building contracts. Instead, Chafee played counselor. "This marriage can be saved," he rightly declared. The 1980s became boom times for Electric Boat and the Navy.

Don't insult the crocodile before you cross the stream. Chafee followed his father's advice to him in his refusal to criticize Lehman at the time. But today Chafee has no qualms about pronouncing Lehman's policies "crazy . . . disastrous."

RARE AND STARTLING are Chafee's attacks in anger.

When state representative Jack Reed tarred Trudy Coxe during the 199 0congressional campaign as a typically insensitive rich Republican and traded on his West Point credentials, which didn't happen to include fighting overseas, Chafee was quick to react.

"Never a foot set on foreign soil] Does he ever say that in his advertising?" Chafee demanded of a reporter.

The senator's sly assault on another man's valor was "a low point," Chafee says now, adding in a mumble, " . . . heat of battle . . . wish I'd never said it."

Last year at a town meeting in Pawtucket, a citizen questioned the valor of one of Chafee's sons and, some say, called the senator a vulgar name. Facing the man down and yanking his baseball cap over his face, the senator snarled, "Don't you talk to me like that or I'll tear you apart." Chafee later apologized to the man.

The senator's pained regret for such outbursts springs from his schooling at his father's knee. The unkind word is like a rock thrown. Can't be retrieved.

Chafee shuns talk of his role in a Reagan-Bush bequest that has tarnished its victory in the Cold War: a national debt that he often decries and usually blames on Democrats.

He is also sensitive about the Reagan experiment, in part because Senate Republicans were "very badly burned" for passing a limit on cost-of-living raises in future Social Security benefits.

The spending curb was right in line with Reagan doctrine, but Reagan got cold feet and killed it when howls rose from one of the nation's (and Rhode Island's) most powerful interest groups: old people. Attacks on "Republican" Social Security cuts helped the Democrats win back the Senate control that had made the Reagan revolution possible.

Chafee still winces at the memory of the loss. He coined a theory based on the experience: "One party alone can't take on the tough issues of high emotional content. The other party will pillory them for it."

Despite the setback, Chafee remained powerful; he was the third-ranking officer in Senate Republican leadership, with weekly White House visiting privileges and, after 1988, an old mate as president.

Chafee had known George Bush since they were young athletes at Yale, tapped for the same secret society, Skull and Bones, and decorated in war. Bush's sister was married to Chafee's old roommate. Barbara Bush still called Chafee "Johnny."

Bush, however, repeatedly disappointed Chafee on social issues like abortion and in his stiff embrace of anti-tax politics. When Bush broke his "read my lips" campaign pledge in 1990 and cut a deal with the Democratic Congress to curb the deficit by raising taxes, Chafee was one of his few defenders.

But Chafee appreciated the president's help on the environmental issues close to Chafee's heart. Bush's collaboration on renewal of the Clean Air Act in 1990, Chafee says, is the model proof of his theory that both both parties must walk the plank together on the tough issues.

In closed-door meetings over a period of weeks, Chafee led the GOP side of a bipartisan cadre of congressional leaders that hammered out a deal with the White House to extend and toughen the expiring Clean Air law.

Chafee loves to recall the scene in which he is on the Senate floor, teamed with his opposition leader, George Mitchell, of Maine, and his environment committee chairman, Max Baucus, of Montana, to protect the fragile Clean Air deal against, ironically, environmental lobbyists.

The lobbyists were upset when Chafee, Mitchell, and Baucus led the Senate in killing an amendment by then-Senator Al Gore that would have sharpened the bill's provisions against industrial chemicals that harm the atmosphere's ozone layer. Should it pass, Chafee and his allies argued, it could alienate enough moderates in the Senate to kill the whole bill.

Environmentalists nevertheless cheered when the new Clean Air Act passed, having garnered the grudging support of moderates more worried about job-depleting regulations than ozone-depleting chemicals.

LATER THAT YEAR conservative Republicans punished Chafee for his fringe status, ousting him from his GOP leadership post. Since then, some of Chafee's friends have predicted that the "real" - meaning "liberal" - Chafee would now break out of the leadership lock step.

But it hasn't been that black and white, which may foreshadow Chafee's difficulties in delivering Republican votes on big issues like health-care reform and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Chafee was never able to deliver enough Republican moderates to join him in overriding Bush's vetos of liberal social legislation. An example was the bill to repeal the so-called Reagan-Bush "gag rule" on abortion counseling in subsidized clinics.

There are, however, benefits to being the Republican fourth-likeliest to vote against his leadership. A moderate Republican is so rare that liberal interest groups don't punish him for "wrong" votes, for example his vote - despite strong reservations - to seat Judge Clarence Thomas, an anti-abortion conservative, on the Supreme Court.

On other fronts, Chafee has shown that he knows how to cut his losses.

Consider the mild morning early in 1992 when the Rhode Island and Connecticut congressional delegations mustered on the Pentagon steps to beat the drum for Seawolf submarines.

Chafee, as usual, was front and center.

Around the politicians pleading before the local news cameras, a whiff of anachronism wafted in from a khaki-colored parade ground. Swords and bright tunics shone in the dissipating smoke from a 19-gun salute for a foreign general.

Chafee reported on the just-finished meeting with Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney. He had pressed his friend for a new Seawolf in Bush's upcoming budget, plus a new Seawolf every year until 1998, and he seemed confident, almost smug, about the case he had made in Cheney's office, down the hall from his old Navy secretary's shop.

But Electric Boat had become a sputtering giant, less and less critical to the state's future. Public sympathy for the shipbuilder was shrinking as demand grew for a peace dividend.

One week later, Cheney ordered a change that caught Chafee like a lowered boom, proposing to scuttle the Seawolf. The Soviet enemy is defunct, Cheney said, so "we don't need it."

Chafee reacted with more than a little bitterness. But soon and with no apparent qualms, he slipped away from the self-appointed role as high- profile champion of Electric Boat jobs that he had cultivated for 15 years in the Senate.

Since then, Democratic Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut has taken the bows for what little Seawolf work Congress spared from George Bush's budget ax. Never since has John Chafee been front and center on submarines.

Chafee's retreat to what he calls a "more defensive" stance on Electric Boat was, in the final analysis, the work of a skilled politician.

IF JOHN CHAFEE is to leave a lasting legacy, it may not be along the lines of a submarine christening, a Chafee Memorial Wastewater Treatment plant, or other such gold watches in the Bizz Johnson tradition.

It may result from a campaign that seems - although Chafee hates the analogy - almost Pell-ish in its idealism: an almost-total ban on handguns, which he proposed a few weeks after the submarine embarrassment.

In Rhode Island, his gun ban is a flat-out political winner. But it is also a farfetched crusade with its share of irony. Chafee's only co-sponsor is far from the sort of middle-of-the-road ally he must have to make the ban law: his old nemesis and the Senate's ultimate Quixote, Claiborne Pell.

"Someday the people will cry out and the gun ban will become law," Chafee proclaims, echoing Pell's claim for his lonely 1970s vision of a national revolt against drunken driving.

CHAFEE'S tried-and-true avenue to legislative success - one that he is sure to use during the upcoming health-care debate - lies in working the Senate's political fulcrum with moderates of both parties.

The leverage is based on the fact that even unanimous Democratic support provides no guarantee for Bill Clinton's success on any given day in the Senate. Although Democrats hold a 56-to-44 majority, Senate rules permit the minority to filibuster - debate indefinitely - any bill, as long as it can hold 41 votes.

So the Democrats need all of their own votes, plus those of four Republicans, to break a filibuster and go on to pass legislation. For Republicans like Chafee who can jump either way, their potential as swing votes gives them bargaining clout at a critical moment for any bill.

On the issues of free trade and health-care reform, there are so many uncommitted Democrats that Chafee will have to recruit more than a handful of Republicans to play the pivotal role he envisions for himself.

Chafee's position has its risk. Crossing the aisle entails a willingness to defy party leadership and step out of the protection of the party line. And Republican Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole doesn't go lightly on heretics in his house. Dole has staked a possible 1996 presidential run on the filibuster strategy.

Dole and his troops used the filibuster to strip Clinton naked during the president's $16-billion public-works bill. No senator brought more spirit to the fatal filibuster than Chafee.

Chafee didn't just deny summer jobs and highway pork to Arkansans or Californians, nor just to the Democratic Central Falls Mayor Thomas Lazieh, who had lobbied in Washington for the bill.

No, Chafee was sweeping bread from the table of one of his own sons, Warwick Mayor Lincoln Chafee. With good cheer and a game shrug, the son took the father's castor oil - forgoing dollars and jobs for his city toward the higher public good of national solvency.

Chafee's selling of the party line seemed less authentic, however, in the debate over Clinton's five-year, $498-million deficit-reduction package.

Appearing on C-SPAN's nationwide political call-in show one muggy mid-July morning, Chafee brought along a GOP fact sheet. Looking at the sheet, Chafee saw that it was partially outdated and misrepresented the Clinton plan. "Doesn't seem quite right," Chafee said of the sheet before the show.

But when a caller demanded Chafee's answer to Clinton's plan, the senator nonetheless used the sheet to tick off spending the Democrats ought to cut "for starters."

Why did you use the misleading figures? he was asked after the show. Why didn't you cry out for what you believe to be the real deficit cure? What about cuts in broad-based entitlement programs like Medicare, agriculture, federal pensions, Social Security?

Apparently, the conscience of the truth-teller in the 1968 Chafee-Licht campaign still gnaws when roused. Chafee scratched his head and tugged at his chin in discomfort. "Well, you're quite right," he muttered.

DAYS BEFORE the congressional recess in August, Chafee motors along a leafy parkway, decked out for summer duty in a tan suit and a blue tie imprinted with the globe-and-anchor motif of the Marines.

"Look at this view" he says, all brightness, "the water, the crews going out . . ." Tiny rowers and shells point for the sand-colored arches of the Key Bridge by the far bank of the Potomac.

Low sun glances off the windows and the silver-painted turrets of a green shingled boathouse. On the palisade above, the towers of Georgetown University rise against the sky like black spikes.

"I love coming in this way mornings," exults Chafee, a cast-iron realist alloyed with a poetic streak.

Chafee says he is swinging to the Democrats on a small but symbolically fraught issue: Clinton's promise to build a Kennedyesque program of national youth service.

Nonetheless, Chafee's sardonic side and his keen eye for cant are aimed at the very measure he is helping to bring to life: "This is a bill that's getting a lot further on its name than on its content," he says.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his allies have been able to forge a bill in their Labor and Human Resources Committee with Republican moderates Senators James M. Jeffords, of Vermont, and David F. Durenberger, of Minnesota. But Kennedy needs two more Republicans to break Dole's filibuster.

Chafee signs on. In return for their support, Chafee and the Republicans negotiate cuts in the program's spending from Kennedy and Eli J. Segal, a former Boston businessman and Clinton's national-service aide.

The filibuster holds by a thread for a day until William S. Cohen of Maine makes a fourth vote for cloture. With the Republican obstruction dissolved, Dole grumbles to the end: "I commend the solidarity on the other side. I wish we'd had more solidarity on our side."

Clinton's budget called for a 5-year, $10.4-billion National Service Corps with an opening recruitment goal of 100,000 young Americans.

The bipartisan bill that passes the Senate July 31 is a 3-year, $1.5-billion package that will start off next year with a modest 25,000 workers.

The reduced grandiosity will limit the scope of the fledgling program's inevitable blunders, Chafee argues; furthermore, bipartisan support will blunt the opposition's impulse to pile on.

On the Capitol steps, one of the bill's authors, Democrat Harris Wofford, of Pennsylvania, calls Chafee "one Republican who, this week, had the courage to break" with Dole.

Wofford softens his remarks, however, when he is asked to describe Chafee's bargaining for a stripped-down National Service bill during talks upstairs in the chandeliered and ornamented Vice President's Room.

"He wasn't majorly involved in this bill," Wofford demurs. "Let's see how he does on health-care reform."

NATIONAL health-care reform is the hottest political property in the land - issue enough to make or break Bill Clinton's presidency and his adviser Ira Magaziner's reputation. At the threshold of a new century, it will test the political system's ability to face down huge and complex problems short of war or economic emergency.

In the words of no less likely an ally than Ted Kennedy (politics does make strange bedfellows]): "Health-care reform is, I would think, the defining issue of John Chafee's career in public service."

Everyone agrees with Chafee that health-care reform - like free trade, welfare reform, and the other bread-and-butter issues coming up - will fly only on bipartisan wings.

But characteristically, Chafee also sees a good fight as the way to flush out competing ideas and gain advantage for his. He can often be heard railing on public TV against the threat of Democratic health-care-cost controls as "Big Brother in Washington."

For now, Chafee sees his job as consolidating a critical mass of Republican support by holding firm to certain bedrock principles of the party on free-market competition.

Late in July Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is charged with presenting the health-care-reform plan to Congress, quietly invites Chafee, the Republican Senate Health Care Reform Task Force chairman, to her work station near the Oval Office to put an offer on the table:

Negotiate with us, she says.

Chafee declines. Put your plan out before the public, he counters. Bring along as many Democrats as you can. We will do the same on the Republican side of the aisle.

CAN CHAFEE deliver the 6 or 12 or more Republican votes that his piece of a legacy will cost?

If he can, his prediction that health-care reform will become law next July may come true.

The great health-care debate now upon us will test Chafee's theory on the importance of bipartisan burden-sharing. Reform may collapse in gridlock or survive cliffhanger escapes from the legislative brink, maybe twisting toward the ironic ending in which he helps Clinton's reelection prospects as well as his own.

John Chafee won't sit still for much of that airy speculation. Today he's back on the job from his annual family retreat, on the rock-ribbed coast of Maine where his father was born 96 summers ago.

Back in the here and now, Chafee approaches the chores of high office in just the way he fortified a barbed-wire perimeter years ago in Korea and repaired a screen window last month at the beach house - with a gravelly instruction in his ear:

Always leave your work station in better condition than you found it.

John E. Mulligan is the Journal-Bulletin Washington bureau chief.