On the wall of Grant Woods' office is a photograph, taken of him when he was at Occidental College, together with an old black man named Preacher. Woods attended the small liberal arts school in Los Angeles beginning in '72, so he missed the pure Sixties, but there are certainly vestiges of it apparent anyway in this icon: Woods' hair is shaggy and curly and over-the-collar, he is wearing a corduroy jacket and an item of headgear that can only be described as a cap. Most of all, the bottom half of the frame is taken up by the words to a well-known Paul Simon song, "The Boxer," that certainly takes you back:
In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade/ And he carries the reminder of every glove that laid him out/ Or clept him 'til he cried out in his anger and his shame/ "I am leaving, I am leaving," but the fighter still remains.
Leaning back in his chair in such a relaxed posture that he doesn't appear to have bones, Grant Woods is responding with slight embarrassment to a request that he explain this souvenir. It is the only embarrassment he has shown during hours of interviews. It is not that his thoughts about the old man Preacher embarrass him, because he has been talking very easily about things that are more intimate. It is probably that this is such a frankly sentimental story that Woods knows he can't tell it without sounding like a sap.
Preacher was an old codger among other old codgers who came frequently to spend the day in a park in Los Angeles. Woods found them interesting, and used to make a point of visiting them there. He got to know Preacher pretty well. "Obviously things had not worked out quite the way he wanted," he says about Preacher. "I think when you are young, you do not dream that you will be alone and have nowhere to go but the park. But all you had to do was talk with him and you would see that the fighter still remains."
This sensitive side of Woods has not been terribly apparent during many of his public appearances and interviews in this campaign. What has been most apparent, perhaps, was his piqued defensiveness in front of the charges leveled at him during the primary by opponent David Eisenstein, wherein Eisenstein insinuated that Woods and his father had become knowingly involved in a business deal with gangster Mario Renda. (The smear seemed to fade in the face of explanations that neither of the Woodses had heard of Renda before he was quietly brought into the business deal in question by a third party. Even Eisenstein told New Times that he now believes Woods' assertions that he was an unwitting partner to Renda.) Also apparent has been Woods' behavior during the evening of acrimony at ASU law school with Democratic opponent Georgia Staton, the evening that was billed as a debate but that deteriorated to the level of petty name calling.
Maybe he has come across in this unpleasant way because the modern-day business of running for office is not designed to bring out the best in anybody. And maybe it is because Woods is a competitive, aggressive lawyer who one of his close friends describes as "kick-ass." Whatever the reason, there isn't any doubt that Woods is more than equal to the demands of bad-tempered maneuvering that crop up in the political world.
But talent with pot shots isn't all he excels at. Perhaps more than any of the other young candidates except Mahoney, Woods, at 36, is possessed of a deeply thought-out and varied map for the philosophical and political portions of his life. It is a mighty peculiar map, too, for a Republican, because it keeps leading Woods back to a sense of compassion for the disadvantaged and a passion for civil rights.
He has been ruminating this morning, for instance, on his regard for one of his first heroes, Robert Kennedy. "Robert Kennedy's real attribute was a deep-felt sympathy with the disadvantaged, and this is something we should all share, whether conservative or liberal," he says. "The Republican party has done a lousy job at that. I hope the Republican party in the Nineties will use its great strength and position to tackle some of our social problems."
He has also been inspired by RFK's dedication to civil rights, a concern that he has incorporated into his campaign by supporting a Martin Luther King Day even during the primary, when his position may have alienated him from some Republican voters. "For people in my age group in Arizona, I find that racism and sexism as it has been known in the past is just so abhorrent it is not even considered," he says. And so he made clear on the primary campaign trail what his bias would be when called upon to prosecute civil rights complaints within the Attorney General's Office: "I talk about the need to enforce the civil rights law proactively instead of reactively, to go out and try to stop discrimination." "I think the Republican party can be a leader in the areas of civil rights. Many Republicans do not go there naturally, but I think they will go there, because it is right," he adds.
He reconsiders slightly. He tells the story of a speech he gave in a rural town, where some elderly Republican gentlemen confronted him afterward with their doubts about a King holiday, saying that they weren't sure the federal commemoration of a black man was anything they wanted to support. One of them told Woods that he was also worrying about Douglas Wilder, the black man who had just been elected governor of Virginia.
"I said, `I think it is a great thing that he was elected, and it really doesn't matter if he is a Republican or Democrat,'" Woods remembers. "`The fact that his grandparents were slaves, the fact that a child from this marriage went on to become a governor of the state says great things about where this country can go.'
"The guy next to him said, `You know, Woods, I think you're right. There are a lot of really good niggers out there.'" Woods pauses, he laughs ruefully. "I have thought a lot about that," he says. "Maybe it means we are making progress and maybe it doesn't."
There are cynics who'd say it behooves Woods to talk this way, whether he's sincere or not. He is widely considered to be a sophisticated political operative who can figure out how to succeed, and he has already wooed a passel of prominent Democrats away from Staton and into his camp with just these kinds of smooth, liberal sentiments.
But even if they are doubling as a savvy strategy, the un-Republican aspects of this Republican candidate's ideals aren't anything he has manufactured for his campaign.
He is remembered by friends and teachers from his Occidental days as an extraordinarily reflective youngster who became the ringleader of other students from Arizona. He teamed up on the one hand with Fred DuVal and Chris Hamel--young Democrats who later went on to work on the Ninth Floor with Governor Bruce Babbitt and then into leadership roles in his presidential campaign. And on the other, Woods befriended political consultant Bob Robb, an arch-conservative who is still close not only to Woods but to ideologue Steve Twist, whom Woods defeated in the primary. One of Woods' professors remembers that these four kids virtually took over the student newspaper and made no secret of their intentions to dominate Arizona politics in the future. They have never changed their individual politics but they are still fast friends nearly twenty years later.
The teacher, Mike McAleenan, also remembers that among the four, Woods stood out as the one who had thought through to the bottom his political philosophies, which even then played as an uncoventional mix of conservatism and caring. "I felt him to be more thoughtful than most students his age, to have thought about his beliefs, tested them against the environment, and he didn't see anything that shook them."
Oxy, like Princeton in the Sixties, was an institution whose administration encouraged its student body with some success to respond productively to a restless age. Liberal political views predominated there, but violence did not: One alumnus remembers that after the deaths at Kent State in '70, the students actually took their typewriters out into the quad to write letters to their congressmen, instead of retaliating with a riot.
Woods has tended to go at the rest of his life in that same directed way--unless you count his lackadaisical years at ASU law school, when he majored primarily in intramural sports and claims to have performed better "per minute spent studying than any other student in the history of the school."
Although maybe even his desire to goof off in law school, after having graduated Phi Beta Kappa from a leading Western college, is also a case in point. Because the sense of direction Woods has displayed has had to do with more than professional ambition, although that has been part of it. He has always seemed to understand that business and politics aren't all that's important in life.
In law school, he was most focused on having a good time and completing a novel that he wanted to option to the movies. (He didn't sell it.) In '85, when he had an excellent shot at the congressional seat being vacated by his friend and mentor John McCain, who was running for the U.S. Senate and for whom Woods has worked as an aide, he decided to forego the race. It was years before anybody would conjure up the terms "mommy track" and "daddy track," but Woods didn't wait for them. "I didn't know how I would spend time with my kids," he says. "The House meets at night half the time. How do you say you are going to miss an important vote to go to soccer practice? And I think soccer practice is more important.
"I don't think I will have that problem with a state job."
His admirers would also tell you that he has demonstrated this loyalty and ability to prioritize a balanced life in relationship to John McCain, who has been branded one of the Keating Five in the years since he helped the former head of the American Continental Corporation delay an investigation by bank examiners. Whatever you think of McCain, it probably says something about Woods that he has never distanced himself as McCain's public image has plummeted. "I care a lot about this race, but it is not the most important thing in my life, and I am not going to sacrifice a friend in order to become attorney general. I would rather sacrifice becoming attorney general," he says. He is willing to be interviewed a second time for this article, this time at his home, where he is found surrounded in the late afternoon by his wife, anchorwoman Marlene Galan Woods, and his two children by his first marriage. The home in question is a roomy, new-looking, uneccentric house in Mesa. It is a house where young kids live, characterized by a certain vacant look that may be the result of a reluctance to leave delicate objects lying around.
Something that isn't vacant is the long cabinet of LPs, many of them ridged with the songs of the Sixties. Jimmy Buffett is prominent here, and Kris Kristofferson. Woods is such a Kristofferson fan that when he was applying for a Rhodes scholarship at Occidental, he tried to convince the board of judges that Kristofferson was one of the great American poets.
"Bob Robb and I were the only two Republicans in the crowd a couple of weeks ago at the Kristofferson concert," he is saying. "He was absolutely great! He is so sincere! He said, `You know, I used to apologize for singing political songs, but I have quit apologizing, because either you believe in basic human rights, or you don't.'
"I have used that several times since in relationship to the Martin Luther King Day holiday." He is barefoot, wearing a pair of shorts and a tee shirt; he is so ultracasual that he is a pointed symbol of the fact that we are about to turn our state's future over to a group of young Americans that has never even learned how to dress.
There are a few other things that some of them may have learned, though, through their unique, immediate, living-color exposure to assassinations, political scandals, jungle warfare, social movements and C-SPAN. They haven't all learned it, but Woods is proof that they didn't have to be committed radicals to learn it, either.
In the end, the Sixties weren't about anger and demonstrations; they were about an exposure to new ideas. There was an abundance of new ideas wafting around, and the technological age made them available like never before. Thought-stopping and thought-stimulating ideas were so thick in the air, and on the airwaves, that if the Sixties kids didn't feel buried by them, they may have begun to perceive themselves as part of a very large world.
Perhaps more than any generation before them, they have had the chance to see that there are many answers but no easy answers to the problems that plague us. And that the solutions, if there are to be solutions, will never lie entirely in anything so one-dimensional as a particular political camp. Perhaps they have even been allowed to glimpse the world that broadly.
If they haven't, Woods at least hopes that they still will.
"What I hope that this generation will be interested in is less energy expended on narrow, individual concerns and more time spent on preserving and enhancing our quality of life," he is saying. "[Arizona legislator] Jim Skelly spent years showing abortion videos to the legislature, and during the same period, a brown cloud rose over Phoenix and is hovering there today.
"The abortion issue has not changed. It is with us and will always be with us. We can all have our opinions about it. But I hope that I can look at the bigger picture."
"How do you say you are going to miss an important vote to go to soccer practice? And I think soccer practice is more important."
The un-Republican aspects of Woods' ideals aren't anything he has manufactured for his campaign.
