COLUMN ONE : 4 Boys Who Could Be President : For Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and Pat Buchanan, the stories of their youth tell much about the men they became and the America in which they grew up.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — The Wynnton Elementary School is a 153-year-old fixture in this Southern city, a gracious building with hardwood floors, carved banisters and stately white pillars. In its simple entryway, above an antique desk, is a photograph of a boy who hopes to prove one of America’s most enduring myths: that anyone can grow up to be president.

The image, fixed in black and white, is the official portrait of Martha Jones’ 1955 fifth-grade class. In the first row is a skinny, floppy-eared kid in bluejeans rolled up at the cuffs and a dark shirt open at the neck. His lips are curled in a mischevous smirk.

Now fast-forward 40 years. The smart-aleck kid is a hard-driving U.S. senator from Texas, a balding, bespectacled man with a doctorate in economics and an eye on the highest office in the land.

To declare himself a candidate, Phil Gramm returned to this little school to recount one of his favorite anecdotes, the story of how he flunked third grade. “What I learned here,” Gramm proclaimed, “is that there is always a second chance in America.”

There is a symmetry to this nostalgic homecoming, a pattern that fits in well with the quadrennial show-and-tell that is American presidential politics. Ever since George Washington chopped down the cherry tree (an apocryphal, if oft-told tale), the presidency has been entwined with tales of boys growing into men.

Now come Gramm, Dole, Alexander and Buchanan, each saddled with the facts of his own coming of age, each spinning those facts in a calculated attempt to tug at the heartstrings of American voters. Each takes part in a tradition that stretches back two centuries.

Abraham Lincoln was a hardscrabble frontier child, walking two miles in the snow to a log cabin schoolhouse. Richard Nixon wore hand-me-downs. George Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. A teenage Bill Clinton defended his mother against a drunken, wife-beating stepfather. In each story, one can find clues to the man. And with each telling, the foundation of image--that most important of campaign assets--is built.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the lone candidate to have lived through the Depression and to have fought--and been critically wounded--in a war, never thought of himself as a man of valor, only a kid who “got shot.” But his new campaign video looks at World War II through a different prism. Its title: “Bob Dole: An American Hero.”

Gramm, a cutup who straightened out only after his mother, a struggling widow, packed him off to military school, recently featured his up-from-the-bootstraps story in a television ad--after spin doctors discovered that voters thought he was born rich.

Conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, the third son in a family of nine children, harks back to his youth to place himself in the camp of “middle-aged men with middle-class values”--though today he is a man of substantial means. Lamar Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee, likes to recount how, as a 10-year-old, his father marched him down to the county courthouse to meet then-Rep. Howard Baker Sr.--a scene laden with images of political destiny.

“This is what we thrive on,” said historian Robert Dallek. “How do you fasten yourself on the mass of Americans? You need to become a larger-than-life character, an almost mythological figure, whether it’s because you’re from a storied family like the Kennedys or the Rockefellers, or a classic Horatio Alger character who has made his way by dint of hard work and drive. People want a story.”

But beneath the mythology, there is at least some truth. Each of these men is the product of his early days. Each draws upon the lessons of his past to offer solutions to a far more complicated present.

“As a young man in a small town,” Dole likes to say, “my parents taught me to put trust in God, not government, and never confuse the two.”

Says Buchanan: “I want to live in the America I grew up in. There is nothing wrong with that.”

This, then, is the story of four men who would be president and the America they grew up in. It is the story of Buchanan’s Washington--a sleepy, segregated Southern city where white Catholics like his family defined their neighborhoods not by city blocks, but by parish boundaries. In Buchanan’s Washington, you didn’t come from Georgetown or Chevy Chase. You came from Holy Trinity or, in his case, Blessed Sacrament.

It is the story of Alexander’s Maryville, Tenn.--a place of Boy Scout hikes through the Great Smoky Mountains and choir practice at the New Providence Presbyterian Church, his home away from home. It is Maryville that Alexander has in mind when he issues his standard stump line about sending power back to states and communities because “we know what to do.”

It is the story of Gramm’s Columbus, Ga., a city where boys who lacked academic promise had two options in life: to work in the cotton mills or sign up with the Army. And it is the story of the tiny farm town of Russell, Kan., where a sign on the grain elevator overlooking Main Street announces in big, blue block letters: “Home of Bob Dole.”

These stories are filtered, of course, through the prism of time, made rosier by the recollections of a Greek chorus of sorts--those whose lives were touched by these famous men before they became famous. Frank Carafa, a 74-year-old maintenance man from New Rochelle, N.Y., is one.

“I’m not a holy man,” said Carafa, who as a young platoon sergeant helped drag a gravely wounded Dole to safety. “But I look back and I say: ‘The good Lord actually used me to save his life.’ . . . You know, there’s a lot of things I don’t agree with him on. But I certainly would love to see him become president.”

CHAPTER ONE: Russell, Kan.

“Can’t never could do nothing,” Bina Dole always said. Bob Dole’s mother never did have any use for laziness.

She was a workhorse, Bina Dole, a perfectionist with a capital P. They marvel still, back in Russell, at the way you could run a white glove through Bina’s house and never come up with a speck of dust. She even waxed the inside of her wastepaper baskets.

The house was on Maple Street--Dole and his daughter own it now--across the railroad tracks from the grain elevator on Main Street where Bina’s husband, Doran, worked. Down the block was the shop where Bina gave sewing lessons. She was a real hand with a sewing machine; she also sold them in her spare time. She’d drive out to the country, convince the farm wives they needed a brand-new Singer, then proceed with a little demonstration. As often as not, she made a sale.

And that was a good thing, because those were tough times in Russell, back in the “Dirty ‘30s.” The nickname came from the dust storms that swept across the prairie. Whole farms dried up and blew away in those storms. One man cut down all his fences to let his cows roam free so they could find some food. Some people got “dust pneumonia.” Some died.

On top of the dust came the Depression; these twin plagues pushed lots of folks in Russell “on the county.” The local economy depended on farming and oil--black gold had been discovered there in 1923, the year Dole was born on the 22nd of July--and the town was always either boom or bust. In later years, Bina’s parents, tenant farmers, went broke. When he was county attorney, Dole signed his grandparents’ welfare papers.

The Doles never went broke, but they came close. One year, when Bob was about 10, Bina and Doran packed the whole family--Bob and his brother, Kenny, and sisters Gloria and Norma Jean--into the basement and rented the house to some oil people. They lived for nearly two years like that, with Bina cooking off hot plates and a little four-burner stove.

There wasn’t much room for a boy to dream in this climate of make-do-with-what-you’ve-got, and some might say that’s how Dole grew up to be such a pragmatist. In the Senate, he’s known as a deal-maker--not a man with vision, but a man with grit and determination and an unwillingness to give up. “Just like my mother,” Norma Jean said.

He always was the serious type. Even as a little kid his nose was always stuck in a book. Kenny was the ornery one; at Christmastime, he and Gloria would peek under the bed, looking for presents. “You’re gonna get in trouble,” Bob would warn.

In high school, he was relentless with himself. He was a jogger back when nobody jogged, waking up at 5 a.m. to squeeze in a run before his paper route. He was a weightlifter too, a star athlete in basketball, football and track.

But not all work and no play, Bob Dole; he liked to have a good time. There was a boy in town, Arvin Bender, whose daddy got rich in oil. Arvin had a fine new 1940 Chevrolet Bel Air, cost $715 and had a radio in it too. On occasion, Dole and his pals could be seen tooling around Russell in that car, having taken the liberty of a little joy ride after Arvin had left the keys in the ignition. And when they’d pass him on the street, they’d honk the horn and give a little wave.

Then there was the time in journalism class when Miss Mae Beveridge announced she was giving a pop quiz. Dole talked her into having an ice cream social instead. “Only Bob,” his old friend, Adolph Reisig, said, “could have gotten away with that.”

And the girls, they were gaga for Dole. Voted him their ideal boy. Always cozying up to Gloria and Norma Jean, hoping the sisters would put in a good word. Dole wasn’t too crazy about the girls though; he was too busy, Norma Jean says, what with schoolwork and sports and his job as a soda jerk at the Main Street drugstore owned by E.E. Dawson.

Dole worked there after class, closing up shop every night at 11 with the Dawson boys, Chet and Bub. The family hired him because they thought he’d bring in business. “He had a following,” Bub said. “He was good-looking and personable and everything you’d want in a soda jerk.”

It was at Dawson’s, the folks in Russell surmise, that the senator from Kansas honed his legendary sense of humor--a tendency toward sarcasm so sharp that he has sometimes been forced to keep it in check, lest it thwart his political ambitions.

That kind of deadpan comedy went over big at the store, though; people would come in just to catch the Chet-and-Bub show. If some lady walked in, her hair all coiffed, Bub might lean over the counter, ask her if she had just been to the beauty parlor. “Yes,” she’d nod, all smiles. Then Chet would deliver the zinger: “What happened? Didn’t you get waited on?”

Soon Dole was dishing out zingers of his own. “He can zing ya,” said Dean Banker, whose family has owned the local clothing shop for 114 years. “But we lived on zingers around here.”

It was a great stomping ground for a boy with a future in politics, but Dole didn’t have designs on politics, at least not then. He wanted to be a doctor. He set his sights on Kansas University. In 1941, he went. In 1943, the Army came calling.

Two years later, having volunteered for the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps, Dole found himself on the outskirts of Rome. In February 1945 the Army plucked Lt. Robert Dole from its ranks of replacement officers and assigned him to 10th Mountain Division, Company I, 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment, to take over for a lieutenant who had been wounded.

He was 22.

The 10th Mountain Division was the Army’s elite ski troops; its soldiers had spent months training in Colorado. Some, like Dev Jennings, became Olympic skiers. This was no place for a kid from the flatlands of Kansas, and when Dole arrived on the 25th of February, Jennings and the other guys thought the new man in charge looked, well, a little green. Look at his pants, they snickered. A true 10th Mountain man would blouse his pants over his boots, so that they fell in an elegant cascade. Dole just folded the fronts and tucked them in.

His men say he quickly earned their respect--he was real down-home Kansas, not all stuck up like those other guys out of officer training--but he wasn’t with them for long. On April 14, 1945, the orders came down for Company I to attack a German stronghold, Hill 913. The plan was for Dole to lead the charge while Carafa gave the troops cover fire.

But then the radio man was killed. And when Dole rushed out to retrieve the radio, he too was hit. A shell exploded in his right shoulder, crushing his collarbone, puncturing his lung, paralyzing him from the neck down. Nobody thought he would live.

On June 12, Dole came home to Kansas, to Winter General Army Hospital in Topeka, in a body cast, unable to do anything for himself--walk, eat, go to the bathroom. Over in Italy, he had purchased a locket, a beautiful cameo, for his mother. When Bina came to visit, he had the nurse lay the locket on his cast, so that would be the first thing she saw.

His recovery was painstaking. He had weighed a strapping 194 pounds when he left; now he was a gaunt 122. He spent 39 months in and out of hospitals, first in traction, then a wheelchair, then slowly learning to walk. His right arm was useless.

He lost a kidney at Winter General to an infection that nearly killed him, then had another brush with death at a hospital in Michigan--only to be saved by what was then an experimental drug, streptomycin. When he came home, he looked, Bub Dawson recalls, “like he’d come out of Dachau.”

Slowly, though, he gathered strength. He asked Adolph Reisig, who opened an auto repair shop after the war, to mold a lead brace so he could work his arm back to strength. Dole walked all over Russell wearing that thing, though it didn’t do him much good.

Finally, he turned to a specialist in Chicago, a surgeon named Hampar Kelikian, who took his case for free. But there were still hospital bills to pay, so Chet Dawson and some other buddies set up a fund, the Bob Dole Fund. They put cigar boxes in the VFW hall and a few other places, and before long $1,800 had been gathered. Dole still has one of the boxes; he keeps it in his Senate office. (It makes a great campaign prop.)

Kelikian did what he could, but there was no magic cure. Three operations later, Dole’s right arm was still 2 1/2 inches shorter than the left, still useless. He has learned, over the years, to carry a pen or a rolled-up piece of paper in his right fist, to make the arm appear normal, so that people won’t notice what he calls “my problem.”

“I think,” Dawson said, “that wound kind of motivated him. By golly, he wasn’t going to be a cripple. He wasn’t going to be dependent on anybody.”

CHAPTER TWO: Maryville, Tenn.

The weathered scrapbook on Jane Monroe’s kitchen table stands as testimony to Lamar Alexander’s youth. It is a chronicle of small-town America in the 1950s, of a picturesque hamlet in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains where the autumn leaves turn a fiery orange and gold and neighbors, even today, see no need to put fences between their homes.

“This was Mayberry,” said Steve Corbett, who grew up with Alexander. “We were taught by our parents and in school and in the church right from wrong, and wrong was not lightly tolerated. You don’t lie, you don’t steal, you don’t cheat, you respect your elders. Ladies come in the room and you stand up. And you don’t spit on the sidewalk.”

Jane Monroe--Jane McDade back then--was Alexander’s sweetheart through high school and college. Flipping through the yellowed pages of her scrapbook, it is easy to see why few in Maryville are surprised that their Lamar (nobody here calls him anything else) is making a pitch for the White House.

In faded news clippings, church bulletins, school banquet announcements, the distinctive name cannot be missed: “Lamar Alexander being entertained in Washington,” “Alexander Is State Jaycee VOD Winner,” “Alexander Elected Boys Nation Delegate.”

There is young Lamar on the Maryville High School basketball court, his body angular and lean in his No. 13 Rebels jersey. There is Lamar, having just captured first in a prestigious statewide piano competition, clutching a shiny silver cup. There is Lamar, fresh-faced and smiling, shaking hands with Senator This or Congressman That.

He was president of the Key Club. Lettered in basketball and tennis. Editor of the “high school news” column in the local paper. Played trombone in the school band. Got elected class president--twice. Made Eagle Scout in his spare time. His scoutmaster, Dick Ray, still remembers him.

“You know,” Ray said, “you get to a campsite, most kids want to hit the sack. Well, Lamar was out collecting firewood, Lamar was offering to help cook. Lamar was getting the guys out to help. You never really had to ask him to do anything.”

He knew how to politick, how to work the angles. Went to Boys State, the mock legislature sponsored by the American Legion. By the time the bus got halfway across the state to the convention at Murfreesboro, he had gathered enough votes to get elected governor. Wasn’t much he couldn’t get elected to. He was even president of first grade. “One time we had a contest for most courteous,” Monroe recalled. “Lamar won.”

One can almost hear the other mothers of Maryville clucking to their sons, “Why can’t you be more like that nice Lamar Alexander? What a fine boy he is.” This was a boy with discipline, who woke up at 4 a.m. to run his newspaper route, came home, practiced piano, then squeezed in another hour of sleep before school.

If he wasn’t perfect, he came pretty close. Of course, there was the great paddling incident--the time the high school principal, J. P. Stewart, paddled Alexander and his buddies for taunting a female teacher. But that was about the extent of his high jinks; what Stewart remembers most about him is his ease before a crowd. “I always envied him,” the 77-year-old former principal recalled, “for having that ability to speak so easily in front of his fellow students.”

His own promise wasn’t lost on young Lamar, nor did he lack in ego. When Parade magazine published an article about the drawbacks of going steady, he dashed off a nasty letter, signing it, “Governor of Boys State.” Once, when Alexander was 19, Jane’s father took him to Nashville to visit the governor’s mansion. “I think,” he told his girlfriend upon returning, “I’d like to live there one day.”

That kind of drive had to come from somewhere, and in Maryville, there is no doubt about where it came from. Her name is Florine Alexander and, in her, Bina Dole would have met her match.

She had big plans for her first child and only son, born on July 3, 1940. They still remember, back in Maryville, how Flo would stand on the porch and order Lamar in to practice the piano. And when Flo issued that kind of order, there was no fussing.

“She absolutely made him a very early achiever,” says Grace McArthur, a family friend who attended college in the 1930s with Flo and her husband, Andy. “She knew how to get what she wanted. . . . Even when he was very little, he came home to get his practice done. I remember him sliding down slides in the backyard and saying his multiplication tables.”

If there were twin guideposts to the lives of Andy and Flo Alexander, they were education and the Presbyterian Church. Both attended Maryville College, a small, private Presbyterian school. Both became teachers, although Andy eventually took a higher-paying position as safety director at the nearby Alcoa aluminum plant. He served on the Maryville school board for a quarter-century.

For years, Flo ran a kindergarten out of a small converted garage in back of the family’s tidy clapboard bungalow on Ruth Street, this in the days before public kindergartens. “Mrs. Alexander’s Institute of Lower Learning” was her son’s facetious name for it. But nobody else in town joked about Flo’s little school. Anybody who was anybody sent their kids there.

Teaching was in her blood. Sometimes, she would clip articles from big-city papers--the Atlanta Constitution, the Wall Street Journal--and tack them to the refrigerator door, with a note instructing Lamar to “read and analyze.”

Alexander didn’t always fulfill his mother’s wishes. While he was a law clerk for a New Orleans judge in the mid-1960s, he played trombone in a Bourbon Street bar. McArthur recalls that Flo was worried sick about it; she thought the clubs were havens for homosexuals. It was not a place for the boy she had always hoped would be a minister.

Still, her son never strayed far. Once, after Alexander had just been elected governor, a reporter asked him about gambling. “I’m against it,” he replied, without skipping a beat. “My mother doesn’t believe in it.”

CHAPTER THREE: Washington, D.C.

William Baldwin Buchanan was a big bear of a man, 6 feet tall and 200 pounds with a lot of bluster but not a whole lot of bite. He was the kind of man who loved a good argument, who knew what he believed in and thought you should believe it too.

And what Pat Buchanan’s father believed in was this: Communism was evil. Life should be lived according to the rules of the church. Loyalty was a virtue, blood thicker than water. A little healthy competition never hurt anybody. And a kid ought to learn to use his fists. Nobody was going to pick on Bill Buchanan’s kids.

“We were always fighters,” said Pat’s younger brother, James. “My dad taught us, because when he was younger, he was refused because he was Irish Catholic. . . . They were second-class citizens, the Irish were, and he felt it when he went for jobs during the Depression. And so he always wanted his boys to stand up for themselves.”

So he strung up a punching bag in the basement of the house on Chestnut Street and set up an initiation rite. When each son turned 7, he was required to hit the bag--four sessions a week, 400 punches a session. Missing practice was a punishable offense.

While Lamar Alexander’s mother was on the porch in Maryville, ordering her son to practice piano, Pat Buchanan’s father was ordering his sons to practice fighting. Once, one of the Buchanan boys invited a neighborhood kid home to look at their new train set. Before he knew it, the kid was in the basement and Mr. Buchanan had put boxing gloves on him and shoved him into the ring with a Buchanan boy. He took such a bad thumping, he never went back.

The first four Buchanan kids were boys, born in rapid succession, from 1936 to 1940. Pat was the third, born Nov. 2, 1938. (Eventually, the Buchanan brood would include seven boys and two girls.) Theirs was a Washington that was decidedly middle class, with a father who rose to prosperity as an accountant after World War II and a mother who gave up her career as a nurse to rear her children and do charity work.

They were a chip off the old block, those Buchanan boys, boisterous to a fault. In high school, they were the ones cracking up the family car, crashing parties and brawling with whomever was brazen enough to steal their beer--or worse, their girls. They got to know the local policeman so well they called him by his badge number, 1020.

“Whenever we were arrested for fighting or came home bloodied,” Buchanan writes in his memoirs, “we were not punished by my parents, so long as we had fought fairly. Pop was usually more interested in how well we had done.”

Chick Leasure, a high school classmate of Pat’s, summed up the entire clan this way: “They work hard and they play hard. They do everything hard.”

Bill, the eldest, was awkward, introspective. Hank, next oldest, was the star athlete. James (Jiminy Cricket--Crick, for short) was the easygoing one. Pat was the scholar, the high school kid who graduated first in his class.

Hank was the real aggressor in the family. Pat was the instigator; he wouldn’t throw the first punch, but he knew how to push enough buttons to get the other guy to do it. And once the first punch was thrown, well, anything after that was self-defense.

Pat “would have the funny lines and make the comments,” says his sister and campaign manager, Angela “Bay” Buchanan. “He enjoyed--what should I say?--the foreplay before the fight.”

The dinner table provided ample opportunity for him to hone those verbal skills. With Bill Buchanan holding court, the discussion centered on history, sports, the news of the day. Tommy McCloskey, a high school chum of Pat’s, would sometimes go there for dinner. He says even the littlest Buchanans--the kids in elementary school--knew more about current affairs than he did.

In Bill Buchanan’s world, there was just one place in the nation’s capital a Catholic boy should attend high school, and that was his alma mater, Gonzaga. It was run by the Jesuits, known for breeding young men of intellectual vigor. Pat worked hard; some nights, his father would get up late for a glass of water, and he’d see that the light was on in Pat’s room.

“He was very, very focused in school,” said longtime friend Brian Kadow. “He lived to be No. 1 in the class.” In 1956, he won a scholarship to another Jesuit-run school, Georgetown University. But he never felt quite comfortable there; he was a commuter, a “day-hop,” while the elite crowd was composed of “boarders” from New York and Boston.

It was Bill Buchanan getting turned down for jobs during the Depression all over again, only this time it was Pat suffering. And then, in the final indignity, he got kicked out--and lost his scholarship to boot.

Really, it was his own belligerence that got him in trouble; he assaulted two cops--kicking one where he “thought it might do some good”--after being pulled over for speeding. He was charged with a felony, but with help from a hot-shot criminal defense lawyer, a family friend, he wound up with a $25 fine and a misdemeanor conviction. And though he lost a year of school--he spent it working in his father’s accounting practice--Georgetown took him back after his father pleaded with the deans.

In the true spirit of a Buchanan, brother James says, Pat has never quite forgiven Georgetown, never quite gotten over how they made his father beg forgiveness for the sins of his son. They would never have treated a rich boarder kid like that!

His brother got his revenge, James says. Now that he is a wealthy man, he doesn’t give the school any money, bestowing his largess on Gonzaga instead.

CHAPTER FOUR: Columbus, Ga.

Young Phillip Gramm always did have a bit of a mean streak. Or maybe it wasn’t mean so much as pranksterish. Or maybe both. He was the kind of kid, Bob Upchurch always thought, who was a teacher’s nightmare. Incorrigible to the core. And smarter than he was letting on.

Upchurch was Gramm’s next-door neighbor on Dogwood Drive in Columbus, in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses on the edge of town, built mostly for soldiers coming back from World War II. That was in the early ‘50s, before the Sears and the shopping malls came in, back when the only thing beyond the houses was farmland.

There was a swing hanging from a tree whose branches dangled over a nearby creek. One day, when the creek was swollen with rain, young Gramm baited chubby Bobby Upchurch to hop on. But the boy was dressed in his Sunday best. He wouldn’t bite.

“Chicken!” Phillip taunted. What he did not tell Upchurch was that he had loosened the swing rope so that anyone who hopped on it, especially a fat kid, was headed for a nasty dip. Finally, Upchurch gave in. He went home a wet, muddy mess.

He was wild, that Gramm kid, always up to some trick. Like the time he jumped out the window at Wynnton Elementary School, where his mother enrolled him in the third grade so he could get a better education. The teacher said something that made him mad, and all of a sudden he got up out of his seat, waltzed over to the window and jumped out. The other kids couldn’t believe it. That window was eight feet off the ground. The Gramm kid landed in a flower bush.

“His mama brought him back up holding him by one of those big ears of his,” Upchurch recalled, “and Mr. Buxton, the principal, gave him a big lecture.”

Who knows where the wild streak came from? Maybe he was just smarter than other kids, as Upchurch surmises, and a little bit lazy, and a whole lot bored. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, a way to find laughter amid tough times at home. Lord knows there were tough times at the Gramm house, tough times, especially, for the woman the senator still refers to as “my mama.”

Life didn’t offer too many breaks to Florence Scroggins, later Florence White, later Florence Gramm. Her father was a farmer and a part-time preacher; her mother was a housewife. Lamar Alexander’s mother went to college. Phil Gramm’s mother quit school in the eighth grade. By the time she was 18, the South Alabama native was married, to a jack-of-all-trades named Jack White.

The marriage produced two boys: Charles, today a retired maintenance man in Columbus, and Don, a retired military man who runs Gramm’s campaign in Texas. But the marriage didn’t last, and in the late 1930s she fled to Columbus, home to the Army’s Ft. Benning, hoping to start her life anew.

She found work in the textile mills and met a sergeant named Kenneth Gramm. They were married on Dec. 6, 1941; their son, William Phillip, was born seven months later. (The couple divorced but later remarried.)

Money was tight. The Gramms lived in a subsidized housing project, Riverview Court Apartments, at the time their son was born. In 1945, while preparing for an overseas tour, Kenneth Gramm suffered a massive heart attack and stroke. His left side was paralyzed; thereafter he walked with a shuffle. “He was,” Don said, “just a wreck of a guy.”

But not a mental wreck. While Florence got herself licensed as a practical nurse and worked nearly round the clock to support her family, her husband stayed home, immersing himself in books. His greatest joy was reading to his young son--he favored “The Odyssey” and other classics. But the boy wasn’t much interested in playing bedside companion. “Phil would want to be outside playing baseball or cowboys-and-Indians,” Don White recalled “and Kenneth would want him underfoot.”

If his home life bothered him, Gramm kept it to himself. “We didn’t know what was going on in the house,” said Sue Betts, a former classmate. Upchurch suspects that Gramm resented his circumstances. “The high school we went to was very social conscious,” he said, “and not being in the in crowd, not being on the rich side of town, I just think it bothered him.”

This was an old-money town, a town of blueblood mill owners and land barons. In Columbus, your daddy could be a gambler or a drunken fool, but if his was a money name, that was all you needed.

The name Gramm, it went without saying, was decidedly not a money name. One of the senator’s strongest memories of childhood is of sitting around the kitchen table in the Dogwood Drive house with his mother, Don and the bills, figuring out who would get paid that month and who would wait. “My mother,” said Gramm, recalling those monthly sessions, “had a greater influence on my thinking than Adam Smith.”

Florence saw neither shame nor disadvantage in poverty. Sometimes, she would drive her youngest son around town, through the hilly neighborhoods of fine brick Tudor homes. “Son,” she would say, “if you want that, you can have it. All you have to do is work for it.”

Gramm’s teachers, though, had other ideas about what the young man might have. When Gramm was in the ninth grade, his math teacher called home.

“Florence,” she said, “that boy doesn’t have enough ability to graduate from high school.”

Florence was unimpressed. “What does ability have to do with it?” she fired back. “He’s either going to college or I’m going to kill him.”

In 1957, Kenneth died, and Florence decided her son needed more discipline than she could give him. He had already been forced to take summer classes to make up for poor scores in the seventh and ninth grades (Gramm likes to say he flunked those grades too, although that is a bit of an exaggeration). So his mother took her husband’s life insurance money--money she had hoped to use to send her son to college--and packed him off to the Georgia Military Academy, a boarding school outside Atlanta.

Although today it caters to the elite, back then GMA drew all kinds--kids who wanted a career in the military, kids who were one step ahead of the law, kids whose parents wanted to send them somewhere to escape the desegregation of the public schools. (The school was all white as well as all male.)

Gramm didn’t go willingly. It was left to Don to lay down the law. “This is your last chance,” he told his kid brother. “There’s nothing wrong with your brain. When you go into your first class, you need to say to yourself: ‘I am as smart or smarter than anybody in this room, and by the time this semester is over, I will have proven it.’ ”

Maybe it was the talk that did it. Maybe it was being away from status-conscious Columbus. Maybe it was the yes-sir, no-sir discipline of a military school, formations every day, full-dress parades on Sunday. Maybe Gramm realized that he was, in fact, smarter than everyone else--an assessment that he does not often let his Senate colleagues forget.

Whatever it was, something happened to Gramm at Georgia Military Academy. He joined the debate team. He went out for wrestling. He made good grades, excelling in English and math. The transformation was wondrous to behold.

“It was,” said former classmate Ben Johnson, “like you were watching a flower open up.”

Of course, there were still capers to pull. GMA had a commandant of cadets named Burnett. His motto was that you didn’t have to tell the truth; you could be excused if your lie was original. One night, Gramm and his roommates were cutting up after taps. When Burnett called him on the carpet, Gramm reported with a straight face: “We were praying, sir.”

In 1961, he entered the University of Georgia, from which he would receive his doctorate in economics. Upchurch ran into him that year--in, of all places, the university library. There was the Gramm kid, the jokester, the teacher’s nightmare, surrounded by a stack of books. Upchurch was stunned.

“Hey,” he said, “let’s go get a beer.”

“Nah,” Gramm replied. “I don’t have time for that anymore.”

CHAPTER FIVE: The Road From Home

In these four corners of America, then, was the stage set for these four men who now want to call the White House home.

Dole and Alexander went on to become lawyers. For Dole, it was a matter of survival; you can’t be a surgeon if your right hand doesn’t work. So he left for Topeka, Kan., to Washburn University, where he finished college and got a law degree, carting around a tape recorder because he couldn’t take notes. He later returned to Russell, where he launched the political career that, by 1969, had taken him to the Senate.

Alexander yearned to broaden his horizons beyond his home state, where he had gone to Vanderbilt University as an undergraduate. He went to New York University School of Law--against the wishes of his father, who thought Greenwich Village was no place for a young man to embark on a political career in Tennessee. His first job in elective politics was as governor of Tennessee--just as he had planned.

Buchanan decided journalism was the profession for him. He went to graduate school at Columbia University in New York, where he found himself a conservative in a den of liberals. But Buchanan did not confine himself to verbal sparring; one of his claims to fame at Columbia is that he slugged another student in the stomach after a heated cocktail party discussion. After stints as an editorial writer and as an aide in the Nixon White House, he went into TV in the 1970s, eventually becoming one of the hosts of CNN’s “Crossfire.”

And Gramm, always full of surprises, wound up more educated than the teachers who once said he would never amount to anything. After receiving his doctorate in economics, he joined the faculty at Texas A&M; University, adopting that state as his own and immersing himself in free-market theories. He ran for the Senate in 1976 and lost, but made it to Congress two years later. He landed a Senate seat in 1984.

In speeches, he likes to hold up his life as evidence that the myth is true: In America, anyone can grow up to be president.

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Making of an Image

Throughout U.S. history, the boyhoods of the men who won the White House have become the stuff of legend. Stories and, in some cases, myths drawn from childhood served to establish and reinforce a president’s persona. A trait exhibited in youth frequently has offered a clear sign of things to come. Here is a small sampling of this interplay.

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GEORGE WASHINGTON

As the story goes, young George told his father: “I cannot tell a lie . . . I did cut [a cherry tree] down with my hatchet.” Long enshrined in American forklore, this myth was concocted by Washington biographer Mason Weems in the early 1800’s. Its staying power speaks to the unique position Washington enjoyed even among his contempories, the leader who alone possessed the character and respect to bind the nation to the new concept of a federal government.

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ANDREW JACKSON

Elected as the first “comman man’s” president in 1828, Jackson’s policies and personality were marked by a fiesty, confrontational style. And his fighting spirit was evident early in life. At 13, he enlisted with his brother to fight in the Revolutionary War. The boys were captured and, at one point, ordered by a British officer to clean the mud off his boots. Both refused, and the officer thrashed Jackson with his sabre. Jackson’s head and hand bore scars from the attack for the rest of his life.

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WILLIAM H. HARRISON

The 1840 presidential race popularized several campaign techniques, including use of catchy slogans and mass gatherings. The winning candidate, William Henry Harrison, was successfully packaged as a man of humble origins, reared in a log cabin and part of a family unable to afford anything but hard cider (which was poured liberally at his political rallies). Harrison actually was born into an affluent family and was brought up on a plantation.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Unlike the myth about Harrison, the “born-in-a-log-cabin” mystique that surrounded Abraham Lincoln is authentic. As if that wasn’t enough to establish Lincoln’s connection to the rustic roots of most of his countrymen, his cousin during the 1860 presidential campaign presented a political gathering with rails he claimed the two of them had split during their youth. Thereafter, virtually all of Lincoln’s campaign literature featured either a log cabin or a “Lincoln Rail.”

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THEODORE ROOSEVELT

As a boy, Theodore Roosevelt was smaller than other children, had poor eyesight and suffered repeated asthma attacks. Responding to a challenge from his father to “make your body,” he transformed his physique through sheer force of will. Adopting a strenuous exercise regimen, he displayed the same energy he brought to his political career. Indeed, as president in the first decade of the 20th Century, he came to embody the vigor of a nation preparing for world leadership.

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RONALD REAGAN

Ronald Reagan’s family moved frequently when he was a boy as his father, plagued by a drinking problem, struggled to improve their economic circumstances. The family’s low point occurred one Christmas Eve when Reagan’s dad, expecting a holiday bonus, instead was laid off. But when recalling his childhood, Reagan referred to it as “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.” His remembrance is a vivid example of the cheerful outlook and unflagging optimism that distinguished marked his presidency.

Researched by ROB CIOE / Los Angeles Times

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The Early Years

The Other Candidates

Rep. Robert K. Dornan / Congressman

* Born: New York, on April 3, 1933

* Parents: Harry, an artillery captain in World War I, and Mickey Dornan, a Ziegfeld Follies girl. Two brothers.

* “My dad won three Purple Hearts in World War I. My mother was a beautiful showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies; in 1939, she went through the windshield of a car on Christmas Eve and tore her face up. And they raised me and my two brothers to be American Eagles, like [President Theodore] Roosevelt’s sons. . . . When you raise your sons to be Eagles, you cannot expect them to act like doves.”

Steve Forbes Jr. / Magazine publisher

* Born: Morristown, N.J. on July 18, 1947

* Parents: Roberta and the flamboyant Malcolm Sr. His mother filed for divorce in the mid-1980s. Three brothers and a sister. His famous grandfather, B.C. Forbes, founded the family publishing business, Forbes Inc. His famous father unsuccessfully ran for governor of New Jersey in 1953 and 1957.

“I have three brothers, also in the family business. You might say we did come to the attention of top management at a fairly young age. Or as my father liked to say, ‘Nepotism is not a bad thing as long as you keep it in the family’.”

Alan Keyes / Former State Department official

* Born: New York, on Aug. 7, 1950.

* Parents: Allison, a noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Army and later a hospital administrator; and Gerthina. Three brothers and a sister.

* In my teenage years, the problem for me was that I started to encounter the reality of black history and slavery and so forth and so on. I can remember still, when I read ‘Before The Mayflower,’ Lerone Bennett’s book of black history--at that age, I was 13, 14 years old--weeping, just crying all over what I was reading, about how my ancestors were treated, and not understanding because I had been raised in [a military family] environment . . . where that was not the premier issue of the moment. And so the encounter with it became a question for me for the rest of my life, and still is.”

Richard G. Lugar / Senator

* Born: Indianapolis, on April 4, 1932

* His father, Marvin, was a livestock agent, and later bought the 604-acre Indiana farm Lugar still runs. His mother, Bertha Green, was a wife and mother who inherited a large share of her family’s agricultural-machinery business, which Lugar still helps manage.

* “It was a continuing series of events and opportunities in my life that shaped my personality, my expectations, my religious faith and most of the other things that are important to me . . . The most important influence was the interest of both of my parents in all of my activities. They obviously had high expectations for me, as a student, as a person involved in athletics, in the Boy Scouts, in the church, in drama . . . Their genius, I suspect, was in all the stimulating events that they surrounded my brother, my sister and me with--the interesting friends and personalities.”

Sources: Interviews with The Times and others, including PBS series “The Challengers ‘96”; campaign speeches and literature.

Researched by GEBE MARTINEZ, MARIA L. La GANGA and BOB SIPCHEN / Los Angeles Times