Jon Ralston recalls Chic Hecht as a surprisingly forceful politician

Wednesday, May 17, 2006 | 7:33 a.m.

Memories of 1988 came rushing back this week with the news of the accidental senator's passing.

Chic Hecht was a kind and gracious man, a gentle soul who showed, in 1982, when he was elected by fortuitous circumstances, and especially in 1988, when he barely lost a seat no one thought he had a chance to keep, that he was anything but mild-mannered when it came to the hurly-burly of campaigns.

People talk about how hundreds of votes separated Harry Reid from eventual victor Paul Laxalt in 1974 or John Ensign from ultimate winner Reid in 1998. And they still recall Hecht's improbable 1982 defeat of venerable Sen. Howard Cannon, after the opportunistic businessman entered the race at the eleventh hour and capitalized on a bruising Democratic primary.

But no Nevada Senate race was quite as spectacular as the 1988 clash between Hecht, the oratorically challenged anti-politician, and then-Gov. Richard Bryan, the smooth-as-message-points politician's politician.

Early polls showed Hecht trailing by 40 points, an upside-down dynamic - an incumbent U.S. senator looking moribund. And yet the man many pundits considered an accident of history, a fluke to be corrected by one of the most graceful pols the state had seen, almost proved the oracles and the polls wrong again.

I remember Hecht as being almost imperturbable in the face of those polls.

He always had a ready smile and even a twinkle in his eye when he rolled out a line needling Bryan, some of them prepared by a cutthroat campaign team headed by Ken Rietz.

Hecht reveled in being a simple man who went on a "Chat With Chic" tour around Nevada, a senator who "doesn't make a lot of noise, he just gets the job done," a "workhorse not a show horse," a campaign theme that was a clear jibe at Bryan.

By the middle of 1988, the governor's insurmountable lead suddenly was surmountable as the invincible Bryan found Kryptonite in the form of a state plane. Turned out Bryan, as most governors had done, rode on the Transportation Department's aircraft several times. But when Rietz crafted some ingenious, brazen spots calling it "the governor's private jet," Bryan & Co. made a cardinal error: They let an attack, which they saw as ludicrous, go unanswered.

Suddenly, Hecht was close in the polls and the national media was interested. Many remember The Wall Street Journal's story with a headline referring to Hecht as a "barrel of gaffes" and as a "capital Rodney Dangerfield," published only three months before Election Day.

But few recall that The San Jose Mercury News serendipitously published a piece a month later about then-Lt. Gov. Bob Miller headlined, "Nevada official vouched for man linked to mobsters," referring to a letter Miller wrote on behalf of an organized crime associate and longtime family friend.

Hecht was shocked, shocked that such a piece had appeared and talked of a "cloud of suspicion" hanging over the lieutenant governor's head and wondered if Miller was fit to take over if Bryan went to Washington. It was brutal and brilliant - two words that were rarely applied to a man who that same year mixed up "covert" and "overt" and who said Martin Luther King Jr. did not deserve a national holiday because "he hasn't been dead long enough yet."

A haberdasher by trade, Hecht never found himself comfortable in a senator's garb. Most senators are stuffy poseurs who want to be president - or at least on TV a lot. Hecht was an unpretentious straight-talker whose words often turned crooked under the klieg lights.

But Hecht never seemed to let his verbal blunders get him down. He was unapologetic about his style, he was comfortable with who he was, just as he was with his staunchly conservative views.

It would be a mistake to remember him as the diminutive, meek man who ultimately was dwarfed by Bryan's superior political skills and done in by a campaign against his ineffectiveness on Capitol Hill.

During a contest in which columnist George Will referred to Bryan as a "rhetorical kleptomaniac" for pilfering GOP ideas, Hecht was, as he always was, true to himself. That may not have made him a good politician or an effective senator. But you will find nary a soul who will not say he was a good man.

And that is no accident.