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First elected
to Congress in 1976, Dick Gephardt ran for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1988. After a quick start, a victory in the Iowa
caucuses and second-place showing in New Hampshire, Gephardt's
campaign ran out of money and crashed on Super Tuesday, a few
weeks  later.
Despite that,
the energy his run generated helped him to win the House Majority
Leader position -- the second-ranking Democratic post -- the following
year.
In that role,
he emerged as one of the Democratic Party's chief strategists
and spokespersons on many major issues. He led the party in opposition
to the first President Bush's tax and economic policies, and supported
President Clinton's health care reform effort with what Congressional
Quarterly described as "the intensity of a revivalist preacher."
His fire for
health care, in particular providing universal coverage, came
from his own family's history. Gephardt's son fought a near-fatal
battle with cancer, during which the congressman and his family
recognized the benefits of their generous health care coverage.
When the Republicans
won control of the House in 1994, he was elected minority leader,
the top-ranking Democratic position in the House of Representatives.
Four elections passed, and although he campaigned vigorously for
his fellow Democrats and the chance to become speaker of the House,
the party failed to regain the majority. He gave up the leadership
post in 2002.
In a NewsHour
interview following that decision, Gephardt explained the decision,
saying being minority leader took up too much time and he wanted
to focus on the larger picture.
"It takes
just an inordinate, consuming amount of time. You don't have time
to step back often enough and look at the long view, look at where
the country needs to go and the kind of new thinking that I think
we need to bring to our ideas," he said.
Childhood
and early political career
Those
closest to the congressman say he has been thinking about the
presidency since his first campaign in 1976.
"It's
his life goal, what he's always wanted to do," his daughter
Chrissy told the Washington Post.
Born in 1941,
Richard Gephardt grew up in the South St. Louis district he now
represents. Neither his mother, a legal secretary, nor his father,
the son of a German immigrant, a milk truck driver and Teamster,
finished high school.
The future
politician went to the all-white Southwest High School in St.
Louis, where he was an Eagle Scout, a Baptist youth leader and
tennis player. His classmates remember him as a straight arrow;
other than a few speeding tickets, he stayed out of trouble.
Gephardt used
scholarships and part-time jobs to help pay for Northwestern University,
where he was student body president, and where he met Jane Ann
Byrnes, his future wife. He went on to the University of Michigan
Law School.
In law school, Gephardt met James Hoffa, son of the fiery Teamsters
Union leader. While they were not close in school, Hoffa is now
general president of the 1.3-million member Teamster union, which
has endorsed Gephardt.
As a law student,
he had received a deferment from the Vietnam War draft, and upon
graduation in 1965, Gephardt enlisted in the Air National Guard.
He served until 1971, achieving the rank of captain.
Gephardt started
in Democratic Party politics in 1965 as a young attorney serving
as captain of the second precinct of the 14th Ward in St. Louis.
He was elected to a seat on the St. Louis Board of  Aldermen
in 1971, where he led a group of aggressive young reformers known
as the "Young Turks," whose goal was to implement bold
new policies to revive the city, according to his official biography.
In 1976, he
headed to Washington, D.C., after winning a seat in the House.
As a House freshman, he served on both the Ways and Means and
Budget committees. In 1984, he was elected chairman of the House
Democratic Caucus, the fourth-ranking leadership post in the House.
Failures
and successes
Gephardt's
critics point out inconsistent stands on key issues over the years.
The young congressman who fought President Carter's proposals
for government controls on hospital pricing now crusades for universal
access to health insurance. Once a friend of the National Rifle
Association and the sponsor of a constitutional amendment banning
abortion, the presidential hopeful now supports gun control and
abortion rights.
"This
is a guy who changed his entire political makeup on economic and
social issues," John Hancock, a consultant and former executive
director of the Missouri Republican Party, told the Boston Globe.
Gephardt responds
that his opinions have evolved and points out that his positions
have remained generally steadfast since his first presidential
run in 1988.
On the abortion
issue, for example, Gephardt said he "had an evolution and
a journey, through my wife, so that I came to a different conclusion
than I once had, and I think for valid reasons."
Throughout
his lengthy political career, Gephardt generally steered clear
of the ethical questions that plagued some of his colleagues.
Gephardt was involved in the House bank scandal of the early 1990s
in which 303 lawmakers wrote bad checks due to lenient policies
at the House bank. The House Ethics Committee cited him for writing
28 bad checks. The ethics panel also investigated a 1996 complaint
that the Gephardts misreported financial transactions related
to a beach house in North Carolina, but the complaint was dismissed.
Gephardt published
a book, "An Even Better Place," donating the $35,000
in royalties to charity in 1999.
Financially,
Gephardt's career has not reaped the rewards of some of his contemporaries
-- especially when compared to some of his opponents in the Democratic
primaries.
When a Washington
watchdog group released a ranking of the major presidential candidates'
assets in January, Gephardt landed at the bottom and a St. Louis
Post-Dispatch analysis of five years of tax returns reported the
Gephradts averaged $134,204 in annual taxable income from 1997
through 2001.
The bulk of
their income during that time came from Gephardt's congressional
salary, which hit a peak of $166,700 in 2002, when he was House
minority leader.
The couple
did come into a $500,000 inheritance from Jane Gephardt's family,
but they put it into the stock market at the wrong time: the height
of the dot.com boom. The Gephardts say their only real asset is
their two-bedroom Washington townhouse. The reason he has never
become rich, Gephardt says, is simple: he hasn't wanted to.
"I've
never really been out of debt, but that has never bothered me
or worried me," he says. "If I wanted to go make more
money, I could have always done that. But I made my choice (to
be in public office) ... and I feel fortunate."
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By Leah Clapman, Online NewsHour
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