Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 25, 1994 TAG: 9410250064
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDWARD POWER LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE NOTE: strip
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In his past three campaigns for political office, Marshall Coleman came up short every time:
In 1981, he lost by 105,000 votes to Charles Robb in a bid to become Virginia's governor; in 1985, when he tried to make a comeback by running for lieutenant governor, Coleman couldn't even secure the Republican Party's nomination; and in 1989, he lost a second gubernatorial bid, this time to Douglas Wilder by 6,741 votes.
Even when he lost, though, ``it wouldn't have occurred to him to get out of politics,'' Warren Coleman, his late brother, once said.
Barring a miracle, Coleman appears headed for yet another defeat in his independent race for Robb's U.S. Senate seat.
But to dismiss Coleman as a nonforce in the current race, or in Virginia politics in general, is to overlook his place in the state's political history and, possibly, its political future.
Tall, handsome, witty and articulate, Coleman made a meteoric rise during the 1970s to become, at 35, the youngest attorney general in state history.
He began his climb in 1972, winning election to the General Assembly, where he quickly built a reputation as a progressive Republican. When he ran for attorney general in 1977, Coleman got one-third of the black vote after blasting his Democratic opponent for helping lead the 1950s effort to close public schools rather than integrate them.
Four years later, facing Robb in the governor's race, Coleman also faced a changed GOP power structure. He embraced the state's business establishment, a change from his days as a progressive.
Among those he most ardently pursued was the legislative leader of Massive Resistance, former Gov. Mills Godwin, despite Massive Resistance's vehement opposition to busing for integration of schools.
Such position swings earned Coleman the wrath of many fellow politicians and power-brokers.
``I want the world to know that he's shallow. He'll say anything and promise anything to get elected,'' said Virginia Sen. Frank Nolen, D-Augusta, who lost a state Senate race to Coleman in the mid-1970s.
No issue better symbolizes Coleman's swings between conservative and moderate Republican politics than his stands on abortion.
Through most of his career, as a leader of the moderate wing of the state GOP, Coleman was a strong defender of abortion rights.
But in 1989, when he needed support from conservatives to capture the gubernatorial nomination, Coleman staked out a drastic anti-abortion stand, saying that the only justifiable reason for terminating a pregnancy is when a mother's life is endangered by carrying a child. Coleman said he opposed abortions even in pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
During that general election, Coleman was tagged as an extremist on abortion by Wilder. To stem criticism, Coleman sought to assure voters that he would not seek any changes in state abortion laws that would impose his views on others.
This year, as he runs for the Senate without the pressure of seeking conservative Republican votes, Coleman has returned to his original stand in favor of abortion rights.
Coleman's tendency to drift on some issues also has carried over into his personal loyalties, say some people who have worked with him. They have attributed this to a fiercely competitive nature and a determination to win at any cost.
Former state Sen. Ray Garland of Roanoke, formerly a close Coleman associate, once recalled spending hundreds of hours as an unpaid volunteer researcher and strategist in Coleman's 1977 campaign for attorney general.
Four years later, fresh from his gubernatorial loss to Robb and pondering his future, Coleman strongly considered moving back to the Shenandoah Valley to run for a congressional seat that Garland coveted.
``He didn't hesitate to get in front of me,'' Garland recalled. Coleman ultimately decided not to run.
He has been called untrustworthy (by former House Speaker A.L. Philpott after Coleman promoted a lobbyist disclosure bill), irresponsible (by two-time governor Godwin, for Coleman's 1981 no-tax-increase pledge), ``the most dangerous man to ever run for office in Virginia'' (by the late senator and longtime Finance Committee Chairman Edward Willey) and guilty of ``transcending arrogance'' (by former House Appropriations Chairman W. Roy Smith).
But while he has drawn criticism from all quarters, Coleman rarely has backed down. His irreverent, caustic style while in the General Assembly angered many senior Democratic legislators, former state Sen. Wiley Mitchell, a Republican from Alexandria, once recalled. And Coleman fanned resentment by making long floor speeches to stake out positions he later would use in his 1977 campaign for attorney general, Mitchell said.
When he arrived in the attorney general's office in 1978, Coleman took an openly political, populist approach.
He had promised to be ``the people's lawyer,'' and he complied by intervening personally in utility-rate cases and responding to hundreds of constituent requests for informal opinions. He installed aggressive lawyers in an antitrust division that won convictions for odometer-tampering in Hampton Roads and Richmond, and highway-bid rigging in Fairfax.
He also forced a 10 percent cut in the cost of operating the office. The reduction brought staff complaints that Coleman was undermining office effectiveness. Others griped that he was too concerned about politics generally.
When Coleman completed his term as attorney general and lost the governor's race to Robb, his closest friends told him he needed to mature, tone down, get some experience in the real world. The one person to whom he is said to have listened was his Democratic successor as attorney general, Gerald Baliles, who suggested that Coleman move to the Washington area.
Practicing law in the fast lane appealed to Coleman. And his second wife, Patty, an artist and writer, liked the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Washington. But there was an even greater appeal, Coleman confided to friends: Leaving Richmond meant he would not have to pick up the paper every morning and read the latest about ``Governor Robb.''
`Be like my father'
Coleman's pursuit of the political life wasn't unique in his family. His ancestors were farmers in Nelson County, a pastoral setting east of the Blue Ridge.
His paternal grandfather, John R. Coleman, established himself there as a Democrat who served briefly in the House of Delegates during the 1930s and later as Nelson County sheriff. He was a loud, colorful figure who went by the nickname ``Rattlesnake.''
John Coleman's son, William Warren Coleman, went straight to the DuPont plant in Waynesboro after high school, ultimately working his way up to supervisor.
``When people used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, `I want to be like my father,''' Marshall Coleman once said.
Marguerite Coleman, Marshall's mother, devoted herself to home and family. Then, in 1950, Bill Coleman, already past 30 and with a wife and two young sons, decided to give up his job at the DuPont plant.
Personable and good-looking, Bill Coleman was the youngest man on the board of the First Baptist Church, but already he had been elected its chairman. He saw the ministry as his new calling, and this path led him to Crozier Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. When he arrived, Martin Luther King Jr. was a member of the third-year class.
Cast into the role of chief provider, Marguerite Coleman found a job at the local General Electric plant, where she worked until retiring in the mid-1980s. To help his mom make ends meet in those early days, young Marshall bagged groceries after school.
Eventually, Marshall won a scholarship to attend the University of Virginia, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He decided to enroll in law school but interrupted his law studies to don the uniform of a Marine lieutenant. He spent 18 months in Vietnam, including a month in a hospital for acute sinus and eye problems.
Assigned to the 1st Marine Division, he served as an intelligence officer and saw action during the Tet offensive.
``I remember a young officer got killed in a convoy right beside me. You see someone right beside you, and the next minute he's killed. It does give you a sense of the transitory and fragile nature of life,'' Coleman once recalled.
Returning to Charlottesville, Coleman married his sweetheart, Maureen Kelly of Staunton, and after Coleman's graduation from law school, the family, which by then included son Sean, returned to Staunton, where Coleman practiced law. A second child, Billy, was born there in 1974.
Even in college, Coleman had stayed in touch with hometown politics, and he quickly was elected Republican chairman in Staunton. When a local Republican delegate stepped down in 1971, Coleman was unopposed in the special election to replace him.
Twice more, Coleman was elected to the House before challenging an incumbent state senator, Frank Nolen, in 1975. Although he was still the new kid on the block, Coleman suppressed potential GOP opposition early with a tough campaign organization.
From there it seemed Coleman's path to the governor's mansion was clear, and his election to attorney general only seemed to validate that. Then came his embarrassing loss to Robb in 1981.
When he took the advice of Baliles and others and moved to Northern Virginia in 1982, Coleman became a senior partner in a Washington law firm, making about three times as much as the $45,000 he had been making as Virginia's chief legal officer.
One of his first clients was Dwight C. Schar, a home builder from McLean. The two men, who discovered they had similarly modest backgrounds, became friends, flying to Europe with their wives for long weekends, living next door to each other and talking politics.
Schar urged Coleman to leave the Washington firm for one in Northern Virginia, and approached Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn, which had offices at Tysons Corner.
``We posed Marshall as a rainmaker,'' a lawyer who attracts business, Schar recalled in a story by The Washington Post, even though Schar figured the rainmaker tag was an exaggeration. ``It turned out that we brought them a real thunderstorm.''
Coleman helped Schar's company, NV Homes, become publicly traded. He later handled the legal work for a takeover of an industry giant, Ryan Homes, for whom Schar once worked. The merger propelled Schar's firm into the Fortune 500 and Coleman into one of the top producers in his 200-lawyer firm.
When asked in 1989 if his annual income was about $500,000, Coleman responded that the figure was ``in the ballpark.'' Coleman also embraced tangible validation of his success: his home in Schar's Ballantrae Farms subdivision was assessed in 1989 at $1,060,000.
`I'm good at it'
With such material wealth at hand and the tribulations of his political past a fading memory, why would Coleman enter the Senate race as such a dark horse, overequipped with old baggage and underequipped with cash?
Moreover, what makes him continue to run in a race where the most recent poll has shown him with 16 percent of the vote - 17 to 20 percentage points below either Robb or Oliver North, the Republican candidate?
``I'm certainly not in politics for the trappings,'' Coleman once said. ``I have a more comfortable life not being in politics. I like it because I think I'm good at it and I can provide some service.''
Some might characterize that as an answer chrome-plated with politics. Steer the response away from self-interest toward public service, and you can't hurt yourself.
Others simply point to a seminal event in Coleman's childhood:
In February 1951, while commuting home to Waynesboro, Bill Coleman, young Marshall's father, swerved to miss a child who had run into the road. His car hit a brick wall.
Eleven months later, after a battle with head injuries and an aborted attempt to return to the theological seminary where he had been studying, the elder Coleman fatally shot himself.
The person who found his body, who rushed too late to a neighbor for help, was Bill Coleman's skinny and mischievous 9-year-old son, Marshall. The boy, who by all accounts idolized his father, had come home for lunch that day, as he often did, to give his dad a boost.
Many people - among them his brother, a former Sunday school teacher and several friends - have said they believe this catastrophic episode may have been the starting point for Coleman's tenacious quest for the governorship.
And that quest may mask an even deeper objective, Garland, the former state senator, once suggested.
Coleman was once ``a young, poor boy growing up in a small town, with his father having committed suicide,'' said Garland. This placed him in a position where he had ``to fight his way up, with way-above-average intelligence and ability.
``He wants to prove to the world how good and smart he is, how successful he can be. There's nothing like politics for that validation.''
The above profile was written using reporting that previously has appeared in The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star and in a 1989 Washington Post profile of Marshall Coleman. Among the reporters whose work the writer drew from are Margaret Edds, Warren Fiske and Washington Post staff writer Donald P. Baker. In limited excerpts, writing was taken directly from previously published reports.
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