Capital insider is 'still Stuart'

"I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to do it, " recalled Stuart Eizenstat, who had been President Carter's chief domestic policy adviser. "My inclination was to go back to Atlanta. That's where my roots were. I didn't consider myself any sort of Washington insider."

He was surprised when his father thought differently. Nearly two decades later, Eizenstat still quotes his father's sage advice.

"He said, 'I'd rather have you happy in Washington 500 miles away than unhappy next door. ... Your real life is public policy issues and politics. This is the city for it, and you ought to stay here.' "

Leo Eizenstat knew his son well.

Stuart Eizenstat stayed and became a consummate Washington insider. Respected on both sides of the political aisle, he prospered as a lawyer and lobbyist during the 12 years that Republicans occupied the White House. For the past six years, he has been one of President Clinton's top trouble-shooters, dispatched to a series of complex and contentious diplomatic missions.

He helped hammer out a global warming treaty that was acceptable to delegates from 160 nations, although it has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate. He is negotiating a settlement between Holocaust survivors and Swiss banks on the restitution of Jewish property stolen by Nazis. Angry Mexicans threw eggs at him on an international tour to explain U.S. punishment of foreign firms that invested in Cuba.

Eizenstat has served as U.S. ambassador to the European Union in Brussels and as undersecretary of commerce for International Trade. Currently, he is undersecretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs. And if confirmed by the Senate, he will soon become deputy Treasury secretary, a key member of the administration's economic team.

At the Treasury Department, he will rank behind only Secretary Larry Summers and take a leadership role in international and domestic policy issues, tax policy and issues relating to the financial system.

But Phillip Medintz, a cousin who grew up with Eizenstat in Atlanta, knows a much more down-to-earth person: "He is still Stuart from Grady High School."

Morningside memories

The year was 1943. Leo Eizenstat was in the Army. Sylvia was with her family in Chicago. So Stuart emerged in the Midwest rather than in Atlanta where his father had been born and reared and where his grandfather had settled in 1904 after emigrating from Russia.

At the age of eight months, Stuart moved to the shady sidewalks and well-tended yards of Morningside, where he would spend his childhood.

"It was a wonderful neighborhood and it still is a wonderful neighborhood, " he said. "My grammar school was probably 60 to 70 percent Jewish. It was very stable. Very safe. A very comfortable neighborhood. People never thought about locking doors."

He would walk to Morningside Elementary School or ride his bicycle. He played touch football in Lenox Park. For six or seven years, he belonged to the Devoted Sons of Israel, a social and cultural youth group. He spent summer weeks at Camp Blue Star in North Carolina, sharing outdoor experiences with other Jewish children from across the South. He was a shy, studious, serious boy.

"He was quiet, never loud, but he always had a lot of friends, " said Sylvia Eizenstat, now an 85-year-old volunteer docent at the Carter Center. "We would have company and he would be in his room studying. We would have to knock on his door. He would come out and tell everybody hello, but soon he would go back to his studies."

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in the South during this era, but Morningside was an insular world --- a Jewish enclave of sorts. Eizenstat remembers only a couple of instances of overt discrimination.

Once his mother drove her son and a few friends to a lake where they were greeted by a sign that read, "No Blacks or Jews Allowed." Another time, he was walking home from Hebrew school when two brothers jumped him, tried to rip his books apart and beat him up.

What he didn't notice as a boy, but would learn of later, he said, was that "other options weren't open." His parents belonged to the Progressive Club, a Jewish social club, but some other Atlanta clubs did not accept Jewish members.

Atlanta also was racially segregated in the 1940s and '50s, when Eizenstat grew up. Looking back, he realizes that "one can, without thinking about it, accept certain social mores."

A boyhood memory: He had been at a movie downtown and was taking a bus to Morningside.

"Of course, the buses were segregated. I was at the back part of the white section. There was an older black lady with satchels who was standing right next to me. My inclination was to simply get up and give her the seat. ...

"I remember sort of struggling with this notion. Would she get into difficulty? Would it be a problem for me? Would it cause a disruption? And in the end, I didn't."

His hindsight: "It struck me how easily one accepts established patterns."

The same can be said about his years as a basketball player for Grady High School: "I never thought about the fact that . . . I never played with or against any black players. I never thought about the fact that the newspapers never carried anything about any black teams. It was not part of one's consciousness."

Now, when asked about being honored as an all-city and honorable mention All-America high school basketball player, Eizenstat says, "It should be with an asterisk because it was in pre-integration days."

Still, he had a deadly outside shot.

Medintz, a teammate as well as a cousin, remembers how Eizenstat went at basketball with the same quiet diligence that led to all of his achievements.

"One year, he was determined to perfect a jump shot, " Medintz said. "He stayed home from summer camp and was in his back yard all day and all night shooting."

Economics lesson

President Clinton's designated deputy Treasury secretary received his early economics lessons from his father and his uncle Berry Eizenstat, who were partners in a wholesale shoe business.

"My uncle was the inside guy; my father was the drummer, the outside guy, " Eizenstat recalled. "His customers were basically the small-town merchants in the South. He sold shoes at sort of the lower end of the scale. He would leave Monday morning and we wouldn't see him again until Friday afternoon. He had a very punishing schedule."

During his boyhood summers, Stuart unpacked and packed shoes in this family operation.

"I remember having a conversation, when I was still a teenager, with my father, saying 'I would be interested in going into your business, ' " Eizenstat said. "He said, 'Under no circumstances.' "

His father, who died in 1986, foresaw a sweeping economic change. The small-town dry goods merchants who were his customers would be pushed out of business by national retail chains.

"He said, 'They are selling shoes at retail cheaper than I can sell them at wholesale. That may be good for the consumer, but it's bad for the small-town merchant who is the backbone of these communities, ' " the son recalled. "That was one early lesson, and that has happened."

Another lesson came as he was unpacking a carton.

"I said to my uncle, 'These look strange.' He said, 'These are Asian shoes, ' " Eizenstat said. His uncle explained how the imported shoes cost less than those made in America, and how troubling that was because of long relationships with domestic manufacturers.

"It was a very early glimpse of just the beginnings of a globalized economy, " Eizenstat said.

The family shoe business taught him the importance of the bottom line, he said, "of how hard it is to remain competitive . . . of how you have to be adaptable. It taught me a basic business conservatism."

Political beginnings

Turning down invitations to play basketball at Oglethorpe College and the University of Pennsylvania, Eizenstat entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1960. A couple of practices with the talented freshman team coached by Dean Smith convinced him to focus on academics rather than athletics. He made seven B's and a few A's that first year, but only one B and the rest A's for the next three years.

On a Sunday when his fraternity house kitchen was closed, Eizenstat and some friends were headed to a Howard Johnson's for dinner and found their way blocked by a group of protesting black students from North Carolina A&T. That sit-in demonstration awakened "my civil rights consciousness, " he said. Soon he was signing petitions and boycotting restaurants that would not voluntarily desegregate.

For reasons he still cannot articulate, the shy scholar also jumped into campus politics. Rather than running for office, however, he served on the student attorney general's staff, wrote political op-ed pieces for the "Daily Tar Heel" and worked on the campaigns of others.

In the summer of 1963, he went to Washington as a congressional intern.

"That was the summer of the Martin Luther King Jr. march, " he said. "I suppose I got what my wife calls the incurable disease of Potomac Fever that summer."

At that time, however, he had not yet met Fran --- the Brandeis University graduate from Boston whom he would wed. That would come several years later, when he was at Harvard Law School and she was doing graduate work at Boston University. They were invited to the birthday party of a mutual friend.

"And we were the only single people there, " said Eizenstat. "I must say I didn't quite realize that this was being set up. That was in '65."

They were newlyweds sitting on a bed in a Washington apartment and watching TV together when Lyndon Baines Johnson made his shocking announcement that he would not seek re-election in 1968. "I almost fell off the bed, " said Eizenstat. At the time, he was an LBJ speechwriter "working like a dog" on a memo pertaining to the re-election campaign.

"My first call was . . . to see if I could stop working on the memo, " he said.

Shortly afterward, he joined the Hubert H. Humphrey presidential campaign team. After Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, Eizenstat went to work as a clerk for a federal judge in Georgia.

"A week or so after the election, we drove out of our apartment. I remember saying to Fran, "We'll never see this city again, " he said. "We were going back to Atlanta and had made a decision not to stay in Washington."

The Carter years

Henry Bauer Jr., an Atlanta attorney and a lifelong friend, talked Eizenstat into meeting Jimmy Carter.

"I saw him at the old Hurt Building downtown. He had on khaki pants and a khaki open shirt. I was immediately taken with him, " Eizenstat said. "I saw in him somebody who could build a bridge between rural and urban Georgia."

Carter was running for governor, and Eizenstat became his campaign policy director. After the peanut farmer from Plains won, though, Eizenstat went into private practice with the Atlanta law firm of Powell, Goldstein, Frazier and Murphy rather than join the administration. But when Carter was appointed chairman of the 1974 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the young attorney agreed to help him write a series of issue papers for their party's candidates.

The issue papers were well received nationally. Eizenstat and Carter went out to celebrate and talk about the future. It was Eizenstat who brought up presidential politics.

"We had lunch at Underground Atlanta and I said, 'My view is that it's going to be a particularly weak field in '76. (Ted) Kennedy can't run because of Chappaquiddick. Humphrey is too old. He's lost before. It's just not a strong field. If you ran and did at all well in any of the Southern primaries, you'd have a good chance of being vice president on a ticket.'

"He laughed and said, 'I've already decided I'm going to run. Why don't you join our team?' "

A presidential campaign later, Stuart and Fran Eizenstat --- now with young sons Jay and Brian --- were headed back to Washington.

"In some respects, (Fran) has made the biggest sacrifices for my political life, " Eizenstat. "She had just been selected for the Leadership Atlanta program and she was president-elect of the Atlanta Chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women in '76. And so she had to leave both of those when we moved up here."

Heeding his father's surprising advice, Eizenstat stayed in Washington after Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980.

"It was a terribly difficult choice, " he said. "I decided to sort of split the baby. I would stay in Washington but go back with my Atlanta firm."

He opened the Washington office of Powell, Goldstein, Frazier and Murphy. During the Reagan and Bush years, he was a lawyer and lobbyist.

"One of the things you have to understand is that when the Carter administration ended in January of 1981, most people left with little prestige or less prestige than when they came, " former Common Cause president David Cohen told the National Journal. "That is not true for Stu Eizenstat."

Serving 'real people'

It's a sunny June afternoon in the area of Washington called Foggy Bottom, and Stuart Eizenstat is in his spacious office in the State Department. He is talking about roots.

"When I drive around Atlanta, I can turn a corner and see a tree or see a yard or see a playground and it brings back all the memories of childhood. It keeps me rooted, " he explained. "I see my old friends and my family (and) realize that politics and public affairs and international events are a very long way away. It gives me a sense of realism. What's really important to people? . . . Their own families. Their own jobs.

"I've found it to be not only refreshing but also important in terms of sustaining me and giving me a better perception of what I'm doing when I come back here. This is not an ivory tower. We are here to serve real people with real needs, most of whom will never know what you do and never care except the end result."

Phillip Medintz has a story that he believes illustrates what his acclaimed cousin is all about.

Brian, the younger son of Stuart and Fran Eizenstat, is engaged to be married. The family of the bride-to-be was wondering how to address the invitation to his father. After all, Stuart Eizenstat is a man of many titles. Should the name on the envelope be preceded by Ambassador? Or Undersecretary of State? Or Deputy Secretary? Or perhaps an all-inclusive The Honorable?

"Just 'Stuart, ' " came the order to Brian from his father.