THE ORGANIZER, IN CONTROL AND BACK IN ACTION

AFTER DUKAKIS, DONNA BRAZILE GIVES THE MARCHING ORDERS TO HELP THE HOMELESS

It's ironic that Donna Brazile -- who, as coordinator of today's Housing Now! march for the homeless, effortlessly juggles the needs of 21 staffers, several thousand homeless and four antsy police agencies -- is best known for a few, fleeting hours when she was totally out of control.

She lost control long enough to sabotage her own top job on Gov. Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign. Long enough to let her righteous anger at her boss, herself, and what she saw as a racist campaign by candidate George Bush goad her into publicly floating the widely circulated -- and unsubstantiated -- rumor that the then-vice president was having an affair.

Today, Brazile is back, doing what she does best: handling things. Her office at the Community for Creative Non-Violence, homeless activist Mitch Snyder's shelter, is a flurry of typed memos, pink messages and manila envelopes taped to the walls. It's a mess. But Brazile is efficiency in a red-flecked suit.

She fields phone calls from celebrities eager to participate in the march that has brought tens of thousands of homeless and their supporters to the capital ("Lenny Kavitz, Kravitz? What's Lisa Bonet's husband's name?" she asks an aide. "His band wants to perform ... Rosanna DeSoto -- she's Hispanic, isn't she? We need a Hispanic."). She calms staffers who ignore the "DONNA'S ON THE PHONE" sign on the door to hit her up for money, advice, direction. She considers last-minute requests for credentials from the politicos who two months ago wouldn't return her phone calls.

Back in her perch in the driver's seat, it's easy for Brazile to talk about her need to be in charge. Ask what scares her and she names two things she cannot control: Flying. And smelling the roses.

The flying part is easy.

"It upsets my balance. I'm at the mercy of a pilot I don't know, a plane I haven't checked out. I'm not in control."

Explaining the roses is more difficult.

"This is going to sound weird," she begins slowly, "but I can smell death. It smells like a rose to me."

It goes back to June 1975, when her grandmother, "the most positive influence on my life, next to my mother," had a stroke.

"Me and my sisters took turns taking care of her. She loved house spray, loved that rose smell. I sprayed it in her room and she said, 'That smells good.' "

Brazile smelled that rose scent at the moment her grandmother squeezed her hand just before she died.

Years later, she smelled it hours before a cousin's sudden death. And last year she smelled it again when her mother was admitted to a hospital in her native New Orleans. This was just days after she had resigned her post as Michael Dukakis's deputy field director after telling reporters that Bush should "fess up" to the American people about whether he was carrying on with another woman.

Brazile takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. "I kept telling myself, 'She's okay, she's okay,' " she says now. "This was the most intense period of my life. I was trying to figure out, 'What did I say?" I needed time to become a human being again, to withdraw. Then I smelled the roses and I froze."

Her mother's death two days later forever changed her life. When Brazile returned home to Louisiana for the funeral, it was the first time she flew without fear, she says, the first time she felt as if she had no purpose.

Until last year, being "without purpose" was completely foreign to Donna Brazile, whom former Dukakis campaign deputy press secretary Deborah Hayes Johns calls "the most well-connected person I know ... one of the smartest Democrats in Washington."

One of her earliest memories is of sitting on the porch of the ramshackle, Kenner, La., home she shared with her parents -- a janitor and a maid -- and her eight brothers and sisters. She watched a parade of people, better-dressed and better-shod than she, pass by on their way to Sunday picnics. It was about then that she decided to make a difference.

She was 9 when she started passing out campaign literature; 16 when she stuffed envelopes and registered voters for Jimmy Carter; 21 when she became a lobbyist for the National Student Education Fund. She was a ripe 23 in 1983 when, as national director of the 20th Anniversary March on Washington, she stood in the Rose Garden with Stevie Wonder and Coretta Scott King while an unenthusiastic Ronald Reagan signed the bill that made the Rev. Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday.

Soon afterward, she used her genius for organizing to aid Jesse Jackson's first bid for the presidency. One week, she says now, she was mobilization director. But then Jackson replaced her with a white person. Then she was Rainbow Coalition director -- until the Jackson people replaced her with another white person and moved her again. These days, Brazile says she still admires Jackson and supports the goals of the Rainbow Coalition. But she hasn't worked officially for him since.

Considering the frustrations of grass-roots organizing, its interminable hours and constant demands -- not to mention seldom getting credit for a job well done -- why does she do it?

"It's the energy I like, the enthusiasm," she says. "When I started working with Stevie Wonder on the King holiday in 1981, they told us it would never be done. For two years, we brought people to the capital, we presented 7 million signatures to Speaker Tip O'Neill. By August 1983, the 20th anniversary of the March on Washington, we had enough support for passage."

Her reverie is interrupted by a phone call. "Un-huh, uh-huh." Brazile nods her head. "Yes, Susan Dey was on 'GMA' -- she pushed Tracy Chapman, the entertainment aspect. She was good. ... Is Dionne {Warwick} calling Stevie? Un-huh."

Brazile hangs up. The phone rings again.

"Okay, Grace Slick is coming in early," she says, nodding again. Then she looks puzzled. "Who's Grace Slick? ... Right, Jefferson Airplane." She laughs. "Now wait, there are some white people I listen to. Like Barbra Streisand. ... But I'm sure I'll enjoy Jefferson Airplane."

Brazile hasn't had more than three hours' sleep a day in more than two weeks, she says. But her bearing, her banter, remains as smooth as the surface on her never-too-distant coffee cup.

"When you meet her you are struck by her real intensity for her causes," says Mark Gearan, former Dukakis campaign press secretary, and currently federal relations director for Gov. Dukakis here. "A lot of people enjoy the fun of politics ... the power. But her motivation is issues and the advancement of people who are less privileged -- the homeless, the poor."

"She believes in what she's doing, devotes a lot of physical and emotional energy to it," says Johns, now press secretary for Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. She was often Brazile's roommate during the presidential campaign. "At 2 a.m., after we'd walked away from work, she'd still be talking about it. I'd be thinking, 'Oh, for one good day in the mall.' She'd be planning the next day or month on the campaign."

But of course, says Brazile. "I'm an organizer. My energy comes from putting my beliefs in action. Nothing frustrates me more than hearing people talk about ideas and then having no way to put them in action." That's why she was a key organizer for the National Hands Across America campaign, and why, at the request of former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, she became executive director of the National Political Congress of Black Women.

Yet another staffer sticks her head in, reminding Brazile that it's time to walk three blocks to the Capitol for a warm-up rally for hundreds of homeless people. Many walked here from New York, Roanoke and Boston; others were part of a caravan of cars that drove from Los Angeles. On the Capitol steps is a swirling wave of people, a scene straight out of the '60s -- jeans and long hair and cigarettes and sandals and babies and buttons and hugs and hype and lots of laughter. There's anger, too, as some complain about a Maryland shelter that served them Rice Krispies for dinner and others chant, "No housing, no peace!" From the steps above, several expressionless policemen survey the tumult.

And, '60s-like, there's lots of love. Women cradling infants and men with uncombed hair surround actor Jon Voight, a tireless supporter of homeless rights, and ask him to sign their "Housing Now" T-shirts. A man from the New York contingent with burnt-chocolate skin and frayed slacks is one of a dozen people who hug Brazile. He tells her he's moved by the sight of so many hopeful-looking homeless people. "I try to tell people God is able," he says. "When people come together, it's the only way King's dream will be fulfilled."

Snyder also greets Brazile with a bear hug. Later, he says, "I don't think anybody else in the U.S. could do what she's done here. She's brought together the most amazing constituencies -- whites, blacks, old, young, everybody."

That talent for pulling together people of all stripes for a common cause -- plus her formidable connections in the black community -- caught the Dukakis camp's attention last year.

Brazile had just finished a stint as national field director for Gephardt's presidential campaign, the first black person to hold such a powerful position for a major white candidate. When no firm offer from candidate Jackson was forthcoming, Brazile threw her lot with Dukakis. Though the governor was way ahead of Vice President Bush in the polls when she joined the campign in May, the Dukakis camp was thrilled to get her, says Gearan.

"People were excited to get someone of her stature and skill. ... The most important thing she brought was her skill in organizing. At that time, she was an important senior staff member of another campaign; she complemented our staff. She was someone with a national reputation ... Everybody has a different perspective; she represented hers very effectively."

Some thought Brazile's hiring was the first signal that Dukakis was ready to make a serious effort to attract black voters. Up to that point, some Dukakis campaign operatives felt so sure of getting the black vote, traditionally Democratic, that they took it for granted.

Things didn't change much, even with Brazile on board. From the beginning, the Duke and his mostly white, Harvard-educated core staff made numerous decisions that galled her and, quite often, black leaders. One was his choice -- over Brazile's strenuous objections -- not to mention the three civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia, Miss., at a rally at the murder site on the 24th anniversary of the killings. Another was the decision by the Dukakis campaign not to have the candidate appear at the keynote dinner of the annual Congressional Black Caucus weekend -- a tradition among Democratic presidential candidates. "They told me that buying a table would constitute a 'slush fund,' " says Brazile now, ice in her voice. "I refused to come to work the next day." Later, she says, Dukakis apologized to her, reversed his position and appeared at the dinner.

Increasingly, reporters and others noticed that Dukakis -- who seldom included visits to predominantly black areas on his campaign itinerary -- almost never made such appearances during the day. Brazile and others thought the reason was obvious: Night trips to black neighborhoods wouldn't make the evening news.

She felt unappreciated, shut out. "I was not a main player," she says. "Nobody was who wasn't in their little insiders club. I was on the sidelines with a lot of very good people."

Perhaps the turning point for Brazile came on the October day when a farmer in rural central Illinois walked up to her, stared in her face and declared, "You're a Willie Horton nigger."

She was incensed, completely floored. Today, Brazile smiles ruefully at the memory. "I called him a cracker or two," she admits. "Then I thought, 'I'm on this man's property, let me get on the {campaign} van."

Incredulously, she displayed to other staffers the brochures that had fueled the farmer's comment. Circulated by the local Republican party, the leaflets showed the glowering face of Horton -- a black convicted murderer who raped a white Maryland woman and stabbed her fiance in 1987 while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

Brazile -- and other black and white campaign experts -- felt certain the Bush camp's use of the Horton case was two-fold: to depict Dukakis as weak on crime and to forward the old racist notion that angry black men rape innocent white women.

Other staffers, she says now, were hardly outraged. "What pissed me off was the nonchalance ... I went around saying, "Did you see this?" They said, 'Yep, yep, yep, we're gonna do something."

The pressure continued to build. That night, a minister from St. Louis called and asked campaign staffers why Dukakis always campaigned in the city's suburbs, never in the black neighborhood. "Of course, they said, "DON-NA!" and I got on the phone and said 'um-hum, um-hum. We're gonna try to get there.' "

Later that night, she watched TV news clips of Dukakis responding to the Horton literature. He called it garbage. Brazile, who thought it was much worse, went numb.

The next day, staffers gathered in a New Haven, Conn., restaurant with the candidate to see the Dukakis TV ads that had just been produced to counter the Horton ads. To her horror, she saw a commercial almost identical to the Horton ad -- with a Hispanic man substituted for Horton.

"I said, very quietly, 'Have you contacted Hispanic leaders about this? ... Black leaders?' I couldn't believe it."

The next people she encountered, she says, were a group of reporters.

Mike Frisby of the Boston Globe recalls the scene:

"I was talking to Donna specifically about the difference between Bush and Dukakis on women's issues. Suddenly, Donna went off and started talking about how George Bush needs to 'Fess up' {about whether he was having an affair} . I remember at one point I said, 'Donna, is this on the record?' She never said no ... Several times, I asked her; then another reporter asked her if it was on the record. At no time did she say, 'No, don't use this.' "

He says none of the reporters covering Dukakis wanted to hurt Brazile. "A lot of people on the campaign would not give you sound answers. Donna would. And because of that, reporters had great respect for her. That's the reason we gave her so many opportunities to say, "Don't use this," and she never said that. ... She was angry. No doubt about it."

Knight-Ridder reporter Ken Cooper saw it differently. "It seemed sort of like an act of bravado -- like she said, 'What the hell, {Dukakis} won't say it, I'll do it.' There was even an element of machismo to it. Donna's a different kind of woman. She's tough."

Word spread among the press corps that a top aide was trashing Bush. Reporters were waiting for her when she boarded the bus press and staff were sharing for a trip to New York for the annual Al Smith dinner.

Brazile thought she was ready for them, too.

"I knew on the bus that I had to clean it up," she says now. "But instead, what I did was finish it."

She repeated her 'fess up' remark; she attacked Bush's use of the Willie Horton literature as racist.

"I talked about how Bush was using 'liberalism' as a code word that meant {Dukakis} was going to help black people, so don't help him.

"The funny thing is, that day, the {Bush rumor} was not really on my mind ... God bless the Bushes, I really wasn't thinking about them at that time. What was on my mind was how I was so hurt, being called a 'Willie Horton nigger.' It rocked me. I had gone to Deborah {Johns} and said, 'I'm tired of being black. Sick of being black.' And I vented."

The enormity of her actions finally hit Brazile when the bus pulled into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Knowing that what she'd done was irrevocable, Brazile phoned Dukakis's national headquarters in Boston.

When she told deputy campaign manager Jack Corrigan that she'd done something he wouldn't like, he asked what.

"I said, 'Well, I called the vice president an adulterer, a racist and a liar. And if I'd stayed on the bus long enough, I would have gotten to the Democrats.' "

Adds Gearan: "She kept saying she didn't want to do anything to hurt the campaign. She kept saying that."

Minutes later, Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich suggested that Brazile resign. Fine, thought Brazile after she hung up the phone. Then, filled with dread, she called her mother.

She needn't have worried. Jean Brazile's reaction to the announcement that her daughter had just quit the Dukakis team was like a balm.

Says Brazile: "She told me, 'You probably should stop working for people who don't know what the hell they believe in.' "

That helped, even when, predictably, Dukakis operatives immediately denounced her as a "minor" staffer who had no right to speak for anybody, and the governor himself -- whom she personally liked and whose candidacy she still largely believed in -- was forced to apologize to Bush for her impropriety.

Not everyone was unsympathetic. Even the Globe's Frisby -- who admits he had a great time writing the "Dukakis Aide Accuses Bush" story -- felt some sympathy for Brazile.

"She's close to being brilliant as a campaign organizer, has a real knack. ... The problem with the Dukakis campaign was that they didn't listen. ... Remember how they used to call {former Dallas Cowboys coach} Tom Landry the 'Plastic Man' because he was so rigid and strict? Some ballplayers couldn't play for him because they couldn't fit the formula. That's what Donna was dealing with, a campaign that was white and Harvard-bred. So if you didn't fit in those guidelines, your ideas didn't get as much weight."

Typically, Brazile doesn't see herself as a victim. She just made a lulu of a mistake, "my first in politics," she says. "Before that, I was perfect.

"I had been raised to think, to express my beliefs," she says now. "But what I did wasn't thought-out or rational. If I had it to do again, I wouldn't."

Back home in Washington, Brazile had hardly begun to heal when she smelled the roses. The next few months were the hardest of her life.

"When my mother died, it left a doughnut in me. A big hole," she says. She removes her glasses again, running her fingers across her eyes. "You could see right through me."

Before then, she says, "it was simple to say what I was going to do with my life -- it was 'I'm going to law school,' this and that. I had organized my life like a campaign. My mother's death took me apart."

Pulling herself together meant taking stock of how she lived, ate, drank. She gave up cigarettes, beef, even her occasional end-of-the-day glass of white wine. She started walking everywhere. She lost 45 pounds, and began going to church again.

"I was cleansing myself. What I kept coming back to was that I could never go back to the way life was before she died. Up until that point, she was driving me, I always did what she would do, speak up for the little guy."

But old habits don't die without a fight. When Mitch Snyder came to her, asking for help in organizing a national march that would focus the world's attention on the plight of America's homeless, her first reaction was, "No way." A few days later, she was on the phone, mobilizing her contacts, doing what she does best.

Sometimes Brazile thinks she does it too well.

Organizing is "a sickness, an obsession," she says, genuinely concerned behind her smile. "I'm obsessed with the thought of making things happen. ... Ultimately, I do it because I'm scared. I don't ever, ever, ever want to be poor again. And the best way to insure that won't happen is to organize, to fight for our lives."

Today, that means putting the finishing touches on the Housing Now! march. Brazile says she knows exactly what she'll do Monday -- when the march and its aftermath are part of her past.

"I will get funky," she says. That means she will throw on some jeans and a sweat shirt. She will walk from her Capitol Hill apartment to Eastern Market, buy a couple of newspapers and walk, very slowly, back home. She will put Anita Baker on the stereo, then some Mahalia Jackson. Next, she'll pop a tape or two on her VCR. "I like two-hour things," she says -- "Spartacus," "Ben-Hur," "West Side Story."

Mostly, she says, she'll concentrate hard on not even thinking about helping anybody.

By Tuesday, she says, she'll have "all the answers I need" about what to do next. She may go ahead and apply to law school. She may work on some other project. "But this is my last march," she says, looking very much like she means it. "I'm almost 30, and there are other parts of my life that I need to develop."

Mitch Snyder isn't buying. Donna Brazile, he says, will be organizing for a long, long time.

"When you're that good at what you do, you've gotta do it," he says. "When you've got a gift from God, you've got to let it flow."

Brazile shrugs when she hears that.

"Hell, no," she says, almost gently. "I won't go through this again."

Then she grins, big.

"But one day, somebody -- Mitch or Dorothy Height or Coretta Scott King will call me and say, 'We've got to do something about this drug problem.' And I'll say, 'When?' "

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.