Pa.'s Arlen Specter looks beyond cancer to next senate race

WASHINGTON - Sen. Arlen Specter says, "I've got to get my hair back."

This is yesterday. He is sitting in his private, hideaway office behind the U.S. Senate chamber, surrounded by four walls of mementos from his long, long career in politics.

He looks pale and frail. His gray-plaid suit seems to hang on his shoulders. And, yes, he is quite bald.

Two weeks after completing a debilitating, three-month regimen of chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease, the 78-year-old Republican pronounces himself in "good physical shape" and says he has an "excellent" chance of full recovery.

There's probably a better chance of a snow squall on this steamy July morning in Washington than that Specter - a former prosecutor and a renowned political infighter - will admit any weakness. "I'm at the top of my game," he says.

Specter, who first was elected in 1980, has had repeated medical troubles, starting with a benign brain tumor diagnosed in 1993. He had radiation treatments in 1996 and a heart bypass operation in 1998. He was first diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a type of blood cancer, in 2005. The disease returned in April.

Already the longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history, he fully intends to run for a sixth term in 2010.

Politically, 2010 is just over the next hill. No opponent has yet stepped forward, but he knows that wolves lie in wait, sniffing the wind.

Meeting over coffee with several Pennsylvania reporters prior to the Senate's August recess, he is asked whether he is physically up to another campaign.

He declares: "Absolutely!" - then stares until his interlocutor turns away.

He played squash, long his favorite form of exercise, one day last week. And he has a match planned with a female intern to New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. He makes sure to note that the intern is regarded as quite a good player.

His legs feel a bit tired, and he's annoyed by teary eyes - a "residual effect," he says of the drug treatments.

But it's the hair that obsesses him. Now that the 12 weekly doses of chemotherapy are done, the once-curly locks will come back. For him, that can't happen soon enough.

"I get more comment on my hairstyle than I do on my public policy," he says in half-jest. "I get letters saying I ought to wear a toupee."

He falls back on a joke that he often made the last time he had chemotherapy: "The people who say I look good compare me more to Telly Savalas than Yul Brynner."

With that remark, Specter reveals a certain amount of age. Savalas, not widely regarded as handsome, played detective Lt. Theo Kojak on TV in the 1970s. Brynner, a chiseled-chin film star, died in 1985.

Ever since the days of his single-bullet theory in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy - when he served on the Warren Commission in the mid-1960s - Specter has relished a place on the national, even international, stage.

His walls are crowded with photographs of him with presidents he has known, starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he met for a photo-op almost a half-century ago while running for district attorney of Philadelphia.

Next month, during the Senate recess, he plans a short trip to Latin America.

He hopes to pay a call on Cuban leader Raul Castro. Independently of White House plans for Cuban-American relations, he hopes to talk about opening up trade and tourism between the United States and the isolated Caribbean island nation.

After that, he hopes to go on to Venezuela. He met Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez in 2005 - "That fellow right there," he says, pointing with his left index finger to a frame on the wall - and he believes he could help soften Chavez's antagonistic views of the United States. "I'm a firm believer in dialogue," he says.

Specter was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 and 2006, the last time Republicans controlled the Senate. He envisions an even bigger role for himself if he gains another term and if the GOP somehow rebounds in the Senate.

"If reelected in 2010," he says, "I think I have an excellent chance to be chairman of the Appropriations Committee."

That would make him one of the most powerful figures in Washington and would be a boon for Pennsylvania, which, like every state, relies on its congressional delegation to bring home discretionary federal funds.

Committee leadership in the Senate comes from seniority, and Specter has 28 years of it. He says he will argue to voters that this is a big reason to keep him.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg made the same argument to New Jersey Democratic voters this spring when he faced a younger man in his party's primary election. Specter says he was encouraged that Lautenberg, at 84, handily defeated U.S. Rep. Robert E. Andrews, who is 50. "There are fair indicators that the electorate is interested in people who can serve their interest with seniority," he says.

Toward the end the August recess, Specter plans to conduct five days of "town hall" meetings across the state.

He says he wishes the Senate wouldn't take a break at all, but would stay in session to deal with energy issues.

"Americans can't travel; they don't have enough money for gasoline," he says. "They're not taking vacations."

His next date with his cancer doctors won't be for a few months, he says. He'll then have to have a PET scan, a diagnostic test.

"When you have Hodgkin's disease, you have to have PET scans every few months all the time - because you need to be checked," he says.

"Chances of it not coming back are better than it coming back," he says, "but you have to be alert."