Father Figure -- Bill Harrington, A Man Of Many Causes, Is Now A Lightning Rod In The Fathers'-Rights Movement

Over his 48 years, Bill Harrington has been attracted to causes like lint to wool.

He has been many things:

-- A leader of antiwar protests as a political-science major at the University of Washington in the late 1960s.

-- A University District community leader in the early '70s.

-- Part of the committee against the R.H. Thomson freeway.

-- Part of the initiative campaign to save the Pike Place Market.

-- Chairman in the mid-'70s of a local government reform lobby called CHECC.

-- A candidate for the Seattle City Council twice.

-- A lobbyist for the Equal Rights Amendment.

-- A Washington, D.C., employee of the American Association of University Women.

Most recently he has become a spokesman for the fathers'-rights movement, as the national director of the American Fathers Coalition. He has been quoted in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, praised in Playboy magazine and invited to the White House. Last week he testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance about child support enforcement.

President Clinton last March appointed the Tacoma resident to the newly formed presidential Commission on Child and Family Welfare, where he has made post-divorce custody and visitation rights the group's top priority.

His high profile has been good for the fathers'-rights movement, but his rise has nonetheless drawn criticism from some longtime fathers'-rights activists.

"When I hear Bill Harrington's name, I laugh," says Vic Smith of Portland, the national president of Dads Against Discrimination.

"I give him credit for bringing attention (to fathers'-rights issues), but he would not be the one we would choose to represent us. . . . He would be the last person we would want to represent us."

He and several other critics often mention, for example, a man who met Harrington through the fathers'-rights movement. Fred Peschen says Harrington moved into his condo while Peschen was in California looking for his ex-wife and children. Peschen says he had to have Harrington thrown out and that Harrington cleaned out the place before he left. Peschen won a $15,000 judgment against Harrington.

Harrington says he lost because he didn't take the suit seriously because he didn't believe he'd done anything wrong.

The money was never paid. Harrington has filed for bankruptcy as a result of that and other judgments against him.

The largest claim resulted from a suit he filed against his former wife's attorney. The fine for bringing an unjustified suit, and the cost of appealing it to the state Supreme Court, plus court costs and interest amount to $34,000, he says.

Fathers'-rights activists also are bothered by the feeling that Harrington, a relative newcomer to the movement, is taking credit and getting attention that ought to go to people who have labored for years in obscurity. They say he has used political connections developed in his years of activism to bypass established organizations and present himself to the powers in Washington, D.C., and to the media as the movement's leader.

Rachmiel Tobesman, a leader of

Fathers United, which represents several fathers organizations on the East Coast, says emphatically, "Bill Harrington does not speak for any of the fathers' groups on this side of the country."

Harrington is not surprised that some people in the fathers'-rights movement find fault with him. "Victor (Smith) has had his chance to do something, and he hasn't." He says he has never heard of Tobesman, but that the complaints against him are just another part of "the nature of politics. You stick your head out and it's ugly. I just hope that people see the good that's out there."

SOUR GRAPES

Stewart Miller, chief legislative analyst for the coalition, says criticisms of Harrington are mostly the sour grapes of people who have not been able to accomplish in decades what Harrington has done in a few years.

"A lot of people want to be chiefs, and not a lot want to be Indians. What you have to look at is what are you accomplishing here and now. Is it benefiting fathers and fathers' involvement in family life."

Before Harrington came along, Miller says, his phone calls to congressmen went unanswered, but now they call him; press releases he sent out went into the trash, but now he gets invited to appear on talk shows.

"Something about his personality opens doors. Some people have that persona, that charisma, and he has it."

Says Mary Cathcart, chairman of the President's Commission on Child and Family Welfare: "Bill has a clear agenda, and his role is to advocate. He knows his role, and he sticks too it. But he is respectful of other people's views."

Central to Harrington's thesis is that American men are encouraged to see making money as their role in life, that men are discouraged from playing a full part in family life - discouraged by business, by government and by women.

"There are no positive messages going to men about fatherhood," he says. "For 40 years we have been knocking men, saying they have no value except for making money."

Families need fathers, he says. "The virtue of men is that men are leaders. We need a new respect for the word `father.' "

His own father died when Harrington was 9.

"When you grow up without a father, there is a hole in your life, in your character, and you fill it with doing good things."

PREVENTING `STUPID WARS'

He sees some fathers'-rights leaders as too volatile to lead the charge. "It's too easy to fight the gender wars. My biggest role in the men's movement is to prevent stupid wars. No men versus women. No Democrats versus Republicans."

Harrington was born in Ephrata but moved with his mother and stepfather to New Haven, Conn., in 1960 when he was in middle school. He says that is when he became aware of social and governmental issues.

He heard Kennedy and Nixon speak on the town green in New Haven, and later heard President Kennedy speak at Yale. His interest in politics was whetted by that.

In 1969, while enrolled at the University of Washington, he was drafted. He never went to Vietnam because of one of the skills he uses now in his work for the coalition: networking. He knew people who knew people.

Asked for a list of people who know him well, he rattles off phone numbers of men in Texas, Virginia, Detroit, then some in Washington state. It takes a little longer to come up with a local woman.

But Harrington spent years working in the women's movement. He was married in 1972 to Melissa Thompson, a local businesswoman and women's-rights activist.

The two of them moved from Seattle to Washington, D.C., in 1976 when she was offered a key job in the national office of the National Organization for Women.

Harrington went to work for the American Association of University Women as a political organizer for the federal Equal Rights Amendment. He spent the last of their three years in Washington working for James Abourezk, then a Democratic senator from South Dakota, and getting to know more of Washington's ins and outs.

When the couple moved back to Seattle, he worked for a while in various political jobs, then both of them started businesses. His involved salvage logging and providing firewood to a variety of clients.

They had a daughter in 1982 and a son the following year.

The kind of family life Harrington talks about - husband and wife as full partners raising their children, the man providing leadership - didn't happen.

They were divorced in 1987, but it was not a clean break. Court papers are full of charges and countercharges. Did he cause the children emotional and psychological damage? Did she break into his house? Did he physically assault her?

The divorce settlement did not require Harrington to make child-support payments; most of the court fights seem to be about access to the children.

Thompson declined to be interviewed. "Anything I say or do could only have a negative impact on my children," she said. "I will only say that his children have not spent a night at his house in years." She says it is not because she would not allow it.

Harrington says he treasures time with his children, but that he has chosen the "sacrifice of my time with my kids for the benefit of others."

The year after their divorce, Harrington got involved in an effort to change state divorce laws.

He went back to school at the UW's Tacoma branch campus and studied to become a legal assistant. He has been doing that work for four years.

The woman he lives with in Tacoma is a lawyer who he says supports his work and does similar work herself. Harrington declined to permit an interview with her, saying he wants to protect the privacy of his personal life.

He spends much of his time networking and writing, traveling often to Washington and to commission hearings around the country.

Jim Towslee of Gig Harbor, the state coordinator for the American Fathers Coalition, says, "The man doesn't have any hobbies that I know of. His entire time is devoted to . . . noncustodial parents. He's on a mission."