JUST TRY TO INDICT HIM ON HIS AGE

Robert Morgenthau is sitting up in his vast and cluttered office at One
Hogan Place, braced for my searing questions about the death penalty, the
Rockefeller drug laws, the falling murder rate, the rising sleaze on Wall
Street and all the other things that veteran New York prosecutors get asked
about, especially when they're running for re-election.

But I don't care about any of that. Not today.

I am here to ask the only question that matters as the 85-year-old
Manhattan district attorney prepares to announce that, yes, he would like
another four-year term.

I ask it the only way I know how to, which is straight out.

"Are you too old to be DA?"

"I don't deny my age," the dean of American prosecutors says with - what is
that? a smile? a wink? I guess I'd call it a shrugging sense of
well-I-am-85-so-I-probably-have-to-deal-with-this-eventually-and-I-might
- -as-wel l-get-started-now.

Morgenthau looks thin, but then he's always looked thin. He slouches, but
then people a fraction of his age do that, too. When he rises from his
chair to grab some papers, his gait is not exactly sprightly. But he isn't
wobbling either. After 30 years in this office, he wears a hearing aid. But
his answers are quick and crisp.

"So?" I ask again. "Are you too old?"

"Absolutely not."

"You'll be 90 when the term is up."

"I can still add."

He sets the papers down and continues.

"My health is good," he says. "I have a terrific staff. I insulate them
from political pressure. We have a lot of important things we're doing
now." He mentions official-corruption investigations, banking fraud cases,
terror-money links, domestic violence initiatives - all gaining focus as
Manhattan street crime has fallen so precipitously. "I would hate to see
that staff disbanded or have someone take over who didn't understand our
priorities."

That someone waiting eagerly in the wings this year is Leslie Crocker
Snyder, a former sex-crimes prosecutor and state judge best known for
giving maximum sentences in narcotics cases. Her autobiography is called
"25 to Life." She is 62.

Snyder, like Morgenthau, hasn't announced yet. But like him, she's running,
for sure. With crime way down and no big office scandal to point to, her
unspoken campaign slogan will almost certainly be, "He's too old."

Morgenthau says he's fit for that fight.

"I've been blessed with good health, knock on wood," he says. "I'm in good
shape. If I weren't, I wouldn't be running. You be the judge. Do you think
I'm failing?"

He reaches for a tan parka on a nearby chair. It has a ski-lift ticket
clipped to the zipper. One of the courthouse beat reporters, he says,
noticed the tag recently.

"You ski?" she asked.

"You're darn right," the DA remembers saying. "My son has a place at
Hunter. I go up there. I play tennis." It's the first thing he's said
that's a little hard to visualize. "There is nothing I can't do. I can't
run a mile anymore in 10 minutes. But I walk everywhere. I have seven
children. You have to stay young for them. The only thing the doctor said
don't do is fall."

His drive to carry on, he says, goes back to World War II. The scion of a
prominent Manhattan family (Dad was FDR's treasury secretary, Grandpa was
ambassador to Turkey), young Bob was executive officer of a U.S. destroyer
that was struck off Algiers by a German torpedo. He drifted in the
Mediterranean in a life preserver.

"I made a number of commitments when I didn't have much of a bargaining
position," he says. "I was gonna do something unusual with my life if I got
out alive."

These days, he says, he's up every morning at 6:45. "I have a 14-year-old
daughter to get off to school. I'm on the treadmill six days a week. I have
breakfast - cereal, fruit, coffee." Then it's straight to Hogan Place.

"Lunch out most days, in the neighborhood so I can walk. Salad, pasta,
fish. I eat three squares. I was the middle child. I needed to attract
attention. I was the best eater in the family."

Most nights include an hour or two of reading at home. "And I have my other
two jobs," chairing the Police Athletic League and the Museum of Jewish
Heritage.

So what's he learned in 85 years?

"You get smarter," says the nine-time candidate for DA. "Some things you
don't worry about so much. What people say about you. Some temporary
setback in a case. You say, 'I've made tough decisions before, and they
worked out OK.'"

The life and times of Robert M. Morgenthau

A look at key events in the life of the longtime Manhattan district
attorney, whose career spans much of the 20th century, and some
corresponding milestones in history:

1919

Born July 31 in New York

City

Prohibition begins

Grand Canyon National Park opens

1941

Graduates Amherst College

Pearl Harbor is bombed

"Citizen Kane" is released

1948

Graduates Yale Law School

Israel is declared an independent state

Fresh Kills landfill opens

1961

Appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York by President
John F. Kennedy

Bay of Pigs invasion

Ernest Hemingway dies

1974

Elected New York District Attorney

Patty Hearst is kidnapped

Richard Nixon is impeached