8TH DISTRICT VICTORY BITTERSWEET; JO ANN EMERSON IS FOLLOWING IN HER LATE HUSBAND'S FOOTSTEPS

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson's daughter Katharine spoke for both of them recently as they sat at a celebratory dinner with other incoming House freshmen at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

"This is a little bit weird, Mom," the 14-year-old told the new Republican congresswoman from Missouri's 8th District.

Emerson has just won a bruising campaign -- raising an impressive $350,000 in just three and a half months, discarding her natural stage fright and decisively besting her Democratic opponent and three others in not one, but two, elections on the same day (all in her first outing as a political candidate). But Emerson was in no mood to celebrate.

She and Katharine, along with 18-year-old daughter Tori, are still grappling with the loss of husband and father, Bill Emerson, an eight-term House member who died, at 58, in June. It was his death from lung cancer that brought Jo Anne Emerson to Congress, where she must deal with her grief at the same time she's dealing with the people's business.

"It feels funny," she says, taking a break from the marathon bull sessions of freshman orientation week to reflect on her emotional state. "It's sad. It's bittersweet, you know," she adds, picking over a breakfast of fresh fruit at La Brasserie on Capitol Hill.

At 46, she's a bright-eyed, girlish woman in a good Republican tweed jacket -- certainly not a vision of widowhood. She has always enjoyed an independent identity. Before she ran for her husband's seat (as a Republican in the special election to fill his unexpired term and, because of the vagaries of Missouri's ballot deadlines, as an independent in the race to succeed him), she was earning more than the $133,000 salary of a House member as senior vice president for public affairs of the American Insurance Association. Before taking that job, she spent 20 years as a lobbyist, grassroots organizer and political operative.

"I'm not excited like the other freshmen are excited," Emerson says, "I haven't worked for a year or two years, or fours years, to get here. I guess I've spent all of my life working to try to make this a better place, along with my husband, but I haven't personally been running for this seat. The other morning, we all had a session with Newt" -- as in House Speaker Gingrich -- "and I got up and said, "`Unlike every one of you, five months ago I would never have thought I'd be here.'"

"I think this was part of her grieving process," said her close friend Debbie Dingeil, a government affairs executive for General Motors and the wife of Rep. John Dingeil (D-Mich.) "In some ways, this is how she has chosen to grieve -- by walking the same paths that she and Bill walked together. She has always felt that Bill is there with her."

Bill Emerson died on June 22, the day after their 21st wedding anniversary. He was in line to become chairman of the Agriculture Committee in the 105th Congress. Everyone from Gingrich to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta (a former House colleague on Agriculture) attended his funeral in Cape Girardeau -- a tribute to Emersons rare spirit of accommodation amid the acrid partisanship of the '90s.

But now he was gone -- and with him, apparently, the Republican lock on this House seat that, until Emerson won it in 1980, had been for five decades the property of southern Missouri's powerful yellow-dog Democrats. Unless, of course, the GOP could instantly field a popular candidate to assume the Emerson mantel of social conservatism with government activism (that is, the federal largess often derided as "pork").

Jo Ann Emerson, everyone agreed, was just that candidate.

After Bill, a three-pack-a-day smoker, learned he had an inoperable tumor in October 1995, the two of them refused to consider it a death sentence, opting for aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. But after he started showing up for floor votes with a wheelchair and an oxygen tank, he began asking his wife at least to think about running. Without her knowledge, he was also discussing the idea with his top political advisers, laying the groundwork for Jo Ann's new career.

"He had asked me on occasion, `Would you ever want to do this?'" she recalls. "And I would say, `We're not going to talk about that because you're going to be fine.' I'm very good at that, you know. If I don't want to think about something, then I just don't think about it. I can put it away for another day."

But at the funeral, friends and even a few strangers were also starting to importune her.

"There were three specific people at the funeral who came to pay their respects to Bill," she says. "There were people who did not know Bill -- just, you know, constituents. There was a naturalized American citizen who owns a small business in Cape Girardeau and he was just so sad that Bill died. And he said to me 'Do you think you'd want to run for his seat?' And I looked at him, sort of in this fog, and I said, 'I can't even think.'

"Then there was a guy who has lots of tattoos all over his arms, a biker-type whom Bill had helped. He may have been a veteran, but I don't know. And the other one was a lady who was just crying, had never met Bill, but said 'He got my father's war medals for me.' I really didn't know any of these people. I didn't even get their names."

But the encounters had a profound impact on Emerson, who says that "never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that I would do something like this."

In the days after her husband's burial, the entire Republican establishment, in Missouri and in Washington, coaxed her into taking the plunge. On July 10 she announced her candidacy back in the 8th District, a long swath of farms and smallish towns that runs from just south of St. Louis to the Arkansas border. "I was so totally focused on a mission to keep the seat and make it a living memorial to Bill," she says.

Just two years after the Republicans conquered Congress, promising revolution, Emerson perfectly captured in her announcement speech the new zeitgeist of bipartisanship. Her platform was the opposite of ideology: a federally-funded bridge over the Mississippi River, widened four-lane highways, soybean research, help for the timber and mining industries, student loans and, way down at the bottom of her list, "the rights of the unborn" and "the right to pray in school."

"I'm not a zealot," she says.

"I never sought this job. Fate put me here," she continues. "So I want to take the skills that I have, whether it's coalition building or strategy or being able to solve problems, and put them to work. I"m very locally oriented. I want to get things done for the folks back home."

"She knows every button to push," says John Buckley, with whom Emerson toiled in the late 1980s at the National Republican Congressional Committee, where, as Buckley's deputy, she supervised the communications operation. "And because she comes from a political background ... she comes to Congress with enormous skill and wide experience."

Far from being a rural Missourian, Jo Ann Emerson is a creature of the capital. Emerson, who now lives in McLean, Va., was born at Sibley Hospital and grew up in Bethesda, Md., the daughter of Ab Hermann, a longtime fixture at the Republican National Committee, and Ab's equally political wife, Sylvia (who introduced her to Bill, then a lobbyist and Republican activist.) The Hermanns' back yard adjoined that of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.), and Jo Ann regularly attended the glamorous parties Hale and Lindy Boggs threw for the likes of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Despite their partisan differences, Hale and Ab frequently shared conversation and bourbon and branch water, on their back patios -- and Hale's daughter Cokie often baby-sat for Jo Ann.

"The thing these women all discover is that they play different roles from their husbands," says Emerson's former babysitter, now better known as ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts, whose mother, Lindy Boggs, served in Hale's seat after he died in a plane crash. "Because they are women, people do come to them with their problems and concerns and the constituents feel much readier to talk to them."

Roberts, a veteran on the congressional beat, says she understands the loss that Emerson must be feeling as she takes up her new duties.

"You find yourself turning a corner in the Capitol, and something strikes you -- a mural, maybe -- and it hits you in the back of the head. It's a sense of 'I miss him.' In some ways, being in the building will help Jo Ann. She'll be among his friends and people who loved Bill -- and people did love him. There will be moments when she's just taken aback by something physical, and it rushes in a flood of memories, and she finds her eyes filling with tears. But that's fine, in a way. She'll go on."

Emerson says it's especially tough getting through some of the rites of freshmanhood that she enjoyed with her husband when he was first elected in 1980 -- such as the speaker's dinner in Statuary Hall and the candlelight tour of the House. "So much of what I'm doing right now brings back all sorts of memories of when I did it the first time," she says.

On Election Day, she went to her husband's grave, the first visit since the funeral. "I spent a lot of time talking to him during the campaign. I just said to him I hope he thought this was the right thing to do. The visit gave me strength to get through the election. I realized that my winning was not only a tribute to Bill, it was in part because I worked so hard for it. I did it for Bill, but I also did for me."