PBS’ Man of Destiny : After less than a year as president, Ervin S. Duggan has big plans for public television. But right now he’s got a concern that’s somewhat more immediate: merely justifying the existence of PBS.

‘Can I go off the record? Can I tell you my fantasy?” PBS President Ervin S. Duggan suddenly says, barely waiting for an answer.

“On the night before the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta,” he unwinds slowly, “Falcon Stadium, there will be a magnificent concert, called--get this--’Night of the Divas,’ and we will have . . . who has been left out in the tenors thing?”

Women, obviously. Duggan is so taken with his idea that he readily agrees it can go on the record.

“We have Kiri Te Kanawa, we have Jessye Norman, we have, who’s the Italian (mezzo), Cecilia Bartoli? I don’t know who the three divas will be. But imagine, ‘Pavarotti or Carreras or Domingo Presenting. . . .’ ”

The 55-year-old former member of the Federal Communications Commission is sitting in a hotel suite at Universal City, tasseled loafers on an ottoman, reflecting on his tenure since taking office Feb. 1 as the fourth president in PBS’ 25-year history.

A man of many parts, who can drop VIP names into conversation as smoothly as he inserts quotes from literary figures, he promises to be public television’s most activist leader.

“Not much has been written for three sopranos to sing together,” he adds, “but we’ll find it. Think of the love duets where this tenor can successively sing with the divas. It will be socko.”

An innate optimist, Duggan spins a web of plans and fantasies, from funding ventures to program ideas, including his signature effort, “The Democracy Project,” which promises to be a diverse series of programs “illuminating issues and political processes” in advance of the 1996 presidential election.

Yet he also has spent much of his first 7 1/2 months in office on the defensive. Only the day before, he was grilled by a gathering of TV critics from across the country, particularly about PBS’ decision not to fund a sequel to the controversial but highly rated and critically praised miniseries based on Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City.” A few weeks earlier Duggan appeared before a Senate subcommittee where some members were angry that the program had been broadcast at all; now he was facing people upset that PBS wasn’t going to do another one. Duggan insisted that the reason for rejecting the sequel was “economics”--PBS was being asked to kick in more than it thought prudent--but he also noted that “viewers in Mississippi are different from viewers in California.”

And what about the decision not to air “Defending Our Lives,” about domestic violence, which won the Academy Award for best documentary short of 1993? He said it violated PBS’ funding guidelines by having underwriters and key participants involved in its preparation.

How about “The Fire This Time,” a documentary about the 1992 Los Angeles riots that PBS also has turned down? “Frontline” already presented a similar program, he said.

None of it, he kept repeating, constituted censorship--merely editorial discretion, the same way a newspaper decides which articles to publish and which to spike.

“We have written the word courage across the screen again and again,” he said in PBS’ defense.

The drumbeat of tough questions clearly caught Duggan by surprise--even though his staff had warned him to expect it. At a patio reception six hours later, he was still talking about “unhappy” producers, “disgruntled” producers, who don’t understand the game and take their gripes to the press. He cited his 1977 political novel--”Against All Enemies,” co-authored with Ben J. Wattenberg--which was supposed to have been made into a movie but ultimately was turned down. He accepted the rejection; why couldn’t they?

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For $148,400 a year, Duggan has put himself in quite a hot seat. Public television is at a critical juncture. There are squabbles with independent producers and with watchdog groups that complain that its programming is too liberal or not liberal enough. There also is the more serious balancing act that must be maintained with the forces in Congress that can turn PBS into a political football. Moreover, competition is escalating at a marathon rate while funding is proceeding in relatively small steps.

The growth of cable is encroaching on the public network from every side. Discovery offers the same sort of nature documentaries. The Food Network is chock-full of PBS-type cooking shows. Bravo just announced a series of six Metropolitan Opera telecasts. CNN provides news and documentaries. Nickelodeon is developing a morning block of children’s programming that will challenge “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” for viewers.

With increasing frequency, the question is being asked whether PBS has a role to play in the burgeoning television landscape that is distinctive and important enough to warrant taxpayer support.

To Duggan, the answer is clear. He talks about public TV being synonymous with the school, the library, the museum.

“Imagine asserting that the existence of dozens of private commercial art galleries in Washington makes the National Gallery obsolete,” he said in a keynote speech last fall before the Southern Educational Communications Assn., an address that helped him win the PBS job.

He points out that cable reaches only 63% of American households--those that can afford it. And with the exception of the pay channels, which cost even more, cable programs are interrupted by advertising.

Which is why, Duggan asserts, acclaimed producer Ken Burns, who was “besieged with lucrative offers” after “The Civil War” in 1990, stayed with PBS, where his 18 1/2-hour “Baseball” is currently unwinding. He quotes Burns as saying, “No one can give me the creative freedom (of) public television. I can sustain the note.”

Then Duggan adds: “If he went to cable, (he) would be interrupted with commercials for diapers for incontinent geriatrics.”

In a sense, Duggan has come full circle with the PBS job. In 1965, after a year as a Washington Post reporter, he went to work as speech writer in President Lyndon Johnson’s White House.

“One of the great moments of my life (there) was the creation of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Douglass Cater was the great architect of public television,” Duggan says, referring to a senior adviser he assisted, “so I had the sense of being present at the creation.”

He also happily mentions “walking down the hall and seeing the towering, looming figure of Lyndon Johnson, waving his arms, shouting down at a hapless aide, ‘I don’t want to hear why I can’t do it, I want to hear how I can do it.’ ” Duggan is an excellent mimic.

It is this sort of outsize Johnsonesque “Great Society” approach Duggan brings to his job. He talks of “binding ourselves anew to the original educational mission of public television--education, culture and citizenship.”

“I think he is the strongest national spokesperson public television has ever had,” said William H. Kobin, president and chief executive officer of Los Angeles’ KCET-TV Channel 28. “I think he is beginning to have probably more public and political impact than any leader we’ve ever had. He’s enormously bright, really literally learned and never at a loss for a colorful phrase.”

Though he was raised in Atlanta and the South Carolina lowlands and graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina, Duggan shows not a trace of regionalism in his speech, which is clipped, precise and polished.

A son of the Old South, Duggan traces U.S. family roots back to the 1680s, when an ancestor emigrated from France. After his father died, Duggan spent the rest of his childhood and teen years living with his mother, brothers, aunts and cousins in a “house that was 150 years old and had columns in front” in Manning, S.C. “It was very much a place of the 19th Century,” he says. “Darwin, Freud and Marx had not arrived in the culture of low-country South Carolina when I was growing up.”

But Duggan became unremittingly New South at Davidson, where he was “sort of a crusading editor on behalf of dismantling segregation in the early days of the civil rights movement.” He says he had “all my ducks in a row to go to law school” when Alfred Friendly, then managing editor of the Washington Post, recruited him. “I think they saw me as a young Ralph McGill, and I liked to think of myself (that way).”

Ask Duggan what he believes he has accomplished at PBS thus far, and what has eluded him, and he replies: “I don’t think something that has not yet been accomplished has eluded us. It just hasn’t been addressed yet.”

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Duggan says he has undertaken a campaign called Operation Momentum “to rally the system, to talk about (PBS’) assets”--which he considers “right up there with IBM or Coca-Cola in terms of recognition”--and to “induce the system to believe in itself and its future again.”

He has identified 16 projects, he says, that will “create the sense of forward momentum.” Among them are a joint venture with Turner Home Entertainment to market PBS programs on home video and another with Disney to share costs on the children’s educational series “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” which is being shown on both public and commercial stations.

These efforts will provide “nonprofit venture capital,” Duggan notes, and will “send a signal that there is a new way of doing business at PBS. We do not believe that being a nonprofit institution should be equated with bankruptcy.”

Eli Evans, president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation and a former member of two Carnegie commissions that studied public broadcasting, considers Duggan to be “the right man at the right time.”

“Of all the choices that the board of PBS had before it,” Evans said, “Ervin was the wisest. He’s a leader, and he cares. He understands the future of the telecommunications revolution.” He also knows Washington very well, Evans added: “He understands the Congress, he understands the agencies . . . he knows the players.”

I ndeed, though Duggan resists being called an inside-the-Belt way figure, he is very well connected.

After leaving the Johnson Administration, he served as director of special history and art projects at the Smithsonian Institution, worked as an adviser to Sens. Adlai E. Stevenson III (D-Ill.) and Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.)--now secretary of the Treasury--and, during the Jimmy Carter Administration, worked at the State Department and as a special assistant to Joseph A. Califano Jr., secretary of health, education and welfare.

In 1981, he formed Ervin S. Duggan Associates, a consulting firm with blue-chip clients that included American Express and Cigna Corp. He also became part-time national editor and writer for Washingtonian magazine. Through Sandy Berger, now deputy national security adviser for President Clinton, he met socialite and Democratic activist Pamela Harriman and helped arrange big-ticket Democratic fund-raisers. And he met Bill Clinton.

“I don’t know (the President) as well as I might, although I’ve been to all the Renaissance Weekends,” Duggan says, referring to the annual public policy retreats held in Hilton Head, S.C.

In 1990, he was appointed to the FCC by President George Bush, whom he did not know. His nomination received the endorsement of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. Duggan, who is Presbyterian, says the support resulted from his work with Helsinki Watch groups to help secure the release of imprisoned Christian poet Irina Ratushinskaya.

“Everything that has happened in my life has happened by accident,” Duggan insists. “Everything. I have never looked for a job in my life. My wife says (she) has pounded the pavements looking for jobs, and she laughs at how the heavens open up and Duggan is swept into a job.”

As he turns on his laptop to reference his initiatives, a voice crackles. “That’s my (younger teen-age) son’s voice (saying), ‘Welcome, oh brilliant one.’ ”

Of all his initiatives, the project closest to Duggan’s heart is “The Democracy Project”--to “broaden, deepen and refresh” public affairs programming. How much it will cost is still to be determined, as is an exact air date.

“Duggan on his first day at PBS gathered his staff and said, ‘ “The Democracy Project” is going to be one thing that we do.’ And everybody fell in and was quite excited,” he says.

He sees “Democracy” as delivering “depth, deliberation, duration, dialogue” nationally and locally. As he outlines it, the project encompasses several strands: “civic journalism,” in which reporters go to the public to find out their concerns, then seek responses from political leaders; polling; expanded debates; enlarging the joint venture by which NBC and PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” collaborated during the 1992 presidential nominating conventions, and town meetings in which “people are up on the dais and the politicians in the dock.”

To help chart the project’s course, Duggan set up an advisory panel chaired by Harry C. McPherson, a Washington lawyer who had been counsel in Johnson’s White House, and Peggy Noonan, former speech writer for Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush. He considers Noonan, who will do a series on “values,” a “kind of Katharine Hepburn.”

But, Duggan is asked, in this era of limited resources, when there is so much public affairs programming on commercial entities, from CNN to “Nightline” and a spate of prime-time newsmagazines, why is he focusing on “Democracy”?

“This myth of limited resources--yes, we have limited financial resources,” he says, “but we don’t have limited resources of imagination.”

Moments later, sounding a bit testy, he adds: “So what are you telling me, that we shouldn’t try?”

With so little PBS money going to serious American drama--$6.7 million to “American Playhouse” this fiscal year, shrinking to $1.7 million next fiscal year, down even further after that--wouldn’t it make more sense to concentrate where commercial broadcasting is lacking?

Punching out his interviewer’s name like little exclamation points, Duggan replies: “Judy! Judy! Judy! Judy! Judy! This is the rhetoric of scarcity and defeat. . . . If people in my system talk that way, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. . . . Money is not everything. Dignity, responsibility, professionalism, imagination, creativity will beat mere dollars anytime.

“Scarlett O’Hara, wrapping herself in the curtains, is the belle of the ball. That was not money. That was nerve and verve. We have been doing great television on a fraction of what the commercial nets do,” says Duggan, who likes to point out that what Fox paid to acquire National Football League games--$1.6 billion--eclipses the $1.4-billion budget for the entire public television system: network, programming and 346 stations.

“You know, the lack of money--every Southerner understands it,” he goes on. “In that respect, the novel ‘Gone With the Wind’ was true. Southerners understand, because they live from generations. They live from the poverty of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As soon as they began to get on their feet economically, World War I came, and being beaten down economically is sort of a historic theme of life in the South. . . . And here you have the most impoverished and poorly educated system throwing up the greatest novelists--Eudora Welty and Faulkner.”

So why not bring us Faulkner and Welty on PBS? “It’s a question of priorities,” he says.

“Look,” he adds on reflection, “you do things one at a time, select the passions that are most doable. We have real hurdles to cross in drama--the expenses, the union costs. You don’t create a sense of momentum by selecting the impossible jobs first.

“You know the thing that troubles me?” he says about that hostile meeting with the press. “It was all a dismal raking over of old coals. What Duggan is about is tomorrow, and that session is about yesterday.”