BANANA REPUBLICAN

WASHINGTON WAS SHUT down by snow, Congress and the White House were locked in budget combat, and U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor last week was talking about...bananas. Kantor announced a cease-fire in a yearlong imbroglio with banana producers Colombia and Costa Rica. In the past, he said, the two countries had joined with the 12-nation European Union to create trade policies that have hurt American commercial interests. Never mind that few bananas are grown in the U.S. or that only a handful of American jobs was at stake. Forget too that major U.S. producers Del Monte and Dole Foods want no part of the immediate spat. After noting he was ruling out sanctions against the transgressors for now, Kantor announced the two Latin American countries had agreed to urge free-market policies on Europe to open up the global banana trade.

The story might have been just another ho-hum item in the trade newspapers, except for a striking fact. One company--and one man--stood to gain more than anyone else from the exercise in U.S. trade pressure. The man is Carl Lindner, 76, a Cincinnati, Ohio, real estate, insurance and banana tycoon who likes to boast of his friendships with U.S. Presidents and sometimes blusters about what his political connections can do for him. For more than two years, Lindner has showered money on some of the biggest names in Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike. At the same time, Lindner, whose empire is worth an estimated $13 billion, has worked tirelessly to get Washington's help in changing the fortunes of his well-known Chiquita Brands banana company, which lost $346 million between 1992 and 1994 and was barely in the black in 1995.

Kantor aside, no one has championed Lindner's cause more enthusiastically than Bob Dole. In recent months Dole has twice pressed for congressional action against Colombia and Costa Rica and tried unsuccessfully to attach a rider to the stalled budget bill that would place sanctions on those countries unless they pulled out of the European pact. TIME has learned that Dole has persuaded several congressional leaders to include language expressing disapproval of Colombia's and Costa Rica's deal with the European Union in the report that accompanies any final budget agreement. Dole insists that standing up for Lindner is simply good policy. A spokesman for the majority leader's office argues that his "efforts on behalf of free and fair trade have nothing to do with his campaign activities."

Maybe not, but Lindner has long been a generous political bankroller. He and his companies lavished $1.3 million on G.O.P. committees from 1988 through 1994, while putting $625,000 in Democratic coffers. Lindner's holding company, American Financial Group, gave an additional $140,000 to the Republicans in the first half of 1995, and handed $40,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee last October, just as Dole was pushing Chiquita's interests in Congress. Lindner also contributed $100,000 to Dole's now defunct Better America Foundation, which helped launch his presidential bid.

Dole has frequently used Lindner's corporate aircraft on the campaign trail. His office repaid Lindner nearly $45,000 for air travel in the first nine months of 1995, based on first-class commercial rates. But the plane rides are worth far more than that, since they amount to airborne limousine service. Dole is not the only pol to get special treatment. Lindner flew Newt Gingrich to a G.O.P. fund raiser in Cincinnati in December 1994 and shared the flight back to Washington.

The reclusive Lindner, a strict Baptist who doesn't smoke, drink or swear, is an all-American success story. Raised in a blue-collar Cincinnati neighborhood, he dropped out of high school at age 14 to help with his family's small dairy. He enlarged the business into the foundation stone of his current empire. Lindner acquired control of Chiquita in 1984. Last year he reorganized American Financial Group, which includes Chiquita and insurance and broadcasting interests, and sold a 49% stake of the holding company in a public stock offering. But the empire remains burdened by Chiquita's troubles, which include a $1.3 billion debt load from an ill-advised expansion after Lindner took over.

Through strenuous cost cutting, Lindner turned a $56 million profit at Chiquita during the first nine months of 1995. But he blames the company's still fragile condition on the agreement between Europe and its trading partners, a deal that sets preferential quotas for bananas grown in former colonies like Jamaica and the Ivory Coast. Colombia and Costa Rica, originally outside the arrangement, have cut their own restrictive deals with Europe and thereby bolstered the quota system.

All that has struck hard at Chiquita. Unlike rival banana growers Del Monte and Dole Foods, the company has grown its wares mainly in Central America and has seen this fruit shut out of the protected Euromarkets. In a bid to change Colombia's policy, Lindner arranged a showdown with the country's President, Ernesto Samper Pizano, in a Miami hotel room in December 1994. There, he pulled out pictures of himself with Ronald Reagan and George Bush and bragged of his relationships with Dole and Gingrich. Colombian Ambassador to Washington Carlos Lleras, who was present, reports that Samper was "very shocked, and I was very angry."

That demonstration may not have changed Colombian minds, and Kantor did little more. Lindner likes to say that "I don't understand balance sheets very well, but I do understand people very well." When it comes to bananas, though, he may still have something to learn.