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A month after selling their Del Mar Heights home, Cunningham and his wife, Nancy, paid $2.5 million for an 8,000-square-foot home in exclusive Rancho Santa Fe owned by Douglas and Karen Powanda.
Douglas Powanda is a former executive vice president at Peregrine Systems, a San Diego-based business-software company.
Peregrine was Cunningham's third-largest corporate contributor in 2004, giving $14,000 in individual and corporate donations. In late 2004, Powanda was among eight former Peregrine executives indicted by a federal grand jury in an alleged multibillion-dollar securities fraud; he awaits trial.
Cunningham, known as accessible and cordial even to reporters who have written critically of him, has hunkered down in the wake of the disclosures about the Del Mar Heights house sale.
Meanwhile, Republicans are maneuvering to run for the seat from northern San Diego County if Cunningham opts to retire. Ron Nehring, chairman of the county GOP committee, has asked Cunningham to clarify the house sale and yacht situation.
Others think no amount of clarification will help. "I think he's dead," said Republican political consultant and lobbyist John Dadian.
County Supervisor Bill Horn pleaded for the public to reserve judgment. "I know everybody's pounced on him, but I think he's due his day in the public square, to explain himself," said Horn.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) ) said that "people should remember that Duke Cunningham has honorably served this country, sometimes in great danger, for 35 years."
A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of the University of Missouri, Cunningham served in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross for bravery, second only to the Medal of Honor among Navy and Marine Corp medals.
He became an instructor at the Top Gun school in San Diego and after his retirement in 1987, decided to go into politics -- just after the movie "Top Gun," released in May 1986, had made celebrities of Navy aviators.
In 1990 he challenged a Democratic incumbent, Rep. Jim Bates, who had been censured by the House for alleged sexual harassment of female staff members. After a narrow victory, Cunningham found himself in the national media.
In the Persian Gulf War, when the United States pushed Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait, reporters were desperate for high-profile combat veterans to explain the war and its tactics, particularly the air war over Baghdad.
As one of the few decorated combat veterans in Congress, the freshman got the kind of exposure that few members of Congress receive. In 1992, looking for a more conservative district, he challenged Republican incumbent Bill Lowery, who was bogged down in the House banking controversy.
Lowery dropped out of the race and Cunningham was elected. In six successive elections he has never been seriously challenged; political professionals consider California's 50th Congressional District a "safe" seat for the GOP.
Throughout his career, Cunningham's views have been conservative and his rhetoric sometimes bombastic. He has referred to gays as "homos," made a derogatory quip about the openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and suggested that Bill Clinton's antiwar past would have made him a candidate for being "tried as a traitor and even shot" had he lived in another country.
In later years, he has supported medical research programs that he once blasted as wasteful. In 1998 he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. Last year, he was among Republicans who urged President Bush to ease restrictions on stem-cell research.
In recent years, Nancy Cunningham, a former school administrator in suburban Encinitas, moved to Washington to be with her husband, taking a post with the Education Department. The couple have three grown children.
His seniority has brought him prominent committee assignments. Cunningham serves on the Select Committee on Intelligence, and as chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Intelligence, Analysis and Counterintelligence in addition to his
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