Back in 1989, Fortune writer Daniel Seligman got so fed up with reading yet another Washington Post story about the demise of the traditional "Ozzie and Harriet" nuclear family he did a computer search on the phrase "Ozzie and Harriet" over the preceding six month period and turned up 88 stories. The usual context in which the phrase was invoked, asked Seligman? "A politician was on stage reciting the news that the traditional nuclear family -- the kind symbolized by the Nelsons during their marathon stint on black-and-white TV -- was dead or dying. Usual moral of the recitation: we need a government program to help the new nontraditional family--the kind where mom is a cop, the kids are on dope, and dad is nonexistent or worse."

In the three years since Seligman did his little survey, announcements of the death of the nuclear family have gotten much more intense, especially since Dan Quayle spoke out on behalf of the nuclear family and in response about 5000 reporters, columnists, essayists and intellectuals rose up to attack him for his nostalgic defense of the nonexistent nuclear family.

• "The white middle class family is a fairy tale," sniffed Ellen Snortland in the Los Angeles Times.

• The Reagan/Bush administrations were trying to re-create the "June Cleaver nuclear family," complained Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of NOW. "The nuclear family doesn't exist anymore. The majority of families are headed by women. The economy is based on something that doesn't exist."

• ". . . the number of kids who will grow up [in a traditional family] is minuscule," wrote Robert Turner in the Boston Globe.

• "Only 26% of U.S. households with children under 18 are headed by a married couple," said the Daily News. "Down from 31% in 1980."

It would be tragic indeed if all these people were right. The question is, is it true? Is the nuclear family really dead?

Not if you believe government figures on the matter.

According to 1990 Bureau of the Census figures, rumors of the family's death are grossly exaggerated--72.5% of children in the country under the age of 18 live in a home headed by a married couple. Another 21.6% live with their mothers only. (The remaining 6% live with their fathers, grandparents or other guardians).

In Los Angeles County, the figures are even more dramatic with the percentage of children living with two parents varying from 89% in La Canada Flintridge, 88% in Westlake Village and 86% in Hidden Hills to a 47% in Compton. For Los Angeles County as a whole, the figure is 64%.

So why do so many people think the nuclear family has disappeared?

One reason suggests William Mattox, director of policy analysis for the Family Research Council, based in Washington, D.C., is that many "upper- middle-class educated" feminists erroneously assume that "every one lives the same way they do." That is to say, in fast-track urban enclaves with disproportionately high rates of alienation, anomie, divorce and single parenthood.

In addition, there is always the general mismatch between reporters and statistics. Having eschewed math in college as a tool of the military industrial complex, most reporters are no better equipped to interpret statistics than they are to fly the space shuttle. The Daily News reporter who thought that only 26% of children under 18 lived with their parents was simply out of her league. What the census shows, says Census Bureau information specialist Larry Hugg, is that 27% of all households consist of two parents and their children.

Well, what of it, you might ask--that's still a tragic number.

Not really. The percentage of households made up of nuclear families has certainly declined, but the reason isn't because most kids now days are being raised by single moms or strangers. The reason is that there are so many more households made up of widows, college students, childless married couples, empty nest couples, and gay households. If you confine yourself to what Mattox calls "the universe of children" (which is what you must do if your goal is to discover who is raising the children), then you discover, says Mattox, that "70% to 75% of all kids are being raised in a nuclear family."

Then where, you might ask, do people like Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd get off saying that only "one in ten American families" fit the fifties mold of dad at work and mom at home with the kids? Or how can Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder maintain, as she does, that "the traditional Ozzie and Harriet" family represents a mere 7.1% of all American families?

The short answer is she uses statistics the same way the Queen of Hearts uses words--"They mean whatever I want them to mean."

Schroeder's contention that "traditional-Ozzie-and-Harriet" families now make up only 7.1% of all families is shell game inside a house of mirrors. In order to make the percentage of traditional families (breadwinner father, mother at home with children) look vanishingly small, Schroeder includes in her calculations both families with children and those without any at all (this alone makes the problem look 50% worse than it would otherwise). She further defines traditional to mean only those families where the mother does no work whatsoever outside the home (under the government classification, says Mattox, even an hour's work a week outside the home is enough to cause a woman to be considered a working mother).

But the cherry on the cheesecake is Schroeder's ingenious semantic distinction. When she uses the phrase "traditional Ozzie and Harriet family," what she literally means is a family exactly like Ozzie and Harriet's--a family which has precisely two children (David and Ricky). Under Schroeder's definition, a family with one child isn't a traditional Ozzie and Harriet family. Nor is any family with three or more children.

There is nothing particularly new about attempts to demean the nuclear family and demonize dads. As far back as the late sixties, feminists were going around saying marriage is a patriarchal trap, children are a disaster, "the erect penis is a symbol of male aggression" and "sex is rape" (actually Catharine MacKinnon is still saying that today). In an infamous example of the hysteria of the age, Ms. Magazine once ran a interview with a feminist who was stunned and appalled to discover that her newborn child was member of the hated oppressor class. The obstetrician held him up, she wailed, "and all I could see was cock." Hillary Clinton in a now famous 1974 article in the Harvard Educational Review described marriage as "a dependency relationship" not unlike "slavery and the Indian reservation system."

These just weren't just the rantings of the radical feminist left-- there were a lot of serious respected writers running around in the seventies, says USC sociologist Carlfred Broderick, turning out best selling books confidently predicting the death of the nuclear family--"We were the last generation who would grow up in a nuclear family. Families would have to give way to more flexible institutions."

Not surprisingly, says Broderick, the people hurt most by this were the people least able to defend themselves--the children. "The hippies had this notion of the free human child, who didn't belong to his parents but was everyone's child, who had no sexual hangups and didn't have to learn the alphabet or any hard thing and why should they be encumbered with the crust of the ages. It turned out that the kids couldn't read or write or add or hold jobs. It turned out that the kids who had multiple parents didn't have any parents. They tended to be abandoned and sexually abused and drug abused. They turned out to be the saddest children of all because their parents didn't take adult responsibility for them."

Despite all the predictions about the need for more flexible family structures, the family didn't disappear ("You can't erase a million years of human evolution in a ten year period," says Broderick). And by the mid- eighties a widespread if fragile consensus had formed around the notion that all things equal a two parent home was better for children than one. "It cut across ideological lines," says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. "It cut across politics. Liberals and conservatives supported it. So did Democrats and Republicans. Even the progressive Policy Institute was championing two-parent families."

At least they did till Dan Quayle gave a speech blaming the L.A. riots on the disintegrating family structure in the inner city. Then suddenly there were hundreds of intellectuals and critics ready, willing and able to bash the nuclear family, it that's what it took, to defeat Dan Quayle.

The "most egregious example" of such ideological attacks, says Blankenhorn, was a front page article in the Washington Post (which argued among other things that fathers were much less important than had previous been believed; new research now indicated that the education of the mother was now the most important factor and, at least for black girls, having both parents was worse than being raised by a single mom.)

In fact, a new politically correct position now emerged in which the nuclear family was understood as a fable from the fifties. In this view, standing up for the family was racist. Family values was actually a code word for hate. "Family values and the cult of the nuclear family, is at bottom, just another way to bash women, especially poor women," wrote Katha Pollitt in Nation. As for the father, it was now understood, that he was irrelevant at best, and at worst downright destructive.

"... nothing is more unsuitable to the needs of the young than 'suitable role models,'" New York writer Leonard Kriegel asserted in the L.A. Times. "The idea that role models can make substantial contributions to the prospects of the young ... is nonsense."

It's no mystery why so many poor women rely on welfare checks, argued feminist social critic Barbara Ehrenreich. They're a lot a lot less trouble than relying on a man.

"I disagree that a father's influence is positive," snapped Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. "I think it is absurd to say that a boy needs a father."

One thing for Ms. Bruce--she doesn't soft-pedal her opinions. When we called her for comment in the aftermath of the Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown affair, she initially responded with a warm conspiratorial chuckle which seemed to say, you serve up your softball pitches and I'll hit them out of the park, and together we'll expose Dan Quayle for what he really is--which is to say an anti-black, anti-woman, antediluvian bigot.

But once it was suggested to her that perhaps the vice-president, whatever his limitations as an original thinker, was at least right in his assertion that boys needed fathers, she went over-the-top ballistic. We were, she sputtered, trying to say that a single mother couldn't raise children without a man around. As a matter of fact, she thumped, the levels of child abuse "skyrocket" when a father is present in the home. The only way to keep men from passing their violent "male mind set" to their sons was to get the man out of the family entirely and give the mother a chance to raise a generation of feminist boys "who love women."

After five minutes she calmed down, observed that, of course, not every man was a child abuser/wife batterer, and pointed out that "the man I know is raising two children" and the fact of his maleness notwithstanding he has a "tremendous influence" on them.

Even so, just for a second there we felt we had an uncommonly clear insight into the kind of radical feminist soul that has contempt for men, dismisses fathers, and otherwise yearns for a brave new feminist society where the government provides the money, the childcare and whatever social services are necessary for a woman to raise children without the benefit of either a husband or a job.

Despite the attacks on the usefulness of fathers, in the sociological literature evidence of the need for fathers is incontestable, says Blankenhorn. Boys with fathers are more mature, more outgoing, more independent, warmer, more self-confident and have better self-esteem. Girls who grow up without fathers are simultaneously more suspicious of men and more dependent on them. The most reliable indicator of whether a girl gets pregnant or a boy joins a gang isn't income or race--it's whether or not the child has a father at home.

"The data is overwhelming," says author Warren Farrell ("Why Men Are The Way They Are"). Without fathers, children of both sexes are more likely to become drug addicts, do worse in school on every single subject from math to literature, more likely to become delinquent, join gangs, go to prison, commit suicide and commit homicide. Children of unmarried mothers are twice as likely to end up in juvenile hall, three times as likely to be expelled from school and six times as likely to live in poverty.

As for the radical feminist notion that the way to make boys love women is to remove them from their father's influence, "We have been raising boys without fathers for 20 years in the black community," says Farrell. "And the result is not gentle black men. The result is a society in which black men are as likely to be in prison as college." In the inner city, says Bill Moyers, who did a TV special on the issue, hardly any teen-age mothers get married; the leading cause of death for young black men is murder; and almost half of the young men are arrested before they reach 18. "The black community is being destroyed by this," says UC Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald. Anyone who says single parent families are good for black people is nuts."

Even so, every time someone tries to address the issue, the media elite responds not so much with an analysis of the problem as an attack on the messenger. When Dan Quayle came to Los Angeles late last May to tour a public school, a L.A. Times editorial characterized his remarks as "simplistic put downs of the evils of single motherhood." And the Times gleefully described a 14-year-old girl who challenged the vice-president: "What would you prefer? A single mom, or a dad who gets drunk and beats your mom?"

"A telling report," opined the Times, as if there were no third possibility--a father who loved, supported and encouraged his kids.

For over 20 years now certain radical feminists have been making the case that men are wife-beaters, rapists, child abusers, murders and plunderers of the planet--all for the purpose of delegitimizing marriage and marginalizing men. So when someone comes along and says, hey, wait a minute, children need fathers, it generates "real anger," says Playboy men's columnist Asa Baber.

Baber got a first hand lesson in just how deep that anger really was when he took part in a debate last Mother's Day with feminist author Susan ("Backlash") Faludi at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

During his opening remarks to an audience of 1000 feminists, Baber noted that on Mother's Day the phone circuits are usually jammed with people calling home. But on Father's Day, finding a free line is no problem. "I said, `We have to ask why there is so much less interest in fathers.'

"It brought down the house," says Baber. "At first, I didn't get it. I thought my fly was open. I said, 'If you think this is funny, you are going to think this is a laugh riot. I think the fact that our fathers are so much out of the loop is a major tragedy in our culture.'"

At this point, said Baber, the audience stopped laughing and started hissing.

Why, we asked Baber--because they thought men were useless, irrelevant and potentially dangerous?

"You got it," Baber said.