Curbing Excesses : Dole: The Good Traits Can Hurt

On whining microphones, in overheated rooms, to bundled and booted voters across Iowa and New Hampshire, Bob Dole tells this story about how he became a Republican.

Years ago, when he had returned home to Russell, Kan., his body shattered by a war wound that almost killed him, the leading Democrat in town came to his house and told him that he ought to consider going into politics.

“But I don’t know anything about politics,” Dole protested.

“It’s not necessary,” came the reply. “You got shot. I think we can get you elected.”

His next visitor was the leading Republican in town. He, too, told Bob Dole he should run for office--but as a Republican.

“Why a Republican?”

‘Twice as Many Republicans’

“Because there are twice as many Republicans as Democrats in Russell County.”

So, Bob Dole tells the voters, huddled inside, out of the blowing snow and cold of early campaign America: “I made a great philosophical decision right there on the spot. I’d learned how to count in the Army.”

Practical? Certainly. Bob Dole is pragmatic. It is one of his strengths. But is he a man with a larger vision of what he could accomplish as a politician, or of what it means to be a Republican? Hardly. Opportunistic? Perhaps. But pragmatism taken to its extreme often looks that way. And he can be practical to an excess. His vision is whatever works.

Bob Dole’s weaknesses are his strengths in excess.

That is what sets him apart from others, both Republicans and Democrats, in this race for the presidency.

There might be some question about whether this candidate or that has the resourcefulness, say, or the toughness to be President. But with Bob Dole, there is no doubt: He has both. The question, however, is whether he has them in excess, and whether he can control his excesses. Or whether they control him.

Hands-On Manager

He is self-reliant, self-determined, self-sufficient and hands-on. But Bob Dole can rely on himself too much. He has trouble delegating authority, especially when the matter involves himself.

He is resourceful, smart, skillful, ingenious and savvy. But he also can be manipulative, crafty and sly. He is a doer, pragmatic, practical, down to earth. But he is not a conceptualizer, a deep thinker, a visionary or a dreamer.

Because his wound left him with a withered arm, he is sensitive. That makes him compassionate, sympathetic and charitable toward the disadvantaged. But it also can make him defensive about himself, private, retiring, remote and a loner.

He is ambitious, hard-working, determined, enterprising, indefatigable. But he also can be unsparing, relentless, driven.

He is tough. But he can be mean.

These traits have made him a successful and unapologetic insider. “My doctrine of government is that we’ve got to make it work,” he said in an interview on his chartered campaign jet as it flew over the frozen Midwestern battleground where America’s presidential politics begin. “People go out there and want to run against government. I am not one of them. Government means a lot of things to a lot of people: It means getting their Social Security check or their veterans’ check. So my doctrine is, ‘Let’s make it work.’ ”

Robert Joseph Dole grew up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. From his parents, he learned the value of hard work. He was gravely wounded in World War II. He fought to live, then struggled to rehabilitate himself. From his experience, he learned the importance, above all, of survival.

He became a state legislator, county prosecutor, congressman, senator, Republican Party chairman and vice presidential candidate. In the Senate, he has been chairman of the Finance Committee and majority leader. He is now minority leader. At every point, he has shown the traits he acquired from family and fate.

Bob Dole was born on July 22, 1923, in the only bedroom of a tiny house that boasted, in addition, just a living room and a kitchen.

It stood in Russell, 67 miles south and 14 miles west of the precise center of what were then the 48 contiguous United States. The town of Russell claimed 2,030 residents at the time. Most of them struggled hard with the unforgiving Great Plains for a living. Oftentimes the struggle, touch and go, was for survival.

At first, his father, Doran, and his mother, Bina, ran the White Front Cafe on Main Street. In time, the Doles moved into a larger, one-story brick home, at 1035 Maple St., where Bob and a brother and two sisters grew up. Then Doran Dole took over a cream and egg station. Farmers would bring their cream in large, metal cans. As manager, Doran Dole weighed it, bought it and shipped it on to market. He also handled eggs and other farm products. To make ends meet, he bootlegged whiskey.

Doran Dole was a stern man, not much given to emotion. “I think he was probably a pretty good disciplinarian,” remembers Dean Banker, who was two years behind Bob Dole in school. When Bob turned 6, the stock market fell, and the nation tumbled into economic depression. That turned hard work into more, even harder work. “The only way to survive,” says Russ Townsley, publisher of the Russell Daily News, “was to work at it. And by ‘survive,’ I mean right down to meat on the table.”

The creamery closed. So Doran Dole went to work at a grain elevator. From the day he was big enough to carry newspapers, Bob Dole sold the Salina Journal. He helped his father. The Dole children mowed lawns, washed cars, dug ditches and sold Cloverine Salve.

Bob’s brother, Kenneth, and others, including Townsley, say that good work was not something that won any special honor. It was simply expected. “Their father didn’t go around saying, ‘Boy, you did a great job!’ or anything like that,” Townsley recalls. “If the kids had done something that was really fine, then Dad would say, ‘You did that right.’ There was no lack of love, but there was not a lot of useless affection going on.”

The importance that Bob’s father placed on devotion to duties shows clearly in a bit of family lore--reported variously, but most recently by Noel Koch, a former Dole speech writer. It goes like this:

Bina Dole was ill, so Doran took charge of the youngsters. He arose one morning without paying any attention to the clock and woke them up. They protested, but he would have none of it. As the four children gathered for breakfast, he sent Bob to the grocery store for milk. Then Doran Dole looked at the clock; and he realized that it was only 3 a.m.

When Bob did not return, his father sent the other children back to bed and went out to search for him. He found him sitting alone in the darkness in front of the store, determined to wait until it opened.

Doran Dole missed but one day of work in 40 years.

“He died in his overalls,” Dean Banker says, exaggerating only a little.

A taciturn man of Midwestern reserve, Bob Dole’s father nonetheless had a sense of humor. “Droll,” recalls Theodora Banker, who is in her 80s, prefers to be called “Aunt Teddy” and is the reigning member of the Banker clan. “Straight-faced, you know. I mean, he would say something, and if you weren’t paying attention, you would miss it. It was sort of a one-up on everybody.”

“Midwest, flatland humor,” Dean Banker says. “Sometimes it’s pretty bitey.”

Beneath it all, Doran Dole was a compassionate man.

“When he was down at the creamery,” Dean Banker says, “a farmer would come in, and they’re supposed to get, say, $3 for 20 gallons of cream, or milk, or whatever, and the farmer would say, ‘I really need $7.’

“And Doran was liable to give him $7 against his next can of cream. And it wouldn’t come from the company. Doran would put it on his own tab.”

Bina Dole worked just as hard. After she and her husband left the White Front Cafe, she drove around Russell and its surrounding farms in the family car selling Singer sewing machines and giving sewing lessons. “Quite a matriarch,” Russ Townsley says. “Things happened the way she wanted.” She figured, by one account, that Bob Dole needed a spanking once a week. She told him: “ Can’t never could do anything.”

Still, Townsley says, she was “a real sweet gal.”

Despite all the hard work, the Doles could not make it. Brother Kenny developed a bone disease that added to their bills. They were forced to rent out their house to new people who began arriving with the discovery of oil. The six Doles moved downstairs and lived in two rooms in their own basement.

It didn’t help that their house was on the wrong side of the tracks.

“They did not have money,” Dean Banker says, “or the big homes over there.”

Nor did it help that in 1935, when Bob Dole was 12, the Great Plains literally blew away. That was the year of the Kansas Dust Bowl.

It was economically devastating. What would grow would not sell. “In the elevator business, it was damn tough with two-bit wheat and 25-cent oil. Two-bit wheat is not going to pay you to harvest it,” Russ Townsley says. One of Bob Dole’s grandfathers lost every acre--his entire farm. His other grandfather, who made his living as a tenant farmer, lost all of his crops.

Those were the years of mustard sandwiches. “That meant more mustard than meat,” says Aunt Teddy Banker. “And onion and walk around. That used to be a Sunday night supper. That was an expression that meant you just sort of picked up whatever there was left and ate it. We would say, ‘Let’s have onion and walk around.’ ”

“Crops and hope alike refused to take root,” Bob Dole recalls.

“It was tough,” he has said more than once. But all of this taught him a permanent lesson: It is necessary to survive. “It was as if his survival-switch got turned on,” says a former Dole aide, “and it never got turned off.”

“I am,” Bob Dole has declared, also on more than one occasion, “a survivor.”

He went from carrying newspapers and doing odd jobs to working at Dawson’s Drugstore.

The hours were long; but Bob Dole’s switch had indeed, been turned on. He got up at 5:30 a.m., did his chores and went to school. After class, he worked at Dawson’s until 11 p.m. or later, when the drugstore closed. He did it each day, including Saturdays and Sundays after church. He jerked sodas, and he clerked.

It taught him what Dean Banker says is the most important thing: If you’re going to get along, you have got to get along. “It came from dealing with people. They were there buying coffee or Cokes or candy bars or Sal Hepatica or aspirin. Bob would wait on them.

“And he learned something else: how to talk to people. ‘How’s the wheat crop, Jake?’ Because, you see, his dad, down at the elevator, wanted to know what he was hearing over at the drugstore.

“ ‘You going to buy any coal, Jake?’

“ ‘You bet!’

“So then his dad could tell the boys at Salina who owned the place, ‘Well, maybe we need two carloads of coal.’

“So Bob got a feeling for it”--what other people’s interests were, what his own interests were and how deals could be made.

If hard work meant that Bob Dole had initiative, then in time he would gain ambition.

“He worked in the drugstore all through high school,” Russ Townsley says. “And through the drugstore, I would imagine, he became a close friend of Dr. Fagin White, who was an old-time family physician. . . . Bob decided he was going to be a doctor out of a small town. He had every intention of being a doctor.”

But there was not a lot of extra cash available in the Dole household--and if he intended to be a doctor, he would have to do it on his own.

He belonged to the National Honor Society. But his main interest was sports. He lettered for three consecutive years in football, basketball and track. By one account, track was his favorite. In track, Bob Dole was out there all on his own.

“He was out to win,” Aunt Teddy Banker remembers. “His coaches said that about him. He was a very competitive player, and he said you went in to play, and you played the best you knew how and took advantage of the breaks--and if somebody made a mistake, why, you were there to get it. You bet!”

Bob Dole left for the University of Kansas, where he enrolled in premed.

But the United States was fighting in Europe; and in 1942, during his sophomore year, he enlisted in the Army.

April 14, 1945, found him in Italy.

Bob Dole was 21 at the time. He was a second lieutenant, leading the 2nd Platoon of I Company in the 3rd Battalion, 85th Mountain Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division. It was studded with Ivy Leaguers, champion skiers and future Olympic athletes, trained in mountain fighting and ready to make the final assault on German defenses in the Apennines.

They had plucked Bob Dole, a flatlander, out of an officer replacement depot.

Near the town of Castel D’Aiano, he braved enemy fire to rescue a fallen radioman, and he was hit.

He remembers: “I felt a sting in my shoulder. And I must say my whole life raced in front of me. I saw my dog, I saw my parents, I saw my family. I saw my hometown. Then I didn’t see anything for a long, long time.”

Commanders had told their men to leave the wounded. But Sgt. Stanley Kuschick, the platoon sergeant who took charge, decided to disobey the order. “The lieutenant was gray--the way they got before they died,” he later told Noel Koch. “I could not just leave him there to die by himself.” Kuschick and his men gave Dole some morphine. One dipped his finger into Bob Dole’s blood and scrawled an “M” on his forehead, so he would not be given more--and overdose. Then Kuschick told one of the men, Arthur McBryar, to stay behind with him.

“I figured,” Kuschick said, “McBryar wouldn’t have to wait long.”

But Bob Dole lived.

It took nine hours for medics to reach him and carry him on a litter to the 15th Evacuation Hospital. There the doctors, too, thought he would die.

Their diagnosis: Whatever had hit his right shoulder had broken his collarbone and his shoulder bone behind it, as well as his upper arm. The explosive had penetrated to his fourth cervical vertebra, fractured it and knocked it out of alignment. And that had shocked his spinal cord.

At best, the doctors said, he would never walk again.

They sent him to the 70th General Hospital in Casablanca, then to Winter General Hospital in Topeka, Kan.

Finally, Doran and Bina Dole brought him home. When Bob Dole had left Russell the year before, brother Kenny recalls, he stood 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 190 pounds. Now he weighed 120 pounds, and he came home on a stretcher.

Every morning, his father had to dress him; he couldn’t do it himself. And he had to be fed. Somebody had to turn him in bed.

Within weeks, he was back at Winter General in Topeka. His loss of bladder function had caused kidney stones and a severe infection. His temperature spiked to 108.7 degrees. Doctors told Bina Dole that her son might die. They removed his right kidney.

He struggled again--and lived.

More than that: “By September, 1945,” Koch quotes a medical report, “the patient had regained function of his bladder and bowels as well as function in both lower extremities with some improvement in the upper left extremity.” He could stand. And he could move his left hand. Bina Dole took an apartment in Topeka, near the hospital. “Bob had learned to walk as a baby when he was between 10 and 11 months old,” Koch quotes her as saying, with a note of undisguised pride. “At Winter General, I watched a nurse get him up out of bed. He walked the same way--tentatively, but with . . . determination. . . . “

Yet, there were things he could not do. When he used the bathroom, someone had to help him with his clothes. He had started smoking, but his mother had to hold his cigarettes to his lips. “You get frustrated,” Bob Dole says, slipping into the second person, as he sometimes does to stave off the memory. “You get mad sometimes.” When he envisioned his future, he thought about an Army pension and selling pencils on a street corner. He did not like the way he looked in a mirror. He avoided meeting people when he had his shirt off. He’d never get married. “For a while,” he says, “I wondered why it happened to me.”

But he struggled on. For physical therapy, he was transferred to Percy Jones General Hospital in Battle Creek, Mich. There, two further setbacks almost killed him. In the final instance, he was spared only because Doran and Bina Dole approved the use of an experimental drug--streptomycin.

However, the meager physical skills he had developed were gone. So, once again, he started over. Standing. Walking. Oldsmobile had built a car equipped with special controls. Bob Dole tried to sell it in the hospital. He hustled deals, Koch recalls, with the men who couldn’t move their feet.

From an uncle, he had heard of a doctor in Chicago named Hampar Kelikian, who might help Dole’s right shoulder and his right arm. Kelikian was an Armenian. He agreed to operate--and without charge, because “Dole epitomized America to me.”

“He had the faith to endure.”

Still, there were hospital costs. So instead of going to Chicago, Bob Dole came home again to Russell. “But this time,” Koch says, “he came standing up.”

He was “skinny as hell,” Dean Banker recalls. But by now, and by dint of hard work, he could jog. On the day he got home, he put on his old track shoes and ran awkwardly around the block. He tried to run faster. When he fell, he got up by himself.

When people in Russell found out he needed to go to Chicago for surgery, they began a fund drive.

There was one cigar box at the VFW hall, another at Dawson’s. Others were scattered through town. People put in dollars, nickels, dimes. “We low-keyed it,” Dean Banker says. “We didn’t try to make it a hero type of thing. That would have embarrassed him tremendously. And his folks were very sensitive to outside help.”

During 1947, Kelikian operated on Bob Dole several times. Eventually, he would regain some of the use of his left arm and hand. But his right arm remained badly damaged, and his right hand would never regain strength or much feeling.

He would spend a total of 39 months--more than three years altogether--in hospitals. Kenny Dole says his brother told him: “I’m going to get those years back.”

Whether he did, it seemed, would be up to one person: himself.

He re-enrolled in college, this time at the University of Arizona. Initially, his first wife, Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist whom he had met at the Army hospital in Michigan, went to class with him to take notes. But that was not the answer. He found a way to do it himself. He came up with “an old-time tape recorder with the big reels,” Townsley recalls. “And he would run that thing and lug it back and forth.” At first, Phyllis signed all of his checks for him. But he learned to write with his left hand.

She helped him whenever she could, Noel Koch says, “but he wouldn’t let her do much.”

His left hand was awkward, but he could use it to dress.

“It takes a long time,” says Bill Taggart, a former Senate aide. “But he does it himself, and he really works at it.” Zipping his pants, tying his shoes and buttoning his shirts were very difficult. But he did it, sometimes with a buttonhook.

If his private life was marked by self-reliance, so was his public life.

Doing things himself made Bob Dole a very diligent legislator, a hard-working county attorney and a very personally involved congressman and senator. “He’s very much engaged,” says Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), Dole’s whip when he became majority leader.

But that can be the problem.

Bob Dole can be too intolerant of assistance.

When he first moved to Washington, he bought a house in suburban Arlington, Va. Phyllis and their daughter, Robin, stayed back in Kansas much of the time. Ward White, son of Dr. Fagin White, who had been Bob Dole’s role model when he wanted to become a doctor, rented one of the rooms and eventually went to work for Dole in Washington. He remembers dinner at Bob Dole’s house: “He did not want other people to cut his food. But he couldn’t cut it himself. So he’d have hamburger steak day after day.”

Tom Korologos, a lobbyist and a friend, recalls him struggling with formal dress. “He ties his tie. He’s a stubborn character. I told him, ‘Go buy yourself a damn tie that clips. Nobody is going to know.’

“But, no.”

Professionally, says John Smith, also a former aide, this self-sufficiency has a profound effect. “This streak of independence and self-reliance is a lot deeper and more central to a lot of things that have developed than most people think.”

Because of it, Bob Dole “doesn’t delegate much,” says an aide who worked for one of his Senate colleagues. “And he also doesn’t impart a whole lot of his thoughts to his colleagues or to his staff.”

Dole could “make a decision as President,” says an aide who has worked for him and for the Reagan Administration. “But the problem he will have after he’s decided what to do is to let other people do it.” One of his biggest problems,” a close friend says, “is that he is not a good administrator. He does not know how to use his staff properly.”

One former aide makes this distinction: Bob Dole will let someone else handle a policy matter before he will let someone else handle a political matter. A policy can get fouled up, the aide says, “and he lives to fight another day.”

But a political problem goes to the heart of Bob Dole’s instinct for survival. “It’s his future,” the aide says. “It’s his ass that’s on the line.”

“I hate to let go sometimes,” Dole concedes. “I’ve always told my staff, ‘You may goof up, but I’m the guy that gets hit with it. I’m on the ballot.’ When it’s a political judgment, I’d like to kind of know what’s going on.”

For that reason, Dole holds things particularly closely during campaigns--and it has caused him trouble in his current presidential effort.

A former Dole staffer and an officer at a large Southern California firm give this account of an instance that cost Dole significant good will and perhaps campaign funds.

Arrangements were made for a series of meetings in Los Angeles between Dole and top executives of several firms, including Arco, the Bank of America, Southern California Edison and Lockheed.

“Four or five meetings,” the corporate officer recalls, “where he could talk to their top 50 people or meet with a few of their managers, just to make contact.” The ex-Dole staffer says: “These were CEO types and presidents of corporations, who have clout and the ability to enhance his opportunities to be the next President. . . .

“And he flat scratched it.

“Just scratched right through it and said, ‘I’m not going to go.’ ”

Economic scarcity and his physical limitations taught Bob Dole to be resourceful and pragmatic.

If his disability meant that he could not be a doctor, he would become a lawyer and a politician. While he was still in law school at Topeka, he ran for the state legislature and won. Two years later, after graduation, he decided to run for Russell County attorney--the prosecutor’s job back in his hometown.

“Bob came to me,” remembers Dean Banker, who by then had taken over his own family’s department store and was emceeing barbershop quartets on the side, “and he said, ‘I’m going to run on the Republican ticket.’

“And I said, ‘Well, that’s the right ticket.’

“And he said, ‘Would you introduce me at our first shot--our first opening salvo over in Bunker Hill?’

“And I said, ‘Why the hell are we going to Bunker Hill?’

“He said, ‘Because Ray Shaffer is from Bunker Hill. You open up in his hometown, and he tells everybody you’re a good man.’ ”

Ray Shaffer was what Dean Banker calls “the Republican mentor.” In Chicago, Banker says, “he would have been a boss, a legitimate boss. If you opened up in Russell, and, especially, if you didn’t tell Ray that you were going to do that, why, Ray could press it pretty hard. And Bob was smart. He’s a smart ass, but he’s an astute smart ass.”

Bob Dole won.

In 1960, he was elected to Congress. As a member of the House of Representatives, Dole became even more skillful.

“I was here (in the House) before Bob, and I was here with Bob and after he left,” says Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and often an opponent. Then slowly and with the authority of one gifted deal maker who recognizes another, Rostenkowski adds: “He was a clever legislative operator.”

In the Senate, his reputation grew even larger. Friends and enemies alike describe him as “extremely intelligent,” “brilliant.”

Former Sen. Russell B. Long (D-La.), who preceded him as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, says without any reservation: “The man is smart. And I think that is his greatest strength. The man’s very smart.”

Bob Dole is “street smart,” says lobbyist Tom Korologos. “Also, he is smart-smart. No less an authority than Richard Nixon told him one time, ‘You’re the second smartest guy in the Senate.’

“I was there, and I said, ‘Who’s the smartest?’

“And Nixon said, ‘Russell Long.’ ”

A large part of Bob Dole’s resourcefulness was his practicality.

“When he was the majority leader, Howard H. Baker Jr. (now White House chief of staff) was the best guy for getting compromises,” Ward White says. “But Bob Dole is the best strategist in how to get someplace.”

He learned the ways of Washington.

Once a deal was made, it was made. He stood behind it. “Some people’s definition of an honest politician is someone who, having once been bought, stays bought,” says Richard A. Viguerie, a direct-mail fund raiser and a spokesman for conservatives. “If you make a deal with Dole, in the best sense of the word, he will probably keep that deal.”

Early in the Reagan Administration, Bob Dole put together his resourcefulness, intelligence and skill in a classic example of legislative ingenuity.

It grew out of a problem he had helped to create. In 1981, as Finance Committee chairman, he had supported President Reagan’s tax cut. By 1982, the economy had fallen into severe recession. High unemployment, low productivity and a Treasury drain caused by the tax cut had created a big increase in the federal deficit.

Interest rates were climbing to 20%.

It was an election year. The President would not stem the tide by raising taxes. Neither would the Democrats.

Dole went to the Treasury, says a former Senate aide, and suggested ways to raise revenue. Most were ways to close tax loopholes.

The Constitution says all revenue bills must start in the House. So Dole took up a minor tax bill that had passed the House and amended his proposals to it.

President Reagan would not budge from his opposition to raising taxes. So Dole got on the telephone and then went to the White House. A top Administration official says he could be “a tough adversary.”

Eventually, the former Senate aide says, “we got the President on board.”

The jeopardy to tax advantages brought scores of lobbyists to the Capitol, each bent on protecting the interests of his clients.

In their book about tax reform, “Showdown at Gucci Gulch,” Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray describe the scene: The hallway outside the Finance Committee room was jammed. Near the end of the committee’s work, somebody referred to the crowd of lobbyists and the expensive Italian shoes they wear.

“There’s wall-to-wall Guccis out there,” he said.

“Well,” Dole replied, “a lot of them are going to be barefoot after this is done.”

As work on the bill progressed, among the hardest hit were powerful lobbyists for the restaurant, banking, insurance and oil industries.

By a party-line vote of 11 to 9, the committee sent the package to the floor of the Senate. Dole made a thinly veiled threat: If the Senate returned the bill to the committee, he would send it back out with even tougher tax requirements. The threat almost worked. But at 4:30 a.m. on July 23, just before the final vote, Sen. David Pryor (D-Ark.) succeeded in deleting a requirement for reports on waiters’ tips, strongly opposed by the restaurant lobbyists.

Immediately, Dole gathered the Republican members of his committee. “He had sort of a committee meeting in the cloakroom right then, in the early morning hours,” one Senate aide says, “and they agreed to disallow half the cost of business meals as tax deductions.” Democrats had been saying deductions for business meals should be disallowed entirely. It was called the “three-martini lunch” amendment. And the restaurant industry hated it--even more than the requirement for reporting tips. But now the idea, in the form of a “1 1/2-martini lunch” amendment, was coming from Republicans. “And the Democrats couldn’t do anything but support it,” the aide says. “It was sort of a master stroke.

“The restaurant lobbyists had all gone home, celebrating their victory, popping their champagne. They woke up in the morning and realized that something even worse had happened to them.

“Well, they died.

“And they suddenly saw the merit of the tip provision. When we got to conference, they decided that the tip provision wasn’t so bad, and what we ended up passing in conference and what became law was not a 7% reporting requirement but 8%.”

And Reagan, who had forsworn raising taxes, signed the bill. It was worth $97.8 billion, the biggest tax increase in peacetime history.

But Bob Dole’s skillfulness can become manipulative. He can be sly and devious.

The slyness was apparent during the confirmation of Daniel A. Manion two summers ago as a federal appeals court judge. After his nomination by the President, Democrats called him unqualified. Republicans said he was being harassed because he was a conservative.

In an initial vote, three Manion opponents were paired with three absent Republicans. In pairs, senators declare their opposing positions but do not vote. But in this case, the proponents were absent--and their positions were only assumed. And Dole, the majority leader supporting the Administration’s nominee, permitted the assumptions.

In fact, however, two of the paired proponents--Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Bob Packwood of Oregon--had not yet decided how to vote. And, since pairs cancel opposing votes, the Manion foes who had paired with Packwood and Goldwater--had canceled their votes for nothing.

Manion was confirmed.

The Democrats were furious.

And some Republicans who had opposed Manion were unhappy as well. One such opponent was Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), whose vote had been canceled by the pair with Goldwater--on a false assumption. Bob Dole had not requested her pair, she says--other senators had. But, she adds that as the majority leader Dole should not have assumed Goldwater’s position.

Perhaps he did it deliberately.

“When he knows it’s a close call, maybe it’s just as well to have it a little confusing,” she says. In the end, she notes, Bob Dole won.

Was it manipulation--transparent after the fact--that upset her?

“Life’s too short,” she says. “But, again, it’s not the way I would do it.”

The deviousness shows in things of large consequence.

In the fall of 1985, the Senate rejected an attempt to bring up sanctions against South Africa, which had been approved by the House and in conference committee--and now awaited final Senate ratification. The President opposed the sanctions, and so did Bob Dole.

Democrats, seeking to embarrass the President, tried repeatedly to bring up the sanctions for a vote. Dole, as majority leader, halted their efforts by taking what senators agree was an exceptional step.

He purloined the bill.

By the accounts of two sources, both knowledgeable, Dole and Sen. Richard G. Lugar, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, approached the clerk’s desk at the front of the Senate.

Dole thumbed through the measure. Then he turned, handed it to Lugar and said, “Here, Dick.”

Lugar slipped the papers to an aide and said, “Take these and put them in a safe place.” The aide walked out of the Senate chamber with them.

With no copy of the bill to bring up, the Democratic proponents of sanctions were stopped, dead in their tracks.

They threatened to hold up other legislation until the bill found its way back to the clerk’s desk. Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and nine fellow Democrats protested for three hours on the Senate floor.

But there was no vote on the sanctions.

Finally, in Bob Dole’s campaign financing, there is a matter of questionable propriety. On a number of occasions he has helped provide tax breaks for his financial supporters.

There is no evidence of any direct quid pro quo.

But on at least two occasions, both reported publicly, Dole has reminded prospective campaign contributors that he will be in a position of power whether he wins his presidential campaign or not.

Dole is not shy about acknowledging this. “The last time I was in St. Louis at a fund-raiser, I was introduced by a guy saying, ‘Well, we’re all happy you’re here, and keep in mind that Bob Dole will be one of the following: President of the United States, vice president of the United States, majority leader, minority leader, chairman of the Finance Committee, or ranking Republican on the Finance Committee. Now, any of you fellows have any questions?’

“You know,” he says with a short laugh, “it’s fairly subtle.

“But it’s a fact: I’m going to be there. I’m not going to just go away. I’ve tried to help my constituents, and I’ve worked with other senators to help them.

“If you got a pattern of always taking care of somebody, well, you’re in trouble. But if you’ve got a pattern of trying to make it work, trying to balance it. . . .”

Among the beneficiaries of Dole-supported tax breaks are commodity brokers, investor-owned utilities and the makers of general aviation aircraft.

Dole says: “I’ve never traded anything.” But these tax breaks have cost the Treasury more than $1 billion.

Just as Bob Dole’s resourcefulness can become manipulative, so too his pragmatism can blind him. His practicality can get in the way of his vision.

A Republican senator who knows Bob Dole well says he is too down to earth to dream.

When Bob Dole ponders the presidency, his thoughts are not those of a visionary.

“You don’t have to guess what Bob Dole is going to do in the future,” Dole says about himself. “He’s got a record of getting things done and looking out for people. I’ve got a record that says I can do it! That’s the vision: making America better. I don’t know what else you want, unless you just want something goofy. . . .

“As President, I’m not going to sit around the White House. I’m going to be all over Washington, going around to these different Cabinet offices. You know, they don’t have to come to me. I’m going to go to them. That’s the way I do business. And I’m not going to make just a little visit every four years. We’ll have the Cabinet meeting one day in the DOT (Department of Transportation) office. The next day, we’ll meet in defense. We don’t have to meet in that (White House) Cabinet room. You can meet anywhere.

“It’s going to be a busy place around there if I get elected. There’ll be three shifts.”

Bob Dole’s heritage and his misfortune left him another legacy that has won him praise: Like his father, he is a compassionate man.

His is a personal compassion, especially for others who are handicapped. And he extends it to the disadvantaged in general. It is hardly a political compassion in the sense that he extends it to those who oppose him--because he does not; but he makes it political by wringing compassion out of the government for those he calls “the down and out and left out.” He started a multimillion-dollar foundation to help train and find jobs for the disabled. He asks that his speeches be translated into sign language for the hearing impaired. And he is especially sensitive to slights against the handicapped.

Tom Korologos, the lobbyist, tells about a fund-raising dinner two years ago. “They had brought in some handicapped guys in wheelchairs. They’d put them all at one table. And it was dumb. Now, if that was not rank discrimination! He got pissed off. He went charging off. He had people moved all around. He ordered them sprinkled throughout the audience. ‘Here, you’re sitting here! You are sitting over there!’

“ ‘They may have broken bodies,’ he said, ‘but their heads aren’t broken.’ ”

Politically, Bob Dole is less sensitive--but neither blacks nor the poor consider him an opponent.

Along with former Sen. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.), he was an early sponsor of food stamps. Former staffers Bill Taggart and John Smith recall that Dole became interested in food stamps as a way to help farmers sell their surplus crops. “But,” Taggart says, “I think that it became more than that.”

In most instances, Dole has voted against legislation considered important by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. Indeed, his NAACP Civil Rights Report Card for the 99th Congress gives him one of the lowest grades in the Senate.

But Althea Simmons, chief lobbyist for the NAACP, says he helped civil rights activists gain the ear of the White House when presidential aides were refusing to hear them--and tried personally, in vain, to negotiate a compromise with Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III on the makeup of the Civil Rights Commission.

“He’s been a person you can talk to, can make sense with,” Simmons says. “He may not agree with you all the time, but at least you feel he’s considering it.”

His sensitivity, however, can make Bob Dole defensive.

Joe Bailey, the former operations director of his political action committee, would take special care during trips to arrange Dole’s hotel rooms to accommodate his handicap--and in ways that would not be obvious. He unwrapped the soap, loosened the tissues and removed the seals from toilet seats. If there was wine in the room, he pulled the cork most of the way out. He unwrapped any candy. And he turned down the bed--and made it look as if the maid had done it.

“He hates it that he is in that kind of shape,” Bailey says. “One time we were at an airport in San Diego, and we kept going back and forth out to the plane to use the phone that was out there. And, at one point, he took off in a sprint. Here’s a guy that was in his 60s. And he looked good. This was not somebody that had never been involved in athletics. It was a sprinter’s sprint. He had his coat off. His tie was loosened. I kind of picked up the pace with him, and we sprinted about 150 yards.

“And I said, ‘Senator, that was a pretty good looking sprint there.’

“He said that, well, he didn’t run much.

“And I said, ‘Well, how do you keep in shape?’

“And that was it--it was just kind of like it hit him, or something came back to him. And he really clammed up. . . . It was like you had mentioned that somebody had died in the family or something. . . . He just didn’t want to talk about it.

“He really has a chip on his shoulder about that.”

Bob Dole’s sensitivity and introversion can make him a loner.

“One thing I’ve learned in that little city of Washington is that up there you don’t really have time to build friendships,” Bob Dole says. “You can get too much advice from your friends. Some of them try to move in on you--and I don’t want anybody to move in on me.

“So I sort of keep my distance.”

Bob Dole’s difficulties made him a determined man.

He was not at the University of Arizona long before yet another blood clot sent him back to Winter General Hospital in Topeka. Undaunted, he transferred to Washburn University in Topeka. There he earned a bachelor’s degree as well as a law degree-- magna cum laude. He came by it the hard way.

The kid who had gotten up at 5:30 a.m., done his chores, thrown the Salina Journal, gone to school, trained for track and worked at Dawson’s until nearly midnight now attacked his classes the same way.

By the time he got to Washington, he was a workaholic who drove his staff unsparingly.

“He expects out of his staff what he expects out of himself,” says Sen. Simpson. “When he’s putting in 18 hours a day, he doesn’t want to see some sonofabitch putting in a 10-hour day.” Hours like that helped cost him his first marriage.

“It was a matter of two people growing apart and going different ways,” says publisher Russ Townsley. Bob Dole said he wanted out, and he arranged for a quick divorce. Phyllis is on record as saying it hurt--but that she was not surprised, since, in retrospect, the marriage had ended anyway. “There was no hint of a scandal . . . “ Townsley says. “Bob is just too busy for that.”

Dole’s second wife, Elizabeth, who quit recently as secretary of transportation to help him campaign, works almost as hard as her husband. “They’re very busy,” says Ralph Stanley, her former chief of staff. Stanley says Bob and Elizabeth Hanford Dole tried to set aside at least one day a week--usually Sunday--for dinner. But a lobbyist says he found them at dinner one Sunday night at a tiny French restaurant in Washington called Le Steak and thought about saying hello--until he realized that they had paper work on the table between them.

“Those were hers,” Bob Dole says. “I don’t do that. She’s worse than I am. She wakes up in the middle of the night and makes little memos. I just told her to keep the lights off--do it in the dark; don’t wake me up. She’s got one of those little flashlights now with a pencil on it. It’s great.”

Dole is no less compulsive. “I’ve suggested to our campaign scheduler, ‘Get us back in Washington for a day off,’ ” he says. “But I’ve got to confess, they gave me next Sunday off, and I said, ‘Gee, I’m out near Iowa. Why don’t I go to Iowa?’ Because if I lose in Iowa, I’m gonna get a lot of days off--more than I ever had in mind. So we’re going to spend Sunday going to the Omaha World Herald board, do the David Brinkley show from Omaha, do two other editorial boards and do a town meeting and get back to Washington and speak to a group of editors that night.”

The drive Bob Dole values in himself and admires in his wife has cost him some members of his staff. Senate records show that during the late 1970s he went through administrative assistants at the rate of about one a year. In addition to long hours, those who have worked for him say that he demands perfection and has very little patience about mistakes. He does not suffer naysayers and--like his father before him--he is stingy with praise.

Friends cannot name a single outside interest that either Bob or Elizabeth Dole pursues, apart from the Dole Foundation and other charitable undertakings.

Former aide Joe Bailey says: “Politics is his hobby. That’s his life--politics.”

Adversity also made Bob Dole tough.

Nobody alive, Sen. Simpson says, “will ever frighten Bob Dole. You’re never going to spook him.”

Rep. Dick Cheney (R-Wyo.), who served as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford, says a President must “have the capacity to make very important decisions and not look back. I don’t have any real doubts about Dole’s ability in that area. . . . “

“My guess is he would be tougher than Ford was,” Cheney says.

Often the toughest thing is to say no.

And Bob Dole did it during the nascent days of Watergate, when he was Republican national chairman.

He found himself at odds with Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon. Tom Evans, who was Dole’s co-chairman for administration and organization, remembers a demand from Colson that the Republican National Committee distribute cartoons of Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.), who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Evans says the cartoons showed Humphrey “with a girl on his knee and a bottle of whiskey.”

With Dole’s blessing, Evans refused.

Dole also turned down attempts by Colson to tell him what to say as the national party chairman, both on the Senate floor and in speeches and at news conferences and fund-raising events across the country.

“Colson used to send the most egregious stuff up to us,” Ward White says. “They were intemperate, extreme, unnecessary sorts of things--points that could be made with equal force but much less obnoxiously. “There were lots of phone calls that went back and forth.” The phone calls, White says, were not pleasant.

Evans recalls hearing parts of them.

“Bob would say, ‘I’m just not going to say that. I’m not going to do that.’ I remember very specifically speeches where he said, ‘I’m not going to do it. Period. I’m not going to give that speech.’ ”

Fifteen years later, the memory still rankles.

“It finally got so bad in ‘72,” Bob Dole says, “that I told Chuck Colson, ‘I’m not making any more speeches out of the White House unless you tell me, who made these charges.’

“I remember giving one in Baltimore one night where I was supposed to attack (then-Washington Post publisher) Katharine Graham by saying that somebody had overheard her at a dinner saying, ‘I hate Richard Nixon.’ Well, I didn’t have any brief for Katharine Graham or the Washington Post, but I said, ‘I’m not going to say it.’ ”

Such independence cost him the party chairmanship.

Tough Bob Dole, however, can get mean. It begins as partisanship.

As national party chairman, Dole called former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark a “left-leaning marshmallow” for defending the Rev. Philip Berrigan, a Vietnam War protester, in court. When former Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Me.), who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, criticized agents of the FBI for spying on Earth Day rallies, Dole told reporters that “the McCarthyism of the ‘50s pales by comparison with the Muskie-ism of the ‘70s.” He said that Muskie was making “a concerted and deliberate effort to turn the FBI in the eyes of the American people into an American version of the Gestapo.”

McGovern, who won the Democratic nomination in 1972, became his most embattled target. Dole accused him of everything from failing to report atrocities during World War II to giving his own brother-in-law a job on his government staff. Dole said that McGovern’s chief fund-raiser was guilty of a conflict of interest--and said that all of this made McGovern guilty of a moral double standard--”perhaps the grossest of indecencies.”

None of it was true, McGovern replied--and no charges were ever brought.

By 1976, when Ford needed a vice presidential running mate who could attack Jimmy Carter with a vengeance, Bob Dole was a practiced veteran. His willingness to “go out and very aggressively charge and take the battle to the Democrats,” says a former Ford adviser, was one of the reasons that Bob Dole was picked.

People called him a “hatchet man.” That fall he debated Walter F. Mondale, who was Carter’s running mate. Bob Dole brought up his war injury. He said he thought about it every day. And he blamed the war that had caused it--and every other American war in the 20th Century--on Democrats. “I figured up the other day,” Dole said, “if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans--enough to fill the city of Detroit.”

Elizabeth Drew reported the debate in the New Yorker magazine. “Why does he do it?” she asked. “He can’t seem to help himself. It is as if some low growl just could not be contained.”

It cost him the debate--and the adverse reaction astonished even Bob Dole.

He saw “at long, long last, that by and large people didn’t like him,” says former speechwriter Koch. “At least, people who did not know him didn’t like him--people that knew him casually didn’t like him. And he thought about that long and hard.”

Koch says Dole told him: “ ‘I’m not that kind of person.’ ”

All of which, Koch says, was not normal. “He is not an introspective man. He was not depressed. I think he was introspective, which is not his style, and you usually get no sense of that at all from him, no real sense of awareness, of self-analysis. . . .

“(But) he realized things had to change.”

Some, including Robert S. Strauss, former Democratic Party leader, credit Elizabeth Dole with diluting some of Bob Dole’s venom. But Koch says: “I simply don’t believe that. . . . He came out of that campaign in ’76 realizing people don’t like him, and I think it probably was a stunning moment for him. . . . And he willed himself to be a different man.”

He went to New York, to the Manhattan Life Insurance Co. building and then up to the 11th floor to a studio with red carpeting and vanilla walls. There he paid Dorothy Sarnoff, an image consultant, $1,500 to help him change what people thought of him. Sarnoff says she has done the same for politicians ranging from Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), who ran for President in 1984, to ex-Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., a presidential candidate this year.

She videotaped him at her lectern, then had him watch himself on television.

“I let the camera suggest what an alternative behavior would be that would be more enhancing,” she says. And Sarnoff had a few suggestions herself.

Bearing: Hold your rib cage high. “Get body tension for attention.” Stand squarely and stop leaning on the lectern with his right arm. It only called attention to it. “He told me a TV director had told him if he leaned on that arm, he would hide it.” And sincerity. “For instant trust.”

Clothes: Blue suits, sometimes dark gray. Ties “with some interest in them.” The joke before the debate was that Bob Dole had to go out and buy himself a new tie, because he had only one.

Finally, Sarnoff says, they discussed the psychology of the kind of things that he said during the campaign. Attacking and being caustic, she told him, “always costs the person who uses it--never the person it is aimed at.”

Before he left, Sarnoff says, “he said to me, ‘Could I send my wife up so that she will know what you have taught me and can reinforce what I’ve learned?’ ”

And about a month later, Sarnoff says, Elizabeth Dole got some image training too.

However, a complete change was difficult, if not impossible. Conventional wisdom had it that there had been an “old Bob Dole”--and now there was a “new Bob Dole.” And the “new Bob Dole” had rid himself of all the meanness of the “old Bob Dole.”

But sometimes the new Dole acted a lot like the old one.

For instance, a compendium of his humor put together by political reporters Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, includes these offerings--all dated after Dole’s remarriage and his visit to Dorothy Sarnoff:

--Sen. Howard Baker, his predecessor as majority leader, procrastinated so much that if he “had been working on the Declaration of Independence, we’d still be speaking with British accents.”

--President Carter had such a penchant for gaffes that “when the last Pope was elected, he sent him a telegram that read, ‘Congratulations. Please give my best to the missus.’ ”

--Carter, Ford and Nixon were “see no evil, hear no evil and--evil.”

All in fun? But other things certainly were not. And they seemed to certify that there was not much difference between the old Bob Dole and the new.

In 1960, the old Bob Dole had run his first congressional race against Keith Sebelius, the Kansas state senator, which Bill Taggart calls “rugged.” It was reported to have included whispers--firmly denied--that Sebelius had a drinking problem. Dole flatly denies that any such whispers came from him. In 1974, the old Bob Dole ran a Senate campaign against a physician from Topeka named William Roy. He accused Roy of slinging mud--and, at the same time, prompted Catholic schoolchildren, Noel Koch says, to “ask (Roy) how many abortions he’s performed.” Dole denies that too.

And, in 1980, the new Bob Dole ended an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency with praise for campaign manager Tom Bell’s services--and a simultaneous refusal to pay him. The matter went to litigation. Dole’s attack included personal charges, all of which Bell denied, accusing him of pocketing campaign money and taking kickbacks.

And, as recently as the summer of 1986, while he was majority leader, Bob Dole engaged Byrd, the minority leader, in a Senate debate that climaxed with words that still get quoted when the dark side of Bob Dole comes up. Congressional Quarterly, never one to engage in hyperbole, calls the clash “extraordinary.”

Dole implied that Byrd had tried to “sneak” a South Africa amendment onto a pending bill for defense spending.

Byrd, in turn, unleashed angry, pent-up complaints about Dole’s basic fairness.

“I have had enough,” he said, sharply, “of this business of having the majority leader stand here and act as a traffic cop on this floor. . . . He determines who will call up an amendment, when they will call up an amendment and what will be in the amendment. . . . There is a point beyond which deference is not required toward an office.

“And that point is reached, I think, when the distinguished majority leader will not let other senators have the floor. . . .

“That goes too far!”

A former Senate aide says Bob Dole’s voice got icy. “I did not become majority leader,” he said, “to lose.”

Some find Dole’s temperament fearful.

Many decline to be quoted by name, on grounds that he might seek vengeance.

Like Richard Nixon, says a former Senate aide, Bob Dole remembers his enemies. “He won’t sic the IRS on them, but he will get them politically.” Dole, says a former aide to a senator who opposed him, “will cut your jugular--but he won’t let you die.”

Rep. Rostenkowski, the Ways and Means chairman, puts it this way: “He’ll break your arm, but he won’t compound the fracture.”

Some would say that is exactly what he did to William Roy in his 1974 Senate campaign.

“Well, that was a mean-spirited campaign on both sides,” Dole says, in the midst of a primary campaign where many are waiting for the vitriol to flow again. “I was tough on Bill Roy and Bill Roy was tough on me. He went out there saying, ‘Bob Dole voted for foreign aid and all this stuff.’ And I had been chairman of the party and Watergate was out there. There were all kinds of innuendo from Democrats--’Bob Dole can’t have it both ways. Either he knew about it or he didn’t know.’ It’s about like Bush right now.

“You go through some of that as you mature in politics. It’s not a bed of roses. These guys, the cynics or the critics who run in safe districts and never have to have an opponent, never have a tough race, they can always say, ‘Well, this guy’s too tough.’

“Well, I grew up; I got away from that stuff. In ‘88, I can set the tone. I’m running and nobody tells me what to say. I’ve learned a lot. I’m smarter. You can be pretty tough on the issues. You can talk about records and resumes, and that’s fair. I know the other side doesn’t like it, but I’m trying to get elected.”

Staff writers Leo C. Wolinsky and Paul Houston and researchers Nina Green and Doug Conner contributed to this story.