For Dole, the Teamwork Ends When It’s Time to Make the Big Decisions

Bob Dole met for nearly 90 minutes with four key confidants on Wednesday to discuss a potential running mate, and afterward the advisors made clear that they have no illusions over their influence.

“I think [Dole] has made . . . clear from beginning,” that in the end, he will make the call, and probably with little final consultation with anyone, said Robert Ellsworth, one of Dole’s best friends and the man leading the effort to vet prospective running mates.

“A lot of names out there,” Dole himself said after the session, which was also attended by campaign manager Scott Reed, former Secretary of Labor Ann McLaughlin and Rod DeArment, a tax expert who worked for Dole in the Senate.

“I want my mind made up before we go out to the convention,” Dole said. It’ll be a surprise--but hopefully not to me.”

This close-to-the-vest style is vintage Dole, say all who know him well.

“He’s one of those people who absorbs good information. He will actively seek out input,” said former South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr., a Republican. “But in the end, it’s not a team, but Bob Dole, who makes the decision.”

“There’s no one person that you can say: ‘Get to this person and that’s almost the same as talking to Bob Dole.’ There isn’t anybody like that,” said Kansas City attorney Kim Wells, a former Dole staffer and GOP chairman in Kansas.

Closely holding important decisions avoids leaks and preserves options until the last minute. But there is a downside to Dole’s management style as well, both as a presidential candidate and an Oval Office occupant.

On several recent occasions, his secrecy has left his staff ill-prepared to follow up on his actions--and left him hard-pressed to deal with their consequences.

On the campaign trail, Dole often ignores large chunks of a painstakingly crafted speech and veers off into a series of stream-of-consciousness ad libs utterly unrelated to the “message” of the day.

The most spectacular manifestation of that style was Dole’s decision to end his 27-year Senate career. Almost no one but Reed and Elizabeth Hanford Dole knew in advance of his decision, reached while he was sunning himself in Florida over Easter.

Dole even kept Sheila Burke, his Senate chief of staff, in the dark until only a day before he went public on May 15. Campaign aides had to scramble madly to put together a rally for the next day.

“I was surprised,” said Burke, who has toiled for Dole for 19 years. “When decisions get made, he decides when and how to tell people. . . . He won’t trial-balloon things.”

“Dole doesn’t want or like others to get ahead of him and tell him what to do or how to do it,” said Tom Korologos, a high-powered Washington lobbyist and longtime Dole confidant.

“He does it on his own. He consults by asking questions and listening. Then he thinks and he thinks and he thinks. He might go out and sit on a beach somewhere, overlooking the ocean or a mall, and finally he’ll say: ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ ”

Now just a citizen-candidate, free of Congress after 35 years, Dole’s management style is undergoing perhaps its severest test. In this fast-moving, rough-and-tumble campaign, he is suddenly without the structured support system that he had come to take for granted on Capitol Hill.

In part to compensate for that, Dole has begun reaching out even more.

In addition to Ellsworth, who was best man at the Doles’ 1975 wedding, Dole also has brought on board former Rep. Donald H. Rumsfeld of Illinois, a onetime White House chief of staff and secretary of defense. While Ellsworth was meeting with Dole on Wednesday, Rumsfeld participated in a session down the hall on foreign policy and national security.

Ellsworth and Rumsfeld “are exactly what he needs,” Burke said. “Dole has left that organized structure, and now he needs to create a new structure that will feed him information.

“People like Rumsfeld and Ellsworth have access and credibility,” she added. “They are peers, people he trusts, people who have been through some of the same circumstances and who have a history with him.”

What happens when the Dole system does not work could be clearly seen in early June when he decided to enunciate a major change in his position on abortion--and did not bother to inform Reed or any other campaign official, leaving them once again unprepared for the fallout.

Initially, Dole’s campaign had issued a carefully crafted statement calling for a “declaration of tolerance” in the GOP platform as a means of reaching out to abortion supporters. Both sides of the issue seemed to go along, defusing a controversy that threatened to engulf the Republican convention in San Diego.

But days later, Dole surprised his own campaign aides by saying that he wanted the tolerance language inserted directly into the platform’s section on abortion, rather than in the general preamble--a distinction of great importance to antiabortion activists in the party. The new stand angered abortion foes, including Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), the party’s platform chairman. Dole and Hyde are still trying to smooth things over.

That sort of action can cause great difficulties for a campaign, said conservative commentator Bill Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard magazine. “There are times when you want to keep things close to vest. But there’s a streak in Dole that says: ‘I’ve been around a long time. I know what I’m doing. Don’t tell me what decisions to make.’

“That’s understandable and even admirable. But that doesn’t lend himself to be handled very easily, and so he can go over the line--and become resistant to sensible advice.”

Today, as Dole jets from one end of the country to the other in his final quest for the White House, the former Kansas senator is relying on the same close-to-the-vest style--amassing facts and viewpoints but revealing little of his own mind--as he nears the biggest decision of his campaign: picking a running mate.

And as is typically the case, those closest to Dole are saying little. Asked about the meeting, Ellsworth would say only: “The process is moving forward. Nobody is ruled out or ruled in.”