For Dole, Each Race Is a Personal Fight

Bob Dole’s real political life began in 1952, when his own hard work and Dwight Eisenhower’s first presidential landslide made him Russell County attorney.

The job itself was not demanding. County attorneys were expected to develop their private law practices on the side. Dole did some of that, but mostly he concentrated on learning the rudiments of his new trade: how to talk in front of other people; how to join groups like the Elks and Masons and the Methodist Church and move to the forefront as a leader; how to cement friendships and win the support of older leaders so that when the time came to make your own move they were on your side.

It was an eight-year apprenticeship. When it was over in 1960, he ran for Congress and his career began moving up and away with the gathering speed of a rocket.

The real fight in 1960 was the primary; the district would go Republican in the fall, but he had to win the party nomination. Dole had secured the support of the retiring incumbent, an uncompromising conservative named Wint Smith, who had found Eisenhower too accommodating to the Soviet Union for his tastes. Dane Hansen, a GOP power broker in western Kansas, also gave Dole the nod, saying after the 37-year-old disabled veteran came to see him: “Hell, I knew he was a fiscal conservative. The tires on his car were threadbare.”

Dole’s opponent was a better-known Republican lawyer named Keith Sebelius. He had come close to beating Smith in a primary challenge two years before. A third candidate was in the race too; his name was Phil Doyle, and concern about voter confusion over their names led Dole to hand out hundreds of cups of pineapple juice at every campaign event--”Dole, like the juice, Dole.”

There was also a collapsible Conestoga wagon bearing the slogan “Roll with Dole” that was carted from event to event. And the theme song that expressed both hope and conviction: “Will everyone here kindly step to the rear, and let a winner lead the way.”

Toward the end, the campaign was darkened by anonymous letters mailed from out-of-state, suggesting Sebelius had a drinking problem. Sebelius, aware of what such allegations could mean in a teetotaling state like Kansas, the birthplace of famed prohibitionist Carrie Nation, cried foul. Dole disavowed any involvement and won the primary, narrowly.

He would win reelection three times and in 1968, encouraged by Richard Nixon, he would move up to the Senate.

Two-Part Strategy

From the outset, Dole advanced his congressional career with a two-part strategy:

First, in public, he became an outspoken partisan gladiator, wielding his sharp sword against the Democrats at every opportunity. As a young member of what then seemed like a permanent minority, there was no percentage in trying to play the statesman. And Dole believed in partisanship anyway.

Second, behind the scenes, he learned to play the insider’s game, mastering the small motor skills of intramural politics and legislating.

He campaigned for and won the presidency of his freshman class in the House, by one vote. He began making national headlines as early as 1961 by demanding that President Kennedy’s administration come clean about the financial schemes of a Texas entrepreneur named Billie Sol Estes, who had been playing shell games with the government’s grain storage program.

And as a senator, Dole became one of Nixon’s most ferocious defenders, especially on the Vietnam War. Time after time, he rose to accuse Democrats of “parroting the propaganda of a Communist enemy” or to denounce antiwar senators as “a Who’s Who of had-beens, would-bes, professional second-guessers and apologists for the policies that led us into this tragic conflict in the first place.”

On most other issues, his voting record was unremarkable for a Midwestern conservative. He supported government programs that aided his constituents, such as rural electrification and soil-conservation subsidies, as well as measures aiding agribusiness, including price supports and subsidies for such things as ethanol motor fuel.

He also put his name to a significant list of special bills and amendments that helped particular businesses and people who were generous supporters. Reformers might denounce him for being too close to special interests, but Dole was only playing a game already in progress--maybe harder and more successfully than most, but not differently. Let people make of it what they will; he was a pro-business conservative Republican, not a liberal reformer.

Dole did vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; then, as later, he argued with little success that the GOP should do more to open its ranks to minorities.

In assessing his record as a legislator, and what it means now, it is important to remember he was essentially a member of the opposition. Like the Republican Party generally for most of the last half a century, he has seen his role as blocking or restraining runaway liberalism. That is why he opposed almost all of the Great Society and the War on Poverty programs, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, but now supports at least some form of government aid to the poor and disadvantaged.

The years in opposition also contributed to his difficulty enunciating broad ideas of his own; doing that has been the Democrats’ job for most of Dole’s career.

Nixon’s Point Man

His allegiance to Nixon and his readiness to take the point for the White House won Dole the job of Republican national chairman for the 1972 election campaign. It turned out to be a thoroughly sour experience.

The Nixon White House treated him like a contract assassin for the Committee to Reelect the President (it was Dole who nicknamed it “CREEP”); the new chairman had no qualms about savaging Democratic standard-bearer George S. McGovern, but presidential aides tried to force material on him that even Dole considered beyond the pale, and he refused to use it.

He was unceremoniously dropped from the job altogether after the election, and his replacement by George Bush, a Connecticut blueblood, was handled in exceptionally humiliating style.

Dole resented the way he had been treated, although it became a saving badge of honor when Watergate swept his tormentors to disgrace.

In 1972, Dole also divorced wife Phyllis. They had been married nearly 25 years, but the relationship had been dying for a long time. When Dole was not campaigning for office himself or battling the Democrats in Washington, he was on the road raising money and plumping for other Republicans.

“I was one of these young congressmen that was going to save the world by speaking every weekend somewhere,” he said in an interview with The Times last year. “I did a lot of it. It really puts a strain on a marriage.”

That was true as far as it went, but Dole had never been a hearth-and-home person. From the beginning, with the Elks and the Masons and traveling the county and then the state to build his base, there had always been someplace more important to be than home. In that respect at least, the most visible difference in his second, apparently happy, marriage to Elizabeth Hanford in 1975 was that she took her own career almost as seriously as he did his and was seldom at home either.

The divorce from Phyllis was one of several factors that combined to make Dole’s 1974 Senate reelection campaign the most harrowing of his political life.

The distractions of party leadership had weakened his ties to the state. A statesman-like decision to support cuts in agricultural subsidies as part of a larger deficit-reduction plan had opened him to charges of trying to take money away from farmers. Worst of all, though he had had no role in Watergate, the Democrats used it against him.

His opponent, a respected two-term Democratic congressman and physician named Bill Roy, contented himself calling for “integrity in government” and “an independent senator for Kansas.” Others bluntly suggested Dole either had guilty knowledge about Watergate or had been a White House dupe.

As a result, he started far behind. Moreover, 1974 was a precursor of future campaigns in which he would raise huge war chests, spend lavishly on consultants, pollsters, advertising experts and other professional help, but somehow fail to get what he was paying for. Belatedly, Dole pushed the hired guns aside and fell back on his core supporters--most particularly himself.

They campaigned with desperate fury on many fronts, but the episode that would pass into the legend of Dole’s dark side was the way he used the abortion issue.

Antiabortion groups had been criticizing Roy because he had performed a number of abortions under the state’s highly restrictive law. But it had not been a high-profile issue until Dole, seemingly out of the blue during a televised debate at the Kansas state fair, suddenly challenged Roy to explain why he performed abortions and favored liberalizing the law.

Caught off guard, Roy could only stammer an awkward response. Soon, anonymous fliers with pictures of dead babies began to appear, along with “Vote Dole” newspaper ads about abortion and euthanasia. Dole denied responsibility for the anonymous material, but biographer Richard Ben Cramer describes visits to local schools during which Dole invited students to ask their parents if they knew how many abortions Roy had performed.

Dole eked out a narrow victory, running stronger than he had before in Catholic neighborhoods in Kansas City suburbs.

Ford’s Running Mate

Back in the Senate, he sought to sand the hard edges off his reputation. He urged his fellow Republicans to show more concern for the needy. He helped expand food stamps. He helped make it easier for poor people to qualify.

McGovern, one of the original champions of such programs, remembers that time with gratitude and kindness. As Republican chairman during the ’72 campaign, McGovern said in an interview, Dole “used to take a bite out of me every morning.” But during the struggle to expand nutrition programs, he became “a dependable, steady, constructive ally who never double-crossed me on anything.”

Less than two years later, though, when Gerald R. Ford--helped along by some backstage maneuvering on Dole’s part--picked the Kansas senator as his running mate, Dole agreed to play attack dog. While Ford wrapped himself in the mantle of the presidency, Dole would rally the faithful in the heartland and knock the shine off the front-running Jimmy Carter. If Ford pursued a Rose Garden strategy, Dole joked to campaign planners, “I guess that means the briar patch for me.”

The result was the famous “Democrat wars” incident. During a nationally televised debate with Carter’s running mate, the earnest Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, Dole was asked about Watergate by a panelist.

It should not be an issue, he said, “any more than the war in Vietnam would be . . . or World War II or World War I or the Korean War--all Democrat wars . . . all in this century. I figured it up the other day: If we added up all 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.”

“I think that Sen. Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight,” Mondale said, seizing the moment.

Ford came within a whisker of overcoming Carter’s huge early lead, and commentators speculated that Dole’s intemperate attack had cost his party the election.

Dole had a hard time understanding the enduring negative reaction his words provoked, and friends say he was profoundly depressed by the experience. “He never did like being called a hatchet man. He was uncomfortable with it. He didn’t relish it,” says longtime Republican campaigner Lyn Nofziger, who had helped Dole win the place on the ticket.

Dole himself summed it up this way in his 1995 interview with The Times: “I think you have to play the hand you’re dealt. If you’re going to be the running mate, maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but you’ve got to take a little heat for the top guy. . . . I’ve gone back and looked at it. I think there were a few times I probably went over the edge a little bit, but as far as being partisan . . . you don’t elect bipartisan leaders.”

Quest to Be President

Anyway, being a running mate was not really what he had in mind. Four years later, in 1980, with Carter reeling, Dole launched a bid for the GOP presidential nomination--along with Ronald Reagan, Bush and others.

Reagan crushed all comers. Dole, after 20 years on the national stage, got all of 607 votes in the New Hampshire primary.

Again, he nursed his wounds and turned back to the inside game in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee--a post that opened for him when Reagan’s ’80 landslide captured the Senate for the Republicans--he helped the new president pass the biggest tax cut in U.S. history. But two years later, with the deficit soaring as the economy sagged, he engineered passage of a massive tax increase, forcing Reagan to accept his plan.

Supply-siders would never forgive Dole for what they saw as aborting their grand experiment before it had time to succeed. But he saw it as a triumph of traditional GOP sound-money economics.

He also worked with House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, two Democrats, to bail out Social Security, as well as with other Democrats on a host of other issues. He had become a master of legislative leadership as it exists in the 1980s and ‘90s.

It was and remains a far different game from the one he had watched legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas play when they bestrode the House and Senate like the Colossi. And the difference is a piece of the puzzle of why a present-day legislative power broker such as Dole has a hard time parlaying that skill effectively into presidential politics.

Johnson and Rayburn worked at a time when congressional leaders had coercive power over their troops. A rigid seniority system, iron control over procedures and patronage, political machines that could give or withhold votes from a party’s aspiring members and other factors enabled them to put teeth in the old axiom, “to get along, go along.”

Those powers have eroded steadily during Dole’s career in Washington. He has had to practice a different craft: the leadership of the broker. Especially in the Senate, modern-day congressional titans had to exert influence by gauging the forces and issues at play, biding their time and then, often late in the game, devising the deal that could command a majority.

It was a game of holding back, keeping the cards close, not committing too soon. In important ways, it was the opposite of successful leadership in the White House, which usually entails stepping out in front with a proposal and building the popular support necessary to prevail.

Even as his long-sought presidential nomination nears, Dole has found it hard to talk out loud about what he will do or what he wants on a particular issue; he has learned too well the price of narrowing one’s freedom to maneuver too soon.

Taking On Bush

Emblematic of his success at the inside game, Dole succeeded Howard H. Baker Jr. as Republican leader in the Senate in 1985. But, when Reagan’s eight years in the sun came to an end, Dole was back on the field as a presidential candidate. He had plenty of money and plenty of expert coaches, and he emerged from the GOP caucuses in Iowa as a victorious front-runner. Then he hit the wall.

Part of the problem was that he brushed aside a request to sign a no-new-taxes pledge; the idea seemed ridiculously unrealistic to Dole, but it was an obligatory ritual for New Hampshire voters.

Another part, at least in Dole’s eyes, was that Bush spent the days just before the vote in a whirlwind of manly physical activity--driving an 18-wheeler, operating heavy equipment, piloting a snowplow. The Bush people were trying to counter the vice president’s image as a wimp, but Dole saw it as reminding voters of his own physical limitations--and he glowered.

Whatever caused New Hampshire voters to turn Dole down--many just thought it was Bush’s turn--they destroyed his presidential hopes again. And again he turned mere defeat into disaster. In a brief election-night interview on NBC news, after Bush had acted the magnanimous winner, Dole refused to play the gracious loser. Asked what words he had for Bush, Dole snarled: “Quit lying about my record.”

Once more friends describe the backlash over his performance as a searing experience for Dole. They said he had a hard time coming to terms with what he saw as undeserved personal antipathy on the part of voters who did not really know him. Eventually, they say, he concluded that his presidential dreams were over and resolved to make the most of what was left, by performing as the best Senate leader President Bush could possibly want.

Friends were only half-right. He would be as strong and wily a Senate leader as he knew how, but he would also run for president again. Not running had not been in his nature for many, many years.

Also, for Dole, virtually every campaign he ran seldom had much to do with issues or specific policy positions beyond the basic pledge to work hard and do what made sense according to his lights.

No, the contests were always personal: Dole versus the other guy; one winner, one survivor. As though he had to win or he would lose himself.

Had the war done that to him? Almost certainly, but teammates from high school have said he played basketball the same way. He was the one who always pleaded with them to keep trying. He was the one for whom losing was almost unbearable.

*

What comes of it at last? What does it teach about a potential future president? The answer is like a Delphic riddle, as hard as it is simple: As president, Bob Dole would be Bob Dole.

It is idle to speculate about exactly what he would do when faced with some future challenge or crisis; the variables are too many. He would react as his life and nature have shaped him to react--do what is now within him to do, not do what is not.

The inner reality of Bob Dole runs deeper and is more controlling than in most men--probably less subject to modification than Clinton’s.

He is a man of a certain age, too; he has reached the point in life when a person turns more and more to what was learned early; the compromises and accommodations of middle life are harder to put up with, like shoes that are stylish but pinch.

And Dole, more than Clinton, is a man shaped by a particular time and place. He grew up in a family that was loyal and close but demanding and undemonstrative. And the impressions of childhood were reinforced, not moderated, by later experience.

Small wonder Dole grew up so guarded, so profoundly reluctant to put himself in the hands of others.

Dole also took form in a place where people saw things in fundamentally personal terms. When he was a boy in Russell, if a friend was sick, neighbors sat up with him at night; if he needed help they pitched in to raise his barn or thresh his wheat.

As Dole said in a speech at the 100th commencement of Russell High School: “Believers in self-reliance,” the people he grew up among “were no less committed to the notion of Russell as family, a place where you knew your neighbors as flesh-and-blood creations and not as some statistic on a government printout.” People took care of their own.

This undoubted virtue was more complicated than it looked, however.

For one thing, at the national level, the people affected by such programs as Social Security and Medicaid are statistics on a government printout. No president can know the diverse reality of present-day America in any truly personal sense.

For another thing, if the people of Russell took care of their own, they expected people in other places to do the same. Even within the community, Russell reserved the right to define its own, who it was obligated to help and under what circumstances. Was a person deserving? Were his problems unavoidable? Or had he brought them on himself--by drinking, perhaps, or living or acting in a way the community did not approve of?

At a personal level, that right to define and choose is the essence of individual freedom. When it comes to government, the situation may be different. As Northwestern University sociologist Christopher S. Jencks notes: “The right to make those judgments and preserve those distinctions is one of the things that distinguishes the private citizen from the government.” The government must define all citizens as its own.

Their highly personal way of looking at things is reflected in the way members of small towns can exhibit such remarkable generosity toward one another, yet appear unable to comprehend the needs of people outside the circle. Indeed, especially with people who are far off and different, such as the urban poor and minorities, there is a tendency to assume the worst.

His Two Sides

In Dole’s case, this helps explain why he is admired by friends for his warmth and concern even as the public sees the hard side. It is why he has been one of the most partisan leaders in public life but has succeeded in today’s Senate: At a distance, it’s all cut and thrust; face to face, he takes people as he finds them and does the best he can.

The tension is inescapable. Dole cannot be coldly libertarian. As he has said repeatedly, personal experience has taught him that people sometimes need a helping hand from government. “It’s pretty hard to stand up, being a beneficiary of the GI Bill of Rights as I have, and say the government doesn’t do any good things--or if your parents benefited from Medicare or Social Security,” he has said. “. . . There’s no doubt about it. There’s a safety net out there, and the government does a lot of good things and should.”

At the same time, both personally and politically, he finds it hard to decide who should be helped and who should not.

Dole has another problem when it comes to empathy on a national scale. His experience recovering from his war wounds taught him that people sometimes have to rely on others, but it also left him with a sense of grievance, of undeserved suffering.

So when he hears someone or some group appealing to the government for special consideration, he knows what it is like to need such help and receive it. Sometimes, though, a small voice down inside him may ask whether these supplicants are asking for more than he himself received and are less deserving besides.

*

It is morning, and Dole the presidential candidate has journeyed to an ornate old building at the edge of Battle Creek, Mich., to visit a fragment of his past. He wears his customary dark suit and immaculate white shirt, and a construction worker’s hard hat perches incongruously atop his head. He peers through a welter of broken walls and concrete dust, trying to get his bearings. The area where he stands has been ripped apart to make office space, but half a century ago it was one of hundreds of small wards in the Percy Jones Army Medical Center, a vast orthopedic treatment facility for men whose bodies had been torn apart in World War II.

Few who came to Percy Jones, as Dole did in November 1945, were more devastated. Few came closer to dying and survived. Few endured a harder struggle to rebuild themselves. None went on to live a more remarkable life.

Now, nominally rounding up last-minute primary votes but in fact already making the transition to Republican nominee, Dole has brought a gaggle of reporters and photographers to what is left of his old hospital room. As camera crews press in, a 79-year-old man named Eldon Draime presents Dole with a small chunk of green tile from the old bathroom. The former occupants’ names have been etched into it.

Draime was a therapist at Percy Jones. Not Dole’s actual therapist, but close enough: He worked here when Dole was a patient and says he remembers the young man’s sense of humor.

At one level, it’s one of the film-and-sound-bite “opportunities” that dominate political campaigns today. Yet the words and feelings evoked in the candidate here and later at a rally outside Columbus, Ohio, when he talks about his early life, are as real as anything about Bob Dole.

“It was an experience I had,” he tells the little group. “I learned a lot about myself, a lot about other people. It was a great hospital. We had great nurses. In fact, I’d have learned to feed myself sooner if the nurses hadn’t been so attractive. . . .

“You go through a period of ‘Why me?’ and all that, and after a while you see someone else a lot worse off and you say, ‘How lucky can you get?’ . . . It certainly changed my life. It made me recognize that a lot of things happen out there that we sometimes overlook. . . .

“The thing I remember best is what a great place it was and how America took care of its soldiers, sailors, whatever,” he is saying. “And it hasn’t changed. It’s still the best.

“I think it’s about character, about growing up in America, about knowing what made America great, having made a little sacrifice for America.

He pauses, somber. “At least it’s important to me.”

Then another protective step back.

It’s nothing a lot of others didn’t do, he concludes, believing it, of course, but hoping still that his listeners out across the land will not.