Solace came from the highest level: Nixon. Dole had called the president to make sure Nixon could accept a divorced man as party chairman. Now Nixon was calling back to say that he was sending over books. ““You ought to read these,’’ the president advised. One was a novel about Benjamin Disraeli, Nixon’s own hero. Here was another wounded soul. A striving outsider of Jewish ancestry in Victorian England, Disraeli had overcome public ridicule to achieve, late in life, his dream of leading Britain’s Conservative Party. More to the point, Nixon told Dole, Disraeli had overcome bad press in London about his scandalous love life. ““The book was about how you separate the public and the private,’’ Dole told NEWSWEEK. ““He was very thoughtful where I was concerned. I think Nixon liked me, you know.''
He did. Dole was a comer then. And now, 24 years and four national campaigns later, Dole hopes to redeem the promise the Old Man saw. Because he is 73, the roots of Dole’s ambition are usually traced to ancient times: to Dust Bowl Kansas, or World War II or the Eisenhower years. But the Dole we know really emerged, both personally and politically, in the ’70s. ““That’s when he came into his own as a national figure,’’ says longtime adviser Charlie Black. ““That’s when he learned that nothing would be easy for him, not just in life but in politics.''
Dole calls the ’70s his ““hectic time.’’ The events of those years fired his desire to be president, but now make it harder for him to win. He achieved national fame, but also a reputation for bitterness. He found a new wife, but in the process cut himself off from the everyday realities of domestic life outside the Beltway. He discovered that nothing was truly personal in politics, and nothing was ever final. He collected a career’s worth of contacts, but missed bonding with the populist movements then beginning to surge through the GOP. He met the Washington insiders who still surround him but whose sense of politics may be too establishment to be of much help. He learned to grasp the levers of power, but to distrust the force he needs most: television.
The wounds that drive Bob Dole were suffered in different ways. The physical ones date from 1945 in the Po Valley, where he was pinned down in a hail of German gunfire and horribly injured. He fought for the rest of that decade to reassemble his body and launch a legal career. In politics, Dole’s trial by fire began in 1971, when Nixon named him to head the RNC, and ended in the rubble of the 1976 campaign. As Gerald Ford’s running mate, Dole was blamed – unfairly – for costing the GOP the presidency. He’s spent all the years since trying to make up for it.
In the ’70s, Dole committed himself – completely, irrevocably – to politics. Arriving in the Senate in 1969 after eight years in the House, he had set about performing for an audience of one: Nixon. He became a self-appointed enforcer, attacking big-spending liberals and Vietnam doves with a relish he would later regret. At the end of 1970 he set his sights on the RNC post, and, after relentlessly lobbying Nixon, got the job in January 1971. It would require constant travel: perfect for a man who finds salvation in mere motion – another plane, another speech, another crowd.
And it was then, at the age of 49, that he gave up any pretense of caring for something more than he cared about politics. He moved into the basement of his family home in suburban Virginia so that he could leave early and come back late. He was hardly ever home anyway. At Christmastime in 1971, he came upstairs and announced to his wife, Phyllis, that he wanted a divorce. Though the term was ““incompatibility,’’ the reason was clear. ““Bob Dole was not a chaser or a drinker,’’ says Lyn Nofziger, a Reagan hand who worked closely with Dole at the time. ““He wanted to marry politics.''
He did. When he was wed to Elizabeth Hanford four years later, both were committed to a Washington life. He was 52, she 39. There was a child, a daughter, from Dole’s first marriage. But more children were not a priority. For 21 years, the Doles have lived the busiest of two-career lives, learning the mundane tribulations of family life through stories they hear from cousins, nieces, nephews, friends.
Dole’s inner circle was formed in the Nixon-Ford time. He entrusted his primary campaign to a younger crew that knew the inner workings of the New Right. But now Dole’s called in the old gang. Two weeks ago, NEWSWEEK has learned, Dole offered the management of his campaign to Don- ald H. Rumsfeld, who was Ford’s White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld declined but remains an important adviser. He put his vice presidential search in the care of Bob Ellsworth, a discreet Kansan who had served in the Nixon administration, and who had been the best man at his second wedding. Another key friend is Washington lobbyist Tom Korologos, who worked with Dole in the Nixon and Ford administrations. None of these characters really knows the GOP grass roots of today: the pro-lifers, militant cultural conservatives and radical tax cutters. But Dole doesn’t seem to care. ““We were with him when he matured as a national figure,’’ says Korologos with a shrug.
Dole also found out in those years that nothing was as simple or easy as it might look. He was riding high as national chairman when two disasters struck. First Nixon, whom Dole had considered a protective mentor, fired him. The president, accepting his henchmen’s calls for a more malleable figure (George Bush), dumped Dole as chair in 1973. Then came Watergate, and suddenly Republicans were running for their political lives – including Dole, who was up for re-election in 1974.
That year taught Dole a key survival tactic: in a crisis, turn sharply right. He already had a solid reputation with the old-liners. He was a classic Midwest conservative: anti-communist, vaguely isolationist, anti-union. But in ‘74 he added another credential – he became the first hero-candidate of the anti-abortion movement, which sprang to life in the Roman Catholic Midwest after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. His opponent was an obstetrician who had performed some abortions, and Dole went after him on the issue. ““I want to know, how many abortions have you done?’’ Dole demanded in a debate. Meanwhile, anti-abortion activists, supposedly without Dole’s knowledge, circulated literature and ads calling his foe a baby killer. It was enough to save Dole. He was a player again.
But in the argot of the New Right, he was never really ““one of us.’’ Though he had relied on pro-lifers, their zealotry made him uncomfortable. So he would later waffle on a ““human life’’ amendment – and become suspect to the true believers. He was contemptuous of the ““supply side’’ economic theories then just beginning to emerge, soon to be championed by Jack Kemp. So though he would later vote for tax cuts, Dole never did so with fervor and was distrusted by the ““growth wing.’’ Dole’s western-Kansas roots made him a Lincoln Republican on race, a supporter of federal civil-rights legislation. So he was no friend of the new anti-busing GOP South.
More practical than passionate, Dole saw early on where his, and his party’s, future lay. The New Right forces were coalescing around Ronald Reagan, who was challenging Ford for the 1976 nomination. Ford and Reagan were neck-and-neck going into the Kansas City convention. Dole was a Ford supporter but was viewed as someone with good conservative ties – at least good enough to be useful. The Ford men gave him the delicate task of shepherding the platform, and Dole helped deliver the most conservative one since Goldwater. Ford narrowly won.
Then Dole saw his Main Chance, and took it. His buddy Nofziger put in a word for him with Reagan. When Ford asked Reagan whom he would accept for the vice presidential slot, Reagan had been primed with an answer: Bob Dole of Kansas.
For Dole the 1976 race against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale was a triumph – and a disaster. The Ford-Dole ticket began a horrific 33 points behind in the polls. Dole, the Flying Dutchman of American politics, was everywhere and nowhere, working the below-radar markets in the Midwest, South and West while Ford stayed planted in the Rose Garden.
Television, Dole learned that year, was not his friend. Dole was unprepared for his confrontation with Mondale in the first vice presidential debate ever televised. In Kansas, he’d never had to worry about such things: getting elected was a matter of shaking hands at Rotary Clubs. He tried to be flip and relaxed, but came off as a hatchet man, blaming 1.6 million battle deaths on ““Democrat wars.’’ The press pounced.
On election night at the old Shoreham Hotel in Washington, Dole sat glumly as the returns came in. He stayed up until 4 a.m. watching the numbers flash on the screen. It was agonizingly close. In the end, a switch of only 10,000 votes in Ohio and Hawaii would have swung the Electoral College to Ford-Dole. In the morning, Dole suggested that Ford call for recounts in key states. He was overruled. Then the commentary started rolling in. The press, fed by the Ford crowd, blamed Dole. Ford’s own polls showed otherwise; Dole had secured the farm belt, helped elsewhere. Then, at a post-election party for the press, Barbara Walters asked: how does it feel to be the man who cost Ford the election?
Dole was sick and exhausted from the campaign, in turns disconsolate, irate and defiant. But it didn’t take long for him to regain his stride. He had a meeting with Charlie Black, a friend, but a Reagan admirer. He wanted to know: will Reagan run again? Dole admitted he was bitter, but he wasn’t going to give up. What would the Old Man say to that? Bob Dole was not a quitter. Never would be. ““You could tell that he was already thinking: “I’m going to get in this thing again’,’’ Black says.
If Dole had doubts, they were dispelled by a phone call the next day. Richard Nixon was on the line. Cheer up, he said. It wasn’t your fault, and there will be another day. Two years later, Nixon was back on Capitol Hill for the first time since he had left Washington in disgrace. The occasion was the funeral of Hubert Humphrey, who had also called to console Dole after the 1976 defeat. Dole was impressed by Nixon’s discipline. Dole watched him work. ““Nixon would take a room in a hotel, and sit down with his yellow legal pad,’’ Dole recalled to NEWSWEEK. ““He would write out notes about everyone that he was going to see, what he wanted to say, points he wanted to make. It was amazing. What I admired was that he never gave up.’'
Neither did Dole. As Reagan prepared to run for president again in 1980, Nancy Reagan had one big worry about the GOP field. She urgently asked Nofziger: ““What about Bob Dole? Is he going to run?’’ Nofziger answered, ““I don’t think so. I think he’s had enough of this.''
Nofziger was wrong, of course. The 1976 race was the first campaign Dole had ever lost, and he’d been running for office since 1950. This new wound was no less real for being political. Dole ran for the presidential nomination in 1980. And lost. He ran for it in 1988. And lost. A superstitious man, he wasn’t sure the third time would be a charm. It was. In the meantime, a new country has grown up around him. He must unify and inspire it, even if he doesn’t quite comprehend it. Perhaps the lesson he learned in the tumultuous decade of the ’70s will be inspiration enough: never quit.
