Dole is organizing a group of young lawyers, including two of his former finance committee chiefs of staff, to look into domestic problems and issues. Another group is being set up to examine foreign affairs. ”There are a lot of areas that we`re starting to get into now, how do we deal with the drug problem, the crime problem, immigration, trade,” the senator says. ”We`re not there yet. We need to spend a lot of time on these issues. We`re doing the same with about 40 people around the country to get input on some of these very issues. It seems to me it`s one thing to dream up an answer here. It`s another thing for people who are dealing with it every day to give you some input. The whole world doesn`t revolve around the capital. You`re not going to solve the problems unless you get out there and listen to some of the people who are really hurting.”
These days the senator polishes the image of a tough, can-do leader who also is compassionate, concerned and willing to listen. Some call him the
”new Bob Dole” in contrast to the rough, partisan gut-fighter who hacked up Democrats and was known as a ”political sniper” during much of the 1970s. When he was about to become chairman of the Republican Party in 1971, former Sen. William Saxbe, a liberal Republican from Ohio, called Dole a
”hatchetman.” After he got the party job, Dole flung cutting one-liners at various Democrats, including former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, whom he called a ”left-leaning marshmallow.”
Though he was GOP chairman at the beginning of the Watergate scandal, Dole was never implicated and, in fact, had been critical of the way administration officials who later were forced from office handled the 1972 campaign. Over the years he has answered Watergate questions with either, ”It was my night off” or, ”I was busy pulling a job in Chicago.” At the same time, the senator began his move toward the center on issues, and in 1976 President Gerald Ford picked him to be his running mate. They started out more than 30 points behind Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, the Democratic ticket, and almost won, losing by only 2 percentage points. Though the Republicans carried the farm states, where Dole was supposed to be strong, and lost the South, where Carter was a native son, the perception has persisted for 10 years that Dole cost the Republicans the election. The reason was his aggressive campaign style that featured such assaults as labeling Carter
”Southern-fried McGovern.”
Dole really got into trouble during a televised debate with Mondale when he referred to wars fought by the U.S. in the 20th Century as ”Democrat wars.” There was speculation that the remark reflected a bitter, dark side of the candidate, and the controversy gave the Democrats an issue: They planted the idea that Dole might be dangerous if he ever became president, while Mondale would be calm and safe.
Audience members at Dole`s speeches across the country now often remark that he seems more relaxed, more cordial. ”His wit has lost that dreadful edge,” says a woman in Chicago. ”The difference really jumped out at me,”
says Democrat Alex Seith, who saw Dole at the GOP fundraiser. Seith, who earned his own reputation as a cutting campaigner when he ran against former Sen. Charles Percy in 1978, says, ”I know how hard it is to get perceptions changed, and it struck me that the man has grown a lot.” Still, some GOP activists mutter about 1976, blaming Dole for the loss of the White House, though as one Republican senator says, ”If they want to blame someone, they should blame Ford for pardoning Nixon” after he resigned because of Watergate.
Dole says he is ”rarely asked” about 1976 any more, ”though I assume somebody will find that debate tape somewhere.” His standard reply to questions about the vice presidential campaign is, ”I was supposed to go for the jugular and I did–my own.”
In a recent session supporters were asked to list his strengths and weaknesses, he says, and ”hatchetman” was 13th on the weakness list. (First was being too much of a Washington insider.) ”My No. 1 strength,” he says,
”was Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth Dole somehow manages to be a cross between a homecoming queen and a Cabinet officer, a mixture of sweetness and shrewdness that charms those who meet her. A native of North Carolina, graduate of Harvard Law School and veteran of several high-ranking government jobs, she married the senator in December of 1975. He and his first wife, a physical therapist he met when he was recovering from his war wounds, were divorced in 1972 and have a daughter, Robin.
In Elizabeth Dole`s office at the Department of Transportation hangs a painting of her husband and, right above it, a photograph of herself with the late Dr. Hampar Kelikian, the Chicago doctor who gave back to Dole partial use of his right arm and, as the senator said when Kelikian died, ”gave me a purpose as well.”
Robert Dole was a strapping young man who stood 6 feet 2 inches, weighed 186 pounds and had the powerful build of an athlete when he left the University of Kansas and went off to war, eventually ending up with the Army`s 10th Mountain Division in Italy in 1945. On April 14, Lt. Dole was leading his platoon through heavy fire across a clearing when he was hit by something, perhaps fragments of a mortar shell, perhaps a bullet, that shattered his right shoulder, damaged his spine and paralyzed him.
After lying wounded for hours (Dole later described it as ”sort of a long day”), he was taken from the battlefield to the first of a series of hospitals where he would spend more than three years and almost die twice from complications from his wounds and from infection. At one point he weighed only 120 pounds. But he survived, thanks in part to streptomycin, then an experimental antibiotic drug.
While he was in Percy Jones Hospital in Battle Creek, Mich., Dole heard of Kelikian, an Armenian immigrant who had became a noted neurosurgeon. Kelikian had a reputation as a doctor who could help vets like Dole, who had fought his way back from paralysis but still suffered from a badly damaged right shoulder and arm. His transportation and other costs paid by the people of Russell, Dole went to Chicago, where Kelikian performed three operations on the shoulder and arm free of charge. ”I do what I can for the country,” the doctor was quoted as saying years later. ”Dole epitomized America to me. He had the faith to endure.”
Through it all, Dole kept the sense of humor he had inherited from his father, Doran, and sharpened as a boy working in Dawson`s Drugstore, where he learned to trade insults and quips with the best of the local wiseacres. One of Dole`s nurses later told Elizabeth Dole, ”He was completely paralyzed when he came to the hospital, but I used to roll him around to the other wards to cheer up the other patients because he had a sense of humor and he was so optimistic.”
”One of the things I really admire about Bob is the way he handles adversity,” his wife adds. ”He really does cope very well with
disappointments and any difficult situation. He doesn`t dwell on things or harbor any grudges. He just moves on. I`ve wondered whether this ability really developed from the years in the hospital, where he had to learn to be on his own. He just deals with things and feels, `Gosh, there are so many challenges ahead, I`m not going to dwell on something in the past.` ”
Today, the only outward sign of Dole`s wounds is the pen or rolled-up paper that he often carries in his right hand and a habit of hitching up his still partially paralyzed right arm when he is very tired. In an interview with a New York Times reporter he explained that the pen is there ”so people won`t grab my hand and break it off.”
His left arm appears unaffected by the injuries, but the senator, who has set up the Dole Foundation to help pay for training physically and mentally disabled persons, described the difficulties he encounters in buttoning his shirt with his left hand, which has only partial feeling in the thumb and forefinger. ”I can`t do buttons like you do, just feel and push them in there,” he said, recalling a recent day when he spent 10 minutes on one button. ”I`ve got to be able to see the hole and sort of push the button in. So every day you get a little test.”
When the reporter asked what he had learned in the hospital, Dole said,
”I learned I couldn`t get up. That`s where it all begins. You learn you can`t do things. I fancied myself as quite an athlete. I never thought about politics. I thought about football, basketball, all that stuff.”
He also thought he would like to be a doctor. ”He knew doctors from the drugstore,” his younger brother, Kenneth, says. But after he came home from the war, Dole told his brother, ”The only thing I`ve got left is my head, so I better use it.”
After going to the University of Arizona and then getting a law degree at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., Dole went home to Russell. He won a seat in the state legislature, then was elected Russell County attorney before running for Congress in 1960.
Kenny Dole, an oil-lease broker in Russell, recalls the years when the brothers were growing up in the Depression. His father supplemented income earned at a creamery by trading odds and ends to farmers for food.
”On the 4th of July, Dad got up and set up a big, round washtub,” he says. ”Then we would go to the ice plant and get a block of ice and Nehi pop. We each got to pick out six bottles. We could drink them or make them last all summer, because that`s all there was.”
There may not have been money, but there was an abundance of wit. In addition to the story about the photograph of the Doles making the bed, there`s another the senator often tells to end the stump speech he gives at fundraisers and other appearances, and it, too, illustrates his use of humor. ”When I first went to Congress, back in 1961,” he told his Chicago audience, ”I learned that you are asked to speak a lot. You may not be any good, just warm and willing and not even too willing, a little like KP in the Army. I was asked to go out to Indiana one night and I was told that it was the biggest event in that area in a decade. When I got there, I learned they
(the Republicans) hadn`t had a meeting in 10 years.
”I remember going into the terminal, where I met the county chairman, who was in a state of near collapse. He said the advance ticket sales had only reached 10. So he rushed me over to the local radio station to try to hype the sales. He said, `We`re going to cut the tickets from $3 to $1. There`s going to be a drawing of a color TV set, and you`ve got to be present to win, and we`re not going to draw till Congressman Bob Doyle gets through talking.`
”And they started through my bio, which was rather lengthy since I prepared it myself. Born in Kansas, reared in Kansas, wounded in World War II and on and on and on. We left the studio and got in the car, and about the time we hit the highway, the driver flipped on the radio and the announcer came on to summarize the interview. He said, `Congressman Bob Doyle will speak tonight at Legion Hall. Tickets have been slashed to a dollar. Going to be a drawing for a color TV set. You gotta be present to win. We`re not going to draw till Doyle gets through talking.` He said, `He was born in Kansas, reared in Kansas; prior to World War II, he was a pre-medical student. He suffered a serious head injury in the war and then went into politics.` ”
It always leaves them laughing.
