Elizabeth Dole moves through the room touching and smiling, as radiant as a movie star, as regal as a queen.
She stands closer to her admirers than etiquette condones. She grasps their hands in her soft, slender fingers and holds on to them longer than a handshake demands. She touches an arm here, a lapel there, cradles an old man`s elbow, leans her head toward an eager young woman as if they have secrets to share.
”Bless you,” she says to each one in her refined drawl. ”Bless you. Thank you. Bless you.”
The crowd basks in her benediction.
”I wish she were running for president,” murmur the women.
”She`s mighty attractive,” murmur the men.
On this Tuesday night, despite a cold, wet fog and the lure of a high school basketball game, 60 people have turned out under the bright lights of the county courthouse annex to hear Elizabeth Dole`s presidential pitch for her husband, Robert, the Kansas senator. Many identify themselves as disgruntled Democrats, an important group for Dole to convert if he is to do well in South Carolina`s Republican primary on March 5 and in the Southern primaries that follow when voters in 20 states go to the polls on Super Tuesday, March 8.
”This may be the biggest gathering in the history of Calhoun County for a Republican,” says Neil Bates, one of the event`s local organizers, as he surveys the people milling about and nibbling cheese and pineapple on toothpicks.
What`s the attraction?
”Her,” Bates says. ”People want to see her.”
Even in a campaign year that celebrates the new breed of independent political wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole stands out. She verges on being a celebrity, rare for a woman in politics.
The people who come to see her out here in tobacco and timber territory, in Democratic strongholds such as St. Matthews, Orangeburg and Chester, aren`t always sure what has made her a celebrity, but they know she may be the most famous person ever to grace their town.
”. . . She was a lady Cabinet member, right? Oh, sure, secretary of transportation. . . . Air safety? Nope, don`t know much about her record on that, but she`s sure a smart girl, Harvard and all. She looked real good on TV the other night. . . . And isn`t that a great coat she`s wearing?”
Elizabeth Dole left the Department of Transportation on Oct. 1 to campaign for her husband. She had recently come under attack for spending so much time away from DOT while working on his campaign. Her record during her 4 1/2 years on the job was under attack, too.
Air safety was a contradiction in terms, her critics charged, and from airports around the country rose the wail of passengers desperately seeking lost luggage.
Her critics questioned the leaps of logic or ambition that transformed her from a Democrat who had worked for Lyndon Johnson`s Great Society to a Republican who pampered big business, from a federal trade commissioner who decried big-business mergers to a secretary of transportation who sanctioned almost every airline merger that came her way.
Even many of those who gave her credit for good intentions lamented that she often lacked the clout or conviction to win the administration`s support for her ideas.
Dole countered by enumerating her successes. She campaigned for higher drinking-age laws to reduce drunken driving; she worked to change airline scheduling practices; she oversaw the sale of Conrail, the government`s freight railroad, which raised $2 billion for the federal treasury. She produced statistics showing that airline travel is safer than it has ever been.
But even her accomplishments, fortified by the legendary charm that has made her one of the best-liked inhabitants of Washington, could not fully shield her from the assault.
Out here on the Southern campaign trail, however, far from frequent-flier country, those issues don`t matter much.
”If she were still running the Department of Transportation and if airplanes were falling out of the sky every day, people would still love Liddy Dole,” says one of Dole`s aides in South Carolina. ”She`s just got charisma.”
By some accounts, she is Bob Dole`s biggest asset. Where his caustic wit wounds, her gentility heals. As a North Carolinian and once one of the highest-ranking women in government, she is equipped by breeding and experience to translate Bob Dole to groups of all kinds, particularly to Southerners and women. Her beauty, still fresh at 51, doesn`t hurt the campaign, either.
Ann Lewis, a Washington political consultant and former political director of the Democratic National Committee, is among the many who see Elizabeth Dole as vital to her husband`s campaign.
”The idea that Bob Dole has `a real wife,` a woman who knows what it`s like to have so much responsibility and not enough time is very important to Republican women,” she says, ”particularly in a field of candidates not making much effort to reach out to women.”
Yet Lewis, like others, detects ”a certain irony” in the Doles`
campaign partnership. ”Bob Dole manages to have the best of both worlds,”
she says, ”a campaign helpmate-and the image of a wife who has a career.”
Dole calls his wife his ”Southern strategy.” To her falls the job of making sure that if her husband scores big in the Iowa caucuses, the momentum will transfer to the South. So while he stumps through the cornfields, she courts her native land, whizzing down two-lane roads at 70 miles an hour, sometimes making appearances in six or seven towns a day, deriving sustenance from Diet Cokes, cheeseburgers and daily sessions with her Bible.
In Holiday Inn banquet rooms, country-club halls and city council chambers, she repeats what she calls ”the Bob Dole story.” She performs it, really, her rich voice rising and falling with the drama, her hands alive with theatrical flourish. The speech is the same each time, but repetition has not leached it of feeling.
Each time she says that she and her husband may be the only two lawyers in Washington who get along, her chuckle sounds spontaneous. Each time she recounts Bob`s Depression-era hardships in Russell, Kan., and the World War II injury that crippled his right arm, her emotion sounds sincere.
And each time someone asks her why she quit her job for her husband, she says in a tone that bids no further discussion: ”This is a personal decision, and that`s what we women have fought for, the right to decide what is best in our own lives. I think playing a meaningful role, a substantive role in the democratic process that leads to the selection of the leader of the free world is meaningful work.”
Work. It is one of her favorite words. Growing up in Salisbury, N.C., she was the kind of kid who often asked the teacher for extra-credit projects.
Salisbury is a town of 22,000, a place where behavior is governed by family, religion and manners. Dole`s father, John Hanford, was a wealthy florist.
Liddy, as she named herself, was a model child. She studied piano and ballet, was elected to a variety of school offices and won a silver cup from the United Daughters of the Confederacy for her essay-writing. Her brother, John, 13 years her senior, was her idol and she was his pet. At 18, she went to her debutante ball in Raleigh.
Liddy Dole has described Duke University as a great research institution that at times resembled a finishing school. As a student there she collected honors befitting its dual nature and her own: Phi Beta Kappa, president of the Women`s College, May Queen.
After college, while most of her friends were getting married, she headed to the foreign ground of the North. She was one of 25 women, along with U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder and former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, in the Harvard Law School class of 1965.
”I didn`t map out a plan,” she says at 10 p.m. one night as her campaign van speeds toward the Howard Johnson`s in Manning, S.C., where she is to deliver a talk at 8 a.m. ”It`s been a matter of things just unfolding.”
However radical her choices might have seemed in her hometown in that era, her parents supported her but not without some regret.
”I wanted her to take home ec and marry and live next door,” says her mother, Mary Hanford, ”but it didn`t work out that way.”
After working briefly as a lawyer in Washington, Dole joined the staff of the White House Office of Consumer Affairs. One day Virginia Knauer, her boss, took her over to Bob Dole`s Senate office. He scribbled her name on his blotter. It took him three phone calls and several months to muster the courage to ask her out.
Finding a man with brains who wasn`t daunted by hers was no mean feat.
”In the beginning she didn`t tell boys she went out with that she was in law school,” says her mother, ”and she didn`t ever talk over their heads, which I think is good psychology.”
Elizabeth Dole was 39 when she married in December, 1975. In the summer of 1976, when President Ford asked Bob Dole to be his running mate, she took a leave from her job as a member of the Federal Trade Commission. She returned the following year, then left again in 1979 when her husband decided to run for president in 1980. In 1981 she returned to government as assistant to the president for public liaison.
The Doles quickly became celebrated as Washington`s power couple. Bob would flit into a party or meeting just as Elizabeth flitted out. They would communicate by phone or via message pads that she scatters around their apartment in Washington`s Watergate complex. They would try to schedule Sundays together, beginning at Foundry Methodist Church, followed by brunch and newspapers. The campaign has upset even that little bit of stability.
Only occasionally does Elizabeth Dole sound wistful about the life she has chosen. ”When first married, we put off looking for a house,” she writes in her new autobiography ”The Doles: Unlimited Partners” (Simon & Schuster, $19.95). ”There`d be time for that later, we told ourselves. Twelve years have passed, and I`m still yearning for a fireplace and little back yard in which to commune with nature.”
Never having had children, she speaks of her good fortune in being close to her two nephews and to Bob`s daughter by his previous marriage.
Elizabeth Dole has long traveled the narrow path between feminism and tradition. In the male enclave of the Reagan administration, she spoke up for women`s rights, though she did not push certain ideas, such as the Equal Rights Amendment, that she felt the President would never accept.
Women`s-rights activists respect her, though some regret that she wasn`t particularly effective on their behalf.
”She didn`t see it as her role to be the White House feminist,” said Char Mollison, executive director of the Women`s Equity Action League. ”I think she is an example of someone who knew the limitations imposed on her by the ideology of the Reagan administration but who still found a way to help.” What kind of First Lady would she be?
”Activist,” she says. She would continue her work for transportation safety. She would fight drug abuse. And she makes it clear that she would not consider herself ”co-president.”
”The country certainly doesn`t elect two presidents,” she says.
Some think that one day Elizabeth Dole could be president.
”If her husband doesn`t get the nomination and we lose the presidency in `88, I think her name would be on the short list of candidates in `92,”
says Chris Bowman, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
But these days at least, Elizabeth Dole is likely to confront such a suggestion something like this:
She is standing on the deck of the Dogwood Hills Country Club in Walterboro, S.C. She wraps her arms around three men in business suits, posing for the camera.
”Come on, guys, move in here, don`t be shy.”
Like proud little boys, they press against her, making their way into the photographer`s viewfinder.
”Elizabeth Dole for vice president!” shouts a bystander.
”Elizabeth Dole for president!” cries another.
Elizabeth Dole wags a finger and smiles.
”Now, now,” she chides. ”None of that.
