What It Takes (106 page)

“... And that is his ability to master the complexities of very TOUGH ISSUES, to use a keen, creative mind to WORK EFFECTIVELY with his colleagues in the Senate, to hammer out a solution to a TOUGH PROBLEM, even if it takes months to do it, or scores of meetings, and then to form that all-important COALITION ...”

The lines were always the same. Solutions were “hammered out,” and coalitions were “all-important.” Once she got a line right, she could chuckle in the same place, smile to the front row with the same sudden pleasure, stress a key word with the same rise of voice ... you could just about
see
the key words on an outline somewhere.

In fact, that’s how it started—an outline that Owen wrote out on one yellow legal-pad sheet. ... “You ask me,” Owen said, “the bottom line is the war record. The punch line is that Bob Dole crawled out of a foxhole, grabbed his buddy under fire, and that’s how he got shot. You know, that needs to be in your story.”

“... whose LEADERSHIP has been TESTED, tahm and tahm again, not only in the United States Senate, but also on the FRONT LAHNS, in World War II ...”

Week by week, she worked on that speech, improving every night. She was a huge hit. Everybody loved Elizabeth. Owen did believe she was the secret weapon. All he had to do was tee it up—she never missed. There were weeks when she pulled in $200,000.

At the same time, of course, she was stretched to the limit. They got to California one night—they were going to stay over at Owen’s condo—and Elizabeth had two funders, plus a meeting with some S&L fellow named Jim Montgomery. She thought it was going to be just a friendly visit with this man who’d signed on to help Bob Dole ... but no: at the last minute, Owen told her she had to
put a move
on this guy. He was coming in cold ... and they wanted him to be Finance Chairman for California.

Well, that was the last and lethal straw: Elizabeth was stressed already, trying to figure her
own
future. ... She wanted to help Bob, of course, but she felt she couldn’t resign from Transportation until her new airport regulations came on line—she’d tried
so hard
to sort out the crush at the busiest hubs—she was pushing the regs
as fast as she could
, she was working
as hard as she could
, but still they wouldn’t be ready till fall, and if she left now, would it look like she was running away from the problem? She had a message at the condo to call Bob Crandall, the president of American Airlines ... and now Owen wanted her to wing it with some
stranger
? ... What was she supposed to say? She had no time to prepare! She didn’t know
anything about this man
! She went into a bedroom—she started to cry. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t possible!

But she did it. She pulled herself together and did the Bob Dole story—one-on-one. And before he knew what hit him, Montgomery was caught up—ready to fly cross-country for a meeting with the Senator, about to sign on as California chairman ...

Which he did: Montgomery would raise another $1.1 million with a single event at L.A.’s Century Plaza.

You might say that made two million for Elizabeth and Owen.

You might ... Dole did not. The word that filtered back to those two in California was a message from Jo-Anne, to Owen ... about the condo:

“Senator says, if Elizabeth stays at the condo, you stay somewhere else.”

She had a funder in Washington, at the J.W. Marriott, two blocks from the White House. Bob was in town, so he stopped in to see what the fuss was about. (“Lotta moneyy!”)

When it came time for speeches, there was Bob, smoothing his tie, but, no: the host, Dick Marriott, introduced Elizabeth, who stepped up and did the Bob Dole story.

“... not only in the United States Senate, but on the FRONT LAHNS, in World War II. ... He was in a FOXHOLE in Italy ... they got him, BROKE HIS NECK with machine-gun fire ... BROKE HIS NECK, and he was PARALYZED ... he spent THIRTY-NINE MONTHS in the hospital ... he had EIGHT OPERATIONS ...”

It was likely the first time Dole ever had to hear a speech about ... his problem. He’d spent half a lifetime hiding its effects. For forty years, he’d labored, strained, so
no one
would have to keep that story in mind ... and here it was, laid out like a cheese platter for the delectation of this penthouse crowd.

They were cheering as Elizabeth introduced him, at last, and he made for the mike. He looked, for once, like he didn’t know what to say.

“Well,” he said, “at least you’ll remember the introduction ...”

He’d remember, too. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was raised that night, and not from a big crowd—maybe fifty people ... but they wrote checks and called on friends to write checks. Dole didn’t need a dollar-count to see what’d happened. Those people felt they knew something about him. They were excited.

His injury wasn’t the only thing—Dole never talked about himself at all. You’d hear five times a day what Dole said to Senator Moynihan on Social Security, what Dole said to Daniel Ortega about elections in Nicaragua ... but there was nothing about Dole: no intimacies about his home, his family, any book he’d read, any friends—nothing of the life that underlay the Leader.

Sometimes he’d proffer an illusion of that life with a joke about him and Elizabeth—that famous two-career couple. There was a picture in
People
magazine of Bob and Elizabeth making the bed. Dole said he got an angry letter from a man in California. “ ‘Senator, you’re causing problems for men all over the country. Ever since that picture, I have to help my wife make the bed!’

“I wrote back: ‘Brother, you don’t know the half of it. The only reason Elizabeth was helping was ’cause they were taking pictures.’ ”

Like most Dole jokes, it was designed to deflect inquiry, not reward it. Anyway, Elizabeth was part of his high-gloss Washington power-persona ... which was the picture he’d polished for voters for the last twenty years.

In fact, you could just about see that persona take shape in the pictures—the press photos. In the sixties, they were almost all the same: Congressman Dole on the steps of the Capitol, leaning his perfect grin over the shoulders of some visiting Salina couple, or a Scout troop from Hutchinson ... thousands of western-Kansas-voter greet-and-grins that showed up in local papers with such frequency, uniformity ... folks in Russell said it was a darned shame no one would give Bob an office in Washington.

By the start of the seventies, when he’d won his seat in the Senate and was angling for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, the photos changed—they were indoor shots, power venues: the Senate floor, the White House ... finally, Dole’s splendid office at the RNC, with its huge wall map of the United States—Dole had visibly gone national. Now he looked serious, stylish, smoother. He didn’t smile at the camera. He had those sideburns (modishly long). His suits fit better.

The other people in the pictures changed. From the early seventies (Lyn Nofziger, Bryce Harlow ...) there were more and more capital smart guys and Big Guys. Cabinet Secretaries made appearance. Through the Ford years (Bill Timmons, Jim Baker, Bob Strauss ...), the photo-buddies got bigger and smarter. By ’76, when Dole ran for VP, men with earplugs showed up in the pictures ... along with iron rings of microphones and cameras ... foreign leaders ... millionaires, movie stars, sports heroes.

The staff in the background changed. Through the seventies, guys behind Dole were mostly slab-shouldered Kansans—looked like they spent summers shoveling wheat, or at least they’d wrestled in school. ... By the eighties, when Dole took over the Finance Committee, the corners of the photos showed pencil-necked Harvard grads—Columbia, at least—with piles of paper under their arms ... tax-code geeks, trade-and-tariff experts, third-party-health-prepayment savants ... with flashbulb glare on their glasses, all waiting for Dole to finish his press conference and head back to the hearing room.

(Dole always mentioned they were Harvard guys. “Oughta know something!” ... He’d ask for their help on everything he touched for a month, then decide: “Well, nice guy ... can’t write.” So he’d get a new favorite: “Aagh! Guy worked for Danforth! Must be good!” ... They were all great if they came from worlds that seemed classy, unattainable to him. Once they worked for
Dole
, well ...)

By 1987, when he set all his sights on the Other Thing, you couldn’t see much Kansas in Dole. Dole always seemed to suspect, if people knew, if they could see, he was just a poor boy from Russell ... they’d figure out he wasn’t supposed to be here, at all.

But he saw what Elizabeth could do with his story. ... And his smart guys said he
had
to talk about himself. Don Devine told him, like a broken record. In Washington, the whole campaign seemed tied up in production of a half-hour video on Dole’s life, directed by a young media guru named Murphy. On the road, Dole’s Communications Director, Mari Maseng, kept after him, every day, to let people into Bob Dole’s life, make them see where he was “coming from.”

Dole started gingerly, just a toe in the water: he’d tell his story about him and Pat Moynihan, saving the Social Security fund:

“I said, ‘Pat! We’ve got to give this one more try!’ ...”

Then he’d add—just as part of the story:

“You know, some people don’t have anything else except their Social Security. My mother was in that category!”

Pretty soon, in southern towns, or farm towns, Dole would mention:

“There’s nothing complicated about Bob Dole! My father ran a cream and egg station ... wore his overalls to work for forty-two years, and was proud of it!”

Dole didn’t want to say too much—wear out his welcome—and he never meant to talk about the war. ... But the crowds couldn’t get enough—people came up to him after events, started talking about their fathers, how their families started out poor ... or they had a kid disabled. It was like they found out they had a friend in court.

Dole started to work in: “So, I think I have been TESTED in life ... I think it proves, you can make it the HARD WAY.”

And he found out something else: when he talked about the
hard way
, about people who caught some
tough breaks
in life, might not have the
advantages, rich parents, top schools
—then, voters started talking to him ... about George Bush.

Dole didn’t even have to bring up the name!

He’d wind up a speech:

“So I think the bottom line is, people are going to look at our records. I think I’ve got a strong record ...” (He didn’t have to add his tag line:
a record, not a résumé.
)

“I think people want to know whether we’ve
made a difference
. ... I think I’ve made a difference!” (He’d leave it to them to judge whether Bush, in all his jobs, had made any discernible difference.)

And the next day, or the next stop, there’d be a few new lines:

“Times were tough. People had to be tougher. I was a County Attorney—people had real problems. Sometimes you had to take children away from their parents. ... People can go bankrupt, lose their property. ... I had to sign the checks for the welfare. I was going through the pile—there was my grandparents’ name ...”

That’s when the smart guys got nervous. What’s going on? ... Dole’s out there, talking welfare!

Pretty soon, he started talking long-term medical care ... child care! “People have real
problems
in this country!”

Don Devine, who thought of himself as the message cop, was going nuts. “Look, Senator,” he’d say. “Voters want to keep their jobs. They want America strong and at peace. Those are big issues. Child care is not in the same league.”

Devine was Dole’s designated right-winger. Republican conservatives didn’t want to hear from
day care
...
the homeless
!

But these were issues to Dole. Real problems! ... They were all coming up for a vote. Every one was some Senator’s baby. The map in Dole’s mind was still the Senate floor. That homeless bill—that was a
Byrd-Dole
bill. That meant a great deal to Dole: he was the only one who could cross the aisle, get it done with the Democratic Leader.

Alas, it might not ring the same bells with voters—not in GOP primaries. That’s what Devine was trying to hammer home: “Senator, you were fine until you got to that bipartisan homeless bill ... you’ve really got to stick to the outline. That’s uh, not our issue.”

Dole’s best issue was “whatever.”

He’d say: “Whether your issue’s drugs, whether your issue’s child care, Social Security—
whatever
...”

And then he’d make his point:

“... I think you have to look at the record.”

Or: “... I think I’ve made a difference.”

Or: “... I can sit down with you and your group and talk about it without looking at notecards!”

And, certainly, he could talk about it without speech outlines ... briefing books ... or meetings. He’d call headquarters, on L Street, three times a day—everybody’s in a
meeting
!

What are they meeting about?

“Strategy group, Senator.”

“Agh! Whose strategy?”

Dole knew he had to have a
big
campaign. He wasn’t going to end up like he did in 1980—no organization beneath him, nothing getting done anywhere, unless he happened to show up. Back in 1980, he had a grand theory on what he needed: the four M’s—management, money, media, momentum ...

“Well, maybe it was five M’s,” he’d say. “I forget the other. I didn’t have any of ’em.”

This time, he knew, he wasn’t supposed to run his own shop. He was supposed to have experts—strategists, field men, finance wizards, media gurus, speechwriters. ... God knows, he’d read enough big-foot punditry explaining “Dole’s problem”—he wouldn’t let himself be managed, organized.

That’s why he rented a whole floor of an office building—Eighteenth and L streets, dearest downtown D.C.—just about enough space to manage General Dynamics. That’s why he filled all those cubbyholes with smart guys. (He knew they were smart, the way he had to pay them—the Dole campaign was putting out tens of thousands of dollars every month, just for “consultants.”)