What It Takes (115 page)

Dole refused.

If they had to have Evans,
Dole
would make the appointment. ... There could be only one chairman!

Till 3:00
A.M.,
Dole hung tough. (“They’re not gonna do this to me!”) ... In the end, he had to appoint two cochairs—Evans and Anne Armstrong, from Texas ... but he won! Well—didn’t he?

Bob Dole got the chairman’s job.

He’d have a big press conference (biggest of his life!) to announce the glad news. ... He was on the move!

What a shame, it left such a sour taste.

D
OLE GOT THE BIG OFFICE
on the top floor on First Street—the one with the grand desk, that huge map behind ... (“Heyy! Nice digs!”) but his job was not to sit in the office.

He started crisscrossing the country, rallying for ’72, raising money, trying to broaden the Party at its base. From the chairman’s pulpit, Dole meant to open the Party to groups long-ignored: farmers, blue-collar ethnics ... blacks, Mexicans, Asians ... he never lost a chance to remind a crowd that his,
theirs
, was the Party of Lincoln, liberty, emancipation.

He never lost a chance at a crowd. Dole was determined to show his critics—show everyone—that he could carry his Senate load (he still never missed a roll call) and show up in every corner of the country to build the Party and its hopes for ’72. Now, for the first time, a car came to fetch him, idling at the base of the Capitol steps as the Senate finished business for the afternoon ... a jet was waiting at the airport ... Advance men were waiting at another airport one or two thousand miles to the west. If Dole could pick up a time zone or two on his way to the dinner, the funder, the rally ... he might have time for a press conference, too—or a stop, somewhere, refueling. ... “Agh, better make it Kansas.”

Kansans are always schizoid when one of their own grabs a glimmer of limelight: they’re
so
pleased (can’t believe, you know, a guy from
Kansas
) ... that they’re instantly on guard for some
slight
(that guy doesn’t care about
Kansas
anymore!). ... There’s a window of about ten days before they decide:
That fellow’s got too big for his britches! ...
So Dole would stop in Kansas, two or three times a week—every time his plane poked west of Ohio, he’d order his pilot to gas up in K.C. or Wichita, Salina or Great Bend ... while he scooted for a half-hour, hit a Kiwanis, or cut a ribbon for a new mall.

Of course, it was midnight, or after, when he’d land again in D.C. (that’s the bad news with time zones—you end up paying them back). Dole would have the car drop him at his big house on Beechway, in Virginia—tell the driver what time to come back. Bob would head for the basement. If Phyllis was still up, she might bring him dinner on a tray. That’s when she’d say anything she had to tell him. Then she’d go upstairs. ... Bob would sleep on his bed, in his cellar.

Chet Dawson made a visit to Washington that year, and he came back to Russell shaking his head: “Bob came home at 2:00
A.M
.,” Chet told the boys in the drugstore. “I guess he didn’t want to disturb Phyllis, so he just curled up downstairs. Four hours later, the limo showed up to take him away again. ... What kind of life is that?”

That’s what Phyllis wanted to know. Sometimes, she’d bring Bob’s tray, with his food—all cut up, as he liked it—and she’d muster courage to announce: “We have to talk.”

Bob would snap: “Whaddya want to talk about?”

She never had a good answer. There was no answer short or neat enough. It was just ... they had to talk—didn’t they? ... What happened to their life? If they couldn’t talk, well ...

It wasn’t that they fought. (Bob didn’t have time.) Sometimes, she would have liked a fight ... then she could
scream
... maybe he’d see how she felt—see her. But when? ... She tried to think of ways she could be different, to fit in with his life. Maybe she should stay up, eat supper with him. But Robin had to eat. And had to get to bed—Robin had school. Phyllis could count—she went back and
figured out
—how many times they’d had dinner together, the three of them, that year, when Bob made chairman. Two times.

One day Robin told her: “Mom, all my friends’ parents sleep together.”

Phyllis put on a brave face: “Well ... you don’t know what happens when you’re asleep—do you?”

She would ever remember the day she knew that life with Bob was never going to “straighten out”—was never going to be the life she’d thought of as a girl in New Hampshire, nor even the life she’d had in Russell, Kansas.

It was the mid-sixties, Robin was in grade school, maybe eleven years old, and she had a doctor’s appointment. The doctor was a wise old head who’d dealt with hundreds of young girls. ... So, just to keep Robin from worrying while he made his examination, the doctor asked—would she like to have her ears pierced? He offered to do the job, thirty-five dollars, including gold posts ... of course, he’d take care of any complications, infections, whatever ... Robin should ask her folks.

Well, Robin came out of that office, high as a kite—so excited! Could she get her ears pierced? ... Mom? ... Mom! Could she?

Phyllis didn’t know what to say. (Where she grew up, the only young girls with pierced ears were gypsies ... or, uh, worse!) “Well...” she said, “you’ll have to ask your father.”

That night, Robin left a note in the basement.

“Dear Dad: Can I please, please, please,
please
have my ears pierced? I talked to the doctor and he said it would cost $35 and that would cover any complications. Please,
please
... Love, Robin.”

And she drew, at the bottom, two boxes: one marked
YES
, and the other
NO.
At age eleven, she’d left her father a speed-memo.

(His response was also characteristic. He drew a third box, checked it, and marked it
MAYBE.
He scrawled underneath: “I’ll talk to you Tuesday.” That was three or four days away—for a girl that age, an eternity. Of course, when they did talk, he was a pushover. Phyllis had to take Robin to the doctor, get it done.)

Anyway, Phyllis knew then. When she saw how surely Robin knew her dad, when she saw how her daughter accepted the facts—the way Bob was ... then Phyllis had to accept, too: it would never be as she had dreamed it would be.

She rolled with it. Or she thought she did. She tried. She’d say what she had to, in the basement ... then she’d leave him alone. If they got a social invitation, she’d tell him, but she wouldn’t push. Sometimes, she’d go to the parties alone. When she got to feeling guilty about always being the guest, she’d invite everybody for dinner, then tell Bob: he was having a party ... did he want to come?

They did get along—they
never fought
. That’s why she felt like she’d been kicked ... when Bob said, one night, in the basement:

“I want out.”

He wasn’t happy. They could see that—the ones who knew him, staff who’d been with Dole since Kansas: they always knew—from the comments that leaked as he worked through the day, jokes he muttered after calls from the CREEPs. (It was Dole who gave Washington that nickname for the CRP, Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President.)

The problem was, the CREEPs held all the cards (and the money—Nixon’s reelection budget was ten times bigger than the RNC’s) ... they treated the Republican Committee like a poor cousin ... or worse: like a trained dog they had leashed in the backyard, to be loosed whenever Mitchell, Haldeman, or Colson yelled, “
Sic ’em!
”

That wasn’t how Dole saw the job. He’d learned a few things after three years in the Senate—he had more respect for his colleagues, and himself.

Sure, he’d attack George McGovern in speeches—try to paint him onto the left-wing fringe ... or off the edge of the canvas! But Dole wouldn’t let the Party newsletter use the cartoon (Chuck Colson sent it over) showing McGovern in the black pj’s of the Viet Cong. He wouldn’t send out the letter hinting that Hubert Humphrey had a problem with booze. He wouldn’t use the collection of new, kindly comments from Ted Kennedy about George Wallace (Colson’s headline:
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A BULLET MAKES!).

Most of the envelopes with the red tags (“Urgent!”) ended up in Dole’s wastebasket now. Dole knew they didn’t come from Nixon.

Problem was, he didn’t know what Nixon wanted. The minute Dole demonstrated his independence, he was adjudged “unreliable” by the CREEPs and the White House crowd. By ’72, Dole couldn’t get in to see the President ... couldn’t ask what Nixon wanted ... couldn’t ask for Nixon’s help. That frustration leaked from Dole, too—in the usual way:

“Agh, I called Haldeman, I said, ‘Bob, I’m the National Chairman! I want to see the President!’

“He said, ‘Fine. Tune in Channel Nine at ten o’clock. You can see him then.’ ”

In fact, so painful and public was Dole’s estrangement from the power crowd ... it probably saved his career. When burglars broke into the Watergate office of the Democratic National Committee, Dole couldn’t even take the story seriously. He’d never believe those Big Guys in the White House were involved.

He did ask his Big Guy friend Bryce Harlow ... who couldn’t make much of the story, either. “It’s got no legs,” Harlow said. “It’ll blow over ...” Dole thought he might make a formal statement—say the Party had nothing to do with this fiasco.

But that might look like he was backing away ...

“It’ll fade in two or three days,” Harlow said.

Dole raised the subject, once, at the White House. “I’m getting questions on the, uh, Watergate,” he said. “Maybe we oughta make a statement, just to clear the air.” But that suggestion lay on the table like a dead fish. Nixon didn’t say a word.

So, Dole saw his duty: he hit the road, tucked his head ... handled the questions in his own way:

“Agh, well, we got the burglar vote ...”

Dutifully, Dole swiped at
The Washington Post
: the
Post
was in bed with McGovern! Doing the Democrats’ dirty work! ... More than dutifully, Dole flew around the nation, trumpeting Nixon’s achievements: revenue-sharing for the states; draft reform, a volunteer Army; the diplomatic opening of China; the hundreds of thousands of boys he’d brought home—with honor—from Vietnam. Dole did believe that Nixon was solving the problems that mattered to Americans, that McGovern was out of step ... that Nixon would win by a landslide ... that Nixon could
reorder
the nation’s politics—not just in the White House, but in Congress, in the states.

But the CREEPs only cared about the reelection—a landslide for the President. They didn’t want to hear about down-ballot races. Dole couldn’t even get a call through to Nixon’s
staff
anymore. They treated the Party like an
enemy
. What could Dole do?

He kept flying. When the Senate went into recess, he stayed on the road for weeks. If they scheduled him a day to rest, an evening home, he’d remind them of some commitment he’d made, some emergency in a distant state. He didn’t want to go home.

One night in D.C., he sat up late, in half-darkness, in his Senate office. Staff was gone—except for Judy Harbaugh and his RNC driver, waiting for Dole to call it quits. “I want to talk to you,” Dole told Judy. “I’m going to need your help.”

Judy tried not to gawk. Bob Dole never asked for help.

“Looks like I’m going to get a divorce.”

She didn’t know what to say. She knew—they all knew in that office—Dole didn’t have much family life. They always figured that’s the way he was cut out. The shock was that he meant to do anything about it.

It wasn’t really what he meant to do. ... After he said he wanted out, he didn’t bring it up with Phyllis for weeks: they stuck to their routines. When Bob did try to talk to her again (“Well, we don’t want lawyers gettin’ their hands on everything—we prob’ly ought to talk”) ... it was too late.

“Here’s the name of
my
lawyer,” Phyllis said. “Talk to him.”

Still, Bob didn’t leave ... he wouldn’t go. He stayed at the house (as much as he stayed anywhere) all through the divorce. He didn’t know where to go. It was Phyllis who finally called his RNC driver to come over and put Bob’s belongings in the garage.

Bob told Judy Harbaugh: “I need you to find me a place to live.”

She rented him a tiny place in the Sheraton Park hotel. She got him some linens, and kitchen stuff—plates, a couple of pans—so he could cook ... if he could cook ... what was he going to cook? For the first time in his life. Bob Dole was alone.

He hadn’t felt like that since the Army, the hospitals. How could he end up like that again? ... How could he not? He had no friends to call, no family in town. He couldn’t even call his mother—Bina took that divorce hard. She took to the couch in the front room, in Russell. She blamed Bob ... and herself. If she’d paid more attention to Phyllis—just a little more!—this wouldn’t have happened. Never! She was so miserable, Doran couldn’t even get her up for Christmas. Bina said: “There’ll be no Christmas for me.”

Phyllis’s mom, Estelle, blamed her daughter. She thought Bob didn’t really want to leave. She told Bob it would break her own heart if he went through with this, if he let Phyllis go. “Well,” Bob replied softly, “if that’s what she wants ...”

The fact was, he had no idea how to work his will in a personal affair. Politics, sure—but not this ... and not now. He was tired, stretched thin. He could not find the will.

He took sick, with a vicious infection that laid him out for days, while he thought what he might have said, or done—thought back through
years
, how it might have been different ... but he could not make it different. He couldn’t do any more now. He was in his bed ... well, not his bed. It was that hotel, four walls ... not much else.

He had his job, thank God, and he did it. As soon as he was out of bed, he was in the air again—another coast-to-coast swing. Bob Dole wasn’t the kind to quit. Sometimes, you had to be tough! He flew a quarter-million miles in that election, for the Party, for the President.

That year, ’72, Nixon piled up the biggest margin of any Republican in history. Of course, the President and his men were exultant ... though Nixon did, sure enough, fail to mention any Party institutions in his victory speech.