Early Saturday morning, December 3, 1994, Senator Bob Dole walked briskly through the glass doors of his office, room 141, on the first floor of the modern Hart Senate Office Building. Dole, 71, appreciated Saturdays. There was much less pressure, fewer people standing in line to see him, he could wear casual sports clothes. He headed for his large private office in the back, a modern, well-lit room with tall windows and none of the dark-paneled look of the older Senate. Even the carpet was white. He had three important appointments scheduled. The first was at 9 A.M. with his wife, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Dole wanted to discuss, systematically and at length, the possibility that he was going to run for president. For nearly two decades it had been an issue in their lives. He had run unsuccessfully twice before. “Okay, Bob,” she had said several days before, “let’s set aside a few quiet hours and let’s just look at some of this in more detail.”
In three days, he and Elizabeth, 58, would celebrate their 19th wedding anniversary. The résumé woman with a Harvard Law degree, she had held separate cabinet posts in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and was currently president of the American Red Cross. On the surface she seemed to be a soft southern woman, courteous and welcoming, with auburn hair sprayed firmly in place, vibrant eyes and a red-lipped, warm smile. Underneath, Elizabeth drove herself and others obsessively. She mastered the briefing books, and her husband recalled many a night when he could hear her in the upstairs of their town-house apartment practicing speeches aloud days in advance. Dole himself would appear for a major speech with a few scribbled notes on a scrap of paper, if that.
Dole had just been elected Senate majority leader, and Elizabeth was pressing him on whether he was going to run for president a third time. The Doles lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment at the Watergate complex, and she liked to keep their home as an oasis away from the noise and rush of their very public professional lives. By the time they were at home together at night, they usually had both been through 12-hour days and wanted dinner, perhaps an old movie and their shoes off. Rather than say to him in his own home, okay, you’re on the firing line, 20 questions, Elizabeth had arranged an appointment. She wanted a Saturday morning meeting away from the swirl of people running in and out, phones and staff.
Elizabeth brought to the meeting one of their closest friends, Mari Will, a longtime political and media adviser, and speechwriter for both Doles since his unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign. Mari, 40, was a six-foot, blond-haired version of Elizabeth. She had started in politics as a campaign press secretary to Senator Strom Thurmond, the conservative South Carolina Republican, in 1978, and was married to conservative columnist George Will. Elizabeth had explained to Mari that Dole was close to throwing the switch to run for president again. It was crucial, Elizabeth said, that he get a cold, objective view of what would be required were he to run. As his wife, she wanted to make sure that he was willing and enthusiastic and that he understood clearly what might happen to him in the process. They were going to give him a look at everything in the harsh light of day.
Personally, Will was going to be a reluctant warrior if Dole ran again. Most of the people and staff in political campaigns were not very serious people, but she considered both Dole and Elizabeth serious. She had prepared a memo that she was going to use as an outline for the points she wanted to make directly to Dole.
Campaigning in the 1990s was completely different than it was in the 1960s or even the 1970s, Will said. The media environment was wild and chaotic. It could be powerful when harnessed and incredibly destructive when left to its own course. That meant message discipline was absolutely essential. Dole would have to find the themes of his campaign, and repeat them again and again, not drifting or sliding off. No more winging it. Was he willing?
Dole said he understood that he had to change his style of communicating, which was undisciplined, chaotic and marked by a tendency to free-associate, often speaking in a series of cryptic sentences. He was prepared to improve, he said.
At one point, Will said that he had to be careful about his humor and jokes. Reporters would treat him differently. “They laugh at your jokes when you’re majority leader,” Will said; “when you’re running for president, they write them down.”
Turning to one of the most sensitive topics, Will said she knew he was worried about his age. In her opinion, she said, it would absolutely not be a factor. In fact Dole’s age, which would be 73 in the fall of 1996, would be an asset if he wound up running against Clinton. The reaction against Clinton was so strong that people wanted someone steady, someone who had been there, someone with experience. People wouldn’t care about age unless he became sick or acted senile, she said.
On this matter Dole just listened and nodded.
Some of the negatives from his unsuccessful campaigns for president in 1980 and 1988 would linger, Will continued. But within the party Dole had largely cleansed himself of the negatives from the 1988 campaign by supporting Bush, being a loyal Republican leader, and then after 1992 emerging as the effective leader of the party when Bush was defeated by Clinton. Now respected by both Republicans and Democrats as a kind of statesman, Dole was going to go down in history anyway. All that would be thrown into play if he decided to run for president..
Directly proportional to the upsides this time were the downsides. The toughest part for Dole, Will felt, would be to get the nomination. With the nomination, she said, beating Clinton would be comparatively easier. Yet a campaign against Clinton would be very negative. “The only way to emerge from that with your reputation intact is to win.” His entire lifetime of achievement would be on the line in that single contest. Succeed, and he would be remembered for that. Fail, and he would be remembered for that.
Will went through the likely competitors for the Republican nomination, listing the various skills some possessed that would likely make a difference. She came back to the centrality of message discipline. In addition, she said, she thought the 1996 Republican contest and the general election would be about values. A candidate would have to be willing to talk about values.
Dole seemed uncomfortable at the mention of values.
It is hard for you, Will said, because in Kansas people didn’t talk openly about values or personal matters.
Dole indicated that he agreed.
It’s like being asked to read poetry aloud or something that you have written yourself? Will asked.
“Yes,” Dole replied.
Talking about values was essential, she said. It was what the country wanted to hear, and he would have to do it. It could be the crux of the election.
Will considered Dole a populist conservative, a Boy Scout from Kansas and the straightest of straight arrows, who reflected popular attitudes. He just needed to explain himself. The authenticity had to come through. After some back and forth, Dole said he was willing to do it, he agreed there was a need to do it.
A willingness and a recognition of the need were not enough, Will said. Would he actually do it?
Dole said he would do it.
Elizabeth was mostly quiet as Will went through her points. It was now her turn. Elizabeth had two central points. Did Dole understand the two very different roles—Senate majority leader and candidate for president? Beginning the next month, for the first time in 40 years the Republicans would control both the House and Senate. That meant big responsibilities and a big agenda just in the day-to-day mechanics of moving things through the Senate as majority leader. His time would be filled, 12 to 14 hours a day, with getting that all done, managing a very broad responsibility in the Senate, every issue imaginable, every amendment someone might offer.
Then, Elizabeth said in her gentle but very attention-getting southern accent, on the other hand he would have to go out and shift gears, turn that off, go out and run for president, talk big picture. She knew Bob was not good at turning things off, and his specialty was not the big picture. “That’s very different. I mean, you try to do those two roles simultaneously,” she said. “Are you certain, are you absolutely clear that those two can be done simultaneously, because it requires a very different approach?”
Yeah, yeah, Dole said.
“You’ve got an opportunity to serve right where you are, Bob,” she said. “Okay, you’re majority leader. You have an opportunity to serve there. Now let’s think about whether you can serve better from the standpoint of being president than you can from where you are right now.”
Yeah, Dole had thought about that plenty.
Mari Will amplified. The style of leading the Senate, being master of that process, meant talking legislative jargon, moving and nudging the other senators along, discussing subcommittee votes, conference and closure. Oh, he was great at it, but that was the very opposite of running for president. The message discipline would have to include a carefully crafted presidential message that was an explanation of what he would do, where he would take the country. He thoroughly enjoyed being leader, they all knew that, but if he took his eye off the presidential ball, he could damage himself in the race and then all the downsides could emerge.
Will and Elizabeth had an additional point: if he did this, it couldn’t be like 1988. It would have to be different. There had to be organization, discipline, and Dole would have to delegate authority—no last-minute decisions that he wanted to visit certain cities instead of those the campaign staff had planned. No more turning his campaign plane around in midair on impulse. He had brought old campaign workers to the verge of tears with his seat-of-the-pants decision making. This campaign couldn’t turn out like the rest, couldn’t falter because old mistakes were repeated.
“How do you feel about that, Bob?” Elizabeth asked. “You realize what it’s going to take to do this?”
Oh, yeah, Dole said. He understood exactly what they were saying.
“Let’s hear you say, Bob,” Elizabeth pressed, “how you do it simultaneously.”
Dole said he knew what it would entail, he felt very comfortable.
Elizabeth said she wanted them to appreciate fully what it was like to govern these days in the case that he was elected. Federal spending would almost certainly be cut, and there wouldn’t be as much money in the budget for spending that presidents previously had used to ensure popularity.
Dole listened, nodded his head, agreed.
The media tended to destroy people who popped their heads up above the herd, she said. They would try to break him.
“Is this what we really want to do with our lives?” Elizabeth asked her husband at one point. “Why do we want to do this? If we lose, we lose everything.” Dole later recalled Elizabeth saying that. His reputation, all the years of hard work and service. The thing that would be left in people’s minds would be the last negative advertisement they saw.
“I don’t think we lose everything,” Dole replied. The stakes were high. The highest. But would losing mean that everything would be gone? No, he didn’t think so.
Later, Elizabeth did not remember putting this question about the stakes to him so starkly. She was sure she hadn’t. His memory had to be absolutely wrong. There had to be some huge misunderstanding. They had a very happy marriage. They loved each other, and she wanted to be supportive. *
That Saturday morning, Dole said he hadn’t made a final decision whether to run.
Will felt that he was just going through his version of the motions. The meeting was Dole’s way of checking off all the boxes, but he was running.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure. There was more to this.
Dole’s discovery that 1988 wasn’t his time had been very difficult. It had been the time for “Ronald Reagan, Jr.”—Dole’s sardonic name for George Bush. Reagan had picked Bush as his running mate, and in a sense created Bush. Bush was in many ways the opposite of Dole. He had been born to bounty, the East and Yale. Bush had his Navy airplane shot down in World War II and escaped without serious injury. Dole had been born in economic despair, Kansas and struggle. His right shoulder had been blown apart in the mountains of Italy during World War II. He had spent three years in hospitals often close to death, finally undertaking the long and painful process of rehabilitating his body.
Dole’s right arm still hung wasted and atrophied, two inches shorter than his left, making it impossible even to shake hands. Instead, Dole clutched a pen in it all day long to help conceal his gnarled fingers, hoping the pen acted as a danger sign, reminding people not to grab his hand. As Elizabeth once said of her husband, “When you think about that guy, every single day, everything he does, it’s like having one hand tied behind your back.”
After the 1988 defeat, Dole had awakened in the night for a year saying to himself, “What did we do wrong?” It had been torture; the loss still haunted him. Any reference to 1988 triggered the memory and the whole awful experience would come flooding back.
But now Bush was gone, ousted from office by Bill Clinton and back in Texas, out of it. Dole could list all the former heavyweights from both parties who were out of office. Walter Mondale, a former senator, vice president and presidential candidate, he too was gone, the ambassador to Japan, his name rarely heard. Dole in particular didn’t want to end up
the Walter Mondale of the Republican Party—a perennial candidate who Dole thought couldn’t live without this thing, the presidency. Jimmy Carter was somewhere else. Former President Ford was somewhere else. Reagan retired. Nixon out, now dead. George Mitchell, the Democratic leader, had just retired. Bob Michel, the House Republican leader, had also retired. “Bob Dole is still here,” Dole said at one point. “And you kind of wonder, why am I still hanging around? Somebody out there, something going to happen?”
Destiny? In 1988, he had proclaimed the year was his “time” in history and that he would not try again. Was he destined to be president? Was some special sense of his place in the future luring him back to the game he said he would not play again? Dole resisted any talk about a plan or destiny, and if anyone started in on it he felt people would say, that guy’s off the deep end.
Yet his survival, out of an entire generation of leaders from the 1970s and 1980s, was a fact. Still he wasn’t sure he should run, and he saw nothing inevitable. Maybe it wasn’t his time, Dole thought. He once said, “Elizabeth has a strong religious belief that God has a plan for everybody, and you can’t do this unless you’ve got him on your side, prayed about it and stuff.” He would ever so slightly roll his eyes to the ceiling at such talk.
A strong evangelical Christian, Elizabeth believed, as she put it, that it was important that a person not be outside God’s will. It didn’t mean that God had a plan for Bob to be president. It meant that she prayed about it, asking: “As Bob makes up his mind what to do, that we do your will, whatever it is, whether we run, won’t run, whether we run and win, run and lose, whatever, that it is your will.” God had his way of speaking through his word, through others, through events, she believed. But she knew that she would never know God’s will for sure. The challenge was to find what God was choosing to do through them. So she prayed and tried to take 30 minutes a day to read some sort of devotional material. Whatever the outcome she realized it was a personal decision for Bob, it would require so much of him. She vowed to support his decision, whatever it was.
Elizabeth also wondered about the impact another campaign would have on her. She had worked for six presidents, served in two cabinet offices as Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Labor; she was regularly listed as a possible vice president or even president herself. She had twice resigned offices to campaign for Bob. What about her future? What about her job at the Red Cross, which she felt passionately about? They could bring in another Red Cross president and that would be it for her. Finished.
Running for president was grueling. You almost ceased to exist. It was total immersion. And, as she liked to say, they would be “accompanied.” Wherever they went, accompanied by the Secret Service, accompanied by the press, accompanied by the voters, the curious. There would be a crowd of people everywhere, people would come up. The crowds begot more crowds. She knew that there was never a minute alone. It would be a long hard road.
Dole too pondered some more. Earlier in the year, he had attended the 50th anniversary D-Day celebration in Europe. With his old 10th Mountain Division, he revisited the hills of Italy where he had been wounded in 1945 about three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Dole, a 22-year-old lieutenant, had been hit in the right shoulder by German artillery while trying to rescue one of his men. Dole’s shoulder, upper arm and part of his spine had been shattered. For the next three years he had hovered often on the edge of death, fighting infections, paralysis, fevers and blood clots. His right kidney was removed. The doctors were certain he would never walk, but Dole rehabilitated himself with painful exercises and therapy. He learned to walk again, but his right arm remained paralyzed, the fingers useless. Even on his good left hand, Dole’s fingers were numb.
The nostalgic trip to Italy got him all jazzed up again. But when he returned, he began to fear the 1994 congressional and Senate elections coming up in November—feared the time because then he would have to make the decision about whether to run for president.
Still, with all the other likely national leaders out, and as one thing led to another with Clinton in trouble and then the Republicans winning Congress, Dole wondered, “Well, Jimminy, maybe I could try it one more time.” On the other hand, Dole thought maybe people were getting too much of Bob Dole, steady, steady, steady. Here he is right after the November election, he’s running for president. He worried about looking and acting opportunistic.
But Dole felt he knew the answer. “You got to try to make it happen,” he said.
He wanted to get away to Florida where they had a condo, where the phone didn’t ring and he could focus on the question, “Is this what I really want to do? Is this what I really want to do?”
Elizabeth, he knew, was very happy with their life together. Lots of nice acquaintances. Both in jobs they liked. Neither was struggling to find something to do. A presidential candidacy would alter everything. Several years of running. And all of this seemed to be starting very early, almost two years before the election, instead of the usual year.
The Saturday morning that Dole met with Elizabeth and Mari Will, William B. Lacy, a longtime Dole political adviser, drove in from his home in Annapolis, Maryland, to Dole’s office. Lacy, 41, had been political director in the Reagan White House for several years, had worked on Dole’s 1988 unsuccessful presidential campaign and a month ago had managed the campaign of Fred Thompson, the former movie actor, who had just won one of the Tennessee Senate seats with 60 percent of the vote.
Lacy, a small, calm man with a comfortable manner and large eyeglasses, hoped to be the chief strategist for the Dole campaign if it ever was launched. Lacy both looked and thought like a professor of political science. To preserve the option of running in 1996, Lacy had been urging Dole to start organizing immediately or all the Republican campaign operatives with experience would join other candidates. If Dole was going to run again and have any chance of success, a new approach would be absolutely necessary. Lacy wanted to lay the foundation for a Dole candidacy.
Eight months earlier, on March 31, 1994, Lacy had sent Dole an eight-page memo entitled “RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT.” It was carefully designed to get all the questions of the “old Dole” out on the table, and separate what Lacy felt were the alleged problems from the real ones.
Lacy dismissed conventional charges that Dole was a “dinosaur,” “too old,” “mean,” “can’t organize” and was “a two-time loser.” All of these could be managed, Lacy said, if Dole addressed what Lacy maintained were the real barriers to a successful campaign for the Republican nomination:
“1. Lack of strategic discipline. We must develop a strategy and plan and stick to them…Presidential campaigns are won by designing a plan and sticking to it.
“Look at the last four competitive presidential campaigns: Carter (‘76), Reagan (‘80), Bush (‘88) and Clinton (‘92) had fairly obvious plans and stuck to them.”
“2. Lack of organizational discipline. You must force the senior people in your campaign to get along and for this once to put winning ahead of personal agendas.”
“3. The campaign structure must reflect your style. I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that a typical campaign structure simply doesn’t match your style.
“At one time in 1987, I counted twelve ‘power centers’ in the campaign that I felt I had to consult before making major decisions.”
Playing to Dole’s interest in sports, Lacy wrote that the campaign team could not operate like a professional football team with a series of set plays and specific, clockwork assignments. “In professional basketball, however, players are rewarded for their ability to innovate and respond to unique situations.” Dole’s campaign team would have to operate like a basketball team—a small group with designated positions but flexible enough to overlap and move around. “A small number of key people who have assigned roles but also wide talents that allow them to work outside their roles as necessary,” the memo said. “They also must have a strong personal commitment to you.”
In essence the memo advised Dole that if he was going to run, he would have to radically change the way he did business.
Lacy was under some pressure from other Dole staffers to make himself available to be the campaign manager and run it on a day-to-day basis. But Lacy was ambivalent about the very prospect of a Dole campaign. At times, he wanted to have nothing to do with it. After much thought he decided he didn’t want to run it, didn’t want the public visibility, didn’t want to get shot at every day. But he did want to be the chief strategist, the one who thought things through, because it was on that ground that a Dole campaign would likely flourish or falter.
About 10:30 A.M., Dole’s meeting with Elizabeth and Mari Will concluded and Elizabeth left the office. Mari and Dole were then joined by Bill Lacy and two others.
First in seniority with Dole was Jo-Anne Coe, a large, brash woman who had started out with Dole 27 years ago transcribing dictation for constituent letters. She was part of a breed of congressional staff aides who devote their lives to the boss. Jo-Anne was an extension of Dole, and spoke openly of feeling like a member of his family. She had been the chief inside person running Dole’s previous campaign fund-raising operations. She knew Dole’s indirectness as well as anyone, and she could read his grunts, single-word reactions and body language. Some found it almost telepathic. She once called this the “unspoken meeting of the minds.” When Jo-Anne said, “Senator says…” or, “Senator wants…” others quickly learned she knew what she was saying. On the question of running again for president, she had concluded that Dole was saying maybe he shouldn’t close the door. To her it was up in the air.
Tom Synhorst, 37, a tall, handsome political organizer from Iowa, also joined the meeting. Though Synhorst had light hair, his long, serious face resembled that of the younger Bob Dole. In 1988, Synhorst, a relentless workaholic, had almost singlehandedly put in place the organization that enabled Dole to trounce Bush, 37 percent to 19 percent, in the Iowa caucuses, Dole’s only real victory over Bush.
Synhorst had no earthly idea that Dole would ever even consider running again, but he had stayed closely in touch with him. He felt that Dole was way too bitter about the final 1988 defeat, and it had seemed to linger too long. But after Bush’s 1992 loss, the election of Clinton and the focus on Dole as leader of the Republican opposition, Synhorst had tried to help keep Dole’s presidential prospects alive.
Lacy produced an agenda of four items for the people assembled in Dole’s office.
Can Dole win in 1996?
Lacy told Dole that the others had all discussed this among themselves, and they all thought this was his year. The rise of Newt Gingrich to the House speakership as the new Republican firebrand, coupled with the deep troubles and uncertainties about President Clinton, gave Dole a new stature. Lacy talked only for two minutes. “Now is your best opportunity,” he said. “You can easily get the money and you can get the best political talent and Clinton is weak.”
Dole said nothing.
Lacy turned to the structure and personnel of a campaign.
Okay, Dole finally said, putting on his glasses and pointing to the agenda. He was offhanded and rushing. He seemed to want to move on. As they went through the items from discipline and decision making to junior personnel, Dole pushed them on, marching through the subitems. Synhorst had never seen Dole quite so detached and hurried.
Lacy said some decisions had to be made. He wanted to send a signal that Dole intended to set up a presidential exploratory committee to let the party and the activists know that Dole would be a candidate. They would not formally set up the committee before December 31, the end of the year, because they didn’t want to have to file a report with the Federal Election Commission on fund-raising.
Dole didn’t give his approval. He wasn’t deciding.
Jo-Anne Coe began discussing the fund-raising plan.
Not strong enough at the staff level, Dole said, engaging the others directly for the first time that morning. “We need more experienced people to help make it happen,” he said.
Next, Synhorst had a list of some 150 calls for Dole to make in 25 key states to line up endorsements and organizers. It was too many, Synhorst realized, and Dole did not indicate whether he approved, disapproved or would make any of the calls.
They turned to the critical question of Dole’s message discipline. “Mari,” Dole said, “this is something you were talking about earlier.” But he let the others talk around him about the delicate subject and made no commitments.
Lacy at one point noted that Republicans normally nominated the front-runner and had done so since Nixon. Dole was very well positioned, Lacy said, as the “moderate.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Mari said, “don’t use that word.” It was dreaded in bedrock Republican circles—guaranteeing the kiss of indifference, if not death, from the conservative activists, which included herself.
“He didn’t mean it that way, Mari,” Dole said, “he means more moderate than Newt and certainly more conservative than Clinton.”
At the end, Dole said they could put together lists—people for staff, people to contact in the future. He took copies of the lists and said if they didn’t mind, he was going to show them to Elizabeth.
Dole thought some of his advisers were more eager for another presidential campaign than he was. The others realized that there was no decision. They would come back next Saturday.
When the group left, Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who the day before had been elected majority whip, Dole’s deputy, was waiting for the third appointment. Dole had not wanted Lott, a former House member close to Gingrich, to be his deputy. And more than enough Republican senators had looked Dole in the eye and promised to vote for Senator Alan Simpson, the whip for the last decade, to defeat Lott. But in a secret ballot among Republicans, Lott had won by one vote and Dole had been stunned. He was forced to one inescapable conclusion: some of his fellow Republican senators, the troops he was supposed to lead, had lied to him.
Lott and Sheila Burke, Dole’s longtime chief of staff who was considered a liberal, were bitter enemies, posing an additional problem for Dole.
But when Lott came in, Dole reached out: good old Trent, part of the team, Trent my man. Great! We’ll work together. Thumbs-up, new team, new future!
Dole knew, even at his age, that he was still growing up in the business of politics. There were always surprises, always defeats. He had learned to accept defeat and, above all, not to let it show. Letting defeat show had been his problem. Welcome, a new Bob Dole.
Even when Senator Phil Gramm, the conservative Texas Republican who was definitely running for president, came into the office lately, Dole was all pleasantness and charity. Months ago, Gramm had arrived, saying with his confident bluster, “I know you’re going to run. I’m going to run. If it can’t be me, I want it to be you.”
“Oh, that’s great, Phil!” Dole had said.
Even when Gramm was agitating in public, going for the sound bite or the headline, which was often, he came again to see Dole. “Am I going too far?” Gramm asked.
“No!” Dole said. He welcomed all ideas, all candidates.
“Am I causing you problems?” Gramm asked, both needling and inquiring.
“No!” Dole said, even though Gramm was a giant pain. This was the new Bob Dole, which meant, Don’t show the anger. Don’t let anyone get on the other side of you. Just stay in neutral. Yeah, he liked being the new Bob Dole. Didn’t know how long it would last, though.