What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “Don’t have time t’discuss your political ph’losophy.”

  That generally kept the next memo shorter.

  Now Dole stood and cranked his left arm around his back, stretching to his right-rear pants pocket, and pulled out his barber’s comb. He always had the long black comb. He’d never be able to get a short one out of his pocket. Anyway, the barber’s comb did a better job, and Dole’s hair, like his suit, his shirt, like his bills, his press releases, his letters, like everything that came from his office or reflected upon him, had to be perfect. Four strokes with the comb through the thick black hair—a bit long in the back, have to get that cut—and it lay down, like a barber had worked it over. He twisted to replace the comb, and as his left arm came around front again, he bent from the waist, almost doubled over, and the arm shot out ahead of him in a strange, twisting, lunge. It was a strain, full of effort, almost scary to people who never saw it before. (One new staff guy jumped out of his chair and leapt for Dole, when he first saw it. He thought the Senator was going to keel over!) But Dole did it just to straighten the arm. At the full extension of his reach, he bent the elbow and brought his hand back for one final smoothing pat of his hair. Then, with the left hand, he hiked up his right arm again, into its carrying position. He reached for his jacket on the chair, draped it over the bent right arm, and his prairie voice scraped through the doorway to the salon.

  “Agh, Wilbert know where we’re goin’?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dean said, as he came into the room. It was Dole’s way of telling him to come get the papers. Meanwhile, Dole poked his head out the other door of the office, the one that led to the warren where the press staff worked on three crowded desks, clustered around a wire-service ticker and a console TV. With the Senate out for the evening, the staff had changed the channel, turned off C-Span, and switched back to commercial TV.

  ... so the crowd is now filling the Astrodome ...

  It was Keith Jackson’s syrupy voice from the booth in Houston.

  ... and we’ll be back with Game One of the National League Championship Series, after this word ...

  Bob Dole couldn’t wait around for the first pitch. He had work to do ... on the other thing. He was off to another hotel meeting room, this one rented for the benefit of Ben Blaz, the delegate to Congress from the territory of Guam. He paused to listen to the top story of the Ted Koppel news-brief: something about an American pilot—Hasenfus was the name—shot down over Nicaragua, said he was working for the CIA. ... Dole rolled his eyes to the ceiling: the whole thing was screwy.

  “Okayyy! ... Keep it up!” he barked at the air, a rasping command that passed with him for enthusiastic good humor. He checked the wall clock: not even eight-thirty. Eight minutes, total, in the office. And he hustled back the way he came, down the grand hall, to the Senators’ elevator that awaited him, to take him to the first-floor door, to the tunnel beneath the Capitol steps, where his Lincoln Town Car was idling in the darkness.

  Come to think of it, even back in Russell, Bob Dole probably never saw a whole ball game. He had work to do. He had school, too, and jobs at home. With Bina Dole driving the train in that house, there were plenty of jobs for the kids. Sometimes, even before school, in the first gray light of day, Bob would run a couple of blocks to Dean Krug’s place, on the west edge of town, where the houses stopped and the endless flat fields began. Dean’s dad was a carpenter, but he kept cows on the side. At dawn the boys would do the milking, and Mr. Stoppel, at the grocery, would sell the milk at a nickel a quart. If they got five quarts, and Mr. Stoppel sold them all, the money from the fifth went to the boys. If they split the work, they each got two and a half cents.

  In the summer, they could get another nickel digging dandelions. Bob and his brother, Kenny, one year younger—and sometimes Dean—would dig weeds from a lawn: five cents a bushel. But they had to pack the basket. If they dug for Bina Dole, she wanted to see the roots.

  Then, too, Bob and Kenny sold a patent remedy, the good-for-what-ails-you Cloverine Salve, twenty-five cents a tin. The boys would pay for ten to a shipment, and the goo arrived twelve tins to a pack, so if they sold a whole sleeve—might take weeks—they made fifty cents. Their relatives had enough Cloverine to grease a herd of cows.

  Weekends, if there was time, they’d deliver grocery handbills. Bob got the job from Mr. Holzer. That was the way it went: Bob got the job; Kenny and Dean would help. They’d get two dollars for the whole town, about eight hundred houses. They’d start on a Friday after school and finish Saturday morning. They couldn’t put the flier in the mailbox because there was no stamp, and that was against postal law. But they couldn’t throw it on the lawn, either: old man Holzer would have a fit. So they knocked on every door. And if people weren’t home, they could put it in the screen door. It could take an hour to do a square block, but heck, there were whole families didn’t have two dollars, cash.

  Cash was always short in Russell: cash and water—they went hand in hand. Just a few years before the town was founded, as a way station for the Kansas Pacific, most atlases called these plains the Great American Desert. By 1870, the railroad made it through, all the way to Denver, and tried to lure settlers along the way. But Wall Street was convinced there wasn’t enough rain on the empty grassland to support agriculture, or a loan for it. Still, railroad agents patrolled the eastern ports, looking for immigrants to break the prairie sod. In the 1870s, the Union Pacific sent scouts to Europe, offering a package deal: steerage across the Atlantic and a boxcar ride to Kansas, for eighty dollars a head.

  That’s how the land around Russell was settled, with the arrival of the Volga Germans. They were farmers whom Catherine the Great had lured to Russia a hundred years before with a grant of black Volga steppe, and exemption from service in the Russian army for ninety-nine years. Now, in the 1870s, the grant and exemption were running out, and the Volga Germans dispatched scouts to America to find a new land for an old people. They were wheat growers, a hard-headed, tight-fisted bunch. They’d have to be. The railroad never told them about the summers when it never got around to raining; about the plagues of grasshoppers; about the winter storms that screamed in across the plain, swirling snow that could bury a house in its drifts. But the Germans stuck it out, and stuck to their ways. (Sixty years later, in his cream and egg station, Doran Dole, Bob’s dad, would use a few words of Deutsch to settle accounts on the big cans of milk brought into town by the Volga Germans.)

  The Doles had lived through another generation or two in America, on farms in New York and Ohio, before they joined the tide of settlers seeking a fresh start on fresh land, after the Civil War. But Doran’s family was one of many in Kansas that came up short in the struggle with the banks, and ended up tenants instead of landowners. They paid a third of their crop to the landlord, and lived on the rest; there wasn’t much left. Doran came into Russell for high school, but America was shouldering her burden in the Great War, and Doran dropped out of school to enlist. He wasn’t loud about it—Doran wasn’t one for speeches about anything—but a call to the flag was, for him, just as basic as the other ineluctables of life: weather, work, and the shortage of cash. When he came back to Russell, he used his Army pay to rent a storefront on Main Street, which he opened as a café, the White Front, in 1920. When he married Bina Talbott, the following year, their honeymoon was a supper, cooked by a couple of friends, and served at one of the two white tables that occupied one side of the White Front Café. That was about all Doran and Bina ever got out of that restaurant. There just weren’t enough folks around Russell, Kansas, who had cash to buy a meal on Main Street. By the time their first son. Bob, was born, in 1923, the White Front was a memory, a picture in their album: Doran Dole, scrubbed and proud, his sturdy form wrapped in a long white apron, standing in front of those two white tables and a sign, WE WELCOME YOU, which hung under four small American flags.

  After the café closed, Doran opened up the cream and egg station. He bought from the farmers, who’d drop o
ff their milk on their way into town, and he sold to the dairy or the grocery stores. He made about fifteen dollars a week and maybe a dozen eggs, or a quart of cream he’d take home to make butter. Doran was up by 6:00, and in the station by 6:30, getting ready. It had to be just so. He stayed late on Saturday, the farmers’ big day in town, and he’d be there after midnight, scrubbing the concrete floor till it shone. If he couldn’t bear to work so late, he’d go back Sunday morning, to make sure the place got cleaned just right. He was a strong man, though you wouldn’t have noticed, the way he carried himself, so quiet. But a full milk can was near a hundred pounds, and Doran took them to the dock two at a time. He missed one day of work in forty years: spoiled his record, he used to say. But he gladly closed the station every Armistice Day, when the Legion marched up the brick Main Street. And, every year, when they read out the Gettysburg Address, Doran was there in his uniform, sometimes in the color guard. Then, there’d be potluck at Bina’s house. That was a big day, Armistice Day.

  Fourth of July was special, too, with a feast of Bina’s fried chicken and potato salad. There’d be soda pop and watermelon for the kids, before the fireworks. And then the homemade chocolate ice cream. Doran would go to the icehouse and bring back a big block on the morning of the Fourth. Then he’d crush the ice in a gunny sack, and do all the cranking, for hours, by himself. That was before they got the electric icebox. That was a day of miracle! Doran built an extra ledge on the back porch, to hold the thing, and all the Dole kids sat outside, staring ... waiting. ... Ice, anytime! Square cubes!

  By that time, Doran was managing the elevator for Norris Grain. The money wasn’t much more, maybe steadier. The hours were as long, maybe longer. He opened up at 7:00 A.M., with his forty-cup coffee urn already perked. Doran made the strongest coffee in the county—used to fill up the inner basket with grounds level to the rim. He liked it so you could float a spoon, and he liked it hot—a nice, full cup, too. He’d have his gone before yours’d be cool enough to sip. When he’d go to his sisters’ houses, they’d worry about making the coffee. If they made him a cup of their regular brew, he’d drink it and say, “Now, how ’bout some coffee?” In the grain elevator, he’d drink it all day, and pass it out to the farmers. He kept chairs and some four-legged stools around, just to make them feel welcome, and they’d all come in on their way out of town. They’d sit in the back, where the earthy grain smell was spiced with the steam from Doran’s urn, maybe four or five old German dirt farmers and Doran, all in bib overalls, complaining about the weather, or rust got into the wheat, or something. Every once in a while, Doran would stick in a quiet comment, sometimes advice, more often a joke. He’d tell a newcomer to pull up a stool: “Sure, sit down. Doesn’t matter if you work. The gov’ment’ll keep you.” He’d tell ’em they’d better get back home to collect their “Fare Well” checks. That’s what he always called welfare. He had a way of delivering his lines so you couldn’t tell if he was joking. He’d be staring off, at the floor or his single shelf of pesticides, still deadpan, while everybody else in the place cracked up. The farmers called him Doley. He called all the men and boys by name. The girls he called Sis. Mostly, he was just always there, rain or shine, any season, every day. Doran stayed open Thanksgiving if the fall was wet and the milo was late. If the farmers were cutting, he was there. During harvest, when the trucks lined up on Main Street all the way to the highway, he’d work till two in the morning, helping the farmers unload. Then he’d drag himself home for a few hours’ sleep, and go at it again the next day. Bina hated that time of year. During harvests, the Dole boys used to run home from school and gulp their lunch, so they could run to the elevator and work for a half-hour while Doran marched home and ate.

  During harvests, Bob Dole used to fill a tray with Cokes from the Dawson fountain and pass them out to the farmers sweating in their trucks on Main Street, “Compliments of Dawson Drug ...” He got the job at the drugstore when he was barely in high school, not yet full-grown. There wasn’t any question in the Dawson brothers’ minds that he’d do the work, do it seriously. Bobby Dole had always been working, always been serious. The neighbors used to see Bob leave for school in the mornings, as they left for work, walking up Maple Street. He’d run out the door with a whoop—“Bye!”—and off he’d go. Kenny’d come trudging behind. Bob didn’t visit with anyone along the way. He seemed to be concentrating. He didn’t talk to Kenny, even if Kenny managed to keep up that day. “That Bob! ... Such a little man!” the neighbor ladies used to tell Bina, who took it as the compliment they probably intended.

  There were years at a time when Kenny couldn’t keep up, after he got the infection in his leg. In those days, there were no antibiotics. In Russell, there wasn’t even a hospital. The local doctors tried what they knew: they dipped bread in hot milk and stuck a bag of it onto Kenny’s leg as a poultice, trying to draw out the disease. They tried to lance the swelling, as they would a boil, but the wounds never healed. There was a doctor named Mead who cut the leg open, swabbed it and drained it, and this time it healed. But Dr. Mead hadn’t got it all, and the leg swelled and broke open again. Kenny was on crutches for most of four years, from the time he was seven or eight, and Bob was nine. For weeks at a time, the doctors of Russell had Kenny tied down on the bed the boys shared while they sowed his leg with maggots, to eat away the disease. There were hundreds of them in his leg, gnawing, eating at him all the time. You could hear them! (Like hogs eating corn, Kenny said.) The smell of sickness filled the house. Finally, Kenny was in the hospital at Hays. Bina traveled the thirty miles every day. Doran would come home after work, bathe and eat, then he’d drive his old green Whippet to Hays to join her. If Doran had a dollar saved before Kenny went to Hays, that was the last he saw of it. The other kids would listen at the table while Bina and Doran plotted payments to the doctors, in currency of chickens, or eggs. Bob didn’t understand all the finance, but he knew one thing before he was ten: he was never going to be sick like that, never going to cost the family that way. Bobby Joe was going to be the strong one. He was going to be a man.

  After he took the job at Dawson’s—every day after school and Saturdays—he was, in fact, a little man of the town. Dawson’s was the place to go in Russell, for medicine, of course, but also for ice cream, coffee, or just conversation. During the day, Dawson’s drew at least one visit from everyone who worked in town. At night, they got everybody from the Mecca Theater, and the Dream, all the kids from the roller rink, the men from the pool hall across the street, shoppers and storeowners who came by after they closed. “Meet you at the drugstore,” they’d call to one another across Main Street. When Bob started out, old Dutch Dawson was still in charge, but most days he sat in his back booth and the tone of the place really came from his sons. Ernie Dawson, the oldest, was the quietest: he was the pharmacist, he worked in the back. Chet and Bub Dawson were the ringleaders, working out front, with the sundries, at the fountain, dealing with the folks, giving them “the treatment.” If Bub saw a lady crossing Main Street, gingerly pulling the scarf off her new perm, on her way into Dawson’s for that new-style curler they’d just recommended while they worked her over at the beauty salon, he’d say, when she walked in patting her coif: “Thought you were goin’ to the beauty parlor. ... They too busy? Couldn’t take ya today?” If a man walked in with paint on his pants, Chet might loudly start a collection, dunning all the codgers who did crosswords under the ceiling fans at the wooden-top tables for “a nickel apiece t’get ol’ Ben some clean pants.” That was if the fellow didn’t really need the nickels. It got so people stuck their heads in just to get their insult for the day. Most came in and stayed for a while, listening to Chet’s constant plaint about his wife, “ornery, damn fool woman ...”

  It didn’t take Bob long to catch on. He had Doran’s gift of deadpan humor and, soon, he had his own patter for the public. For his schoolmates, he learned to flip the ice cream or the cherry into the air, before it landed in the mixing cup, or the glass, whe
re he’d pour the soda on top. “Nickel green river, comin’ up,” he’d announce, then ask: “You want the flip in it?” He talked to the adults who took their coffee breaks on the fountain stools, and he could retail all the news in town. People thought nothing of asking young Bob what happened with that wreck on the highway last night. And Chet or Bub’d call across the store: “Why you askin’ Bob? He’s just the soda jerk.” And Bob’d snap back: “Well, somebody had to have the intelligence to mix a milkshake ’round here.”

  Such a little man of the town!

  Such a man at school! Most of the kids who left Russell High at three o’clock each afternoon wouldn’t see a thing until they came back the next day: it was home, supper, homework, maybe Jack Benny or the Lone Ranger on the family radio. But Bob was in town every night. He knew who ducked into the back room at Dawson’s where they might put something extra in their Cokes. He saw the men stopping by the newsstand next to the theater where they had two slot machines, and the woman who ran it was a whore! Heck, he’d been in the pool hall! Donny Sellens’s pool hall was a place kids didn’t go. But Donny had a lunch counter in there, and when Bob worked a full day, Saturdays or summers, he was allowed to walk right in. He only got fifteen minutes for lunch, and Sellens’s was just across the street. He’d climb onto a stool and they wouldn’t have to ask: Bob got the quarter special, a hot dog, bowl of chili, and a Coke. They’d shove a box of crackers and a bottle of ketchup down the counter, and he’d eat all the crackers, and pour all the ketchup into his chili. Meanwhile, he’d watch the tables. That was as close as he ever got: pretty innocent, when you got down to it. But when Bob went back to school, all he had to say to draw an openmouthed stare was, “Guess who I saw in the pool hall ...”