What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “... 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.”)

  And that’s why he kept looking for a Big Guy ... to run it! He was ready to hand it over! ... But it had to be a Big Guy.

  (It hadn’t quite worked out with his Big-Guy-of-Choice, John Sears—not after that Christmas meeting, where Keene put the kibosh on the Sears deal. So Dole had installed his friend Bob Ellsworth as chairman. They called a press conference and rented half a hotel ballroom for the announcement—and Ellsworth did fine, explaining to the big-feet how Dole had changed, he was ready to be organized ... despite a competing press conference conducted, ad hoc, by Keene and Devine, just outside the ballroom doors—mostly to leak how the deal with Sears had fallen apart. ... So, Dole’s continuing talks with Sears had to be semisecret, so as not to lose Keene and Devine—Dole had Ellsworth wooing Sears ... but it wasn’t much of a secret, what with Sears and Keene pissing on each other’s legs, in the papers. ... So Dole opened quieter negotiations with other Big Guys—Drew Lewis, Don Rumsfeld, Bill Brock—Cabinet-rank, one and all ... but each had his own ideas and his own price, so Dole hadn’t reeled in anyone yet ... what the hell, a few months of negotiation wasn’t unusual with Big Guys!)

  It all went with Dole’s Washington-Watergate-Town-Car-Brooks-Brothers persona. He would send a big signal on the capital tom-toms ... show all the columnists, political observers, lunchers at Joe and Mo’s, everybody who was in-the-know:

  Dole was going big-time—he could pull in first-class talent!

  Dole would have a manager of size, gravitas—his own Jim Baker!

  Dole had mellowed—he was ready to do things right!

  Hands off! ... just the candidate! ... Presidential! ... Dole would listen!

  Well, yeah, sure.

  But that didn’t mean a Big Guy—or any guy—was going to tell Bob what to say.

  Why would they? Why should they? It was working! Dole could smell the wind out there. (Must feel kinda hot on Bush’s neck!) ... Dole was closing the gap all over the country. During the August Senate recess, Dole was everywhere in the country. He started in Ohio—Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland ... then Red Bank, New Jersey, Manahawkin ... Cheyenne and Casper, Spokane, Yakima, Vancouver, Portland, Denver, St. Louis, Mobile, Charlotte ... back to New England—Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts ... back to Chicago, then Iowa—a dozen towns ... Kentucky, Arkansas, New Orleans ... then straight into Texas—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio ... straight up Bush’s wazoo!

  That was just two weeks.

  In one month, he hit and made news in seventy cities, twenty-nine states, D.C., and Puerto Rico. (Not to mention Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica.) He traveled light—one or two staff, no press on the borrowed corporate jet. There were no votes back in Washington—nothing to slow him down. Sun was out. Dole was making hay.

  Hey! New polls showed Dole the most “electable” Republican (the one with support among Democrats and independents—still a majority in the nation). Dole had lower “negatives” than Bush. Dole had a slim lead in Iowa—in fact, across the Midwest. He’d cut Bush’s lead in California by half, pulled ah
ead in Idaho, Colorado, maybe Washington State. North Carolina was solid for Elizabeth ... and ¡caramba! Dole troops even hijacked the Partido Republicano in Puerto Rico! ... Nationwide, The New York Times reported, Bush’s ten-point lead was “shaky.”

  And it wasn’t just cold numbers—Dole was hot! He’d hit a town, the press was waiting at the airport (and maybe the editorial board was waiting downtown). Dole knew the smell of ink—liked it! ... In a dozen states he had a committee of bigwig supporters to announce—his “leadership team.” (Dole liked a stage filled with pooh-bahs. In every state, he’d demand of his field staff: “Are we organized?” That meant he wanted to see a list of names—big names, like Senators, atop them all.) In another two-dozen towns, he’d be whisked from the airport to a “presale meeting.” That was for his committee-to-be, or people who were going to put on fund-raisers. Back in D.C., he’d demand of his money men: “What about St. Louis—z’at guy gonna make it? ... New York—that’s supposed to be a million?” Dole still could not believe that money wasn’t a problem.

  What he could believe, what he couldn’t miss, were those events—those crowds! It wasn’t just the turnout, though that was startling (Gwinnett County, Georgia, eleven hundred people—at four-thirty in the afternoon!) ... it was who they were. They weren’t political types. They were working people, farmers, small businessmen, homeowners, solid citizens ... they told him they’d never been to any meeting—not for President ... school board, maybe, years back. They told him they came because they saw him on TV, and something he said ... or they had an uneasy feeling, where the country was headed—maybe Bush wasn’t tough enough ... or they had to let him know how much they admired Elizabeth and him. ... But they didn’t really have to tell him. He could see it, the way they wanted to believe. They were looking for someone—it was their hope, on him. If it was him and Elizabeth, that was something else. It was beyond hope, it was ... adulation. The Doles would speak, then hustle to the exits to shake hands as people left (“Agh! That’s how we Methodists do it—we get the dorrs!”) ... and the look in people’s eyes when Elizabeth had them ... well, it was the look that movie stars see.