Dole’s sidelong approach to so crucial a choice grated on his wife, Elizabeth, though she hid her frustration. She had long since learned that her husband did not like to be told what to do. Deft at indirection, Elizabeth preferred to arrange situations that would, ever so gently, prod her husband into action. But there wasn’t much time. Filing deadlines were coming up. There was money to be raised, and Dole’s chief competitor for the GOP nomination, Phil Gramm, was already out there raising it. As they had watched Republicans sweeping to the control of Congress for the first time in half a century on Election Night, Elizabeth had wondered aloud if Bob Dole’s time had come. Dole had said nothing. By early December, she felt she had to nudge him toward a decision. Other wives might have done it across a pillow. Elizabeth scheduled an appointment.
At 9 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3, Elizabeth met with Dole in his formal Senate office, at once less cozy and more private than the majority leader’s suite in the Capitol. For reinforcement she had brought along another woman, Mari Maseng Will. An expert speechwriter and conservative polemicist, Will was used to dealing with strong-minded men. She had been a press secretary to Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and she was married to columnist George Will. Will arrived with a memo, a point-by-point recitation of the obstacles Dole would have to overcome in order to win. She began with the biggest one: his speaking style. He rambled, he wandered, he mumbled. He ignored prepared speeches and talked off the top of his head. Modern presidential campaigns are wild and chaotic, she said. Staying on message is everything. Did Dole understand?
He nodded yeah.
IN WILL’S ESTIMATION, THE ELECTION would center on values. Dole would have to talk about cultural decline, about fear of crime, about trash TV and religious faith. In past campaigns, Will had watched Dole edit out anything that touched on values. She wanted to make sure Dole understood that the 1996 election would turn on the very subjects he had been reluctant to mention.
Dole mumbled that he would talk about values, if that’s what it took.
Will could see that he didn’t really want to. His Midwestern reticence got in the way. He disliked preaching. And the issues were so personal. They forced him to reveal himself, to be immodest. It was, Will suggested, like having to write a poem in fifth grade and then stand up to read it to the class.
Elizabeth worried whether her husband could play his dual role as leader and candidate, shifting from the minutiae of the Senate to the big-picture themes of a national election. Could he handle both?
Yeah, yeah.
And another thing. This time around would have to be different from 1988. Dole would have to delegate responsibility and not try to run his own campaign on whim. He couldn’t sit on the plane with a map in his lap, deciding where to go next. There would have to be planning, discipline.
Dole said he understood, but it wasn’t clear that he really did. These two forceful women, who cared deeply for Dole and knew him well, had given him prescient advice. They knew the race would be ugly, and they feared that it would rake up Dole’s old reputation as a hatchet man–that history would remember him for that if he won, and for losing if he failed. Did he understand the risks? Mari Will wasn’t sure he grasped how hard it would be for him to run a successful presidential campaign.
Even after that December gathering, Dole continued to be opaque about his intentions. ““I’m sort of inching along,’’ he told Elizabeth. Then, on Jan. 6, The Washington Post ran a big pie chart on the front page. It showed Dole’s approval rating at 62 percent, versus 45 percent for Clinton–a 17-point margin. Six days later, without any fanfare, he filed the necessary papers with the Federal Election Commission to become a candidate.
Bill Lacy, Dole’s chief strategist, was a slow-speaking, amiable Tennessean who had worked in the Reagan White House and on many congressional campaigns. He operated and thought like a cautious, deliberate general in a long war. He believed in overwhelming the opposition. No surprises, no tricks, just better research, better organization and more money. Lacy loved meetings–lots of them–and he loved data: focus groups, polling, surveys. In the spring of 1995 Lacy drafted the ““Dole for President Campaign Strategy 1996.’’ In Lacy’s mind, Dole did not need an electrifying vision. Experience and character counted far more, and those the senator had in abundance. As the campaign strategy evolved in the spring of 1995, Dole would stress three umbrella themes: ““reining in the federal government, reconnecting the government to our values, promoting American leadership abroad.’’ “‘Promoting’’ was later changed to ““reasserting’’ so that Dole could run on the ““three r’s.’’ It sounded more catchy.
Scott Reed came aboard as campaign manager in February. Reed, 36, wasn’t deeply concerned with vision or message. What he really cared about was getting it done. He was a detail man, a manager. Others–Lacy, Mari Will–could sit and ponder the message. Memos stayed on Reed’s desk only long enough for him to check them off for action. He was bothered from the first by Lacy’s plodding style, the endless conference calls and meetings. Even as the Dole team took shape, the players didn’t really fit well with each other– or with the candidate.
DOLE HIMSELF HATED THE ““three r’s.’’ He thought the slogan was gimmicky and fake. What did it really mean, anyway? He felt silly speaking in alliterative bumper sticker-ese. He would say his lines but then betray his impatience. On ““Larry King’’ one night, he fumbled around trying to spell out his message and finally said with a shrug, ““what- ever it is.’'
In fact, Dole did not really have a vision. His Midwestern pragmatism made him suspicious of big, sweeping themes or catchy slogans. Though he was conservative, he wasn’t necessarily anti-government. He had seen what the government could do for people, and as president he thought he could do a good job of running it. He wanted to give people the benefit of the caring community that had raised him in Russell. He did have a ““small v’’ vision of balanced budgets and lower interest rates, but he was incapable of spelling it out, certainly not in a 20-second sound bite.
Dole’s unwillingness to stay on message drove his handlers to despair from the very beginning. Lacy tried to convince Dole that repetition made sense. ““You know, I heard you speak on the stump in 1987 probably 15 times. And probably 14 of those times I heard you tell the same jokes,’’ Lacy told Dole. ““And you told the same jokes be- cause they worked. You tried ’em, people laughed. Why don’t you develop some real catchy lines and stick with them?''
““Got to say something new,’’ Dole grumbled.
It didn’t help that dozens of old friends–senators, lobbyists, pundits–were bombarding the candidate with advice. Dole would mix in their ideas with the official campaign themes, whether or not the two jibed. His aides sometimes heard these ideas for the first time when they popped out of Dole’s mouth on national television. It was almost as if he enjoyed defying his handlers. His independence made his aides turn on each other. ““Isn’t it interesting,’’ Lacy wrote in a confidential memo to Scott Reed late that fall, ““that we discuss broadcast scripts out the kazoo and show them to everybody, but none of us know virtually anything about speeches until a day or so before they are to be given?’’ Lacy was by implication blaming Mari Will, who ran the speech shop, but the real culprit was Dole, who would not settle on a speech until he was actually giving it.
DOLE’S CONTRARINESS WAS born partly of his own integrity, the inner-guidance system that made him do things his way. Sometimes things worked out well. In June of 1995 he had given a highly publicized speech excoriating Hollywood for promoting trash. Dole, as ever, had been reluctant to talk about values, and he kept his aides in suspense right up to the moment he actually said the words ““the mainstreaming of deviancy must come to an end.’’ But too many speeches wandered off into dangerous, uncharted territory. In July, for example, he went to Philadelphia to address the Republican National Committee, and suddenly his high-mindedness seemed to melt away into I’ll-do-whatever-it-takes ambition. Off the cuff, Dole told the party faithful that he was ““willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that’s what you want.’’ He was immediately scorned for pandering.
In desperation, the staff turned to a speech coach. In the late summer Bill Lacy asked Roger Ailes, the well-known imagemeister who had made ads for the Reagan and Bush campaigns, to recommend the best coach in the country. Ailes sent Lacy to Jack Hilton.
A gravel-voiced man in his late 50s, Hilton had taught scores of shy, dull or tongue-tied CEOs how to win an audience. He had no qualms about being blunt when he met Dole in the early fall. The candidate, too, was perfectly frank with Hilton. ““I hate repetition. I’m too busy to practice,’’ said Dole. Hilton was brusque: ““We have no chance to progress or succeed if you hate repetition and have no time to practice.''
Dole said he didn’t want to sound tedious to the media. ““These people follow me around. They’re going to get bored.''
Hilton tried to convince Dole that the press expected him to have a standard stump speech and stick to it.
““I know, I know,’’ said Dole. But he still felt uncomfortable about the idea of bored reporters at the back of the ballroom. He liked to watch a few people in the audience while he spoke. He didn’t like them to look bored. Hilton replied that yes, it was good to get signals back from listeners. But he doubted that reporters were the most reliable indicators.
Dole submitted to a half-dozen sessions with Hilton over the next six months. Hilton tried to get him to rehearse his actual speeches, but Dole would beg off, saying that the speech wasn’t ready. So Hilton had to study tapes of Dole on the stump, as well as tapes of focus groups talking about Dole. Drawing on these lessons, Hilton offered some advice. The candidate had a habit of pulling his body back and tilting his head to the left. Hilton told Dole that it would make a stronger ““executive impression’’ if he could tilt his upper torso forward. ““Soften your facial expressions,’’ Hilton urged. He didn’t have to smile all the time, but he didn’t need to look so severe when he was concentrating. And he needed to slow his pace. ““Neither you nor your audience is double-parked,’’ said Hilton.
Dole was not unreceptive. He once asked for advice on where to place his disabled arm when he sat in an armchair on the Brinkley show. He would improve–for a while. Then he would return to the old Dole. Hilton actually thought Dole had potential as a speaker. He had a good voice and could appear forceful, but he desperately needed to practice. Among the words Dole had trouble pronouncing was ““presidency.’’ He would garble the word into something like ““presincy.''
““Maybe,’’ suggested Hilton, ““we should run for an office we can pronounce.''
Dole chuckled dryly.
Dole was equally adamant about deciding policy for himself. In December the staff was dismayed when it learned what the candidate intended to do about Bosnia. For most of the fall, Dole had been on message about American involvement abroad, vowing that U.S. troops would never serve under the command of United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Dole would string out the foreign-sound- ing name–Booo-tros Booo-tros–in his prairie-flat voice; crowds loved his old-time xenophobia.
BUT DOLE WAS NO ISOLATIONIST, and he believed in honoring America’s commitments abroad. The Dayton peace accords meant that President Clinton would have to honor his pledge to send 20,000 troops to Bosnia. Dole was going to support the president, he told his staff. He pointed to his stomach. In here, he said, I know what’s right. America’s credibility was at stake.
““Senator,’’ Lacy interrupted, ““have you seen the polls? They’re running 60 to 30 against this.''
Yeah, said Dole, he had seen them, but he felt obligated. The staff shrugged and tried to figure out the best spin. Dole was satisfied: this was the way presidents had to act. His staff knew he had to win the nomination first.
Later, as he looked back on the short, brutish primary season in the winter of ‘96, Dole would feel a sense of bitterness. He had very nearly been knocked off in the first few rounds by men he regarded as lightweights. He only barely defeated Pat Buchanan in the Iowa caucuses, the once “‘Magic Kingdom’’ that Dole had carried by almost 20 points in 1988. In New Hampshire, Buchanan beat him. For a moment, as he was riding back to his hotel in Manchester early on primary night, when it appeared that even Lamar Alexander might outpoll him, he considered dropping out. Then, in Delaware and Arizona, he suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the campaign’s most improbable contender, millionaire Steve Forbes.
The Forbes campaign deserves little more than a footnote in the history of American politics. But it is worth examining as an object lesson in negative campaigning. It shows what money can do to tear down an opponent, and how negative campaigning can drag all sides into a survivalist struggle that, in the end, scars the winners as well as the losers.
STEVE FORBES’S CANDIDACY GOT its start as a reaction against Dole. Early in 1995, Jude Wanniski, the polemicist who sold Ronald Reagan on supply-side economics, was wearying of his efforts to convert Senator Dole to his cause. Dole refused to accept the premise that cutting taxes would produce more revenue for the government. Wanniski decided he’d have to look elsewhere for a candidate. His favorite, Jack Kemp, had already turned him down. Who would carry the flag for the tax cutters?
Wanniski’s thoughts turned to Steve Forbes. Here was a true believer with a personal fortune in the hundreds of millions and the willingness to spend it on a good cause. Wanniski knew that Forbes was a political junkie who had lately begun to overcome his shyness as a speaker. He had been increasingly active in supporting conservative issues, not just as a bankroller but as a spokesman. A run for the White House might strike him as a grand gesture in the tradition of his flamboyant father, Malcolm Forbes. Wanniski whipped off a fax to the publisher of Forbes magazine: how would he like to run for president?
Forbes and his wife laughed at this call to destiny when their 7-year-old daughter Elizabeth pulled it off the fax machine in Naples, Fla., where the Forbeses had gone for spring vacation. But Forbes did not say no. He had been smitten with politics ever since he trooped door to door with his father on Malcolm’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaigns in New Jersey in the ’50s. As a little boy, Steve Forbes held elections with his stuffed animals and could recite New Jersey’s officeholders county by county, along with their margins of victory. He had been proud to chair Radio Free Europe for Reagan and Bush during the communist collapse. At one point he had taken the RFE board to Moscow aboard the company jet, Capitalist Tool. Very Malcolmesque.
Jack Kemp tried to warn Forbes about what he was getting into. ““Are you ready to hold the hand of every county chairman in Iowa? To give every moment of your life to the party apparatus? Never to see your wife and kids? Because if you aren’t, don’t do it.’’ Forbes gave Kemp one of his slightly goofy grins. ““I’d rather write a $20 million check and have you do it,’’ said Forbes, who knew that was prohibited by the $1,000 limit on individual contributions. Kemp was adamant: he had seen too much of the abuse, the rumors and the money grubbing of presidential campaigning. But for Forbes, untested in public life, it was all new and challenging. He decided to run.
To handle his campaign Forbes hired William Dal Col, a former Kemp aide. Dal Col had been groomed by Arthur Finkelstein, a secretive New York political consultant regarded as one of the true pioneers in the art of negative campaigning. Another Finkelstein protEgE, John McLaughlin, came aboard as pollster. Forbes also hired Carter Wrenn, whose darkly insinuating ad campaigns had elected and re-elected Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina four times. Wrenn was a deep cynic. ““Carter’s idea of a perfect campaign is to have the candidate stay locked away at home so he won’t make any mistakes, and just run television ads,’’ said GOP consultant Charlie Black, an old Wrenn crony. Wrenn didn’t believe in publishing position papers. He figured that opponents would just turn them into negative ads.
Dal Col, McLaughlin and Wrenn immediately started looking for dirt on Dole. Through a series of leading poll questions, they found that Dole could be painted as a perk-loving Washington hack and pork-barreling tool of special interests. In Iowa, for instance, they found that nearly half of all self-identified Dole supporters would switch their votes when they were told, ““Bob Dole voted to spend $18 million for a subway under Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., so Senators would not have to walk from their offices to the Capitol. This subway cost $5,000 per square foot to build.’’ This ““information’’ was quickly turned into a negative ad. Normally, a campaign airs positive ads on its own candidate to establish his character before airing negative commercials. The Forbes campaign was airing negative ads on Dole four days before the Forbes bio ad was even made.
FORBES WOULD EVENTUALLY spend $22 million on ““paid media’’–an immense sum, far more than any candidate had ever spent in a few primaries. Much of the money went to remind voters of all the times Dole had voted to raise taxes over the years. The ads worked: the front runner plummeted in the polls. His negatives tripled in Iowa and New Hampshire.
But Dole, no novice to negative campaigning, hit back. One Dole ad suggested that Forbes had been corrupt as chairman of Radio Free Europe. He put ““276,000 of your tax dollars to waste redecorating the residence of a friend,’’ charged the commercial. ““This is war,’’ Dal Col declared when he saw the ad. Another ad chastised Forbes for firing his longtime secretary because she was old. Both times the Dole ads ran, Forbes’s numbers ticked down two or three points. That support, however, didn’t go to Dole but to Lamar Alexander, who began creeping up in the polls. So Forbes took aim at Alexander as well. ““What is behind Lamar Alexander and his red flan- nel shirt?’’ asked a Forbes ad. The campaign hit something of a low when an anti-homosexual activist held a press conference to announce that Forbes had a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, the homoerotic artist and demon of the Christian right, aboard his yacht. Forbes blamed Dole for planting the story. Actually, it was Phil Gramm.
DOLE WAS, HOWEVER, BEHIND thousands of anonymous phone calls telling Iowa Christians that Forbes was wobbly on abortion. Dal Col could see that for Steve Forbes the lark was over. When told of the smear-by-phone campaign, the candidate flushed and began furiously tapping his feet, which was the way the gentlemanly Forbes sometimes signaled his emotions. ““He was as wound up as I’ve ever seen him,’’ said Dal Col.
The day of the Iowa caucus, Dole’s campaign manager, Scott Reed, decided that the time had come for a peace feeler. He called Dal Col. Both Reed and Dal Col had once worked for Kemp, but now they were wary rivals.
““What do you think is going to happen?’’ Reed probed.
““I got you guys [Alexander, Buchanan and Dole] tight, but I am fighting to come in fourth.’’ Dal Col paused for effect. ““We think you might do third.’’
““Third?’’ Reed tried not to let the panic show. ““Our polls have us at about 35 [percent].''
Dal Col let out a howl. ““No friggin’ way. We have you at 25.''
This time Reed paused. ““Look, we’ve been kicking the s–t out of each other. We are both suffering for it. I think it is time to cool it.''
““Sure, you stop it and we’ll stop it,’’ Dal Col snapped back.
““OK,’’ Reed said. There was another pause.
““OK,’’ said Dal Col.
The mutual-nonaggression pact brought some civility back to the campaign. But it was, in effect, the end for Forbes. Without negative campaigning, he had no way of stopping Dole. ““Voters needed a reason not to vote for Dole,’’ Wrenn said. ““And we didn’t give it to them.’’ Forbes had spent about $30 million to win 900,545 votes, or $33,313.16 a vote. But he had shaken Bob Dole more than he realized.
Those anonymous negative phone calls that the Dole camp arranged became known in the press as ““push polling.’’ The caller said that he was simply taking a poll, but the real purpose was not to obtain the voter’s opinions but to use loaded questions to plant negative information in the voter’s mind. It was hardly a new technique, but it had never been used on quite the scale employed by the Dole campaign.
The man behind Dole’s push polling was Steve Goldberg, a short, stocky New Yorker who looked like Detective Sipowicz on “‘NYPD Blue.’’ His techniques were not exactly scientific. He built up a large database by randomly calling voters and finding out which of them intended to vote and what they cared about. Later, with what he preferred to term ““advocacy calls,’’ he would call back voters who cared about a certain subject–say, agriculture–and frame a question in such a way as to let them know something negative about one of Dole’s opponents: did you know that Senator Gramm missed the vote on the farm bill, and would this make you more or less likely to vote for him? Goldberg could instantly pinpoint who might switch his vote to Dole. His polls thus served as a cheap nightly tracking system, as well as a kind of person-to-person negative ad.
From time to time, Goldberg would use his information to help the lesser of Dole’s opponents. When Gramm seemed like the big threat in Iowa, Goldberg secretly leaked some 10,000 names to the Buchanan campaign. Right-to-life voters were told that Gramm had lost the Louisiana and Alaska caucuses, that he couldn’t win, so if they didn’t want to waste their votes they should vote for Buchanan. It was a ploy that very nearly backfired.
As the campaign began to take on a harder edge, Bill Lacy’s methodical pace grated more and more on his colleagues. Scott Reed could feel his impatience growing. As chief strategist, Lacy controlled both polling and ads. At first Reed hadn’t worried about shaping the message, preferring to run the day-to-day operation, but he felt thwarted when the pollsters and admen seemed frozen in Lacy time, tentative and muddled. Reed enlisted another strategist–Don Sipple, a seemingly laid-back California admaker who was actually a driven manipulator. Sipple had come aboard against Lacy’s wishes and now fit uneasily into the campaign structure, resented by Lacy’s adman, Stuart Stevens.
Already, there were two Dole campaigns: the official one, and a rump one that had started meeting secretly back in December. About once a week, Reed, Sipple, Goldberg and some others made a reservation at a Washington restaurant under an assumed name. At first the dinners were a way of getting input from Sipple and letting the rest vent their frustrations about Lacy. But as the dinners continued, they became a campaign-in-exile. They allowed aides to make decisions without going through Lacy’s painstaking process.
The day after Dole lost New Hampshire, frustration and distrust peaked at the early-morning staff meeting at the Holiday Inn in Manchester. Sipple and Stevens were interrupting each other. Goldberg could feel Lacy’s leg shaking under the table. After the meeting, Sipple, Goldberg and a few others in the rump group flew back to Washington in a Cessna. Swearing and grumbling, they decided that the time had come for a coup. Lacy had to go.
Goldberg took the lead. He flew to Denver that night to find Scott Reed, who had flown out West with Dole. It was late when he knocked on Reed’s door.
““What are you doing here?’’ asked Reed, standing in his boxer shorts.
““I had to tell you,’’ said Goldberg, once he was inside. ““It’s the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.’’ Reed had to get rid of Lacy, said Goldberg. If Reed didn’t move first, Lacy might move against him. Or Dole would get rid of them both. The last time a Dole presidential campaign had collapsed in New Hampshire, in 1988, Dole had just left two of his top aides on the airport tarmac, with their bags.
Anxiously, Reed approached Dole the next day. Reed blamed the poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire on lousy polling–Lacy’s domain. Reed didn’t exactly suggest that Lacy be fired, just moved aside to give Reed more control. But Dole was ready to dump him. That Saturday night, when Dole learned that he had lost Delaware, too, he told his political director, Jill Hanson, ““I’m sick of this. I want it changed. I want the pollster and the strategist fired.’'
Reed called Lacy on Sunday morning. ““We have a real problem,’’ he said. Dole had ““lost confidence’’ in Lacy. Lacy immediately understood that he would have to bow out, but he was stunned. There had been no warning. Reed promised to keep the story out of the papers until Lacy had had the chance to talk to Dole himself.
OF COURSE, THE NEWS LEAKED first. That Saturday night, press secretary Nelson Warfield had left a voice-mail message for another of the conspirators: ““The torpedo is in the water. The monarch knows.’’ The ““torpedo,’’ of course, was headed for Lacy; the ““monarch’’ was code for AP reporter John King, who was often used as a designated leakee.
Dole was apologetic when he called Lacy on Tuesday morning. ““I’m sorry about the way this happened,’’ he told him. Lacy said that Dole had been misled. In fact, the polling supervised by Lacy had not been off. He predicted, accurately, that Dole would win in South Dakota, then South Carolina, then the rest of the way. ““Please remember it was my strategy that got you there,’’ he told Dole. Within a few months, Lacy moved to Kansas to run his family candy company. He had always planned to quit politics after the campaign. He had had enough.
By March 25 the huge harvest of Super Tuesday primaries had been gathered in. It was clear that Dole had won the nomination. He signaled his relief by going home to Russell. The trip was almost canceled when a late-winter snowstorm blew across the prairie, but Dole insisted. As a 50-mile-an-hour wind whipped across the Kansas plain, the people of Russell gathered in the high-school gym to praise their favorite son.
Dole allowed himself a rare moment of public emotion. ““It was here I learned that doing was better than talking . . . it was here I learned not to wear my heart on my sleeve. But I also learned to feel deeply for my country and my family–that some things are worth living for . . . and dying for. These lessons have left their mark on me.''
Afterward, a few reporters replayed clips of Dole’s speech on a video-editing machine, stopping the tape at key moments. ““I wanted to be home’’–Dole’s voice cracked and he looked down–““to come to this place’’–his lips quivered and he mashed them down–““and see all my friends.’’ The reporters had never before seen Dole get emotional on the campaign trail. Had he cried? The reporters couldn’t be sure. But some of them had wept.
THIS SIDE OF DOLE HAD BEEN missing through most of the primary season. In most speeches, the candidate had been at once discursive and soporific. Mari Will, his beleaguered speechwriter, had run out of ways to try to impose discipline. At one point she worked out a ““theme formula’’ to keep Dole on message. In Iowa he would give three sound bites on cultural issues for every one on economic and agricultural themes (““3 X culture + 1 X economic + 1 X agriculture’’). In New Hampshire the formula was three economic for each cultural and each defense or foreign-policy sound bite. Her precision was lost on Dole, who said pretty much whatever came into his mind.
Will finally gave up. Out went the 40-page tracts. She began giving him a few pages of talking points, one-paragraph summaries that he could glance at for inspiration. Dole promptly confounded that plan by reading the paragraphs whole, making his speeches sound even more disconnected than usual. After an especially awkward performance on the night of the New Hampshire primary–TV viewers could watch Dole shuffling through his three-by-five cards like a high-school debater–he abandoned the paragraph model and tried a single sheet of words and phrases. ““I pretty much decide myself what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it,’’ he said. ““I don’t think I need a speechwriter.''
No one on the plane dared suggest otherwise. Dole’s staff was intimidated by him. Campaigns are notoriously profane, but no staffer swore around Bob Dole. Campaigns once were fueled by alcohol, but some staffers were afraid to drink so much as a beer around the 73-year-old senator. Left alone and lonely, Dole needed company. His fellow senators began looking for ““grown-ups’’ to travel on the plane. Sens. Bob Bennett of Utah and John McCain of Arizona were enlisted.
In gingerly fashion, McCain and Bennett encouraged Dole to talk about his hardscrabble upbringing and his painful recovery from his war wound. Dole tried, in part because he was so miffed about being cast as a Washington fat cat by his primary opponents. He grumbled that voters thought he was ““born in a blue suit’’ and had never had to suffer or work for his position. So in March he began talking more about his triumph over hardship. Still, it made him uncomfortable. ““I sorta like to hurry through it and get on with it,’’ he admitted. Unfamiliar with the confessional form, Dole had trouble striking the right balance. At a campaign stop in Vermont, he was so frank he gave an overly explicit description of his war-wound recovery, mentioning that he had had to learn to go to the bathroom by himself again. At a rally on New York’s Long Island he made listeners wince with a comment about how he might have taken longer to recover because the nurses were so pretty.
By the end of March, Dole had been campaigning for three months straight. He needed a break. He decided to go sit in the sun in Florida and be alone, to make some basic decisions about the rest of the campaign.
Bob Dole had been coming to his condo at the Sea View Hotel in Bal Harbour, Fla., for the previous 14 years. Elizabeth had bought the place from Dwayne Andreas, the agricultural-commodities magnate who has funneled more money to more politicians than perhaps any man alive. The Sea View, a slightly faded resort, is a Washington annex. Occupants include George McGovern, David Brinkley, Howard Baker and Bob Strauss. The lobby is adorned with photos of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. The piano bar in the Emerald Room plays melodies from an earlier time.
FOR 11 DAYS DOLE SAT BY THE POOL, sunbathing. A photographer caught him in an unflattering pose, his shorts hiked up on his skinny thighs, his face scowling under a Farmland cap as he talked on a ubiquitous white phone. Sometimes Elizabeth would join him for a while, but mostly he just sat alone, staring out at the sea.
He was trying to figure out what to do next. He knew he had to do something fairly drastic. Before the primaries his campaign research had shown that voters knew hardly anything about his legislative accomplishments. After the primaries the image was even worse: thanks to the negative ads of his opponents, he was seen as a Washington hack and tool of corporate lobbyists. It had galled Dole to be pitted against men he regarded as fundamentally “’not serious.’’ On a plane trip in early March he had let his bile spill out. He was particularly offended by Forbes. “‘Tells everybody he’s going to cut their taxes,’’ he had muttered. “‘Get a life.’’ At debates he had refused to shake Forbes’s hand.
Slowly Dole began to turn over in his mind a plan of action, a dramatic stroke that would shock the political world. He had been cast as a Washington insider. Well, then, he would leave Washington. Not just give up his job as majority leader, as many had urged, but depart from Capitol Hill altogether. He would resign from the Senate. That would show he was really serious, willing to sacrifice everything.
Dole made this plan alone. He did not tell his Senate colleagues, and he did not inform his most trusted aides until he had already made up his mind. Though he and Elizabeth had discussed the idea, he didn’t even tell his wife.
Don Sipple, the strategist who took over after the coup against Lacy at the end of February, couldn’t believe the sorry state of the campaign. There was no money; it had all been spent on the primaries. There was little useful research on Clinton, and no real plan for taking on the president in November. Then in April everyone, including the candidate, went on vacation. At about that time, Newt Gingrich decided that the GOP campaign needed more muscle. In mid-March, over bourbon with senior party officials in the speaker’s office, he suggested a ““total party effort’’ to shape a unified message. He was a little vague about what this ““Team GOP’’ might do, but he clearly envisioned a large role for himself. As Dole plunged in the polls, Republican leaders were getting nervous. Fred Steeper, a GOP pollster, believed that Dole had to make his case before Labor Day–in fact, before the Olympics at the end of July–or risk falling too far behind. But no one could agree on what a winning message might be. By mid-April, even the normally ebullient Newt was looking worried.
NOTHING IMPROVED WHEN the candidate returned from Florida. He was supposed to look leaderly running the Senate–the so-called rotunda strategy–but instead he looked like a tedious Washington insider, spouting legislative arcana. Worse, the Democrats were tying him up in legislative knots. Their proposal to raise the minimum wage was dominating the floor and the headlines. As Dole left the Senate chamber one day, reporters peppered him with questions on the subject. He staggered into his office, closed the door and complained to his old friend the lobbyist Tom Korologos, ““I’m so sick and tired of the minimum wage I can’t stand it.’’ Korologos was worried about Dole. He said that Dole’s colleagues were suggesting that he step down as majority leader. ““I hope you don’t,’’ said Korologos. ““You ain’t gonna, are you?’’ Dole simply stared at him.
On Monday, April 22, author Mark Helprin stopped by Dole’s office. Helprin was an unusual man, at once a literary figure who wrote fabulist novels and a conservative foreign-policy expert who wrote hard-line op-ed pieces for The Wall Street Journal. He had written a flattering editorial about Dole in January. On his own initiative, Helprin had agreed to help draft Dole’s acceptance speech for the GOP convention in August. Dole had been touched by Helprin’s first draft, an elegant evocation of a simpler time, America before the 1960s.
Helprin was led out onto the leader’s porch, “’the Beach,’’ where Dole was sunning himself. The author did not know Dole well, but he was not shy about giving advice. Why don’t you leave the Senate, he asked shortly after they shook hands. ““Pull up a chair,’’ said Dole.
The next day, Dole let Scott Reed in on the secret. ““I’m thinking of resigning,’’ he said. ““What do you think?’’
Reed could barely contain his joy. He had been getting blamed by the pundits for Dole’s stalled campaign. He resented the fact that he couldn’t control the candidate, who spent most of his time in Washington under the dangerously moderating influence of his Senate chief of staff, Sheila Burke. Reed tried not to show how happy he was, lest his enthusiasm cause Dole to change his mind. But as soon as he had left Dole’s private office he scrawled a list of all the reasons Dole should quit:
Bold/unpredictable Burst of energy Shake DC insider image Free from Senate Engage in campaign Screws up Clinton strategy Redefines Dole Better control of message/not Senate
To be judicious, he also wrote down some of the cons:
No longer leader. Diminished? Depressed/Alone. Loss of platform? Running from problems. Money shortage–need to keep moving
The ayes clearly had it. He called Dole later that day and told him that resigning was a very good idea. But one worry nagged him as he lay awake that night. Dole’s life was the Senate. Would he be depressed by the loss of that anchor? Could he adjust to a new routine, to the rigors of constant campaigning? Would he become the Dole of 1988, constantly second-guessing his campaign manager?
Over the next few days, Helprin and Reed became what Reed called ““midnight phone pals.’’ Helprin would fax drafts of a speech announcing Dole’s Senate resignation to Reed’s private number when no one else was around. Reed would scoop up the pages and bring them to Dole. Helprin struggled to match his flowery prose to Dole’s no-frills style. ““Can’t say that,’’ Dole would grumble. ““Don’t want to say that.''
The day before Dole was scheduled to make his surprise announcement–amazingly, the secret held even after a few key staffers had been told–Jack Hilton, the New York speech coach, got a call from Scott Reed. Reed told him to be on the 7 a.m. shuttle to Washington the next day. He didn’t say why.
When Hilton arrived at campaign headquarters, he was handed the speech. Hilton read it to Dole the way he thought it should be read. ““I have done it the hard way,’’ he said, drawing out the words of the highest-impact line.
““I have done it thehardway,’’ mumbled Dole.
““No,’’ said Hilton. ““The . . . hard . . . way.’’ Hilton tried to coach Dole on reading from the TelePrompTer, which the candidate still regarded with suspicion. The machine had failed him several times during the campaign.
Hilton could tell that Dole was moved by the speech. His breath caught, his eyes welled as he practiced. Hilton was thrilled. The speech coach had worked on Dole to stop calling himself ““Bob Dole’’ like some freshman congressman who was trying to boost his name recognition. ““You know what I like most about this speech?’’ Hilton asked. ““The word “I’ is in it 49 times.’’ Dole laughed. Hilton had also tried to cure Dole of his other speaking foibles, like his unfinished sentences and myriad ““whatevers.’’ These were among 10 tips Hilton had written down and ordered Dole to tape onto his refrigerator. But he had no illusions that Dole would actually follow the advice.
LATER THAT MORNING, WHEN Dole told his Senate staff of his plan to leave, they stood and applauded. Dole was overcome and began to cry. ““I just wanted you to know . . .’’ he began and broke down again. Tears were flowing liberally throughout the room full of longtime loyalists. Sheila Burke went to get tissues and came back with a towel. ““It’s not the end,’’ Dole said. ““It’s the beginning. I think we’re going to make it. I’m upbeat,’’ he continued. He gestured at Elizabeth. ““Slept like a baby.’’ When he delivered the speech, Dole choked up several times. He tried to focus on the TelePrompTer screens so he wouldn’t break down. It was the best speech anyone had ever heard Bob Dole give.
The next morning, Dole went to open the Senate. He was supposed to leave for the ““bright light and open spaces of this beautiful country,’’ but it was hard to let go. He walked around the leader’s office that would soon not be his; he looked out at the Beach, where he would no longer be able to bask. ““I’m outta here,’’ he finally said, and got on a plane for Chicago.
