"Some people think I'm just tough, no feelings," Dole says pensively. "I like people. [But] hugging is not my nature—kissing, holding babies." Anyway, he says, "with only one hand, I'm always afraid I'll drop them."
The sly grin, the quick one-liner. They are as much a part of Bob Dole as the trademark felt-tip pen he clutches in his withered right hand to ward off handshakes. They have made him a media favorite able to carry his conservative agenda beyond the Sunday morning talk shows to 60 Minutes, The Tonight Show and Murphy Brown.
And at an age when most pols begin writing their memoirs, Dole is adding a whole new chapter to his career—as Bill Clinton's nemesis. Name an issue, from the budget (he argued for more spending cuts and no tax increases) to the Brady bill (he threatened to prolong a stalemate), and there is Dole speaking his mind as the leader of the opposition. "He's one of the most interesting people in politics because he can be so cynical on one level, yet so reflexively truthful on another," says Michael Kinsley, the liberal voice on CNN's Crossfire. "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. Dole has this instinctual habit of saying what he really thinks, and that's a grave liability."
In fact, it is Dole's sharp tongue and pointed retorts that may pose the greatest obstacle to his longtime goal: the Presidency. Supporters and critics alike say that he has become his own worst enemy. As CNN's Kinsley says, "You do have this image of him as the kid who always liked kicking the cat."
"I do think he's gotten a rough rap on this mean streak," says former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who was once a target for Dole's jabs, but who still considers him a good friend. "Some may bristle under his sharp wit, and he's got a hot temper, but that doesn't mean he's mean-spirited."
Dole, typically, downplays the ambiguities in his thorny persona. "I don't think I'm particularly complicated," he says. "I just see it as sort of a normal human being who moved up the ladder and was able to cope with it."
Few have risen so far and coped with so much. Dole grew up during the Depression in Russell, Kans., then a town of about 2,500, where his father, Doran, ran a cream and egg station. While raising four children, his mother, Bina, sold Singer sewing machines door-to-door while her oldest son, "Bobby Joe," peddled the Russell Record and hawked Cloverine salve. At one point the family was forced to rent out their tiny home to oil workers and move to the basement, where, between the furnace and a coal bin, six of them shared two makeshift bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen.
Humor was one way to ease the hardship. At Dawson's drugstore, where Dole later worked as a soda jerk (and developed his lifelong passion for chocolate milk shakes), putdowns were a way of life, and Dole excelled at them. "We wanted them to leave laughing," he says.
A top high school athlete in football, Dole became the first in his family to attend college when in 1941 he borrowed the $300 tuition for Kansas State University. The following year he enlisted in the Army, later becoming a second lieutenant in the 10th Mountain Division, stationed in Italy's Po Valley.
On April 14, 1945, just three weeks before the end of the war in Europe, as Dole was leading his platoon through heavy shelling, he saw his radioman go down. He began crawling to his aid, but was barely out of the foxhole when he was struck by Nazi machine-gun fire. "I thought maybe I'd lost my arms," he says. "I couldn't move my legs." Lying face down and paralyzed, "I can remember seeing my little white dog, Spitzy. It's all just a fog after that."
Eventually he was put in a body cast—"boxed up, you know, like a piece of furniture"—and sent home. He returned to Kansas with his right shoulder blown off, his arm dangling, and paralyzed from the neck down by spinal-cord injuries. For three years and three months he was shipped around to veterans' hospitals, finally ending up in Battle Creek, Mich. He had his right kidney removed and suffered from blood clots in his lungs, seizures and fevers so high that "they'd pack me in ice like a fish and blow fans on me."
By the time Dole returned to Russell in 1946, he had lost more than 70 pounds. "I looked in the mirror and I couldn't believe what I saw," he says. "I've avoided mirrors ever since." As he convalesced, "I kept wondering why did it happen to me? But then something has a way of taking over. You take another step, and you're able to raise your left arm or something. And you finally get a fork in your hand and then in your mouth. It just takes a lot of time."
Though he was soon able to walk, his atrophied right arm remained lifeless, his forearm locked at a 90-degree angle. The condition was finally remedied when Chicago orthopedist Dr. Hampar Kelikian operated seven times, at no charge, straightening the limb so that it would hang freely at his side.
More important, Kelikian changed Dole's outlook on life. "He said, in effect, 'You've got to grow up,' " Dole recalls. " 'You're not going to be like you were.' I always figured something out there would happen, and suddenly I'd be all right." To help cover Dole's hospital bills, his hometown took up a collection, dropping $1,800 in a cigar box at Dawson's. "People from all over town, 30 cents, 50 cents, whatever," he says. "When I needed help, they were there."
At an officers' dance back in Bat-lie Creek, Dole met occupational therapist Phyllis Holden, and in 1948 they wed. Like Kelikian, Phyllis rekindled Dole's self-reliance and pride. "I used to have to pick up a glass and it would slip through my fingers," he says. "It was always embarrassing to me. She'd just say, 'Pick it up.' "
When his wounds healed, Dole went back to school, earning his undergraduate and law degrees by 1952 from Washburn Municipal University in Topeka, Kans. Each day he took a disk recorder to class and then, struggling to write with his left hand (to this day, it has little, sensation), worked through the night transcribing the recordings.
Although Dole says he had no political ambitions when he returned to Russell to practice law, local Republicans, attracted by his sterling war record, persuaded him to successfully run for the state legislature in 1950. Three years later he began an eight-year stint as county attorney, followed by four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and, finally, his election to the U.S. Senate in 1968.
During the 1970s, Dole earned a reputation for harsh rhetoric that often overshadowed his political accomplishments. Yet he insists that his years of adversity did not leave him embittered, and despite his sometimes blunt talk, he has been a pragmatic consensus builder among Senate Republicans. "I'm no philosopher," he concedes, "but I think I've got pretty good political eye-sight. And a taste for political combat. Says Kinsley: "What moves him is being a Republican. He is not an ideologically driven person."
Unfortunately, as Dole's political identity was taking shape, the demands of his job were leaving little time for his wife and only child, Robin, now 39 and a lobbyist for the real-estate company Century 21. "We didn't see him very often," says Phyllis. "Politics was his main interest." In 1972 the couple divorced.
That same year Dole met Elizabeth Hanford, a 36-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer, who would later hold Cabinet posts in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Married since 1975, the pair "have a lot of the same interests," Dole says. "(A) we like to work, (B) we like to work, and (C) we like to work."
In 1976, Dole was lapped to be Gerald Ford's vice-presidential running male, and four years later he made his own bid for the Presidency. Elected Senate Majority Leader in 1984, he seemed on his way to the 1988 presidential nomination when, after winning the Iowa primary, he blew a 20-point lead in New Hampshire and lost to George Bush.
"I went over that election every night for a year," he admits. Though Dole observes dismissively that it's "all history now," when asked what he misses most in life because of his war injury he immediately harks back to New Hampshire. "Bush was out there being the macho guy, tossing snowballs, driving a tractor," he says. "I sort of regretted I couldn't do that. I might have driven a tractor. But then again I might have run over someone."
Dole swears that eventually he and Bush turned out to be "great friends." As for Bill Clinton, Dole says the two "got off to a bad start, but I want to help the President. I didn't get elected to embarrass him."
Taking his job may be another matter. Dole spent his August vacation in New Hampshire admiring the political landscape, and he has already met once with friends and advisers to discuss a possible run. Some have even bandied about a Bob Dole-Colin Powell ticket for 1996. ("Nice ring to it, but he might like it the other way around," says Dole.) As for age, Dole says, "it isn't a factor, unless it matters to voters."
For now. Dole shows no sign of slowing, even though he will be 73 in 1996. He jets to as many as five cities in a weekend to boost Republican causes and candidates. He and Elizabeth, now head of the American Red Cross, still live in the small Watergate duplex apartment that he bought as a bachelor in the early '70s, but because of their busy schedules, their only regular meal together is Sunday brunch, often at a Washington restaurant. Frequently joining them is Dole's daughter, Robin, with whom he has become closer in recent years. "You try to catch up with some of those things in life that slip by," he says.
As for Bob and Elizabeth, some in Washington View their relationship as a "marriage of convenience," as one friend of the couple puts it. But, she adds, "it works because both of them are total public-service junkies." During their many days apart, "we burn up the telephone," says Elizabeth. "Our life is not what you'd call glamorous."
Even so, it is a life that Dole seems to relish. With last year's prostate cancer halted through surgery, he is looking forward to upcoming Senate face-offs over health care, welfare reform and other Clinton causes. As Washington's second most powerful politician, "I probably have as much input now with a Democratic President as I did before," he says. He is a frequent visitor these days at the White House—which brings home to him all the more forcibly the crucial difference between host and guest. "He gets to slay overnight," says Dole, with humor dry to the point of ignition. "I have to leave."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
