But the first thing he did was seek the judgment of the pundits from the safe haven of his Washington home at the Watergate. He and his wife, Elizabeth, sat in front of the big-screen TV, channel-surfing from “Larry King Live” to C-Span to . . . whatever. “Stayed up until about midnight watching all that stuff,” he told NEWSWEEK. He had begun his day huddling with campaign staff, then stood before the nation and a choir of congressional politicians. Now Dole was ending the drama in a characteristic way: in private.
In the aftermath of his tearful valedictory, observers focused on the horse race – and the possibility that there would now actually be one. But Dole’s momentous decision was less important for what it did to the race than for what it said about the man, the campaign he’ll run – and the president he’d be. For Dole last week made his first major move in a new role: CEO of the only large organization he’s ever built, his campaign. Sure, he’s run the Senate for decades, cutting deals and keeping his opinions to himself. The presidency is very different, and Dole seems to be realizing this only now.
The story of Dole’s decision reveals him to be a shrewd loner in a gregarious business. He is not, by nature, a man who cares about organization charts or the chain of command. He listens to many, cautiously sounds out a wide circle, but fully confides in no one. He has no small cadre of lifelong loyalists, but is instead relying on a team of younger men he barely knew until recently – and who in many cases once worked for his Republican rivals. His secretiveness, he thinks, gives him the freedom to change direction quickly. He puts off committing to a course until crisis demands action, and then can abruptly reverse himself to cut his losses. His moves can inspire – or sow confusion in his ranks.
Dole’s decision also lays bare his intention to pursue a mirror image of President Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. Dole and his allies have been carefully distancing his campaign from the GOP Congress and its Gingrichian agenda. Dole wants to stay away from the people the Democrats brand “extremists,” while being free to attack Clinton with his own conservative “wedge” issues – without having to worry about passing them in Congress. Welfare is an example. This week, NEWSWEEK has learned, Dole is expected to propose mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients: a whole console of “hot buttons.” It’s a hardball move, but also shows something else: Dole risks mistaking maneuver for message.
Dole’s dramatic resignation announcement brought the predictable reactions. Republicans were jubiliant. “Things are moving,” said Reagan-era imagemeister Mike Deaver. Reporters were happy to have a campaign to cover. The fax-happy White House was momentarily nonplused. “You caught us all by surprise,” President Clinton conceded when Dole told him the news in a courtesy call. Democrats soon struck, accusing Dole of desperately abandoning his mission for mere politics. Dole himself acted like a man reborn.
The morning after the most memorable and eloquent speech of his life, Dole set out for a hastily arranged campaign stop in Chicago, changing on the plane from his regulation suit to a tieless, dress-down outfit. The NEWSWEEK Poll, taken after Dole’s announcement, shows how much farther the soon-to-be ex-senator must travel. It’s not an impossible mission. He trails Clinton by 16 points (49-33) in a hypothetical three-way race with Ross Perot or another third-party candidate. And 30 percent of those interviewed said that “personal character” would be the top issue in the campaign – a presumed area of Dole strength.
But Dole must do more than change jobs and clothes. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, he said that he aims to show that he is “a full-time candidate,” and that there is more to him than a dour man in the well of the Senate. He doesn’t intend to claim he’s now an “outsider.” But he might want to try. The NEWSWEEK Poll shows that Dole’s announcement did nothing to allay suspicions that he is “too much of an insider to be a good president.” Last week 43 percent of voters thought so – a slight increase from the 41 percent who viewed him that way in January.
Dole says that he began seriously considering the idea of quitting during beachfront ruminations in Florida over Easter break. He and Elizabeth were winding down from the primaries at their longtime getaway, the Sea View Hotel in Bal Harbour. “I just needed to get off by myself,” Dole said. “No reason to consult anyone. It’s my seat, my decision.” He says he’d “pretty much decided” on the move by the time he left the beach.
But if he had, he didn’t bother to tell his own wife, who learned what was afoot only two weeks later. The only person who can authoritatively say what was on Dole’s mind is Dole – which is just the way Dole likes it. Besides, longtime aides say, nothing’s ever quite that simple with Bob Dole. They focus on the words “pretty much.” “I suspect that what he did was “pre-clear’ it with himself,” said a former top aide. “In other words, he said to himself: if things get bad enough, am I ready to go that far?”
Dole war-games his strategies as covertly as he can. When an old friend, lobbyist Tom Korologos, stopped by for a chat in mid-April, Dole slyly broached the topic of resignation. Seeming to make idle chatter, he noted that “there were a lot of people asking me” to quit. “You ain’t gonna, are you?” Korologos asked. Dole stared away, and said nothing. There was no heart-to-heart. There never is.
In Dole’s world of decision there is no Hillary Clinton, Jim Baker, Bebe Rebozo or Robert Kennedy. Dole’s famous cronies at the Sea View swimming pool aren’t really soulmates, political or otherwise. Neither, really, are his many Senate admirers. Dole has various groups of advisers, depending on the issue, the location or the battle at hand. “We’re all just spokes in the wheel,” says GOP Sen. John McCain. “There’s only one hub, and that’s Dole.”
After Florida, Dole waited to see how things developed. They developed badly. Through much of April he was on the defensive. The polls continued to deteriorate, and the hope of using the Senate to sharpen the contrast with Clinton faded, ruined by Democratic sniping and GOP disunity. Every Republican talking head within distance of a TV camera derided his campaign as a directionless mess. But Dole did not convene a meeting. He watched, and waited.
His campaign staff waited, too. In Bob Dole’s world there are no permanent enemies – or friends. The attitude is purely legislative: you never know whom you’ll need on the next vote. In his third presidential campaign, he’s put himself in the hands of a squadron of former allies of Jack Kemp – once Dole’s mortal enemy on the Hill. All are thirty-or fortysomething products of the age of Reagan and the teachings of the late Lee Atwater.
The pragmatic Dole knew he had no choice. Either he’s outlived the older generation of operatives or they’ve outlived their usefulness. Campaign manager Scott Reed persuaded Dole to pay homage to the New Right in the primaries; now new communications director John Buckley has persuaded him to read prepared texts from a TelePrompTer, and to listen to the advice of a New York speech coach.
Dole believes in blind luck – bad and good. He’s sometimes willing to rely at important moments on the kindness and inspiration of relative strangers. One of them is novelist Mark Helprin, whom Dole admired but knew only casually, as a friend of Sen. Slade Gorton. Dole had already asked Helprin to begin working on a convention acceptance speech. Then, on Monday, April 22, Helprin happened to stop in and see Dole. Helprin suggested that Dole quit the Senate. Dole told a startled Helprin that he agreed.
That was the triggering event. The next day, Dole called Scott Reed and told him what he wanted to do. Then he called Elizabeth, who was out campaigning. The next morning he tracked down Helprin, who was at Washington’s Union Station to catch a train back home to New York state. Dole asked him to begin drafting a farewell-to-the-Senate speech. For the next two weeks only the Doles, Reed and Helprin knew what was up. On May, GOP Chairman Haley Barbour was brought into the loop. The night before the speech, Dole told Reed to advise aides that the senator still might change his mind. “What was in my mind was, if they were sure, they’d tell,” Dole said. “Leave a little doubt.”
So Dole pulled off his coup. But his operating style has its costs and risks. Or- ganization, even his friends say, is not his strong suit. His campaign survived the primaries but wound up broke and is now selling off office equipment to raise cash. Dole’s cat-quick change of direction left the campaign scrambling. To save money, most of the 17 events scheduled between now and July 4 are for local and state fund-raisers. So the man who portrayed himself last week as a political Jack Kerouac, eager to travel to the “bright light and open spaces of this beautiful country,” will spend much of his time speaking to GOP contributors at banquets. He sobbed uncontrollably when he broke the news of his Senate retirement to his Hill staff, but he left them dazed at the turn of events. “It’s a Dole plot to raise the unem- ployment rate in time for the election,” one staff- er joked.
But what is the sound of Bob Dole Unplugged? As he said last week, he will soon be “without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man.” As he prepares to leave the Senate – the current plan is for him to do so around the first of June – he must explain who he is, and what he wants to do as president. That will require more than nifty maneuvers or a list of cutting “wedge” issues. Dole will have to speak from the heart about his plans. How will he do that? “That’s what all those quote “experts’ work on,” he told NEWSWEEK, characteristically mordant. Besides, he added, “right now we don’t have the money to do it.”
Meanwhile, he said, “it’s time to move on.” His first trip, by chance, was to a city with more personal meaning than his schedulers realized. Nearly 50 years ago, Dole journeyed to Chicago to begin a series of operations that reassembled his body. Now he was back in town, reciting the poetic lines of his Washington speech to the Chicago crowd, declaring his “trust in the hard way.” As Dole himself certainly knows, Chicago is only the first step on a long road back.
