The Whole ROBERT DOLE

When Iranscam erupted, Senator Robert Dole hit the ground running. Running, that is, toward the `88 campaign. GAIL SHEEHY investigates Dole's character— and finds that his combative wit and formidable drive stem from the will to overcome his crippling war wounds

GAIL SHEEHY

ROBERT DOLE IS A SURVIVOR. Bom with none of the genealogical gloss or family wealth or social position taken for granted by many Republicans, Bob Dole did have one obvious Godgiven gift: he was a natural athlete. He played basketball and football, he was tall and he could run. In fact, he ran everywhere he went, always training, lifting weights he made himself out of cement blocks and lead pipe, and he nearly broke the indoor-track record at a university he could barely afford before he went away to war, where his gift was shattered.

Granted, most people don't know that Bob Dole is not whole. Even those closest to him often forget that he has no working right arm. So brilliantly does he compensate for his disability, even his wife will forget and say, "Will you hang that picture?" Senator Alan Simpson, another tall, blunt, irreverent wit, who has been in the trenches with Dole on deficit busting and tax reform, shakes his head in unaccustomed awe when asked about Bob Dole. "What can you do to a guy who's lain in a hospital bed for three years? You can't spook him up. He's invulnerable."

Yet not a day goes by that Dole doesn't have to prove himself. Just to tie a shoe, buckle a belt, thread a cuff link, demands the patience of the demented. And then his nemesis—pushing the tiny buttons of his shirt through the holes. Some days it takes ten minutes. If he gets flustered, fifteen. Because, you see, he hasn't enough feeling even in his good hand to pick a dime out of his pocket. Somebody asked him, "Why can't Elizabeth button your buttons for you?" Because he doesn't want to get in the habit of leaning.

No. Bob Dole is dependent on nobody, never has been— well, not since that hazy, hideous gap in his life that opened up when he was twenty-one years old.

"I was all this physical-fitness, bodybuilding, da-da, dada kind of person," he told me when we first talked, last June. Sunbathing is one of the few sensual pleasures Senator Dole permits himself, so his press secretary had set me up on a Senate veranda. Dole had been up until one A.M., the indefatigable majority leader, trying to get the tax-reform bill done. He settled back and let the sun butter his face, and talked of his passion for sports and survival.

He can remember the running and push-ups. And pumping those weights in the basement where he and his younger brother bunked together. They lived just across the tracks, in Russell, Kansas. When his father's feet hit the floor above them at five A.M., everyone else hit the floor running. Had to. His mother, Bina Dole, had to load up the old Chevy with the Singer sewing machines she sold around the county. All four kids had their chores, washing and vacuuming and setting out the meals. "Bobby Dole was a good worker," recalls Bub Dawson, who used to own the drugstore where Bob worked as a soda jerk until 11:30 every night.

So it was only in the dark before dawn that a boy with a crush on sports had a few minutes to himself for running and push-ups, before he plastered down his hair with vanilla and raced off to school and his afternoon job delivering newspapers. The girls went for Bobby Dole, with hi§ big sad eyes and his biceps and his shyness, but he didn't have time for girls. "If he had a girl, he'd a had to take her to the show," says his brother, Kenny. "Who had that kind of money?"

Dole's father took pride in being a man who never gave in to emotion. The Western Union man would go all to pieces when he had to read the killedor missing-in-action telegrams to townsfolk, so Doran Dole would do it for him. Cool as you please. He was not ambitious, but his wife more than made up for it. Few dared confront her. During the Depression, Bina Dole rented out their house to oil and gas people. The family moved into the boys' room in the basement. To this day, her son appears to bear a class resentment, but rather than becoming a social reformer, he has followed her pragmatic credo, "Can't never did anything."

DOLE DID NOT SEEK OUT DANGER in the war. It was his duty to enlist, he felt. He was called up halfway through his sophomore year at the University of Kansas. Time: 1943. After officer-candidate school, he was sent to Italy, assigned to an infantry replacement depot near Rome. Safe. Dreams of the Olympics danced in his head when he saw athletes running around the Colosseum. "I figured the best way to get out of the army over there was to get in the sports school," he has said.

On February 25, 1945, he was assigned to the 85th Mountain Regiment. Bobby Dole, son of a grain-elevator manager, a boy from the dead-flat center of the States, thrown in with a bunch of Ivy League richies to an elite ski division—it was a bad joke. Dole had less than a month of real exposure to combat before that fogged day when he was ordered to take Hill 913.

His men scuttled from shell hole to shell hole, clinging to what little safety they could, but when firing began from the hill it was bad, an indecipherable, crippling rain. "I was trying to drag the radioman back into this little shell hole," he said, still puzzled. "All I remember is a sting. I must have been turning over when I was hit, because my arms were over my head. I couldn't bring them back.

Sometime during the eight hours he lay there thinking both his arms had been blown off, somebody piled them on his chest. The medic had been hit too; in fact, almost every man in his unit was down. The orders were to leave the wounded. His platoon sergeant dipped his fingers in Dole's blood and blessed the boy's forehead with an "M" to let the litter bearers know he'd been dosed with bootlegged morphine.

When he woke up at the evacuation hospital, Dole couldn't walk, couldn't void. Whatever had hit him had crushed his most important wires. He still couldn't bring his arms back. All four limbs were paralyzed. Just like that. No lead-up, no connection to his past life, no comforting sense of heroism; hell, he didn't even know the radioman's name.

"They shipped me back like a piece of furniture from Italy to Africa to Miami," he recalls. Still crated in a full-body cast, he was sent to Topeka, Kansas. Winter General Hospital. A large V.A. facility. A scrap-men dump.

A few weeks later his parents brought him home on leave for the first time. The townsfolk of Russell turned out to see his pathetic frame lifted down from the train on a stretcher. Bob Dole looked away in shame.

WHEN HE BECAME VISIBLE as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, in 1981, the media discovered a "new Bob Dole." Up to then he'd been best known as Gerald Ford's hatchet man, for having run around the country cutting up Democrats in the 1976 presidential election while his running mate remained, presidentially, in the Rose Garden. Suddenly Dole was being saluted for his "independent streak," for being "straight," even "warm and likable"—and funny. Much will be made of these changes as Bob Dole gears up to campaign for president.

There is merit to the notion of two Bob Doles. But the "new Dole" has been under reconstruction for forty years. Ever since that day at Winter General Hospital when they first got him up on his feet...

He had been through three stormy months, once flaring to a temperature of 108.7, only hours from death. A severely infected kidney had to be removed. But the day they got Bob Dole out of bed for the first time was not a day of celebration. He heaved himself into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

"It was a pretty awful sight, to me."

He stood before himself, this young man of twenty-two, a sucked-out, skin-and-bones invalid. His weight had dropped from 194 to 122 pounds. He'd scarcely had a chance to grow from boy into man before the gods pushed him back into infancy, and it made him bitter.

Bob Dole is a loner who can't stand to be alone.

"You go through the period of self-pity,'' he told me.

I asked him if there was anger.

"Yeah,'' he said quietly. "There you are, a grown man, and you can't do anything, can't get dressed. I couldn't feed myself for a year...'' His voice trailed off into the ether of memory. Gratefully, he has forgotten exactly how long it took to make each step, but he admits it was an inch a day. Or less.

After languishing for six months in the V.A. hospital without rehabilitation or exercise, Dole got himself transferred to an army hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. Doctors found his shoulder still paralyzed and deep injuries in his spine; but worse, the muscles of both upper arms had been allowed to atrophy grotesquely. His right hand was crabbed, and his left nearly as useless. Active exercises were ordered immediately. Doctors shook their heads. They did not expect Lieutenant Dole to live.

Blood clots developed in his lungs. Month after month he lay on his back, through the bleak winter days and then the nights, his mind jumping around, listening for the howl of the train whistle and the brief, tantalizing sound of motion. Not until March of 1946 was he permitted up in a chair for short periods. And the next time he looked, another year had passed.

"You think nobody could have it worse than you, why did God do it to me, I didn't do anything, it's unfair,'' he recalled. "I'm never going to get married, never going to amount to anything. Live off a pension. Selling pencils on the street corner.'' There were times he'd throw things. But precisely because the survivor does not die or give up, the self with its wanton appetite for life comes upon its true innocence.

"You change the way you measure everything," as Dole described the turning point to me. "Life becomes about learning how to use what you have left."

Kenny Dole remembers indelibly the statement his brother made in the hospital. He said he figured he'd lost ten years of his life; he swore he was going to make it up.

"And he's still trying to make it up," Kenny told me, startling himself as the revelation popped out.

"He's a man in a hurry," I said.

"It's true."

Young Dole started running around to doctors, in search of the magic operation. An immigrant Armenian surgeon by the name of Kelikian agreed to work on Dole for nothing.

Still, there were other costs. So a cigar box was set up at the V.F.W. post in Russell, and the townspeople gave whatever they could.

He endured three operations, believing each time that the next one would restore his shoulder. "You go through this dream period," he told me, "where you know it's going to be just like it was."

I asked the senator how much his disability had delayed him in starting his career. "I'm not certain I had a career before this happened," he replied. "Would I have gone back to school? Maybe not. My grades weren't all that good." He made a C average in high school. "This bad time actually gave me a new start."

He didn't mention his first wife. When I asked if she hadn't been instrumental in his new start, he seemed to resist the memory of dependence, and merely acknowledged that she was "helpful."

I COULD SEE DOLE'S FIRST WIFE from the door of her widow's condo in Topeka. She had a cigarette going and she was planning folk art for Kansas Day. At the bell, she primped the gray hair piled like scissor-curled ribbons on her head.

Warm and chatty as a small-town switchboard operator,

Elizabeth, newly svelte, has switched to a younger, looser hairstyle

Phyllis Holden Dole Buzick told me she first saw the young Dole in the mess hall at the Battle Creek hospital. He was not a patient of hers. She was an occupational therapist on the psychiatric ward. "That poor Bob Dole, he has not long to live," somebody said. Such a nice-looking man, Phyllis thought, it was sad.

"I had him, probably within days, at a dance up at the officers' club," she says. When he asked her to dance, she knew to stay close so it wouldn't hurt his arm to pull. Having worked with so many shattered men, she didn't even consider Bob Dole handicapped.

Three months from the day they met, Bob married Phyllis. Shortly thereafter he was released with a "total and permanent disability," and enrolled at the University of Arizona. Phyllis went to class with Bob and took notes for him. She had to sign his checks as well. Even his good hand had no abductor and adductor control. He would have to learn to write all over again, as if holding chopsticks. Frustrated, he started running again. Sometimes he would fall. Pick himself up, fall again, pick himself up. "I learned very quickly," says Phyllis, "you don't help him unless he asks you."

Running one day he was stopped by a pain he knew like an old friend. He'd shaken a blood clot loose. So it was back to Topeka, where he could have his blood checked weekly, and there he ran double time through his bachelor's and law degrees at Washburn University. He dragged a primitive recorder, bigger than a bread box, to every class. "Sitting there by the hour at night transcribing notes from that silly thing must have been tremendous practice for him," muses Phyllis. "I had to hide in the comer because he didn't want any noise."

Now that his body had turned incontrovertibly against him, he had a new instrument to train: his mind. Phyllis can still see him pacing the mg while she quizzed him in German.

"Bob, why do you have to get an A?" she confronted him one day. "Why can't a C be good enough?"

He whirled with a vehemence that scared her. "You tell me how to study a C or a B's worth and I will," she remembers him saying. "I can only study until I get it."

Even as he was racking up A's in law school, he ran for the Kansas legislature and served a term. And no sooner had he started his first job, working for "Doc" Eric Smith, an oil-andgas lawyer in Russell, than he had Doc out campaigning with him. Dole was elected county prosecutor for four straight terms, augmenting his county caseload with a full private practice and tireless campaigning for the Republican Party.

"He worked harder than any man I've ever known when he was county attorney," says his Aunt Gladys. The Doles produced only one child, a daughter, and Dole found time to take her to the local Methodist church each Sunday. But apart from that meager family recreation, Phyllis can vouch that his breakneck pace continued—every night until ten, every weekend—throughout their marriage.

I APPROACHED MY FIRST INTERVIEW with Bob Dole having just written a book about survivors. My conclusion was that those who face and master the trauma may become almost immunized against the ill effects of future life accidents and emerge as the most successful and resilient adults. It helps if one was raised to tough it out. Bob Dole agreed, though with characteristic brevity boiled it down to "strength through adversity."

The winner against adversity emerges with what I think of as the victorious personality. Bob Dole has most of the hallmarks: the self-trust, the sense of humor, the perspective to understand that his plight is not unique. Tested again and again, a survivor develops the strength and self-directedness necessary to fix his sights and chart a course without depending on outside forces—indeed, often in spite of them.

Why did he choose to go into politics, for instance? "The one thing he really regretted about the injury, he told me, was he would no longer be able to participate in competitive sports," offers his former wife. "My feeling is that he channeled that drive to compete into politics." His brother, Kenny, agrees.

Yes, but why choose a profession based on glad-handing when you start with one arm tied behind your back? I speculated that perhaps the way Bob Dole defied his disability was to choose the hardest possible professional road.

"You just might have hit it on the head," chuckled Russ Townsley from Russell, the town's iconoclastic newspaper publisher. But then, Bob Dole never did talk about what he feels most deeply. Russ and his wife spent many social evenings with their neighbors Phyllis and Bob during the early career years. The two men would sit in the living room reading their newspapers.

"So," Bob might say.

"So," Russ would reply.

"Bob was in too much of a hurry to waste time chitchatting," says Townsley.

Few would dispute that Dole today is the fastest runner on the Hill in seizing a political opportunity and exploiting it. Survivors of extremity must return to their creature nature and rely on it to fight their way back, acting and moving much of the time by instinct. Dole doesn't have to wait and poll a dozen friends and advisers before he knows what move to take. He has the sure, silent instincts of a prairie lion.

In Washington, he again hit the ground running—for four terms in the House, then as "sheriff" of the Senate to curry favor with Nixon, then for leader of his party, then for leader of the Senate, and now for leader of the nation. More than ever, at the age of sixty-three, Bob Dole is a man in a hurry.

DOLE STILL HAS A DARK SIDE. He must struggle always not to surrender to the anger, not to slip down into the well of selfpity that waits just beneath sleep.

It is not always easy to be a nice guy when one has to stop and work for fifteen minutes just to button one's shirt. Retested every day, in the physical mantra he must perform to dress, Dole steps out into the world hungry for action. "You'll find more decisions around Bob Dole than almost anyone else in public life," notes Senator David Durenberger.

It drives him crazy, almost, when the me-tooers line up to offer amendments in the newly telegenic Senate while Bob Dole is endeavoring to make a deal. The 1986 tax-reform bill was a prime example. Tempers were frayed after the second midnight session. Shouts erupted in the Republican cloakroom. "Let's stay here all night and shut 'em up!" hollered one side. The others wanted their moment. Suddenly Dole backed off and defused it all. He suggested that they break up the night into time zones. "Let's see, we'll put the senator from Alaska on at one a.m.—that's prime time where he's from." He let everybody blow off steam and then made it clear he had a plan.

"I have to keep in mind I'm the leader," Dole says. "If I start screaming and kicking, you might as well not have a leader."

His wit is described as "sharp," "biting," "cutting," "slashing"—all combative words. His slingshot tongue deJL^ole still has a dark side

fends him against the old feeling of helplessness. In one of his mordant moments, Dole reportedly quipped that he might vote for Pat Robertson if the evangelist could bring his arm back. He can savage more political peacocks in fewer words than anyone in public life. Here is Bob Dole at the closed Gridiron Club Dinner in 1983:

"I told John Glenn it wasn't fair for him to take advantage of his hero status as an astronaut. I mentioned this to him at the unveiling of the portrait. . .showing me invading Italy."

A touch of bitterness?

He knocked off three past presidents in one blow:

"History buffs probably noted the reunion at Sadat's funeral a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford, and Nixon—See No Evil. . .Hear No Evil. . .and Evil."

Then he wiped the floor with his presidential rivals:

"And my good friend George Bush can't win. . .He's the only one here tonight who will have to show an ID card to get out.

"Yes, there's Jack Kemp. . .Even as a kid, Jack wanted to play quarterback. . .because he's the only one on the field who gets to talk all the time."

It has been said that a funny man is an angry man. While Dole can swallow a rival in one bite of sarcasm, the aftertaste it leaves with voters can be sour. "I can hear him today," says his former wife, "and know it isn't funny, it's a dig."

Dole knows it. "I have to watch my tongue," he told me.

And more and more he does. Well, except with certain people. His frequent needling of Bush is not without class resentment. A quip his political director won't confirm or deny: "Bush is the kind of guy who screws with his socks on." And there are other exceptions, like Jack Kemp. Dole, a skinflint with words, sees Kemp as a profligate pretty-boy who deflates the value of ideas every time he opens his mouth. The two made a pact some time ago to be civilized.

But when, early in the Iran-contra debacle, Kemp's press secretary charged Dole with making Brownie points on Reagan's corpse, Dole fired back an ultimatum: "You start up with the press again and I'll let you have it."

Given his pragmatic political style, Dole may be the right man for the times. As the world becomes increasingly threatening and irrational, and as it becomes harder to be reverential toward anything or anybody, Dole's lightly cynical, deadpan humor offers a refreshing detachment. He would be a smash on Saturday Night Live. And in a society increasingly short on shared norms and splintered by interest groups, a master compromiser who can play pick-up-sticks with his eyes closed could be a comfort. But there is no real evidence that the anger beneath Dole's jagged-edged humor has been stilled. It may be a ticking bomb that could explode under the pressure of the coming campaign.

When I asked his political colleagues to name Dole's most distinguishing feature, most often mentioned was his brightness. "I think Dole has the best mind in the U.S. Senate since Jacob Javits," says Bush's former press secretary Pete Teeley, who once did a campaign plan for Dole. "But he's not perceived as intellectual, because of his keen wit." People mistakenly associate a ready wit with being superficial, lightweight. In fact, humor is the most intellectual of defense mechanisms. It is a barrier against feelings that the ego dare not let escape.

Dole's intelligence isn't book-learned. It's intuitive and selective. Senator Simpson swears Dole has a four-track mind. A clutch of his colleagues will be buzzing on the floor while Dole's eyes are fixed in the middle distance—nobody thinks he's even listening. "You go back to the chambers with him and damned if he didn't hear everything in his range," says Simpson. "His responses come so quickly, he must have a special endocrine in his head."

The private engine that drives this master deal-maker is another source of wonder to those who know about his disability. "He won't quit," says his former chief of staff, Rod DeArment, not until he gets the deal done. Constantly munching on junk food as his fuel, he takes giant strides between his two offices. Everyone who has seen him campaign says that when the rest stall, Dole's engine restarts.

DOES HE HAVE COMPASSION? I wondered. Moments of vulnerability?

His divorce was brutal. He walked into the house one night after twenty-three years of marriage—during the last year of which he and Phyllis had broken bread together twice, on Easter and Christmas—and he said, "I want out." That was it. She got no child support.

Phyllis didn't argue or confront. "You don't do that with Bob Dole," she warns. But today she says of her former husband, "He has a lot more feeling inside than he ever will let anybody know." His best male friend, Robert Ellsworth, a former NATO ambassador and Nixon's 1968 political director, explains: "Men from the high plains of Kansas can't express feelings, especially not love for each other. We're a little bit afraid of that." But Ellsworth's feeling for Dole runs deep, that is palpable, and like the few others who have been allowed close to Dole, he insists this is a warm and unusually sensitive man. He volunteered several vulnerable moments.

When they came to Washington as freshman members of the House, in 1961, and were put up the first night at a motel, Dole knocked on Ellsworth's door. He shuffled a bit before he had to ask Ellsworth to button his top button. When he looked up, his face spoke volumes of vulnerability.

And one day in 1973 he said, gruffly, "I'm seeing a lot of this girl."

"So," said Ellsworth.

"I just wanted you to know about it," said Dole.

That was it; he never talked about how he felt.

The "girl" was Elizabeth Hanford, thirty-six. She was the brainy brunette who had been sitting in his office one day to talk about. . .what was it? Anyway, he wrote her name on his blotter because she was awful pretty.

He was far more cautious this time—three calls before a date. They talked about education for the handicapped. "It was really cute," says Elizabeth. He kept up the courtship at long distance during his lonely '74 campaign for re-election to the Senate in the downdraft of Nixon's tailspin.

H_is divorce was brutal

Bob Dole is a loner who can't stand to be alone. If there aren't four people in his office pressing him at once, he'll work the phones. Elizabeth Hanford was rather taken aback when he asked for a favor. "If you don't mind my calling you kind of late in the evenings, it's just kind of something I look forward to... " She was a warm voice at the other end of exhausting days driving the monotonous infinities of Kansas.

Elizabeth hesitated. "These middle-of-the-night calls didn't put me in the best situation for work the next day, but I felt like that was one way I could make a contribution to his campaign."

The most revealing story Elizabeth told me was of Bob's visit to her parents in North Carolina. One morning, unbeknownst to his wife, he went downstairs while her mother was fixing breakfast. He had on bathing trunks, with a towel thrown over his shoulder.

"I want you to see my problem," he said. Then he pulled off the towel.

"It was something he felt needed to be on the table," says Elizabeth, still awed by his painful honesty. Even today, Dole admitted to me, "I purposely won't look at my shoulder in the mirror. I don't know why. It shouldn't bother me."

Finding a moment to get married in December 1975, the Doles moved into his apartment in the Watergate; six months later he was off and running again—this time on the national ticket. It was a breakneck ride. The survivor of Ford's vicepresidential selection process, Dole was the only Republican whose conservatism was concrete enough to please the ascendant Reagan right-wingers. Ford's people said, "Let's announce in Russell. Tomorrow."

His eye blooded with a broken vessel from all the strain, Bob Dole came home to Russell, this time in a la-di-da (as he would see it) presidential helicopter. The whole county had a population of 9,664, and yet 10,000 people were jammed in the courthouse square to see him. Stepping smartly to the speaker's stand, Dole introduced the president while his wife and his daughter, Robin, flanked Mr. Ford. But what met his eyes were the faces of the people who had filled the cigar box for his operations.

"I can recall when I needed help, the people of Russell helped.

His voice broke off. His left hand came up to his head. Elizabeth instinctively leaned forward—was he about to collapse? Ford restrained her. Russ Townsley flinched. He'd heard that "silence" only a few times, in connection with assassination. But then Dole's shoulders began to tremble. The audience could see that Bobby Dole, unbelievably, was just plain crying.

Ford broke the awkward silence by rising to his feet to lead the applause. With scarcely a dry eye left in that sun-filled courtyard, Townsley went back to his paper to write, "I was relieved to see it was Bob Dole, being as human as I've ever seen him in thirty years."

BUT THE ROUGH EDGES WERE STILL THERE, and under the glare of his first national campaign, they made Bob Dole look small and mean. He personalized his crude partisan attacks. His charge during the debate with Walter Mondale that every war in this century had been a "Democrat war" turned off the nominal Democrats he needed, and incensed conservative columnist George Will, who condemned Dole as a liar about history who deserved to be forgotten.

Despite polls that showed he'd helped gain significant support for the ticket, Dole was blamed by the press for losing the election for Ford. It was Bob Dole's first political defeat.

"I'd always wondered how he'd react," says Phyllis. "He can't stand to lose control." Indeed, he did not react well. "Remote" and "hostile" are two words used by old Kansas associates from whom he remained aloof for the next four years. His humor, or the brittle remains of it left in the detritus of that campaign, he turned on himself. Referring to his debate with Mondale, he quipped, "I went for the jugular—my own."

During the holidays after the campaign, though he's never sick, Dole succumbed to the flu. He gave his only comment on the defeat. "Elizabeth," she remembers him saying, "this is a disappointment. I'm so glad I have you." That was it. And that, for Bob Dole, spoke volumes of appreciation. He never raised the subject again. When the Senate reopened, he plunged back into his work, kept busy, kept moving forward, kept running.

By 1980, some of Elizabeth's social confidence seemed to have rubbed off on her husband. This was a lady not so much as grazed by the Cinderella complex. Raised comfortably in Salisbury, North Carolina, she distinguished herself at Duke University and Harvard Law School, and staked out a yuppie career path well before her time. While her friends were trading in frat pins for wedding rings, Elizabeth slipped off to the Soviet Union and talked about Sputnik. She made it to the White House (as consumer-affairs adviser) by age thirtythree, setting a record Bob Dole likes to say he can't match.

The senator appears delighted by his wife's dazzling success. Predictably, she shies away from the suggestion that theirs would be a mom-and-pop presidency. A woman who commands the equivalent of four divisions in the Reagan revolution, with 100,000 employees as secretary of transportation, could hardly be expected to find fulfillment in picking china patterns. Certainly she would redefine the role of First Lady. Perhaps Robin Dole, less ambitious, could pinch-hit as First Daughter while Elizabeth did what she likes best: launching seaways, selling railroads—that sort of thing.

In 1979, the Doles were already in demand around Washington as a power couple, her smiling, bubbly manner a perfect complement to her husband's acerbic stiffness. What many miss is that she's as disciplined as he is. Schooled in professional southern charm, Elizabeth says nothing she doesn't intend to—with utterly convincing spontaneity. If she thought her husband's run for the presidency in 1980 was doomed from the start, she never said so. She appeared at joint speaking engagements with the poise of a perfect meringue, a delicate, sugary coating over her own raw ambition. For her, the decision to quit her prestigious job to help her husband campaign was "all good for the career path." This time, Dole himself will resign as Senate minority leader, "if it looks like I have a real shot," and expects his wife to quit again. In the event of a successful Bob Dole presidency, the redoubtable Elizabeth would have a unique opportunity to present herself as the first experienced female presidential candidate.

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T) obert Ellsworth is Dole's only conX\fidant besides his wife. I asked him to assess how the man's character has been shaped by his life. He demurred. When I pressed, he came up with the Germanic myth of the ring, on which Wagner based his opera cycle: two would-be heroes, one given a head start by the father of the gods; the other, Siegfried, born without privilege or even a living father. It is Siegfried who conquers all.

"Dole has not been given anything by the gods, ever, yet he's emerged from it all as truly whole, internally powerful," said the man ranked as "general" in the senator's exploratory committee for the presidency. "That's what it takes."

Perhaps, but it can also create a control freak. The Doles' only child was bom fat, according to her mother. Her father used to needle Robin with mean nicknames, and he bugged Phyllis about her weight too. Called her "Bones." As she analyzes it, "he had to fight to get control, and I think he can't understand when other people can't control."

Dole's own discipline is there in his military bearing, in his work habits, in his management of staff. Jo-Anne Coe, for twenty years his faithful office manager, cannot remember a word of praise. He can fire people as coolly as his father read the war wires.

The bright side of his need to control is how proficient he's made himself at so many things. Dole has become as good a speech writer as any of the pros who used to work for him. He wings it now, alone. And he is known around town as his own best press secretary— no offense to the very able man who holds that title, Walt Riker. Dole became virtually the designated hitter for Republicans during the Iran crisis. He didn't miss a Sunday on a major news show for six weeks. Other Republican leaders watched in awe. Almost daily he came up to bat and threw out another suggestion for what Reagan should do to save his presidency.

But, alone among Republican leaders, Dole never called for the obvious: Donald Regan's resignation. Why? Because Bob Dole leams from past mistakes. During Watergate the CREEP people had hung him out to dry. There he was, taking heavy flak as G.O.P. chairman, and Haldeman and Ehrlichman wouldn't take his phone calls. When Iranscam exploded, Dole cultivated his former enemy Regan, and was cut in on the loop of phone calls when everyone else was on the outside. He went out of his way on Face the Nation to praise the president's dissembling chief of staff. As a result, Dole was able to separate himself from a tar-baby president, collect praise from all quarters as a voice of reason, even knock Reagan on the op-ed page of the Washington Post and simultaneously—just short of miraculously—earn a pat on the back from Reagan through Regan.

"Sitting next to his office door is like watching George Brett take batting practice every day," says Riker. "Dole is a Political Hall of Famer. ' '

But what does he stand for? What is Bob Dole's vision of America's future?

T~\ole's brand of conservatism stands .Ly apart from the triumphant economic ideology of the Reagan era that has brought us record-busting deficits straight through a prolonged recovery. And he remains aloof from the Ramboesque interventionism on foreign policy. His innate sense of fairness has prompted him to back such conservative bugaboos as protecting voting rights for blacks, the 1982 tax increase, and the food-stamp program he helped to start with George McGovern. When reporters feed back to him criticism from conservatives who want a true believer, his anger flashes: "That's too bad. There's a need."

Dole still has a sound enough conservative voting record to earn a zero rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. He has consistently voted with the president on defense, S.D.I., and funding the contras; with the pro-life forces on abortion; with the National Rifle Association on looser gun control. He has called for constitutional amendments that would mandate a balanced budget and allow for organized school prayer. And on arms control he dug in to repulse efforts in the new Democrat-controlled Congress to force the administration to comply with the unratified SALT n treaty.

But the pragmatist in him keeps muddling the scorecard. To protect his agricultural constituency and woo farm states before the 1986 congressional elections, Dole urged the administration to offer a bonus to the Soviet Union for buying grain from U.S.-governmentsubsidized surplus. On the tax increase he fought for as Finance Committee chairman, closing loopholes on bankers and insurance fat cats, he told Reagan to "just say yes," and got away with it. Today, Dole can point to a $10 billion annual reduction in spending.

But does this add up to the sort of coherent political philosophy that can separate Dole from the pack—what his rival George Bush calls, in exasperation, "the vision thing"? Vision is a gut feeling for how the world works that is formed before reasoning begins. Bob Dole grew up with hardworking people who were all broke at one time or another. In that isolated state of mind called Western Kansas, hotbed of populism a hundred years ago, the paradox that enflamed passions then is echoed loud and clear today: that for all his industriousness, intelligence, machinery, and ability to feed the Western world, the American farmer is being driven into peasantry. Although they have been long and generously endowed out of the public coffers, Kansas farmers— just like Bobby Dole as a boy—like to think of themselves as long-suffering but never dependent on government. Yet not long after he formed his first tentative hypotheses of how the world worked, Dole's own control was kicked out from under him. He felt in the gut what it is to be helpless through no fault of one's own.

So one would have to get up awfully early to pigeonhole Bob Dole.

"Dole has a gift for phrasing that sometimes allows him to have it both ways," says political analyst Richard Reeves. Who else can warm the cockles of conservative hearts by slamming Democrats even as he collects praise from the likes of Mondale, McGovern, and Bill Bradley for having grown beyond narrow partisan politics?

Dole had no shame in admitting to me, "I'm not an ideologue." His own senior political adviser, David Keene, elaborated: "Dole's problem is to drag that overall vision out of himself. You can't be elected president by giving a legislative briefing." Keene also worries that his man has become too hot too soon. "Tactical exploitation can overwhelm a broad theme."

"It's no particular political philosophy that draws me to Bob Dole as a presidential candidate," says Republican senator David Durenberger, echoing many moderates in both parties. "But for the period of fragmented interests we'll be in at least until 1993, he would be a good decision-maker. ' '

Most Democrats, liberals, and media people I've asked about the notion of Bob Dole for president say essentially the same thing: "I could live with Bob Dole." That's not chopped liver, at least in a general election. But it's traditionally been the poison pill for Republican primaries.

Potentially more serious is the loner problem. A man can't become president by himself. He can't raise his own money, write his own speeches, be his own press secretary, and still shake a thousand hands after every appearance. And so, when the political handlers look over Bob Dole, they see his fierce independence as a liability. During his 1980 bid for the presidency, he fired his campaign manager and several consultants, hurtling himself toward a humiliating defeat. Ellsworth has already taken him to the woodshed on the subject. The senator assured him, "If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right."

r I ''he senator was riding high in the A polls and political columns when he dropped in for a down-home reception in Russell last January.

The original campaigners—doctor, broker, oilman, farmer—mostly hung back in the kitchen, a bit awed by this talking head they see on TV who looks ten years younger than any of them. Tanned from a typically two-day vacation at Elizabeth's condo in Miami, Dole presented his glamorous, fiftyyear-old wife. Svelte since she started peddling on their new stationary bike, Elizabeth has stopped going to Nancy Reagan's hairdresser, and has switched to a younger, looser style. She was happy to have a day with her husband. Normally they communicate by check-off memos that fly between their offices. Some weeks the closest the secretary gets to the senator is to sip from the banquet glass he just left.

The talk among Dole's core constituents was of hard times and extreme solutions. "I'd like to see about three Arab heads of state go boom boom," seethed an oilman. "Thing that bums me out is they're supposed to be Christian countries," said another. "All's I say," chimed in a farmer, "there's no way to get ahead of Russia unless you destroy it."

One could almost hear Dole's mind racing, the laser beam in his brain illuminating problems too far ahead for him to find solutions, yet. The people of Russell are still in Bob Dole, but he has grown beyond them. As he told me later, "I can see it coming in rural America—'It's either me or them'—farmers who are making it who don't want to be dragged under by interest payments to keep their neighbor afloat."

But what he gave them was a quick legislative briefing and a pep talk. "We will be coming to Kansas quite often, entertaining people who might be looking for stories. Be sure to keep telling them all those lies." ,.

After a second stop in Kansas and a standing ovation, Senator Dole stood outside the snug six-seat charter he likes to commandeer around the country. The wind snorted across the Kansas plains and bit into his shoulder. Elizabeth was already inside, buried in briefing papers. The Doles dined on their usual campaign-plane appetizer—Dunkin' Donuts—and finished off with a doggie bag of barbecued beef. There was no small talk. She read. He read. Once, he chuckled and read aloud a newspaper item: ''The only thing George Bush has left to run for is the Best-Dressed List."

Forty minutes outside of Washington, Dole caught me napping. He grunted and pushed a cup of coffee at me. He wanted to talk, to use the time.

''You come out here to Kansas and talk to people and they never did want to fund the contras," I began.

''That's right," Dole said. "I don't think they're unwilling to be persuaded, but nobody's persuaded them yet."

''How do you feel about it?"

''There may be other ways to resolve it. Free elections, a negotiated settlement. Before I start cheerleading for somebody who's called a freedom fighter, I like to see the whole deck."

Dole was a hawk on Vietnam. I asked if he had second thoughts. "I voted for the Cooper-Church amendment [to withdraw U.S. troops] after defending the Nixon White House," he admitted. "I think Nixon did the right thing in getting us out of there."

It took him an awfully long time, I mentioned.

''Yeah. And there was never any American support." His voice suddenly became more intimate. ''Every day you had a body count. How many did we kill today? How many did they kill? I mean, it's sort of sick. Not a very good period in American history."

After a pause, he added that if he was ever in a position where he had to retaliate militarily, he'd do it ''as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It wouldn't be a game with me."

I recalled our first talk. Dole had mentioned an insight he has that he thinks nobody else does. ''You're sort of sensitive to people around you, whether they're poor, hungry, cold, old, sick, disabled. If I were whole, I'd be embarrassed to go into a paralyzed veterans' association." The self-revelatory words ''If I were whole" had stopped me.

"Do you think you've ever fully accepted the loss of your arm?" I asked him quietly.

"Oh, I hope not," he said. "Not that I have any self-pity. But I still fantasize sometimes of raising my arm.. .

"I think it makes you try harder. Sort of like Avis, you're number two. I push and push and push. Not because I'm disabled. I like to be a player."

Still running, still overcoming, Dole may not have accepted his handicap, but he makes it work for him. He can't quite connect the funny bone to the shoulder bone, or make the emotions move the muscles so that strangers can feel the sincerity and compassion of this complex man. But there is no telling what Dole might be able to draw out of himself in the next two years. Not even he can know.