What about Bob? - NR Guide to the 1996 Election

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by Rich Lowry, Washington Irving

IF NO ONE ELSE DOES, at least Bob Dole knows he's going to beat Bill Clinton, knows it the way he knew after his World War II wounds that he'd walk again -- work again, heck, even play basketball again. The analogy between Dole's current political straits and his recovery from his World War II wounds has, by now, become a cliche. But Dole's excruciating way back from paralysis and fever, his obliterated shoulder and twisted right arm resisting him at every step, is indeed the central drama of his life. It was a triumph of will. And Dole has brought the same determination, driven in large part by a deep, ever-present fear of failure, to his politics.

In Dole's first race, for the job of county attorney, the other candidate at some point realized he would inevitably lose, because Dole would go to any lengths to win. He won his primary races for the House and Senate and his re-election in the Senate in 1974 largely on his desire, just wanting it more than the other guy. Charged by the Ford White House with hitting the campaign trail alone to reverse Carter's 30-point lead in 1976, Dole almost killed himself trying. So trailing President Clinton by 15 points can't be cause for despair; it just means another campaign stop, another speech, working at it and working at it, until this obstacle too has been ground away by that hardened nugget of desire and will at Bob Dole's core.

But what is at that core, except the drive to keep on running? It is emblematic of Dole's continuing mystery that his campaign has had to "re-introduce" him to the American public four or five times now. Other re-introductions may yet be necessary. Who is Bob Dole? After his 35 years in public life, four national campaigns, more appearances on Sunday talk shows than any other politician alive, and countless hundreds of speeches, it's still a question that defies ready answer. But any understanding of Dole begins with his terrible wounds; it's a story, even after all the re-tellings in the press, that is shocking and affecting, and goes to the root of Dole's shame, emotional distance, and perseverance.

As Richard Ben Cramer recounts in his brilliant sketch of Dole in What It Takes, the doctors who first treated him shipped him home in a body cast to die. When his mother, Bina, met him at the hospital she had to pick cigarette butts out of his cast; in transit, he had been used as an ash tray. Bina stayed with him month after month. The doctors chipped away at the stinking cast as feeling slowly returned to Dole's limbs. On good days he dreamed of full recovery, but often, when he talked at all, he would refer to himself as being used up, "a piece of garbage." One of Bina's sisters came to visit once. "She tried to smile [at Bob]," Cramer writes. "'Well, you listen to us jabber,' she said, and she turned to Bina. Then, she heard his voice: 'Don't have anything to say, anyway."'

When Dole was well enough to go home, he warded off visitors. He would work alone, always alone, at fixing his "problem," pulling at weights rigged up against the garage wall to regain his strength, trying everything to recover the use of his right arm. One day Bina found him hanging from one of the garage rafters, trembling with pain and exhaustion, trying to straighten the arm out. He managed once to walk all the way downtown to Dawson's drugstore, only to have an old-timer take one look at him and remark, "Gee, that's too bad. . . . You prob'ly wish they woulda finished you off." When he was back in the hospital, his wit made him a favorite. Cramer explains that Dole felt he had to keep his dream of recovery hidden away from the dreary hospital reality; whenever someone approached him "there was always a joke to hold them off."

When Dole did fight his way back to health, winning the county-attorney job, and speaking to people in public during the campaign, it was the final step in his recovery. In 1960 he won a seat in Congress. (At a Kennedy White House party for the newly seated freshmen, one congressional wife remarked on how perfect the evening seemed, to which Dole replied: "Live it up while you can, Rose Mary. We're parked in a ten-minute zone.") The early Dole was a fierce partisan. He made a name for himself as a freshman rooting out a Kennedy Administration agricultural scandal. A few years later, in the Senate, he was a pit bull for President Nixon, bashing anti-war Senators for "parroting the propaganda of a Communist enemy." This was Dole the "hatchetman," for whom the word Democrat was often an adjective and a nasty one (as in "Democrat wars").

Gradually, other parts of Dole's political persona took over. As allegiances in Congress began to be less partisan and more ideological, Dole became a less polarizing figure. He believed in limited government in his way, but believed too that particular programs could help the handicapped or poor, for whom he always felt a kinship. His first speech on the Senate floor was about the need for housing for the handicapped. In the mid 1920s, he collaborated with George McGovern to broaden and liberalize the food-stamp program. At one committee hearing, according to Cramer, he asked of Sen. Jim Buckley, sponsor of a bill to rein in the program: "Agh, d'you put in a burial allowance . . . f'the ones who starve?"