Bob Dole: comeback adult

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 1996 | by Jamie Dettmer

A string of victories has put the Senate majority leader on the road to the Republican nomination, yet he remains ill at ease in the spotlight. Supporters say Dole will find a way to let his character shine through.

He still fears he might be jinxed; you can see it in his eyes. And in balmy Houston, after receiving the backing of his longtime political nemesis and erstwhile rival, former President George Bush, he admitted as much.

Twice before, flinty Republican Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas has sought the White House, only to be confounded and humiliated in the primaries. In 1980, his campaign never got off the ground; eight years later, even though he left nothing to chance and organized, in the words of one commentator, down to the last corncob in Iowa, Bush gave him a drubbing. Though he is the quintessential fighter, Dole considered giving it all up after that 1988 debacle, of retiring and joining the hordes of Rust Belt pensioners down in Florida.

But after being dealt early 1996 campaign scares in Iowa, New Hampshire and Arizona by TV commentator Pat Buchanan and multimillionaire Steve Forbes, "Beltway Bob," as Buchanan derisively dubbed him, has turned into the "Comeback Adult" and "Mr. Inevitable." Good things come to those who wait -- but those eyes say Dole can't quite yet believe it.

Even though he has a virtual lock on the GOP presidential nomination, Dole won't ease up. He can't, for both psychological and political reasons, say friends. Indeed, his grin still is edgy and vulnerable and he campaigns at breakneck speed, as Insight observed on an exhausting 48-hour Dole tour of delegate-rich states in the wake of the Senate majority leader's eight-state "Junior Tuesday" sweep and resounding win in New York.

Dole's campaign plane, Leader's Ship, made six flights and spent nearly eight hours in the air in the two days Insight traveled with him. The senator obtained the endorsement of the Bush family, held discussions with dozens of lawmakers and party officials, delivered speeches to Cuban-Americans in Miami, businesspeople in Palm Beach and supporters in Orlando and held several press conferences. He was up by 6 o'clock every morning and late to bed each night. And he still looked sharp in his dark suit -- the trouser legs are a little short -- somber silk tie and white shirt. Not bad for a man only weeks away from turning 73. Not bad at all.

Half a century ago a great future beckoned for the young Dole. By dint of hard work and athletic ability he had escaped the poverty of the small, Depression-humbled and Dust Bowl-tested Kansas town of Russell and secured a place at the University of Kansas as a college football and basketball standout. Dole was going somewhere and was going to be someone. When the second World War came, Dole answered the call and, on a mountainside in Italy the young lieutenant's 6-foot-2-inch, 194-pound body was shattered. He shouldn't have survived, but courage and guts pulled him through.

The years of struggle not only to face his wounds but even to learn to dress himself -- his right arm is gnarled and useless and his left is weak -- still are compounded by the discomfort that has been his constant companion. All this has marked him. He seems to remain haunted, steeled for some further crushing setback, ready for the next roll of the dice to come up snake eyes. "He is not defeatist, quite the reverse," says a friend. "But he is prepared for the worst, he expects hardship and struggle, and he is ready."

According to Buchanan friends, the anecdote that best sums up the fire-breathing TV pundit is one that has him as a boy laying into a punching bag -- 100 blows to the right, 100 blows to the left. The Senate majority leader's friends say Dole's character is captured in an anecdote told by biographer Richard Ben Cranmer that has him home from the war, "soaked and trembling with sweat and pain," hanging by his bad right arm from the rafters of his father's garage, trying to straighten it. By comparison, a Dole friend remarked, Buchanan's punching bag story is like Forbes saying his most trying life's crisis was going away alone to summer camp.

On this, his last electoral hurrah, Dole is determined to be as tough on himself as he has to be lest fate rob him again. But the melancholy and bleakness that were associated with his 1988 campaign -- the traveling press corps called him "the candidate from hell" -- are in some ways things of the past. Encouraged by political allies, he is endeavoring to lift the heavy curtain of reserve that has cloaked him since his terrible World War II injuries. Though hardly relaxed by any normal standard, Dole is more approachable -- a little less uptight, sometimes. On his Boeing 727, he even occasionally joins in a playful campaign tradition involving staffers and the press, rolling oranges with messages written on the rinds up and down the aisle. But his attempts to push away his reticence often can be awkward. Dole friends agree that he is like poet Robert Lowell's image of Col. Shaw, a Civil War soldier in "For the Union Dead," who seems "to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy."