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By Howard Fineman
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Bob and Liddy Dole are consummate insiders in a capital most voters hate. This is their Washington life--the one you won t see in Dole's campaign ads. It's just before Christmas and Bob Dole is having his favorite kind of Sunday in Washington, the kind he thinks ears lead to contentment, salvation -- and maybe a budget deal. The sun's out, which is good; he hates cold weather. He is chipper and well rested. "Did my treadmill last night and went to bed early," he brags. His wife, Elizabeth, is home from a long campaign swing. She's even had time to get her hair done. So they'll do their favorite Sunday thing: brunch at a downtown hotel.
But first, the obligations of faith. For Elizabeth, that means services at the National Presbyterian Church. Her husband, meanwhile, works in a different vineyard. He's got a Sunday show. He almost always has a Sunday. show. Today it's "Meet the Press." The studio, as it happens, is next door to the church. It's like a small town, and Dole is the local councilman stopping by the drugstore to chat about property assessments. "I wish the president would call me," he tells host Tim Russert. "Heck, he can call my beeper." The next day, Bill Clinton does call, and they've been talking budget ever since.
Welcome to Dolesville, the town-within-a-city inhabited by Bob and Liddy Dole. Politics is personal here. It's a small world, literally, presided over by a driven, deal-making couple who look like they're straight out of the pages of Modern Maturity. He is from hardscrabble, Depression-era Kansas. She's from prim, cotillion-and-country-club North Carolina in the placid '50s. Yet they have lived most of their adult lives in a place you won't see on the biographical maps provided by the Dole campaign. It's a two-mile-square area in downtown Washington.
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As the campaign season begins, Dole's handlers are eager to retail the fables of his early life. They'll do ads about his upbringing in the Dust Bowl days of Russell, Kans.; his heroism in World War II; the 39 agonizing months of rehabilitation that left him with a withered fight arm. "You're going to be hearing a lot about Russell," vows one top campaign aide.
It's worthy, inspiring stuff. But what about his other life--the one he's actually been living since moving to the capital in 1961? The Dole campaign can't ignore it. Common-sense voters--and his enemies--won't. And unless the Doles can convince the public there is something redeeming about their Washington world, they probably won't be moving to the White House.
In fact, insiders are people, too. But that's not an easy sell in a country that basically despises its capital. And this is a couple from deep inside the, Beltway. They've cut deals with hundreds of interest groups. They've raised millions in campaign cash from every sector of corporate America. They've taken more than their share of cut-rate rides on private jets, not for the fun of it, but so that they can do the Dole trick: be in two places at once. Dole needs to be everywhere, or at least wants to. He confirmed to NEWSWEEK last week that he plans to remain as GOP Senate leader throughout the presidential campaign.
Between them, Robert Joseph Dole, 72, and Elizabeth Hanford Dole, 59, have 59 years of federal service. Since their 1975 wedding (at Washington's National Cathedral), Mrs. Dole, now on leave from her job as head of the American Red Cross, has held two cabinet posts, a regulatory-commission seat and a White House staff job. With that kind of sterling resume, her career will be examined as closely as her husband's, from hundreds of administrative decisions to controversies over AIDS and the blood supply at the Red Cross. And her husband has served as Republican Senate leader longer than any other man in history. (To celebrate, Elizabeth gave him a Waterford crystal figure of the Capitol, "including," Dole crows, "the House and Senate wings.")
Most longtime Washingtonians establish roots in a leafy neighborhood or suburb: a Georgetown, or a McLean, Va. But although they occasionally have allowed friends to cajole them into house-hunting, the Doles have never left the concrete of downtown. For their entire life together they've lived in the same two-bedroom, first-floor Watergate condo Dole purchased when he was divorced from his first wife in 1972.
The Doles' isolation isn't just physical; it's sociological. They have had limited contact with children they can call their own. Dole's 40-year-old daughter, Robin, is single, and hasn't lived with her father since the divorce. Bob and Elizabeth did not have children of their own. They do keep in close touch with a nephew in North Carolina, with Elizabeth's 94-year-old mother (the senator calls her regularly) and with relatives back in Kansas.
And yet to a degree that would surprise outsiders, the Doles have fashioned a rich personal life amid the downtown canyons. One way they've done so is charity work. It's a genuine impulse, and they've rarely sought publicity for it. The Dole Foundation supports programs for the disabled. It's backed by lobbyists and others eager to contribute to a good cause--and to curry favor with a powerful man. The Doles both volunteer at programs for impoverished seniors and for "at risk" kids.
Some good works are spur-of-the-moment, and can be both comical and touching. One Thanksgiving, Dole impulsively decided to take a group of inner-city youths out for dinner. The scene was a little odd: "Mr. K's" Chinese restaurant on K Street, the lobbyists' main drag. Elizabeth periodically worries about the plight of the homeless who take winter refuge on steam grates outside the federal office buildings. She once emptied the Doles' condo's closets of blankets, and gave them away on the street.
The Doles seem to care about money in only one form: campaign contributions. Elizabeth is independently wealthy, yet she and her husband live fairly simply. Their apartment is on the Potomac but has no river view. In their few off hours, they drive an old Chevrolet Celebrity. She owns a condo in Bal Harbour, Fla., but they rarely get to it anymore. They like a fine meal-Italian at Galileo, for example. But Dole is uncomfortable in plush surroundings. When he and his wife do the brunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel, Dole orders biscuits and gravy. "For $3.50," he says, "you can't beat it."
Though his wife was socially prominent back home--and though his position would make him a prize dinner guest--the Doles largely shun the Washington scene. "I've never seen Bob Dole at a Georgetown dinner party," says columnist Rowland Evans, who's been surveying the scene there since 1945. There's a practical reason. Dole can't use a knife and fork, and he doesn't want to have to ask a hostess to see that the caterers cut his food. The Doles' idea of a swell night is to stay at home, order in and watch old films. "Love that American Movie Classics channel," the senator says.
But such evenings are few and far between. Hungry to reach the White House, to be where the action is, they constantly feel the urge to move. They're so busy they've made a neighbor "co-owner" of their 13-year-old schnauzer, Leader. During Christmas week, when there was a lull in budget talks, Dole's first thought wasn't to join Elizabeth and her mother in North Carolina. Instead, he considered flying to Bosnia to be with U.S. troops. His staffers rolled their eyes, but packed their bags. Dole abandoned the idea after a chilly Pentagon response.
The Doles like to make long-distance gestures to each other. On their 20th wedding anniversary in December, Bob was in the Senate, Elizabeth in Iowa. Dole had his staff call Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa to find a good restaurant from which to order his wife an anniversary dinner. He had it delivered to her hotel room. Meanwhile, she had gotten the same idea, and called the Capitol to ask the same aide to order a special dinner for Bob from Mr. K's. As they ate their meals, they talked to each other on the phone.
They are dogged but not particularly patient people. For Dole, it's hard to sit still to read. "That's something I haven't done enough of in my life," he admits. Elizabeth has an answer. For Christmas, she gave him "The Lives of One Hundred Great Leaders"--on tape. He listens on the treadmill. Dole has found the time for one new book, the magisterial Lincoln biography by David Herbert Donald. What really got Dole interested was Donald's appearance on C-Span's "Booknotes." Dole, characteristically, was impressed that Donald had worked on the book for 11 years. "Eleven years!" Dole exclaims.
Dole appreciates such stoicism. He lives it daily. His war wound requires extra work. So Dole carefully lays out his clothes the night before, inserting the cuff links into the french cuffs (always french cuffs) in advance. He uses a homemade buttonholer to fasten his shirt. He wears loafers, not laced shoes. At work Dole relies on a personal aide to take notes, giving him a signal in meetings when he wants items recorded. Aides hold letters down on the glassy desktop so that Dole can sign them without the paper slipping.
It can be a lonely life. After losing to George Bush in New Hampshire in 1988, Dole became angry and withdrawn. He had come so close; it was a brutal defeat. He retreated to Bal Harbour, and the sun. Elizabeth, refusing to give up, had kept on campaigning. She would call staffers from the road and talk for hours. If there was ever any strain in their marriage, that was the time. There was no one outside of politics to confide in. Having so completely mixed the personal and the political, it was hard for the Doles then--and now--to find friends they could rely on. "I even talked to Elizabeth about this," Dole says softly during an interview at his campaign office. "It's terrible in politics. You really can't have any friends."
So they have each other, and the ambition they share. Elizabeth pokes her head in the door. Her staff has gotten the dry cleaning. She has wrapped up her own appointments. Dole has a new suit in his own bag--a Christmas present to himself from Brooks Brothers. "Gotta go," he says, and they're off to the airport and to Iowa again.
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