What It Takes (13 page)

“You know, I was thinking about you last night, and I decided to make ...” And she’d give her work to the woman and assure her it was nothing, no trouble at all. It was easy, with a Singer machine. ...

Sometimes, the kids would get home after school to find Bina out at work. The house would be studded with notes:

Do the dishes.

Put the potatoes in at 4:00.

Then, just before Doran got home, Bina’s Chevy would roar up Eleventh Street (she always drove foot-to-the-floorboard, till she got where she was going), and Bina would lug the machine back into the house, along with a fistful of chickens, a couple of pounds of aluminum, or a pound of copper. ... She’d take anything that she could convert to $1.75, the down payment on a Singer. That night, she’d be up late again, catching up on her mending, or baking, or working on her next sewing project.

There was never enough time in the day, never any time for dreaming. “If you shirk work,” Bina told her kids, “work shirks you.” That’s what her grandmother used to say. There wasn’t any point telling Bina, “I can’t ...” That was one thing she wouldn’t abide. There wasn’t anything Bina couldn’t get done, and there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do, if they were willing to work at it. “Can’t never could do nothin’!” she’d say. “Now, get busy!”

The only time she wasn’t doing four things at once was when the headaches came upon her. It was only every so often—sometimes a year would go by without—but when they came, even a footstep on the floor hurt. Bina would shut herself into the front bedroom, sometimes for days. Doran would get up earlier to fix breakfast for the kids, and he’d be home at midday, too, to get lunch ready, and send them back to school. But there was nothing anyone could really do for Bina. God knows, Doran would have leapt to do anything. It was such a helpless feeling in the house. One time, in the middle of the night, Bina must have said something about milk. Doran jumped up from his sleep and woke Bob: Your mother wants some milk! Bob went straight to the grocery, and only then did Doran look at a clock. It was three in the morning. There was nothing open in Russell. When Bob didn’t come back, after an hour, Doran went to hunt him. He found him half-asleep, eyes puffed and drooping closed, sitting on the curb in front of Holzer’s grocery, waiting for the shop to open.

Bob took it to heart when Bina was sick with her headaches. There was an understanding, a shared set of standards between those two. Sometimes she used to tell her sisters, Bobby Joe was more particular than she was. One time she found him with a sweater on in the middle of summer.

“Bob, aren’t you hot? Bob! Take that sweater off!”

No, he said, it was all right.

When she asked him again, she found out: his shirt was wrinkled. He didn’t want that to show.

When he got older, sometimes he’d pay his sisters a nickel to iron his shirt. But it had to be ironed just so. He was worse than Bina. That was the way he held himself, in every thing he did. In a gaggle of kids outside the high school, you would always notice Bob, always with a crowd around him. Bob was the tallest, and he held himself perfectly straight. Of course, he was scrubbed and combed, with his thick dark hair in perfect trim. Lord knows, the girls noticed: in his senior year, the members of the Girls Reserve voted Bob Dole their Ideal Boy. But that wasn’t why Bob did all that. He didn’t have time for girls. He was just working on himself.

Bob had the first set of weights in Russell, an iron bar with blocks of cement on either end. He used to lift that thing every chance he got, until he was thick with muscle. By the end of high school, he was six-foot-one, 192 pounds, with legs that could pull like a tractor. Building his body was part of the program.

He never walked anywhere, but ran. God hadn’t really blessed him with speed, but he worked at it, and he made himself a runner, held a local record in the half-mile, and beat some college boys from Hays while he was still in high school.

That was only one of his sports. He won three letters at Russell High. In the fall, he played on the football team, as an end, a pass receiver, although under Coach Baxter’s single wing, there weren’t too many passes to catch. George Baxter preached a brand of drive-’em-back, knock-’em-down football that relied more on stamina and will than grace. In fact, Coach did more than preach. If a boy didn’t hit the way Coach wanted, then Coach would drop to a three-point stance and knock the kid on his ass. (No pads in those days, either.) He never had to do that with Bobby Dole. Bob and Bud Smith, best friends, were leaders on the team. Bud was one of the oil kids, came to Russell in ’37. Bob and Bud were the best athletes. In any game, they were Russell High’s one-two punch.

But in basketball, Bob Dole was the leader, the big guy on the court. In team huddles, he was the one to go around, clap every man on the backside, tell him they could win,
had
to win. “Don’t give up, guys. We’re gonna get ’em,” he’d say. “We still got a chance. They can go sour.” If things went badly, you could see his eyes tearing up and he’d turn away, go off by himself. He never told anyone, but he used to dream about basketball, how he’d make the baskets, how Russell would win. And the basketball Broncos were winners. Got to the state tournament one year. You had to be good to make that team. Bobby Dole was good. He could handle the ball, shoot that newfangled one-hand push shot, and he was big and tough under the boards.

It wasn’t just his size, it was his attitude, conditioning ... and the game itself was changing. Up until 1937, there was a jump ball after every basket. The game would stop, as the boys arrayed themselves anew at center court. But that year, just as Bob made the Russell High team, the rules changed. When one team made a basket, the other team got the ball. Suddenly, there were no breaks. For a boy like Bob, who could run all day, who
did
run all day, it was the best change possible. He was always in the middle of the action. He brought the ball up, saw the whole court. He set up the play, made it happen. When it came time to pick the Union Pacific All-Stars, the best from the towns along the railroad trunk line, Bob Dole was the only Russell boy picked by the coaches of the conference.

Basketball was the game Russell watched. Kansas was basketball country, and had been for years, ever since the University of Kansas brought in the game’s inventor, James Naismith, as the chief of athletics. Naismith trained the coaches who fanned out to towns around the state—and to colleges around the country. One legend of the modern game, Adolph Rupp, the revered coach of Kentucky, played his ball at KU for Naismith. So did the next legend of Kansas basketball, Forrest C. “Phog” Allen, so nicknamed for his stentorian voice, who was the KU coach while Bob grew up, and a godly figure all over the state.

In Russell, KU had the air of the East, of money and sophistication. Snob Hill, they called it. If Phog had ever walked down Main Street, there wasn’t anyone in Russell who wouldn’t have stopped work, and run to the window to look. As it was, you couldn’t get your hair cut or your car fixed on the afternoon of a local high school game. The gym was the newest, biggest building in town, and everybody was there. You had to go early and sit through the “B” game (for kids who couldn’t quite make the grade) to have your place at seven o’clock, for the “A” game. By four or four-thirty, the men and boys would get their afternoon papers and a sack of sandwiches and head over to the gym. The women showed up later with their knitting. By midnight, there wasn’t anyone in Russell who didn’t know how the Broncos did, and half the town probably stopped at Dawson Drug to discuss it.

That’s one of the reasons Bob got the job at Dawson’s. The Dawson boys wanted a kid for that fountain job who was a leader, who’d bring in the other kids. Bob Dole, basketball star, was that boy. Anyway, there were no bigger fans in town than Chet and Bub Dawson. (Chet was a diehard K-State fan. He’d claim: “If KU was playin’ Russia, I’d root for Russia.”)

That was the same reason Bob got the Kaw Pipeline job. Every summer, the pipeline company gave one job to a high school kid, and that was the best job in town, the biggest money a kid could make. Usually, the job went to the best athlete. The oil companies sponsored semipro teams, and there were more than a few oil workers whose main job was playing in the weekly games. In fact, the year Bob got the job, one of those workers was Phog Allen’s kid, Milton (they called him Mitt), who had better moves on the gym floor than he did around an oil rig. That’s when Bob Dole’s plan came together, when the pieces clicked into place.

Bob wanted to go to college. He’d kept his eyes open at Dawson’s and he’d seen who it was who never seemed to want, the men everybody listened to, men of substance, respect. They were the doctors, whose word was law in any drugstore. So Bob was going to be a doctor: he was going to get to college, and then to med school. And when that was done, he’d have made it, past the dreams of any kid from Russell, past any insecurity, reach of fortune, weather, dust, or want.

But how? No one named Dole had the money for a year of college, much less seven. Then Phog Allen came to visit his son. And Mitt Allen told his dad that he ought to meet this boy named Dole, who was a heck of a nice guy, and a heck of a ballplayer, too. Phog Allen himself came into the drugstore! And shook Bob’s hand! And later that year, Bob got a note from the East, from Lawrence, from KU, Snob Hill!
Bob Dole got a letter from Phog Allen himself!

See, it wasn’t a dream, after all! Bob Dole was going to KU. He was going to play for Phog Allen. They gave scholarships to the team, didn’t they? It could be done!

Harold Dumler, from Russell, he was a few years older, he made it to KU. Heck, he was already rushing Bob Dole for Kappa Sigma!
Bob Dole had a letter from Phog Allen!

When the boys from Kappa Sig made their rush tour in the summer, it was Bob Dole put on the party for them in Russell. It was real! Harold said Bob could wait tables at the Kappa Sig house. He could pay his board that way.

Bob talked to Bina. He said he wouldn’t go if it would be too hard on her and Dad. He knew things were tight. He knew how hard they worked. But Bina said he’d better go. Can’t never could do nothin’, she said. They’d find money, if it came to that.

And there was nothing Bina couldn’t get done. When Bob got the train east in September, she sent him with sixy-five dollars, cash.

I
T WAS CALIFORNIA
that charged up the Bobster, convinced him he might keep the Senate after all. California felt so good: the crowds were huge and happy; Ed Zschau, the Republican, was closing on Cranston in the polls, the TV news in every market had Zschau and Dole, Dole and Zschau. Dole, Dole, Dole ... like
he
was the guy running. “I can feel it!” Dole would rasp into a mike.

“I smell VICTORYYY! ...”

That was the last week before the voting, the last days of October ’86. Dole had been on the road for weeks, twenty-one states in the last fourteen days, thumping the tub for his Senators. Some campaigns were still too close to figure: one day, the tracking would show one of Dole’s guys up five points—“O
kayy
, pretty
good
!”—and the next day the same guy would be down seven points, sinking like a stone. “Aghhh, numbers gotta be off ...” The polls came from Dick Wirthlin, who had a private contract with the National Republican Senatorial Committee. (“Lotta moneyyy!”) Dole would look at the breakdown in the mornings and claim the numbers were useless. Next day, he couldn’t wait to see the new set.

Mostly, he went by his own sense of smell. He’d been there, had a feel for every race. Paula Hawkins in Florida, “Gaghhd! ...” You could see she was a goner. In the farm belt, every Republican was running against five years of rural recession. And the farmers didn’t want any morning-in-America crap. In the Midwest, there was no Reagan recovery. Dole was taking heat in Washington for the $30 billion price tag on the farm bill he wrote the year before. But no one in the grain belt had seen any money. Dole tried to assure them, over and over: “It’s a good bill. Farmers will see the effect.” But on the plains, he was talking to a wall.

It got so nasty in the farm states, Dole violated his new “Be Nice” rule. For years now, Elizabeth and his Washington smart guys had been working on Dole to be more
statesmanlike ... Presidential
... or, in Elizabeth’s homelier Carolina argot, “nahce.” When a clever, vicious line occurred to him now, he’d swallow it, or maybe say it in the car, where it couldn’t come back to haunt him. But no one was going to convince Bob Dole he should turn the other cheek, when they were
kicking him in the face. ...
That’s what nobody understood when they wrote that Dole was a snarler, a “hatchet man.” From behind Dole’s eyes, it was obvious: they were coming at him with knives, backing him into a corner. Well, if that’s how they wanted to play. ... They weren’t gonna make Bob Dole, the Republican Senate, take the blame for the farm crisis! So Dole snarled back: “Wasn’t
us
called the grain embargo in 1980.
We
didn’t cause the recession ...”

What did they want him to do? Just take it? Give up? If Bob Dole was the kind to give up, he could have lived his life in a hospital bed, or a wheelchair, with someone taking care of him twenty-four hours a day. But nobody had to take care of Dole. He made sure of that. Dole never quit. “
Don’t give up, guys
. ...
They can still go sour
. ...”

So he flew into Fargo, North Dakota, where the prairie wind blew brutal cold—cold to make Dole’s bones ache—and where Mark Andrews had fallen to a dead heat with his young Democratic challenger. Dole claimed that a Democratic victory would shift attention to the cities, away from the wide-open places like the North Dakota plains. (Wide open! Some of these North Dakota towns made Russell, Kansas, look urban.) Without Mark Andrews, how was Ronald Reagan going to lead the country? Without Mark Andrews, North Dakota would have two Democratic Senators—no political balance, at all! Without Mark Andrews, how was North Dakota going to get its share from a Republican administration? “He not only brings home the bacon,” Dole said, “he brings home the whole hog!”