What It Takes (138 page)

Then he arranged for a poll of Republican members of Congress. Who would they choose for Veep?

George Bush!

From the Oval Office, it had to look like a groundswell: all those people, letters, telegrams—Republicans, all over the country, talking up Bush! ... Actually, Bush had a friend, a Committeeman from Omaha, Dick Herman, who moved into Washington’s Statler Hilton, whence he ran a telephone boiler room, beating the tom-toms for Bush.

At last, in Kennebunkport, Bush got the call: White House on the line! The President had made his decision. ... The new Vice President of the United States would be ... Nelson Rockefeller.

Bush was hurt, then angry. What did a guy have to do? He’d stood up—taken heat, put his own good name on the line—through the worst shit-storm his Party ever faced.

What did it get him?

Ford said they’d have to get together soon “to discuss the future.”

Goddammit, there’d better be some discussion—because George Bush was through with the RNC.

Well, Ford couldn’t have been nicer, more solicitous—after the fact, of course. He said there were two
top-notch
diplomatic posts (Ambassador was still the title Bush used in Washington)—Paris or London ... Bush could have his pick.

Bush had another idea—China.

China?

It wasn’t even an embassy! Just a “listening post.” Anyway, China policy was mapped and made by one man—Henry Kissinger. The Liaison Office in Peking had nothing to do. It was there simply to be there. “You’ll be bored beyond belief,” Kissinger said.

No, Bush was sure it would be
a wonderful adventure
(he and Bar had decided). China was exotic. China was important!

China was ... his choice.

See, you had to look at it as Bush did—that is, through the woeful misadventures of four years.

Here was a young up-and-comer who’d given up his safe House seat to run for the Senate. The President had asked him—and Bush so much wanted into the big game ... but he caught that bad break with Bentsen ... and that dream was dashed.

So he went to the UN—but not before he made sure he’d have a seat at the table, Cabinet rank, and the President’s ear. “No problem!” the President’s men assured him. ... But in New York, he found he wasn’t in the game at all. Nixon and Kissinger were the whole team.

So, loyally, he took the RNC job—making sure he’d keep his seat at the Cabinet table, and
this time
(for sure!) he’d be a player on the President’s team ... But by that time, the captain was about to be drummed out of the league, and the badge of team membership was a public shame.

The loss of the Vice Presidency was just the last straw.

So, China was important ... enough. China was intriguing ... enough. China, best of all, was seven thousand miles away.

When he got established in Peking, he wrote to a friend: the warnings were true—there wasn’t any work. “So I’m trying to do this job, and meanwhile figure out what I’m going to do with my life.”

Bush felt he’d played the game—as hard as he could.

Maybe it wasn’t the game for him.

T
HIS WASN’T ANY GAME
to Dole. This was the only part of his life that meant anything, that was left to him. But everything ended up looking wrong—he couldn’t make people
see
. ...

The buzz in Congress that year, ’74, was inflation: Whip Inflation Now! ... That was the first time Dole put forth his instinctive notion that Congress (that he) could cut the budget fairly. But every finger of government, every program, would pay the price—say, five percent ... just tighten up the belt! On the floor of the Senate, Dole proved his
bona fides
when he offered an amendment to cut five percent from the agriculture appropriation. “I offer this amendment,” he said, “because every Senator’s got to take the hit.”

By the time Dole got back to Kansas, Bill Roy had the state half convinced that Dole was
taking money from the farmers
—stealing the sneakers off their children’s feet! Why would Bob Dole vote against his farmers?

Well, to serve his President, and Party ... just as he opted for President and Party when he took the RNC chair ... and forgot about Kansas, spent his time all over the country, making “hatchet-man speeches for Nixon.” ... Bob was a caustic fellow, anyway, and partisan, with those nasty jokes—not a caring man, like Bill Roy, who was a
doctor
, a healer (delivered five thousand babies!) bringing
life
... and then, in concern for the public weal, decided that he must study law, as well ... which he did, at night,
with his wife
(who also became a lawyer) ... Dr. Bill Roy was a man of concern, credentials, family, faith ...

Bill Roy was about to bury Bob Dole.

At the start of September, Lieutenant Governor Dave Owen (he’d decided not to run for another term) became the working chairman of the Dole reelection campaign. In D.C., Dole’s top Senate staffers quit the federal payroll to volunteer in Kansas. They found a campaign in ruins:

There were no ads, no money to run ads. (Dole had raised half a million dollars, but Herb Williams spent it. Dave Owen would find eighty thousand dollars in unpaid bills in Williams’s credenza.) There were true Dole-folk all over the state, but they’d almost given up. The campaign was flirting with the fatal affliction: it was ridiculous. Williams and his high-tech campaigners had managed to contract for billboards ... but no one had come up with art or copy—Dole was renting empty billboards.

Somehow, they had to get rid of Williams ... but the campaign could not take another bad-news story. Somehow, they had to make some good news—some ads! ... but where was the money?

Owen and friends called some guys together at the Petroleum Club—twenty or thirty good fellows—and walked out that same day with $130,000.

Then Owen called the ad agency in Boston and threatened to start making ads himself. He did, in fact, hire a local announcer to sit on a stool, with a smoke in his hand, and stare straight into the camera while he took the hide off Bill Roy. (That was an old format used by Governor Bob Docking—it was ugly, but it’d worked before.) Jack Connors called from Boston, to protest: just hold on forty-eight hours! ... Sure enough, on day two, Owen got tapes, air express.

The ads showed a standard campaign poster of Bob Dole, and off-camera, a narrator said:

“
Bill Roy says Bob Dole is against the Kansas farmer
.” (FWAP ... a big glob of slimy mud hit the poster, and slid down Dole’s face.)

“
Roy says Bob Dole voted to cut school lunches
.” (FWAP ... another glob of mud.)

“
Roy says Bob Dole voted against cuts in the federal budget
.” (FWAP ...)

Then the announcer rebutted all the charges, and said Dole was
for
budget-cutting, school lunches, and the Kansas farmer. ... Meanwhile, the film was reversed, the mud started flying off the poster, leaving a handsome and smiling Bob Dole.

“
All of which makes Bob Dole look pretty good
,” the narrator said. “...
And makes Bill Roy look like just another mudslinger
.”

The ads caused an uproar. Kansans had never seen their politics played out so graphically. Half the voters thought these were Bill Roy’s ads—they were furious: How could he fling that slime at Dole? The other half understood they were Dole ads—they were mad at
Dole
for throwing mud at his own face! ... Voters called the TV stations, wrote letters to the papers, they denounced dirty campaigning and candidates who sullied the airwaves—and Kansas!

Dole thought he had to pull the ads. (Of course, he wouldn’t say that. He had Huck Boyd call Dave Owen to suggest that
Owen
ought to pull the ads.) But how could anyone pull the ads? Dole would look like a waffler! He’d look ridiculous!

Owen and the boys thought up the play:

First, Dole quietly reserved for Herb Williams a soft landing pad with the RNC in Washington. Next, Williams held a press conference—in Kansas—and quit Dole’s campaign ... because
Dole would not permit him
to run any more mudslinger ads.

Eureka! The ads came off the air, and Dole got rid of his Campaign Manager, six weeks before the vote. ... But instead of two killer stories—DOLE CAMPAIGN IN DISARRAY—Dole got one plump creampuff: Bob was too nice, too honorable, for dirty politics.

In the end, it was Bill Roy who couldn’t pull the trigger. The Democrats had prepared ads on Watergate—Dole as Dick Nixon’s political twin and alter ego ... but the state chairman didn’t want to take the low road. So Roy held back the ads—despite warnings from Norb Dreiling, who knew Dole well. “You let Bob Dole get his head off the mat,” Norb said, “and you’ll never hold him down.”

Then, too, the Roy campaign decided not to answer the antiabortion nuts. They were after Roy as an obstetrician who had performed abortions when the health of his patients required them. In fact, Roy had hated abortion since his residency in Detroit, when he watched a teenage girl die in his emergency room because a back-alley abortionist had perforated her uterus. But the Roy campaign decided not to “dignify” the issue. Abortion was a matter of medical ethics—and Roy was, first and foremost, a doctor. He’d jumped from medicine to Congress, in 1970, in a three-month campaign—politics was not his life.

He would find out, it was Bob Dole’s life.

The great confrontation was the half-hour Agriculture Debate at the Kansas State Fair, in Hutchinson. Dole insisted on the Lincoln–Douglas format—no moderator, no panel, just the two candidates, toe-to-toe, in a tent, and on statewide TV. Both candidates tried to pack the arena. The Dole crowd, Russell folks, were
convinced
that Roy’s people were nothing but thugs (who’d been
paid
ten dollars apiece to show up!). Those Roy people were cheering when their man asked Dole:

“Why did you support legislation to do away with the Department of Agriculture, when it’s so important to the farmers of Kansas? ...”

Dole didn’t know what legislation Roy was talking about. (His staff had put together a fat briefing book—last minute, of course, dictated from phone booths—Bob never looked at it.) Dole hemmed and hawed: he couldn’t answer, and that threw him off track.

Near the front of the crowd, Bina Dole kept her eyes on her son, and as he began to press, she saw his brow grow dark. She knew that look—he was enraged. Bina stopped whispering with the other Russell ladies, her own mouth drew into a tight line—she was rigid with worry, her hands worked in her lap. Bill Roy was pressing his advantage, painting Dole as a thoughtless political slasher ...
Look who you are ... compared to me
—
a doctor!

How could Bill Roy know ... that’s what Bob Dole always wanted to be? How could Roy understand what had been stolen from Dole ... as Roy seemed now to be stealing the rest of Bob’s life?

With one minute left, Dole strode to the podium. “Why do you do abortions?” Dole said. “And why do you favor abortion on demand?”

There was an instant’s hush in the tent ... the crowd began to boo. This was so ugly ... hundreds of people—not just Roy’s crowd—were hooting Dole back to his chair.

Roy stammered out words, but nothing like an answer. He knew he had less than thirty seconds. The statewide broadcast ended with his senseless mumble into the microphone, the angry hoots of the crowd, and Bob Dole stalking off stage.

The folks from Russell planned to stay for dinner, but Bob didn’t come. He had a plane waiting to take him to Parsons—just a three-seater. Dole asked Bill Wohlford: “Whyn’cha come on to Parsons?”

Wohlford was one of Dole’s Washington staffers who’d quit his job to help in Kansas—one of those big, humble Dole loyalists who didn’t expect much talk from the Senator. Wohlford hardly knew what to say in the plane—though he saw: Dole was down. For the first time that Wohlford knew, Dole seemed to want reassurance. It was dark in the plane—just dim nightlights, the glow from gauges ... Dole was slumped in a sling-seat.

“We can do it,” Wohlford said, heartily. “We just got a lot of work, but we got a lot of people now ... we just have to turn it loose!”

He meant, to win.

“Yeah,” Dole said. “... I’m just not sure it’s worth it.”

In the end, there was no time to wonder—no way to change
anything
. The campaign tumbled to its close with a relentless ferocity that everyone tried to disown. No one could deny, though—the Dole campaign did “turn it loose.”

Dave Owen found an account of Dole’s war service in a vets’ magazine; he had the story reprinted on hundreds of thousands of fliers, under the headline
GUTS!
... then dispatched crews in motor homes to hand them out—for days at a time, one Main Street after another. It was the first time the Bob Dole story had been told in anything other than whispers.

In the end, there was also a mailing to Legion vets, which alleged (in another headline):
THE ONLY MILITARY TERM BILL ROY KNOWS IS AWOL.
Then there was a little asterisk. You had to go to the next page to find a box that explained: Bill Roy was absent from the House of Representatives for two votes on military matters. (They’d happened to fall on Fridays—Roy was back in Kansas.)

In the end, there were stops at local high schools, where Dole would tell the kids, at the close: “Go home and ask your parents if they know how many abortions Bill Roy has performed.”

In the end, the mudslinger ads went back on TV—no one seemed to think they were shocking anymore. ... By that time, there were newspaper ads, too, showing a skull and crossbones: one bone was labeled “Abortion,” the other “Euthanasia.” Underneath, it said: “Vote Dole.” By that time, the last week (especially that Sunday of the last weekend), there were thousands of fliers found on windshields. Those showed photographs of dead babies in garbage cans: “Vote Dole.”

Dole said this stuff didn’t come from him. He was trying to stop it. This kind of thing didn’t help him!

But it did.

In the end, a switch of two votes per precinct would have made the difference. And one of the most Democratic precincts was around the Catholic church in Kansas City—Bill Roy lost there. His own Catholic precinct, in Topeka, he used to win two-to-one while running for Congress. He broke even in that one.