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Exploring How Dole Thinks

By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 4, 1996; Page A01

It was time for the torts examination at Washburn University's law school. Robert Joseph Dole, one of many young war vets on campus, entered the pillared front of the Carnegie library, built from ancient gray Kansas stone, and took his seat for a task that he knew would exhaust him.

Some students might scribble for four hours, filling two blue books with answers, and still not satisfy Professor Jim Ahrens, whose reputation in 1949, while not as intimidating as a colleague known as Mr. Evil, was tough enough.

There was no way Dole could fill a single blue book if he sat there all night. He was a natural righty whose right hand had been useless since the spring day in 1945 when he was gravely wounded by an exploding shell during hill-to-hill combat in northern Italy. Nearly five years later he was still teaching himself to write left-handed. To keep pace in law school, he had to carry a bulky Victrola-like contraption known as a Sound Scriber to class. He would plug it in on a desk close to the professor and record the lecture.

At night back at Topeka's Senate Apartments, while his wife Phyllis waited in the other room listening to the radio with a blanket over her head to muffle the noise, he replayed the scratchy recording of the lecture and transcribed it as best he could, slowly and painfully.

"When you comin' to bed?" Phyllis would call out.

"Naaggh. Not yet." He would stay up until he got it right.

His experiences in law school are central to understanding Bob Dole today as a presidential candidate -- and to anticipating how he would function in the White House. For a seemingly uncomplicated man, he confounds even his closest friends, who confess that they sometimes have no clue what is going on inside his head. This late in his game (he turned 73 on July 22), after he has performed in the public realm for four decades, there still remains a mystery about how Dole thinks.

Some of his recent troubles on the campaign trail underscore the riddle. Why does this seasoned politician have such a difficult time articulating his message to the American public? That temporal question prompts deeper ones about his mind. How does Dole process information, formulate ideas and make decisions? Why does he communicate, or fail to communicate, the way he does? How does he deal with moments of tension and frustration? How does he discipline his mind and organize his day?

The debilitating war wound, which reconfigured Dole mentally as much as physically, is one of three defining forces that provide answers to those questions, the others being his midwestern roots and his congressional tenure in Washington. They form a symbolic triangle -- Kansas, Wound, Senate -- that goes a long way toward solving the puzzle of Bob Dole's brain.

The Washburn law school days fall in the Wound category. When Dole entered Ahrens's classroom for the torts exam, he came with a special request. He asked whether he could dictate his answers to a secretary since he would not be able to write fast enough to finish in time. Sorry, no secretaries are available, Ahrens said, but he felt sympathy for Dole's burden and offered another proposal: "Why don't you outline the high points of your answers to each of the questions. It doesn't have to be too long or detailed. Just give me a sense of the points you would cover and the ideas you would discuss."

Dole covered all the questions in five or six pages, Ahrens recalled. "They were outlined and very well done. I don't remember whether he got a B+ or A-, but it was a high grade." The exam impressed Ahrens so much, in fact, that when another student grumbled about getting a low score despite gushing out two blue books-worth of answers, the professor pulled out Dole's paper as a model of brevity and precision.

That Dole was able to attain a high score on the test while writing only an outline was evidence of his newly acquired ability to listen. He had painstakingly trained himself to listen -- first to the lecture in the classroom, then later to the recording, over and over -- and to retain what he had heard. It was the only way he could get through law school with a nonfunctioning right arm and an awkward left hand that tired easily. "It made me focus on listening and memorizing," Dole said in a recent interview. "When you have difficulty taking notes, and then reading them, you start using your mind and memory more."

His capacity to listen became a notable characteristic of Dole the legislator and politician. Colleagues and members of his Senate staff knew that even if he gave no indication that he was paying attention during a conversation, he undoubtedly was, and anything they said to him -- a fact, an anecdote, an argument -- might be recited back to them or included in one of his public utterances weeks or months later. They had to make sure that they gave him the right stuff the first time, said Sheila Burke, his chief of staff, because whatever they told him would stick.

To listen was an active verb in Bob Dole's world. He listened, said Tom Korologos, a Washington lobbyist and longtime friend, as a matter of both survival and recreation. "He ain't like you and me. He can't take notes. Can't think by doodling on a piece of paper." If he was at a meeting and the other participants were later asked to describe what Dole did, the invariable response would be, "He listened."

Attentive listening is a beneficial trait that helped him succeed in Congress, an institution where most members listen only to themselves. (A politician's definition of a bore, jokes Haley Barbour, the gab-happy chairman of the Republican National Committee, is someone who talks when you want to be talking.) But the wound also constricted Dole's thought process in other ways. Much like his outline of answers in the torts exam, he began developing his own intellectual shorthand, written and oral. While perhaps protecting him from the dangers of verbosity, this also sometimes led to the short-circuiting of ideas, making it harder for him to communicate with the masses. People around him noticed that his mind worked quickly in a linear way, memorizing one fact and then another, but that he proved less adept at associative and creative thinking, placing several ideas and events into coherent patterns. He was, in that sense, an intense yet passive listener, taking what was given him but little more.

In the decades since law school he has rarely written more than a paragraph or two at a sitting. Writing is still uncomfortable for him. Just to sign his name on a letter, Dole needs to place a weight on the paper to hold it down. The fingers in his better hand, the left, have so little feeling that he could not use a typewriter or keyboard effectively, so he never entered the computer age. There is no word processor on his office desk. All of this has rendered him less than fluent in the written word and might explain why he at times seems disdainful of it, according to many of his old speech writers. He has never written a full speech and follows a script written by anyone else only with some reluctance.

Doers and Stewers

The Doles of Russell were not scornful of intellect. They believed education could better their children. Aunt Mildred gave her nephew a quarter every month when he brought home school papers with perfect spelling. Bina Dole took great pride when her oldest son was named to the National Honor Society, got an A in history, and was accepted by the University of Kansas. But the power and glory of the English language was never of particular importance to them. There were almost no books in the house. Dole remembers reading "Black Beauty" during his childhood. His teenage years rushed by without him cracking the classics.

The family ethic was captured in a saying: "Be a doer, not a stewer." The children were discouraged from sitting around reading or daydreaming when they could be out working or playing. While his friend, Phil Ruppenthal, the judge's son, sat at the library devouring books and preparing his mind for Harvard, Bob Dole, or Bobby Joe as he was known in western Kansas, was earning his dollar-a-day scooping ice cream at Dawson's Drugstore or "running around playing basketball and football . . . and things that you couldn't use later" in life.

The notion of Middle American reserve can be overblown, Kansas has its share of chatterers, but talking was a clipped art in Bob Dole's early years. His father, Doran Dole, who quit high school to enlist in the service for World War I, was so quiet that even his laconic son would call him a man of "eloquent silence." Russell High had a top-notch debate team, but Dole did not join it. His idea of a debate was an exchange of barbed one-liners at the drugstore between the Dawson brothers, who were huge K-State Wildcat fans, and their Kansas Jayhawk customers. From his teenage years on, the one way Dole felt comfortable showing off his brainpower was through his quick wit.

Dole left for college in Lawrence with a limited awareness of the outside world. He grew up before the television age. He learned about life by listening to the radio and watching movies at the Dream Theater. Unlike Bill Clinton, another provincial boy from an American small town, who traveled to Washington as a teenager to shake hands with a president, Dole never left his state as a youth, except for one week-long fishing trip with his father and brother in the mountain streams of nearby Colorado. At the University of Kansas, by his own account, Dole was intellectually lazy. He partied more than studied. He took a course in logic and received a D.

"It didn't seem very logical to me," he said. "Tried to reach for the stars. Didn't get far up the ladder."

It was not until a few traumatic years later that he showed much interest in broadening his mind. By then he was stuck in a sterile room at Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Mich., recuperating from the life-threatening war wound. He and the massive fellow in the bed next to his, George Radulescu, a former football player at Michigan State, started their own reading group of sorts. Unable to hold the books that the candy-stripers brought by for them on pushcarts, they instead used a projector to read the pages reflected on the ceiling.

First they studied the military strategies of Alexander the Great, Robert E. Lee, and U.S. Grant and then the leadership theories of Plato, George Washington, Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. Plato was too regimented for the Kansan. Franklin too much of a fiddler. He loved Lincoln. But it was not so much curiousity as ennui that drove him to the world of books, Dole acknowledged in a recent interview. "Why did we do it? I think we dealt with a lot of boredom in those days and we would try to find ways to pass the time of day. We were flat on our backs day after day. It was a way to maintain our sanity, I guess."

The urge to avoid boredom is often greatly underestimated as a factor in human motivation. Dole is rather open about how it affected his life. After the wound, had he not decided to use his brain, his days would have become excruciatingly tedious. When wondering what drives him, why he often has five meetings going at once, why he keeps running for things at an age when most people ease into retirement, it is important to remember that the wound made him especially afraid of being bored.

From the moment he arrived in Washington as a young member of the House, Dole followed a mantra: learn one new thing a day.

For one stretch it was a new word. He had a dictionary out on his desk and would pick a word and repeat it and repeat it until he knew what it meant. Judy Harbaugh, his staff assistant, found him working alone at his desk late one night, signing letters, and asked him what drove him. It was the same impulse that led him to learn how to memorize the law lectures, that compelled him to read Plato in the hospital bed, that was now pushing him to practice signing letters and to learn new words. "Every day I try to do something that I haven't done before," Dole told her. "I can't go and paint a picture. And I can't carry somebody's bags. But I can try to do something different every day and achieve something more."

The Stoic Senator

Kansas and the Wound set the context for Dole's behavior as a legislator and politician. His capacity to listen, his tendency to seek verbal shortcuts, his uneasiness with the written word, his late-blooming regard for his brain as a final resort against boredom, all these begin to explain things that otherwise might seem baffling or contradictory.

Why would someone who says with conviction, "I hate meetings!" be known for holding more meetings than anyone on Capitol Hill? It was not just because he was majority leader of the Senate. Holding five meetings simultaneously suited the way Dole's brain works. He is an avid listener yet has a limited attention span. He could move from room to room, absorbing and memorizing bits of information. He could listen, but not have to take notes or say much of anything. If one meeting became tedious, he would move on to the next after five or 10 minutes. The doer, not the stewer. If a discussion dipped into academic theory or brainstorming, said Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Dole's longtime Republican colleague and friend, he would most likely either pick up the telephone -- an unmistakable signal that he had heard what he needed -- or leave the room.

The Oval Office budget discussions last winter, when Dole was stuck in a room for more than 50 hours with the two preeminent policy blabbers of modern times, President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, was by all accounts pure agony for him. "You could see it was painful," said Sheila Burke, who was among the staff assistants waiting outside in the Roosevelt Room during those marathon sessions. "He is not a wonk."

Whatever meeting he is in, even with his closest friends in the Senate, it is common for the others in the room to wonder what in the world is running through Dole's brain. Friends and associates who have watched him over three decades say he has never changed in that regard: He will sit there and give you nothing beyond an occasional senatorial nod and acerbic aside. "I never know what he is thinking," said Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who considers himself a Dole confidant. "He sits there passively and it's not clear what his thoughts are."

This trait can create problems for a presidential candidate -- it can be interpreted as another component of Dole's inarticulateness. But it was generally useful in Congress, where it enshrouded an otherwise familiar persona in mystery and provided him with what Gingrich called "tactical fluidity." Dole was often listening for things that his colleagues could not hear, sometimes figuring out how to move them to his predetermined position, sometimes figuring out a position from what they were saying, but always calculating what it would take to win. "He responds to patterns that he sees emerging tactically," Gingrich noted, "whereas I am almost indifferent tactically."

McCain said he will never forget the day last fall when he and Dole, two decorated combat veterans who had decided not to criticize President Clinton's decision to send troops to Bosnia, held a meeting with a dozen colleagues angry about the administration's policy and Dole's unwillingness to attack it. "The rhetoric was intense and emotional: Don't put our boys in harm's way. Body bags. All that. They were just pounding us," McCain said. "I was getting more and more depressed. Dole said almost nothing." Finally, a vote was called in the Senate and everybody piled out of the majority leader's office. As McCain and Dole were a third of the way to the Senate, Dole turned and said, "Makin' progress!"

"I laughed at first. I thought he was joking," McCain recalled. "Then I figured this guy knows something I don't know. He could see it and I didn't have a clue." McCain came to realize that Dole could see the others were venting their spleens and once they got over that, even if they disagreed with him, they would not hold it against him.

According to Dole, that is part of what he was thinking when he sat there quietly taking the pounding from his colleagues. He was also calculating how his Bosnia position would play in the New Hampshire primary. "I think I thought I was making progress," he recalled. "I was getting a lot of advice from New Hampshire people saying, `It's going to be terrible in New Hampshire. You already got problems. You don't need this!' My view was it wasn't as tense as it might have been."

Making Decisions

Dole's method of processing information, in which he often appears placid on the outside but is internally calculating and maneuvering, parallels in some ways a larger issue: how he makes decisions. He does not talk much about it, and often appears reluctant to make decisions until the last minute. He listens to a wide range of people but tells few of them, rarely even his closest aides, what he has decided until after the fact. He tends to be passive, passive-aggressive or reactive. Rather than creating choices, he tends to choose from what he sees in front of him.

That characteristic -- being more reactive than creative -- is prominent in all aspects of Dole's thinking process. It was evident in Dole's decision to run for president this year, after trying and failing to win the Republican nomination twice before. In Bob Woodward's book on the 1996 race, "The Choice," Dole talks about how he kept inching along, taking small steps toward the starting line, and then woke up one morning and was running. His staff learned about some of his steps the same way the rest of the nation did: by reading about them in the newspaper.

In an unpublished section of an on-the-record interview with Woodward, Dole, speaking in the second person, said there was a period in 1993 and 1994 when he did not want to confront the decision to run at all. "If even you get close, you kept sort of fearing the [off-year] election was going to come in '94 and then you'd have to decide [about running in 1996]. It's always nice when you got something you don't have to decide this month or next month. . . . Then suddenly November came and you have to start focusing."

In a recent interview, asked to explain the reticence about running he revealed in his conversations with Woodward, Dole said that he kept confronting self-imposed barriers along the way. "So you jumped that barrier and were one inch closer," he said. "Before you know it you are in the arena, sort of through the back door." It was quintessential Dole -- there is a goal that he wants to reach but not confront directly, so he keeps placing barriers in front of him. They are removed one by one: the Dole process of elimination.

This style of decision-making is suited for someone leading the Senate, where Dole was constantly guarding his own opinions, negotiating barriers, and working toward goals through a process of elimination. "You are always thinking, this may be all right for Pete Domenici, but what is Jim Exon gonna think about it?" Dole said of how he would ponder decisions in the Senate. "And are we gonna get any help on the Democratic side? Because I'm gonna lose four or five on our side. You go through that whole process. That's one of the reasons I don't say much at meetings."

Holding cards close to his vest also comes naturally to him. Since his childhood in Kansas, when he was taught not to talk too much about his own concerns, Dole for better or worse has often been able to keep things in, large and small. He never said a word about divorce to Phyllis, his first wife, until the evening in 1972 when he told her he wanted out of the marriage. He worked with McCain for nearly a decade in the Senate before telling him that during the years McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Dole wore a remembrance bracelet, coincidentally, with his name on it. He told none of his Senate colleagues beforehand that he planned to resign, and informed Burke, his longtime chief of staff, only two days before the announcement.

"One thing you learn about being in Congress -- most of them blab," Dole said. "That's why I didn't tell anyone. You are tempted to say to your friend Pete Domenici, Pete, I want to tell you about this, but. . . . " Dole didn't.

What Dole relished most about his decision to leave the Senate, he said, was that he did not have to consult his colleagues. After all those years, he took a whiff of decision-making freedom and enjoyed it. "I didn't have to worry about the internal politics of it. We had the votes -- my vote!"

His resignation from the Senate did not rid him of external pressures. On the contrary, his decision-making has seemed especially uncertain lately on several policy fronts, especially abortion and tobacco, as he has struggled to balance his own instincts with contrary political forces. But for all the recent turmoil in his campaign, Dole nonetheless says he feels freer and more in control than ever.

His major mission over the next week, selecting a vice-presidential running mate, has brought him a further sense of release from his legislative past. He said he enjoyed reading profiles on potential running mates that his staff has given him -- "going back and looking at the Lexis-Nexis [printouts] and different stuff, sort of getting a feel for what the problems would be, what the pluses would be, which I think I have to do. It's my decision. Can't have a committee make it. Get a list of names. And I've eliminated a lot of them. So I will eliminate, eliminate. That's what I try to do, get all the facts, then eliminate. Process of elimination. Get it down to a finite number, then not tell anybody."

The freedom might be new for Dole, but the pattern is familiar: make a decision through the process of elimination and then keep it to yourself. There is a measure of passivity in that approach, as there is in much of Dole's decision-making. One lesson he has not discarded from his years in the Senate is that doing nothing is sometimes the wisest course. "I've learned over the years, to be honest about it, that a lot of those people who rush into your office with a big problem, if you just give them a little time, the problem goes away," Dole said. "I don't know how many times I call back to my colleagues the next day and they say, `Oh, I don't need you anymore.' "

"Well," Dole said he would then think to himself, "I don't have to go through that one, what a relief!"

Compared with the balancing act he had to perform as majority leader, Dole thinks "being president would be easier." For the big decisions "you want the bipartisan leadership involved." But for the average executive decision, he said, "to me that's, well, I've watched presidents make decisions. They are not all easy. Obviously some of them are very difficult. But I bet 90 percent of them are like falling off a log."

Anger and Silence

Rarely is anything so easy for Bob Dole. Many of the decisions a president makes concern how to communicate with the American people, a realm where he has a history of trouble. Here the triangle of forces that shaped his mind -- Kansas, Wound, Senate -- works against him. His propensity to speak in shorthand; his preference for the one-line barb over the studied answer; his turning away from the rehearsed or written word; his distaste for handlers and image-shapers; his discomfort with complex thinking, all these, when combined with fatigue and a sense that he is being misinterpreted, can transform Dole at the most public moments into something he is not: an angry man.

Much of his success in the Senate came from the way he could deal with people one-on-one, coming across as funny, reasonable, a nice guy. But on the public level since 1976, when he conducted his first national campaign as President Gerald Ford's running mate, Dole has defined himself by his occasional spurts of vitriol. Some politicians script their outbursts aiming to gain political points in the process: witness Clinton's planned attacks on Sister Souljah and Jesse Jackson in 1992, and President Bush's calculated television spat with CBS anchorman Dan Rather in 1988. Dole's heated moments are unscripted; indeed, they defy the script.

The biggest verbal blunder of Dole's career, when he uttered the phrase "Democrat wars" during his vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale in Houston in 1976, partly resulted from the candidate's disdain for rehearsal and preparation. His advisers set up a mock debate hall in Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's living room on Foxhall Road, renting cameras and lights and the whole works for three days, but Dole refused to drop by the first two days and when he showed up the third day he joked around for a few minutes then rebuffed his staff's attempts to get him to handle practice questions.

He also ignored his briefing books, according to several aides involved in that campaign, and only with great reluctance agreed to a last-minute economic prep session with Alan Greenspan. One of his aides compiled a list of Do's and Don't's for the debate, including a Don't about describing the wars America had been involved in during the 20th century as Democrat wars. Dole had used the phrase several times on the campaign trail, his shorthand way of claiming that the Democrats had a history of neglect for the military until wars came along during their administrations. But Dole seemed uninterested in the checklist, the aide felt rushed, and did not even mention the Don't on Democrat wars, believing that there was no way Dole would say it on national television. Dole did, of course.

It was near the end of the debate, in response to a question about a different subject: the AP's Walter Mears had asked him about Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Dole hated that subject, which had almost cost him reelection to the Senate two years earlier. He was angry at Mondale, his aides said later, for presenting himself as the defender of the little guy when, as Dole saw it, Mondale had had a soft life, getting appointed to every office he held, while Dole had scraped his way back from the wounds of war. He felt he was being set up, so he exploded. Some very complex feelings were swirling around inside his brain, but his raw anger and lack of associative verbal skills betrayed him. Out came Democrat wars.

"It is an appropriate topic, I guess," Dole said that night in response to the pardon question. "But it's not a very good issue. Anymore than the war in Vietnam would be or World War II or World War I or the war in Korea. All Democrat wars. Every one in this century. I figured it up the other day because of some things that happened to me there that changed my life and we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat War this century -- 1.6 million Americans -- enough to fill the city of Detroit."

Democrat wars hounded Dole the rest of the campaign and has come back to haunt him ever since, brought up every time something similar happens. In 1988 it was on the night of the New Hampshire primary, when he snarled into the monitor in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw to tell George Bush, who had defeated him that night "to stop lying about my record." Before he went out to concede defeat that night, his aides feared he might show his anger. His eyes were sunken, he was acting snappy, he was mad that his pollster's numbers had kept telling him he was going to win, he was frustrated that Bush had spent the final week shoveling snow and driving trucks for the TV cameras, photo-ops that his disabled arm precluded, the arm was hurting, he had a cold -- all signs of Dole fatigue, physical and mental.

"You're going to lose. The important thing is to make a warm and gracious statement to your workers," advised his campaign chairman, Bill Brock. "This is step one." But after Dole's furrowed-brow snap at Bush, there was no step two. Judy Harbaugh, a member of his original staff when he reached Washington, was watching the returns at Dole headquarters that night. The moment she heard him take his blast at Bush, she said later, she left in silence. She had seen this before. The people would not understand that Bob Dole was not like that. She knew it was over.

There have been more snits this year. He accused Katie Couric on NBC's "Today" show of being a tool of the Democrats for questioning his positions on tobacco. He charged that NAACP president Kweisi Mfume had set him up in a dispute over why Dole did not speak to the organization's recent convention. In both cases, Dole and his staffers had made similar complaints privately, but no one around him expected to go public that way. He had lost all sense of political subtlety and had not filtered his responses for public consumption.

The people around Dole constantly deal with that paradox: they know that he hates to be "handled," yet they also realize that anything they say sticks in his brain and might be repeated later. His aides call it the whisper-in-the-ear syndrome. Sit him down and tell him what to do, and he will rebel, but whisper something in his ear just before he takes the stage, and you might hear your words coming back at you.

Dole's tendency to stray from the script is legendary. It is not that he does not know a good speech when one is written for him. He has admired the work of his best speech writers, including Richard Norton Smith, now director of the Gerald R. Ford Library in Michigan, who wrote his eulogy at Richard Nixon's funeral; Mari Will, the lobbyist and political adviser, who wrote his speech attacking the lack of values in Hollywood, and Mark Helprin, the novelist, who wrote his Senate resignation speech. But none of those successful efforts break him from the habit of more often than not ignoring the words set before him.

Noel Koch, a national security consultant and speech writer who worked for Dole during the 1976 campaign and later, said it was a frustrating task. "At first I thought I could write any damn thing I wanted to; he didn't know what he wanted to say. Put words in his mouth," Koch said. "Then over time you began to realize that he didn't use much of it anyway." Koch discerned a pattern in Dole's speeches that is familiar to others who have tried to write for him. "He would get up there and start quipping, Rotarian style. You have to tell a joke, but then get down to business. Well, he never would. As long as he had them, he'd keep going. When it was time to turn to the speech, papers'd be flying, skipping pages. Disastrous. You couldn't wait for him to stop. Anyplace would be a good place to stop."

Dole does not hide how he feels about campaign speeches. They are part of being handled. They glorify words over action, stewers over doers. Visions are not provided in words, he has told his friends. He once told Warren Rudman, his old pal in the Senate, that he thought the whole vision thing "is a phony." One of the best speeches he ever gave, or at least the one he felt most proud of, he said, was at a private fund-raiser in New York on June 24, in a small room, with just a group of wealthy people listening, no press there "to second-guess what I was saying."

The Dole brain -- shaped by Kansas, Wound, Senate -- views the world warily, sardonically, shielding the man inside with missiles of sarcastic and biting humor. He has been a central player in the process for decades, yet much of it bores him, especially the words and promises of the national campaign. "You could put on a recording and just move your lips and people would nod," he said. "I have thought about that -- just give me a recording and just stand up there and lip sync. Save your voice. And people would think, boy, that guy's good, didn't miss a word."