It was a political gesture that to many seemed oddly impolitic.
On the eve of the California primary in March, when the Republican nomination was virtually sewn up, Bob Dole paid a visit to the lemon farm outside Los Angeles where Richard M. Nixon was born.In a half-wistful, half-triumphal visit, Dole spoke admiringly of what Nixon had accomplished. He also expressed affection for the man who, for all his achievements, plunged the country into crisis and left the White House in disgrace.
"I got along very well with President Nixon," Dole said to reporters. "We were friends in the good times and bad."
Dole's ties to the former president go back almost 30 years, to 1968, when Dole won his first term in the Senate and Nixon finally captured the White House. It was for the freshman senator, as much as for the new president, a heady time. Dole quickly made a name for himself defending the president with uncompromising - some even suggested unseemly - zeal and was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Republican Party.
The connection long outlasted Nixon's retreat from political life. Despite his well-known aversion to advisers, Dole regarded the former president as a mentor, turning to him privately for counsel, and he helped smooth the way for Nixon's public rehabilitation.
In a poignant tribute, Dole has said Nixon was the only man in Washington who consistently remembered, in greeting, to reach out for his healthy left hand. Speaking at the former president's funeral two years ago, Dole tried, unsuccessfully, to choke back the tears.
According to Dole's supporters, his attachment to Nixon reflects deep wells of feeling that lie hidden beneath the senator's detached manner and mordant wit. It is a matter, they also suggest, of mutual identification.
"In Dole, Nixon saw himself," one associate of both men said. "And in Nixon, Dole saw himself."
But Nixon is a curious choice of attachment and not merely because of his ambiguous place in American history. Dole's kinship with the former president suggests at once loyalty, admiration and a highly selective - and forgiving - account of their association.
While Dole certainly rose to prominence during the Nixon years, that rise carried a high price. It was in his self-appointed role as Nixon's defender on the Senate floor that Dole first earned his damaging - and enduring - reputation as a hatchet man. (So antagonistic was Dole, former senator William B. Saxbe memorably observed, that "he couldn't sell beer on a troopship.")
During these years, Dole was subject to private insults as well.
For all his championing of the president's most unpopular policies, he remained outside Nixon's inner circle, often humiliatingly so. He was frequently ignored and occasionally even mocked by the president's closest advisers. And though Dole pleaded to stay, Nixon unceremoniously dumped him as party chairman after the 1972 election.
Two years later, engulfed by Watergate, Nixon resigned, and almost took Dole, who was then facing re-election, down with him.
In recent weeks, Dole has tried to turn Watergate against President Clinton. "I think it smells to high heaven," he said of the Clinton administration's handling of sensitive FBI files. "I remember Watergate."
Nonetheless, he is reluctant to talk about the scandal as it relates to Nixon himself. In an interview aboard his campaign plane, Dole shied away from criticisms of the former president's behavior, either as it affected the country or him. Instead he made a point of noting that his hurtful treatment by the Nixon White House was strictly the work of the president's henchmen.
"Maybe I excuse Nixon," he said.
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Even more than today, the Senate Dole entered in 1969 was an ideological muddle. Though Democrats controlled the chamber, many conservatives in the party, mostly from the South, were sympathetic to the Republican administration. At the same time, the Republicans were factionalized, with a liberal Eastern wing that was often at odds with Nixon.
There was, by contrast, nothing ambivalent or ambiguous about the new senator from Kansas.
Dole joined the Senate after eight years in the House. In a period when many Republicans were crossing over to vote in favor of the Great Society, Dole had remained part of the loyal opposition. He voted "no" on the 1964 expansion of the food stamp program, "no" on President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty program, "no" on beginning federal aid to elementary and secondary schools and "no" on the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. He did, however, part company with the Republican right to vote for the civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965.
"The true conservative wants to remove the shackles from the oppressed," he once said, explaining those votes.
Nearly every year he served in the House Dole won the plaque awarded by the Americans for Constitutional Action, a now-defunct group, to the most conservative congressman. This impressive record prompted one colleague at the time to describe Dole's stance as "somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan."
With his hard-line politics, Dole was a natural ally for Nixon in the Senate. Like the new president, Dole was firmly committed to the battle against the creeping forces of liberalism.
"First of all, he believed," a former aide recalled.
But in advancing the president's policies, Dole was clearly trying to advance his own career, too.
Normally, the role of defending a Republican president from the floor falls to the Senate's Republican leader. In this case, however, the Senate minority leader was Hugh Scott, a moderate from Pennsylvania. Scott, a donnish man who smoked a pipe and collected Oriental art, could not always be counted on to carry Nixon's water. In fact, Scott helped embarrass the president early in his first term by joining with Democrats to reject his Supreme Court nominee Clement F. Haynsworth Jr.
With few Republicans senators stepping up to defend the President, there was a highly visible role available for someone who would. Dole seized it. As he put it in "Unlimited Partners," the joint autobiography he wrote with his wife, Elizabeth, and with substantial help from a ghostwriter: "politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum."
Or, as one Dole associate put it: "Dole saw an opening to be somebody. He took the partisan role because no one else did."
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As the president's self-appointed point man on the Senate floor, Dole acted as both the scourge of Nixon's critics and the chief cheerleader for his achievements. He played both parts to the hilt.
When a Gallup poll came out showing Nixon's popularity on the rise, Dole regularly had the results read into the Congressional Record. When senators like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee took the floor and criticized the president's conduct of the Vietnam War, Dole was inevitably on hand to defend it.
"These critics are not asking the president to act reasonably because they see personal political gain in embarrassing and discrediting the president vis-a-vis Vietnam," he said in one exchange.
And when Dole ended his first year in the Senate he rose from his seat to sum up (somewhat prematurely) the Nixon administration's unparalleled accomplishments, declaring, "Never in the history of our Republic has one administration done so much, so quickly to bring the nation back from the valley of turmoil and division, and placed it on the high road to peace and unity."
Herb Klein, the Nixon administration's director of communications, recalled that the White House often sent over "talking points" for Dole to use in defense of the president and that about "75 percent of the time he was receptive."
"I always considered him one of the most cooperative people in the Senate," Klein said.
The chairmanship of the Republican National Committee was Dole's reward for supporting the president. It was not the post he originally had his eye on.
Dole had at first planned to challenge Scott for the post of Senate minority leader. But this extreme breach of protocol by a freshman senator was firmly and swiftly repulsed. Dole's senior colleagues informed him that he could not possibly run for minority leader until earning more credentials, said Bill Taggart, a former aide to Dole. When Dole demanded to know how Scott had earned his credentials, he was told that he had served as party chairman.
"Fine," Dole responded, Taggart recalled. "I'll be party chairman."
Few prominent Republicans were eager to fill the chairmanship when it came open in late 1970. Indeed, several A-list candidates flatly turned it down. The Nixon administration, it was widely understood, would be running the president's re-election campaign in-house.
Even so, Dole nearly did not get the job.
When he emerged as the leading candidate, fully half of the Republican senators reportedly protested the choice to the White House. They complained, according to news reports of the time, about his excessive partisanship, his divisive attacks and his somewhat too-obvious ambition. John Ehrlichman, one of the president's top aides, recently recalled that the White House staff, too, was cool to Dole, saying that the senator was considered for the chairmanship in spite of the staff "not because of us."
So weak was his support that the night before the Republican National Committee was set to confirm Dole, Nixon almost gave the job to someone else. The president followed through only after Dole, by his own account, threatened to quit the senate altogether.
"If this is the way you're treated as a loyal Republican senator, after all I've done for the president, all the battles I've fought on the floor, all the heat I've taken in the press - well, I'm not so sure I want to be a senator," Dole remembers saying in the heat of the moment.
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While the role of party chairman was a limited one in the Nixon years, Dole labored to make the most of it.
A news release sent out by the Republican National Committee in June 1971 declared unequivocally: "Dole most active GOP chairman in recent years" and goes on to note that he had made "56 appearances in the 30 states in the five and a half months he has headed the GOP."
People who worked for Dole in his years as party chairman still marvel at the pace he kept up. Even before he headed the party, the senator was actively campaigning for other Republicans and had earned a reputation as the kind of politician who would travel hundreds of miles to speak to half a dozen party faithful. This practice, associates say, was part of Dole's plan for advancement: everywhere he went, he collected an IOU to be called in at a some future date, just as his mentor had done.
"Go out and make a lot of friends, go out and get a lot of chits, that's exactly from the Nixon playbook," said Tom Korologos, a former Nixon administration official and a close associate of Dole's.
As party chairman, it was not unusual, those who worked with him recall, for Dole to head out to the West Coast after the last Senate vote of the day, then, taking advantage of the time difference, make a speech that evening before heading back to Washington in time for the first vote the next day.
This grinding schedule kept Dole away from his family virtually every night. Dole's first wife, Phyllis Macey, whom he divorced in 1972, once recalled that during their last year together, the senator had dinner with her and their daughter, Robin, only four times.
"When I asked him why," Macey said a few years after the divorce, "he didn't have time to talk about it."
Both in his capacity as a senator and in his trips around the country as party chairman, Dole continued to lash out at the president's critics.
As the 1972 election approached, Dole routinely questioned the motives and the ethics of the Democratic presidential nominee, George S. McGovern, and the Democratic Party chairman, Larry O'Brien.
Then, after the Watergate scandal broke in the summer of 1972, Dole only stepped up his attacks. He accused the McGovern campaign of "a pattern of willful deception," demanding a federal investigation into what he said was "more than $250,000 in hidden and secret McGovern campaign funds." And when The Washington Post turned up more damaging stories on the break-in, Dole turned his attacks on the newspaper, which he called McGovern's "partner in mudslinging."
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Though Dole's relationship with Nixon resulted straightforwardly enough in mutual political benefit, it was nevertheless deeply vexed.
As a patron, Nixon seemed to display, at best, an intermittent sensitivity toward the young senator. And Dole, for his part, never seems to have fully appreciated how dispensable a part he played in the White House's plans.
The tension was apparent almost as soon as Dole assumed the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, after having nearly been cast aside.
Ehrlichman recalled that Dole complained "nonstop" that "the White House staff was not paying enough attention to him." White House memos of the time record that Dole was constantly trying to get appointments with the president, generally to no avail.
Dole himself recounted that he had so much trouble getting past the palace guard that at times had to resort to accosting Nixon at public functions. Eventually, Dole tried to turn this awkward situation into a joke, which took the form of a fictional exchange between himself and the White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman.
"I'm the national chairman and I need to see the president," Dole would say in the joke.
"You need to see the president?" Haldeman would hiss. "Tune in channel 9 tomorrow night at 10 o'clock."
People who worked with Dole in the Republican Party say the White House was so mistrustful of him that it actually went as far as assigning more trusted officials in the Republican National Committee to secretly keep tabs on him. Dole said that whenever he was able to get an appointment with the president, they were never alone.
"There was always somebody in the room, always a note taker there to protect the president, I guess," he said.
Yet even as it held Dole at arm's length, the Nixon White House still seemed to have expected him to attack on command.
Not entirely content with Dole's homegrown invective, the White House frequently assigned its own speechwriters, including Patrick J. Buchanan, who emerged this year as the main threat to Dole's last chance for the Republican nomination for president, to write material for him. Nixon aides then complained when he refused to deliver the most cutting lines.
Charles W. Colson, an aide who headed what came to be known as the "attack group," was particularly adamant that Dole deliver speeches as written, keeping careful track when he demurred. In a memo to Haldeman, for example, Colson took Dole to task for softening a pair of speeches sent over especially for him.
"They were good Buchanan hard-liners," Colson wrote of the speeches, which were aimed against Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, at that time a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. "Dole watered them both down considerably, taking out most of the personal references."
Just how little regard the White House had for Dole's feelings became painfully apparent two weeks after the 1972 election, when he was invited to see the president at Camp David.
Dole had said publicly that he expected to stay on beyond the election as party chairman. But Nixon, after presenting him with an autographed map showing the thousands of miles he had traveled for the party, made it clear that he was out. Dole took the news hard, according to Haldeman's diaries, delivering "a long harangue about his own position" and saying that it would "ruin him in Kansas if it looks like he's kicked out." Nixon was apparently unmoved, and to make sure there was no doubt about what had been decided, the White House leaked word of Dole's fate to reporters.
A few days later, at the White House's request, Dole traveled to New York to meet with George Bush, then the United States delegate to the United Nations, to ask him to take the chairman's post. Apparently unknown to Dole, Bush had already met with the president and agreed to take the job. Dole would later say he had been "bushwhacked."
Dole's associates say he was deeply unhappy about being replaced by Bush and about his treatment by the White House.
"Infuriated," is how Robert F. Ellsworth, a former delegate to NATO and a friend of both Nixon and Dole, described the senator's mood.
Yet neither his humiliating dismissal nor the president's subsequent disgrace seems to have shaken Dole's commitment.
When the Watergate scandal first surfaced, Dole shrugged it off with characteristic humor. The break-in, he declared, had occurred on his "night off." He continued to defend the president even as the scandal mushroomed. A White House memo to Nixon from the spring of 1973 notes that Dole had requested a meeting to offer "his personal encouragement" about Watergate.
"Bob believes Watergate is not nearly as big an issue outside Washington," said the memo from William E. Timmons, the Nixon administration's chief Congressional lobbyist.
Although Dole would begin to express some vague concerns about Watergate the next year, he stood behind the president up until the very verge of impeachment. The day Nixon finally resigned, on Aug. 9, 1974, a former aide recalled, Dole did not emerge from his Senate office.
"He was very torn up about it personally," the former aide said.
The Watergate scandal had serious implications for Dole's own political life. Up for re-election that November, just three months after Nixon's resignation, he very nearly lost his seat; it would be the only close call of his entire Senate career.
In recent weeks, Dole has frequently invoked Watergate in criticizing the Clinton administration's possession of FBI files on some prominent Republicans. But when asked to discuss the events of the real Watergate scandal, Dole is more reticent, skirting the question of Nixon's conduct. It is almost as if with Watergate, too, he draws a sharp distinction between Nixon's actions and those of his associates.
In an interview, Dole delicately referred to the tumultuous time leading up to Nixon's resignation as "the hectic days." He also recalled being told that the Watergate story had "no legs."
"Well, I'm not a journalist, so I didn't know what that meant," Dole said.
He seemed more comfortable discussing the former president's rehabilitation.
"I gained respect for him when he sort of went away," Dole said. "He was very quiet, slowly just started to come out of the shell, incrementally rehabilitate himself, which I thought, despite his faults, was remarkable."
Dole himself was, according to associates, instrumental in Nixon's eventual comeback. He would regularly invite Nixon to luncheons in the Capitol and round up crowds to have their photographs taken with the former president. He also sought out Nixon in his home in New York. Korologos, who often accompanied him on these visits, reports that Dole always paid rapt attention to the former president.
"The only time I saw Dole sit around and listen to anyone for more than 10 minutes was with Nixon," he said. Dole, Korologos added, "saw in Nixon a font of knowledge he could use."
To many politicians, including some of Dole's own aides, invoking Nixon these days is a curious political strategy. But Dole's associates say the ties to Nixon run deep. Certainly, many have pointed out the striking similarities between the two men. They shared poor backgrounds, a distrust of the Eastern establishment, a sense of having struggled for everything they got and a deeply nursed resentment of rivals who had not.
Paradoxically, the humiliation Dole suffered at the hands of Nixon only underscores the bonds between them.
In his eulogy for the former president, Dole noted that to get ahead, Nixon had always had to "work harder and longer than everyone else." And when Dole announced his resignation from the Senate last month, he stressed how difficult his own rise to prominence had been.
Sounding almost Nixonian, he declared: "And I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except in the hard way, which is good because we have a hard task ahead of us."