Fight Over Control, Direction of Campaign Cited : Two Dole Aides Fired in Shake-Up

With a game plan that changed by the hour, eating cold food and cold medicine, flying a second-rate air charter, loose threads dangling everywhere and his advisers in open warfare, Bob Dole campaigned for the South Thursday.

Woody Woodpecker and Frankenstein stood with him at one stop.

But two longtime conservative advisers no longer did. They were suddenly fired during breakfast, in full view of everyone, turning up fresh turmoil in an already besieged campaign.

“Get their bags off the plane,” Dole campaign chairman William E. Brock III was overheard to say after ordering the purge.

And just like that, there went political consultants David Keene and Donald Devine, two charter members of the Dole-for-President effort.

Key Problems Surface

The firings brought into the open a struggle over control and the direction of the Kansas senator’s already ragged campaign organization. Here was a juicy bloodletting to dominate the attention of news reporters at the very time Dole said his Southern strategy depended on the news media to spread his message of leadership to voters.

Florida and 16 other states vote their preferences for the GOP presidential nominee in just 12 days--the biggest one-day prize in the 1988 campaign.

Keene, chairman of the activist American Conservative Union, and Devine, a former director of the Reagan Administration’s Office of Personnel Management, were two advisers with combative instincts and right-leaning tendencies. Both had traveled at Dole’s side for the last two weeks at the senator’s behest.

On Wednesday night, Brock joined the traveling party. And within hours, Brock ordered them out.

Dole tried to distance himself from the purge. “They’re friends of mine,” he said when asked. “I’ll consult with them. . . . There are tensions in every campaign.”

Brock promised more shake-ups ahead in an effort to make the campaign “as organized and coherent as it can be and extend resources as efficiently as it can.”

Disputes Cited

In interviews with Brock, and separately with Devine and Keene, several explanations were offered for the firings. There were disputes over scheduling, and perhaps over the conservative tone of recent Dole speeches. But from outward appearances the biggest rub was competition for the ear of the candidate.

“A power play,” said both Keene and Devine. Waiting in an airport for a flight home to Washington Thursday, they both pledged loyalty to Dole. And they insisted that their departure should do nothing to hurt “Bob Dole’s chances.”

Perhaps, but a misfiring campaign could hurt -- and there were signs of just that in recent days.

“We’re flexible. We see a big crowd, we’re liable to land,” Dole joked about himself.

That was only a slight exaggeration. The campaign has darted here and there through the South in the last two days, giving Dole’s threadbare advance team almost no opportunity to arrange compelling events or attract good crowds.

Dole penciled in schedule changes himself, according to Brock, adjusting to accommodate hunches and “because he wanted to do something different.”

For such undertakings, Dole relied on an aged Boeing 737 charter that was equipped with little, not even a stove or oven. All food, including pizza, was handed out cold. Dole gulped medicines day after day in search of one that would knock down persistent nasal congestion, occasionally announcing he had found something that helped for at least a few hours.

And then there were Woody Woodpecker and friends.

Bulldozers, Too

Almost inexplicably Thursday morning, Dole traveled to the site in Orlando where Universal Studios is building a new tourist and movie-studio complex. Awaiting him were 440 acres of stripped-bare land, a regiment of bulldozers, a couple of partly completed buildings, a pack of studio publicity wizards and people wearing costumes of Woody Woodpecker, Frankenstein and some other barely distinguishable Hollywood look-alikes.

As bulldozers roared and red Florida dirt blew up in clouds from a strong wind, a wide-eyed Dole stood at a podium in the middle of the construction site and gave what many believed was the shortest speech of his life, barely three sentences.

“We’re very pleased to see some growing industry,” he said, adding his approval of a project that would create many jobs. Then he hurriedly left.

Later, the vanquished Devine would not resist a dig. The Woody Woodpecker event, he chortled, “is a good example of Chairman Brock’s leadership.”

Dole’s travails come as he is attempting to make the transition from the leisurely handshake politics of the early primary states to the helter-skelter demands of trying to cover many states in a few days.

At a meeting in Orlando with about 100 businessmen and women, he spoke almost wistfully of the good old days of just a few weeks ago in Iowa.

‘All Wholesale Politics’

“We went to all 99 counties--met everybody in Iowa. That was retail. Now it’s all wholesale politics.”

Dole is among the last of the major presidential contenders to decline Secret Service protection and logistical support. For one thing, such protection would cramp his ability to alter his destination almost at will. The lack of it also gives Dole’s campaign a low-key feel that sharply contrasts with the vice presidential trappings that pervade the campaign of George Bush, and it enables Dole to brag to audiences how he is saving the government thousands of dollars every day.

It also means, however, that his traveling party can find itself scattered all over town, with no organized motorcades to get it from place to place. On Thursday, his entire campaign press corps was lost for nearly 25 minutes on a bus at the Orlando airport trying to track down the Dole airplane.