Though Insider, Dole Strives for Common Touch

During her many years in Washington, Elizabeth Hanford Dole has spent frequent Sunday afternoons making private visits to nursing homes and shelters, bringing newspapers, ice cream and such to the elderly and the poor, trying to maintain a “one-on-one relationship” withreal people, as opposed to the policy-makers at the top level of government.

“When you’re in a government job, one of its satisfactions is knowing that maybe you can help people,” she told The Times once in an interview. “But there’s a problem with that. It’s almost always policy. You hope you can help people, but you can never see it. I wanted the one-on-one, the opportunity to work with people individually.”

It is an attitude that Dole--selected Saturday by President-elect George Bush to be secretary of labor--has said she tries to bring to every position she holds. Indeed, even her initial comments on being chosen for her second Cabinet post seemed to reflect this.

Recalling a man she had met last Sunday during a visit to Martha’s Table, an inner-city shelter here where hot meals are provided to the poor, she said the man told her: “All I need is a job. All I need is a job.” Never mind, she said, that unemployment is at a 14-year low.

“One person who needs a job, a good job, and can’t find it is one too many,” she said.

Dole, 52, must be confirmed by the Senate, and she will approach the process with one sure vote. She is the wife of Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.)--who has been one of Bush’s bitter political rivals--and, together, the Doles have become popularly known as Washington’s “power couple.”

“She knows the labor leaders she’ll be dealing with--she dealt with them in transportation (and) all the others in the private sector--so my view is, it was a good choice,” her husband, Sen. Dole, said Saturday.

He added: “Even though it means TV dinners again for me, I’ll still probably vote for her confirmation.”

Resigns to Campaign

Dole, known as Liddy as a child, served as President Reagan’s secretary of transportation from 1983 until she resigned in October, 1987, to campaign full time for her husband, who was then seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

She ran the Transportation Department during some of the airline industry’s shakiest years, with the public nervous about air safety and increasingly frustrated over eroding service.

Further, she successfully bucked an Administration seeking less--not more--government regulation by advocating the requirement of air bags or self-buckling safety belts for new automobiles.

Dole is a native of Salisbury, N.C., and a graduate of Duke University, where she served as student body president and where the newspaper named her “leader of the year.” She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and also holds a master’s degree in education from Harvard. She is a former campus May Queen and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and also participated in a summer study program at Oxford University in England.

She has called herself an achiever, but one who learned as much from her losses as from her victories.

“The losses are just as important,” she told The Times in an interview several years ago. “I ran for president of my high school when I was 17. They never had a girl president. I lost. I ran for president of the freshman class at Duke. I lost that too. But I’m the kind of person who bounces back.”

Works for Johnson

Her first government job came during the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration, when she served as a staff assistant to the assistant secretary of health, education and welfare, specializing in the educational problems of the handicapped. In 1967, she administered the first National Conference on Education of the Deaf. Later, she became a public defender in the District of Columbia court system.

In the early years of the Richard M. Nixon Administration she worked on consumer affairs issues in the White House, and she was named to the Federal Trade Commission in 1973. She and Sen. Dole, who was divorced from his first wife, were married in 1975.

“Our lives just meshed,” she has said of the relationship. “And our two careers fit together beautifully.” Although the two have not always agreed on all issues, she has described their political disputes as “healthy” and “never cantankerous.”

In 1976, she took a leave of absence from the FTC to campaign for her husband, then the Republican vice presidential nominee. In 1979, when he decided to seek the GOP presidential nomination for the first time, she resigned from the commission to campaign full time for him.

After Reagan’s election, he named her a White House special assistant for public liaison, where she served until she joined his Cabinet as transportation secretary.

Blind Trust Questioned

Dole’s Washington record over the years has been nearly trouble-free, with only one exception. At the beginning of this year, questions arose over whether a blind trust in her name had benefited because of her husband’s political connections. No wrongdoing was ever established, but the matter led to a personal spat between Sen. Dole and Bush over whether the Bush campaign had spread the rumors about her finances.

Dole, accepting Bush’s nomination, refused to discuss specific labor issues before her Senate confirmation hearings. But early reaction from both sides--labor and management--was positive.

“We look forward to working with her,” Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, said in a statement. “She is a person of proven stature and wide experience in public life who will give the Labor Department an important voice in the affairs of interest to working Americans.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, agreed.

“President-elect Bush saved one of his best appointments until near the end,” he said. “Elizabeth Dole is an excellent choice for the Labor Department. She is a woman of great ability with many friends in both parties on Capitol Hill. I look forward to working closely with her to meet the broad range of challenges facing American workers and to guarantee the vigorous enforcement of the nation’s labor laws.”

Saul Kramer, a New York labor lawyer whose firm, Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn, often represents management in labor matters, said her appointment “signals that the Labor Department will be an important department in a Bush Administration. She has a reputation for being very capable--a good administrator and a balanced, thoughtful human being.”