Archives Detail GOP Candidates’ Nixon Connections : Records: Among the insights is Dole’s 1969 flood of letters to the new administration urging the appointment of Kansans to numerous posts.

In January 1969, Sen.-elect Bob Dole of Kansas began deluging the incoming White House of Richard Nixon with letters recommending the appointment of loyal Republicans from Kansas for jobs in the new administration.

According to a cache of Nixon White House documents released Tuesday by the National Archives, Dole sent dozens upon dozens of letters suggesting candidates for positions in virtually every government agency and advisory board.

And Dole received back dozens of form letters from a mid-level White House personnel aide named Harry S. Flemming politely rejecting the incoming senator’s advice. “Your recommendation is very much appreciated and will be carefully considered,” Flemming wrote time and again.

By April 1, Dole had collected more than enough White House rejection slips.

In a letter dripping with Dole’s famous caustic wit, the senator complained to a senior Nixon aide that every one of his recommendations had been passed over. Only one native Kansan had been named to a job in the administration, Dole noted, and his appointment papers listed him as a resident of Michigan.

Dole added sarcastically that he still had hope that his entreaties would be answered. “I can tell you, in confidence, that we do have an inside track on a janitor’s job at the [Agriculture Department but] we lost out on the doorman,” Dole wrote.

The exchanges are among the thousands of pieces of Nixon correspondence and memorandums unveiled Tuesday at the massive archives facility in College Park, a suburb of Washington.

In addition to five boxes of Nixon papers regarding Dole, the archives released smaller files documenting Nixon’s relationship from 1969 to 1974 with current presidential candidates Lamar Alexander and Patrick J. Buchanan, as well as with 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot and Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who flirted with a presidential bid this year.

There are no startling revelations among the thousands of pages but there are scores of fascinating historical curiosities and new insights into the byplay between the Nixon White House and its allies in and out of government.

There is a plea from Perot for a meeting with Nixon to discuss problems Perot was having with a Wall Street brokerage house he bought and which later failed.

The Perot file also includes a note from Nixon’s military aide thanking Perot for his late 1969 attempt to deliver Christmas packages to prisoners of war in North Vietnam.

There is a letter from Kenneth Cole, a White House assistant, to Alexander, then a young aide to newly elected Tennessee Gov. Winfield Dunn. Cole urged Alexander to read a Look magazine profile of Nixon Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and said that Haldeman--the aide Nixon relied on to carry out unpleasant tasks--was “the kind of man the governor ought to have on his staff.”

There is nothing in the records reflecting Alexander’s later service in the Nixon White House as a legislative aide.

The file of Buchanan, a Nixon press aide and speech writer, is likewise sparse, including a couple of dinner invitations and the official record of an appointment to an advisory board.

Powell is found in only a handful of documents that mention his tenure as a White House fellow in the Office of Management and Budget in 1972 and 1973. On July 31, 1973, White House staff secretary Bruce A. Kehrli asked communications aide David Gergen whether the president should issue a letter of commendation for the promising young lieutenant colonel. The answer isn’t recorded, but Powell’s military career obviously flourished after his White House service.

While the Dole files are by far the most voluminous of the records released Tuesday, they mostly record the mundane, day-to-day relationship between a constituent-minded young senator and a White House of his own party.

There are countless pleas for Nixon appearances at Kansas events, requests for patronage jobs, recommendations on legislation of interest to Kansas and requests for presidential birthday and wedding anniversary greetings.

In return, Nixon regularly thanked Dole for his support on the Vietnam War and other major foreign and domestic issues. There are also dozens of invitations to White House social events.

From Dole’s early rocky start with the Nixon White House, the relationship clearly grew warmer. By 1972, Dole was chairman of the Republican National Committee as Nixon was seeking reelection, and there is a tantalizing sample of the political correspondence flowing between the party and the White House in the months leading up to Nixon’s landslide win.

All the explicitly political material has been exempted from release and remains the property of the Nixon estate, although a couple of revealing notes slipped through. Herbert G. Klein, Nixon’s communications director, wrote to Dole at the Republican National Committee in February 1972 to complain that Dole had announced that Klein would be leaving the White House to become communications chief at the reelection committee.

He told Dole that he was “a little shaken up” to learn that Dole had made the announcement. Klein added, “This is not my plan, and if it were, it would seem to me it would be best if I made the announcement.”

But to show there were no hard feelings, Klein penciled in on the bottom, “Great socko by you on Muskie,” apparently referring to a partisan Dole attack on the then-front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine.

In January 1973, Dole was ousted as chairman of the Republican National Committee and replaced by George Bush. But Dole remained loyal to Nixon, who was then six months into the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation.