For Dole, Road to Politics Began at Kansas Courthouse

These were good days, and on good days Bob Dole took the steps two and three at a time. His office was on the northwest corner of the third floor of the Russell County Courthouse. Sometimes life was so good he whistled up the stairs.

The county back then was tall in wheat and rich in oil. In the town of Russell, there were two movie houses on brick-paved Main Street, two newspapers, a drive-in theater and a combination bowling alley-pool hall. No longer just a wind-blown, flat-iron settlement of Old World immigrants, the community was at the peak of its day when Dole took office in 1953 as the new county attorney.

Traditionally, the job went to graduates just out of Kansas law schools. They would serve the short two-year term, then move quickly into private practice around town. In 1953, there wasn’t a block on Main Street that didn’t boast a law firm.

But Dole had other plans. For eight years he trekked up and down those stairs, representing the people of Russell County in the building’s single courtroom, hashing out legal problems in his tiny office with the wood paneling, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the glass-brick windows.

Dole was county attorney during the time Bill Clinton was in grade school; the same period Dwight D. Eisenhower served in the White House. When the decade ended, Dole emerged a U.S. congressman. He moved to Washington; his Russell years were over.

Forty-six years later he is running for president, running against Clinton with a campaign that resonates Eisenhower themes of American spirit, 1950s-style progress and small-town do-goodism.

His critics contend that he is lost in a time warp, trapped in an era whose values cannot be pasted onto the complicated and ever-changing global world of today.

But he persists. At campaign stops, his speeches often travel back to his baptismal days as a lowly civil servant, frequently praising a time when people looked to friends and neighbors, rather than a distant bureaucracy, to solve social problems.

It was his first taste of government service, his first chance to press the public flesh. It marked his entry into politics. It laid the groundwork for Bob Dole the public man.

In Russell in the 1950s, Dole often sat alone in his courthouse office, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and sorting through his community’s travails without the help of big government programs or the hassles of red tape.

When half a dozen children were taken from their parents because of neglect, he helped local families adopt them. When his grandparents fell on hard times, he helped process their welfare benefits.

Whenever a lovers’ quarrel would erupt between the endlessly bickering couple who owned Red’s Chicken House out on South Fossil Road, Dole would be called on to make the peace. Everyone knew Judge Benedict P. Cruise was a staunch Catholic and did not grant divorces. So Dole was endlessly playing the role of conciliator for the battling pair.

He won four consecutive terms. He dined with the Rotary Club and the VFW crowd, and he kissed babies. He shook the hands of farmers, and he seldom missed a chance to beam for photographers with the annual county rodeo queen. Every month, it seemed, another barbershop quartet hit town. Barbershop quartets were a big draw back then. They drew voters. And that drew Bob Dole.

He was in his 30s, a man on the go when small-town America could still be fashionable. He wore dark blue suits, even in the humid-dipped months of July and August. This was before air conditioning, and still he never loosened his tie or shed his jacket.

He prosecuted town drunks and nighttime brawlers and, occasionally, rapists and thieves. While many of his cases were plea-bargained, when Dole did take a case to the courtroom, he often as not left the chamber victorious. He wasn’t swank and he didn’t swagger, but he won.

People recall that he worked tirelessly--he walked home for lunch and then returned to work, and then walked home for dinner and returned again. The light in his office often burned past midnight, past the time the sound of the Union Pacific train was heard rumbling by Russell’s giant grain elevator as it headed for Denver or Kansas City or other places east and west he longed to experience.

He also was feeling the kick of gut-level politics. In 1957, at the behest of the powerful Kansas petroleum industry, he went to the state Supreme Court in Topeka and persuaded the high court to strike down a new severance tax that would have cost the oil and gas men millions of dollars.

The oil companies responded with campaign money and support that ultimately helped parlay this nondescript county functionary into Kansas’ 6th District congressional representative and started him on the path to becoming a Washington power broker.

He touched many lives in such a small town. How do they remember this complex man of the Plains?

* To his courthouse secretary, Juania June Ball, he was a workaholic.

“Always long, hard hours all night long,” she said. “I had a Dictaphone, and he was talking and I was typing, and you’d lose track of the time until you heard the train go by. He’d say, ‘Well, there goes the 2 o’clock train. I guess we better go home.’ ”

* To retired Sheriff Harry Morgenstern, Dole was someone who quickly learned the politician’s gift of dealing with the voting public, and how to know them so they won’t forget you.

“He was so damn popular,” Morgenstern said. “He knew everybody. He’d call everybody by name. There wasn’t a stranger to him.”

* To Norbert Dreiling, an attorney who became active in the Democratic Party, Dole always was more politician than lawyer.

“He wasn’t regarded as a poor lawyer, but he wasn’t regarded as a good lawyer either,” Dreiling said. “He was using that office to move up the ladder. Kansas was heavily Republican when he came up, and he had everything he needed to pack the house. He was a mean warrior when it came to politics. He was out to win.”

As for Dole himself, he attempted to get at the essence of what it was like to be county attorney when he wrote in his autobiography:

“Politics at the grass-roots level is almost always personal. The smaller the town, the fewer the secrets and the greater the importance placed on personal connections. To many voters, the chief function for the county attorney was springing their friends nabbed on traffic charges.”

For most of his life, he had been surrounded by Russell friends and Russell neighbors. He was born here, the first son of the man who ran the butter and egg creamery on Main Street. At Russell High School, the girls voted him the “ideal boy.”

Dole quietly had dreamed of being a surgeon. But his wounds in a closing battle of World War II cut those hopes short. He spent the next few years in rehabilitation, in and out of hospitals, adopting a stick-to-it determination that someday he would be whole again. He earned a law degree in 1952, and not soon afterward stood up at a community meeting 9 miles out of town. He fought back his shyness and uttered seven words: “I want to be your county attorney.”

The next day he purchased a blue suit on credit at Banker’s Mercantile, then stepped out on Main Street and began passing out fliers.

He ran against Dean Ostrum, a Phi Beta Kappa who was the scion of a prominent local attorney. Ostrum was destined for great things; he would move to the East Coast and become a leading counsel for American Telephone & Telegraph. But first he would lose to Bob Dole.

By all accounts, Ostrum was the better lawyer. But Dole had one thing Ostrum did not--a Purple Heart.

“He never made a big thing about it, but you knew it,” said John Woelk, a lawyer and a Democrat in his 70s who still practices law in Russell. “He had the handicap for all of us to see. You were immediately aware of it because he shook your hand with his left.”

Politics, Dole would later write, “knocking on a stranger’s door, looking him in the eye and asking for his vote, was a way to overcome my disability without denying it.”

He beat Ostrum by less than 200 votes in the GOP primary, then won the general election by more than 2,000.

The job paid $248 a month, less than what the county janitor made. But there were perks, foremost being that the county attorney was allowed to maintain a private practice on the side, complete with use of a free phone and desk.

“He was doing two jobs, really,” said his first wife, Phyllis. “But I didn’t pay that much attention to his work. Bob did what he wanted to do.”

Old-timers remember that county business was slow in the 1950s, and Dole spent much of his time on his private practice or doing what he liked more: Politicking. His pals down at Dawson’s soda fountain tell a story that gives a feel of the time.

One day, according to owner Bub Dawson, Dole stopped by and mentioned that he had a “case.” Dawson rounded up a group of fellows. “Hey, Bob’s got a case,” he told them. Everybody thought Dole had a case of beer. But no, this time he had a real case.

Most of it was run-of-the-mill stuff. Drunk driving. Loitering. Carrying a switchblade knife. A murder file never crossed his desk. There were a couple of incidents of gang rape, and a fatal hit-and-run by a youth in a stolen Pontiac. Dole also convicted a traveling carnival worker who kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl.

“He also had that rather sarcastic wit,” remembered Marvin Thompson, another young attorney then. “He could use it to great effect sometimes. . . . But he wasn’t going to blow a jury apart with his oratory either.”

Dole occasionally took on the oil interests. Farmers often complained that the wells caused saltwater poisoning of their fields, and like county attorneys throughout this region known as the nation’s breadbasket, Dole would defend the farmer.

But Dole found himself allied with the oil companies in 1957 when he filed a challenge to Kansas’ new 1% severance tax on production. He took it to the state Supreme Court and won--the tax was struck down because of a technicality he found in the law’s title.

“Probably my biggest day in court,” Dole would say later.

“After that,” said Dick Driscoll, a Russell lawyer and Democrat, “he suddenly had a lot of support from the oil industry. He helped oil, and oil helped him.”

With money, backing and newly won prestige, the Dole name was becoming known outside Russell. In 1960, he filed as a candidate for Congress. His years as county attorney, he said, his years in local politics had stood him well. Little, in fact, had gotten by him. Even his campaign rallies for Congress were jazzed up with performances by a group of female harmony singers called the “Dolls for Dole.”

All those trips to listen to the barbershop quartets had paid off.