The Elizabeth Quotient

We’re serious about California. . . . Elizabeth said she would move out here, if that would erase any doubt.

--Bob Dole

*

The floats and marchers are queuing up this foggy Fourth of July morning in Huntington Beach, preparing to strut. The guest of honor has yet to arrive, but she is anxiously awaited by fans pondering the morning’s thorny question:

Who do you like better, Elizabeth Dole or Bob?

“That’s like picking between ice cream and steak, it’s two different things,” argues Nicki Wolfe, a member of the Balboa Bay Republicans, pausing just a moment before getting to the real point. “If she were running for president, I would sure vote for her.”

For 20 years, Elizabeth Hanford Dole has been her husband’s “Southern Strategy,” “Rainbow” to his “Ramrod,” to use their early Secret Service monikers, his most ardent defender. And, his occasional competitor. In 1988, both were on the short list to be George Bush’s running mate.

Today, she is an integral cog--both as advisor and mate--to his hopes of moving into the White House.

Dole is her husband’s surrogate on the hustings, which allows them to cover twice as much ground. She serves as his eyes and ears and calls his aides with daily reports. And GOP strategists see her as the bridge over the candidate’s yawning gender gap, though some polls show so far that she’s not really much help in that department. In California, men like her, while women favor Hillary Clinton.

Various polls also show that while Americans know surprisingly little of the personal side of Bob Dole, a man who has trod the public stage for 35 years in the highly specialized world of Congress, we know even less about his wife, long among the most powerful women in U.S. politics.

Elizabeth (“don’t call me Liddy”) Dole has given up more prominent Washington jobs than most men have ever accepted. She is, in no particular order, a former secretary of Transportation, a former secretary of Labor, a former member of the Federal Trade Commission and a former assistant to President Reagan; currently, she is on hiatus from the presidency of the American Red Cross.

“My wife is so talented,” declares a jocular Bob Dole, in a dig at the current first lady and her imaginary conversations, “that Eleanor Roosevelt is trying to reach her.”

And he is fond of telling cheering conservatives: “She does a great job, and I think she’ll do an outstanding job as first lady. And she will not be in charge of health care. We may have a little blood bank in the White House, but otherwise. . . .”

While it has become commonplace to compare Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Dole as sisters under the skin--both have Ivy League law degrees, both are devout Methodists, both come from affluent professional families unlike their Horatio Alger husbands--to do so is to miss a crucial fact of their lives.

“There is a very important distinction,” says historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written widely on the political power of presidential wives. “They are only about 10 years apart, but those 10 years represent being on different sides of a mountain.”

Clinton, 48, is a product of the feminist movement. Dole, 60, began her studies at Harvard Law School in 1962--one of 24 women in a class of 550--the year before Betty Friedan’s landmark “The Feminine Mystique” hit the country’s bookstores and our national psyche.

Dole’s “advancement has been a product of individual initiative against the rest of the world,” Anthony says. “She operated in a vacuum, a woman out there among men. She became one of the boys. She proved herself.”

Elizabeth Dole’s current full-time project is her husband’s struggling presidential bid. While she denies that California is her particular focus, she has spent 23 days in the Golden State over seven separate trips, visiting 39 cities with and without her candidate husband since he announced his run for president 16 months ago.

She has walked through food banks, feed companies, hospitals, even toured the gas chamber, pretty in pink. She has met with young people, old people, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, even Shamu the killer whale.

She has been to breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, barbecues and chili cook-offs here. She has signed books, watched “Independence Day” while munching popcorn and Goobers, celebrated her 60th birthday at Chez Helene restaurant in Beverly Hills. She has raised money but never lowered her guard.

“I’m very much an extrovert, so I don’t think of myself as a private person,” says this woman who has perfected the art of saying a lot while giving virtually nothing away. She adds: “I certainly enjoy the privacy of having time with my husband alone rather than being out on the social circuit.”

She hasn’t had much of that lately, but that goes with the territory when your husband is trying to become the leader of the Free World. Perhaps more striking is how little privacy this power couple of politics has ever had.

Their intimate life is a government life. They swap political stories like other couples trade tales of the kids, the grocery store, the dog. Their domestic squabbles end up on national television and concern not who forgot to buy milk, but rather whether the federal government should establish a consumer protection agency.

“ ‘Good Morning America’ heard that we’d had a difference of views on this issue” in the mid-1980s, she recounts. “David Hartman [then host of the ABC morning show] had been at Duke University with me. So he called and asked us to debate this on his program. As you might imagine, it was very lively . . . and we got a lot of pretty interesting mail.”

Like the letter from one female viewer who counseled the good senator that if he ever wanted to get ahead in politics, “he had better get his wife to shut her mouth,” she recalls in “Unlimited Partners,” the couple’s joint autobiography.

The Doles were introduced in the early 1970s by Virginia Knauer, head of Richard Nixon’s Committee on Consumer Interests and Elizabeth’s boss and surrogate mother.

“He was handsome, a lawyer, he was definitely public service oriented,” says Knauer, who arranged for Elizabeth, then her deputy, and Bob, then serving not only as a senator but as Republican National Chairman, to discuss consumer affairs. “I set up the meeting and stepped back so Elizabeth would shine in all her glory. And it worked.”

When they were wed in Washington’s National Cathedral in 1975, the printed announcement at their wedding breakfast was far from the usual romantic rhetoric. On each guest’s plate was a reproduction of the Congressional Record with the following suggestion: “I move to amend the Robinson-Patman Act to render the Dole-Hanford merger a combination in the public interest, and not in undue restraint of trade.”

On the campaign trail, she calls him “Bob Dole.” But, shoot, on the campaign trail, he calls himself “Bob Dole” and then struggles to explain to voters that he “wasn’t born in this blue suit.”

That’s where she comes in.

Nelson Warfield, press secretary to the mister, is quick to tell reporters that the missus “doesn’t act like a campaign consultant,” that “the most important decision maker in this campaign is Bob Dole.”

That said, Warfield continues, Elizabeth Dole is “the campaign’s most hearty road warrior”; she has visited at least as many states as her candidate husband. And her job as she hops around the country with two Secret Service agents and a personal assistant?

“She can talk about the man she knows, differently than the man can talk about himself,” Warfield says. “She can talk about the qualities of kindness and care that she knows from a unique perspective.”

She likes to tell audiences of the tributes paid to her husband from lawmakers to the left and right when he retired from the Senate on June 11. She likes to tell them of Senate surveys of the little guys who work in government, polls that “asked who’s the friendliest, nicest senator that you’ve been involved with that you see on a daily basis. And Bob Dole was No. 1 for those employees who run the elevators, capital police.”

But most of all, she likes to recount how the Social Security system was going broke and her husband was instrumental in saving the day. As a member of the Reagan administration’s National Commission on Social Security Reform, Dole and his compatriots were charged with finding a way to overhaul the system. The group was given 12 months, bogged down, got a two-week extension and crafted a package of changes that Congress passed in 1983.

“The only part of the tale Bob Dole leaves out is his own role,” she says in her soft, North Carolina drawl. “My husband’s a modest man. He won’t say it but I will. I’ll say it in a minute. Bob Dole was the key to saving Social Security in 1983.”

*

Early on a sunny Friday morning, nearly 100 of verdant Salinas Valley’s farmers and agricultural executives are dressed in natty blazers, gathered for a morning with Elizabeth Dole.

Ann Veneman, California’s top agricultural official, introduces Dole to the Western Growers Assn. breakfast as the guest of honor stands demurely by.

“When you look at Elizabeth Dole’s resume, it is one that is so impressive that you cannot do it justice,” Veneman gushes before reciting a laundry list of accomplishments that ends like this: “And she’s been named by the Gallup Poll as one of the 10 most admired women in the world.”

Here is where Dole, bright in Republican red, gives a little moue of embarrassed displeasure, a facial “oh, how you do go on,” the kind of expression that hides the fact that she put that line in her official campaign bio, right up there in the very first sentence.

Veneman finishes with the obligatory “I’d like to introduce you to the next first lady of the United States,” and Dole is off, prowling through the crowd with a cordless microphone like an Oprah Winfrey with the perfect hair.

She likes, she says, to be “a little informal,” strolling through the crowd on well-shod feet, thanking her hosts for the “beautiful setting,” remarking on “this glorious day,” “this wonderful occasion.” She charms the group, she touts her husband’s record and she winds up with a visual aid color-coordinated to her elegant suit.

She notes that on a recent trip to North Carolina, her home state, “I was given this little rocking chair. It’s called the Bill Clinton rocker. It rocks right to left.” She gives the miniature rocker a tap and smiles broadly. “Isn’t that interesting. Talk right. Govern left. . . . It sums it up, doesn’t it?”

Dole is the queen of staying on message--a highly prized political art. She is so much better at it than her husband that at times he looks like a novice when they speak on the same stage. Sometimes, she is even good enough to thwart his penchant for rambling and keep him on script.

But it’s a tough job, as was seen in a recent CNN interview:

Larry King: So you would say to all Americans, “Stop smoking”?

Bob Dole: Yeah, all of you, stop smoking.

Elizabeth Dole: Certainly. And pregnant women and elderly people who have respiratory disorders certainly should not smoke.

Bob Dole: It’s not good for you. My brother had emphysema. . . . So it’s just not good for you. It’s bad for your health. Don’t do it. And having said that. . . .

Elizabeth Dole (a hand on her husband’s): That’s it.

Bob Dole: That’s it.

Larry King: That’s it. Pretty firm.

*

Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford was born in Salisbury, N.C., the only daughter of a prosperous flower merchant and a music-instructor-in-training who gave up a career to become a wife. Elizabeth doted on her older brother, John, and took spiritual guidance from her grandmother, Mom Cathey, whose well-worn Bible she quotes from today.

“My spiritual journey began many years ago in a Carolina home,” Dole tells religious audiences, “when Sunday was the Lord’s day, reserved for acts of mercy and necessity, and the Gospel was as much a part of our lives as fried chicken and azaleas in the spring.”

As an undergraduate at Duke University, where the freshman handbook instructed women to write thank-you notes to their dates and avoid blue jeans, Dole graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and was elected student body president and May Queen.

Her grandmother is the probable source of Dole’s single-minded desire to be useful in life, a trait that--combined with her strong Christian faith--causes her to refer to her job at the Red Cross as a “mission field.” When Mom Cathey lost a son at the hands of drunk driver, she donated the money from his insurance policy to build a wing on a Pakistani hospital.

“I suppose the thing I’ve loved in Elizabeth these many years is her loyalty, not only to family and friends, colleagues, but to what I think she feels is her mission in life,” Knauer says.

That life, however, has not been free of controversy. For instance, while Bob Dole has filed income-disclosure statements saying that all of his wife’s speaking fees were contributed to a Red Cross charity account “except for taxes, a contribution to a retirement fund and speech-writing expenses,” a Los Angeles Times analysis showed that the couple kept a substantial amount of those earnings.

Two weeks after that story appeared, she paid $74,635 to an American Red Cross charity to resolve a discrepancy between the donation she claimed she had made and what appeared on the couple’s tax returns and financial disclosure forms. She said a “tax and accounting error” had resulted in a smaller donation than she had intended.

A recent story in Time magazine, meanwhile, noted that Elizabeth Dole’s massive restructuring of the Red Cross “was largely forced on her by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after its inspectors found the Red Cross to possess dangerously little control over its blood operation.”

And a recent article in the Nation contends that Dole has assembled a team of longtime political advisors to “vet important Red Cross actions, both managerial and scientific, with a political sensitivity to what might help or hurt Bob Dole’s presidential ambitions.” It also took Dole to task for allegedly having her allies rewrite a Red Cross AIDS prevention manual to “cater to Christian right orthodoxies.”

That Elizabeth Dole is quite public about her Christian faith would come as little surprise to those who watch “Hour of Power.” As Red Cross president, Dole has been a guest speaker on the Sunday morning television broadcast from the Crystal Cathedral.

And to small prayer breakfasts and huge Christian revivals, such as last month’s Harvest Crusade in Anaheim, Dole tells the story of her “spiritual crisis” while working in the Reagan White House in 1982.

“My life was threatened with spiritual starvation,” she told some 30,000 worshipers at Anaheim Stadium. “I’d built up my own little self-sufficient world. I had God neatly compartmentalized, crammed into a crowded file drawer of my life somewhere in between gardening and government.”

A Monday night prayer group and Bible study with other Senate wives, she says, helped her to regain her equilibrium. She struggles these days to keep Sundays free for family and reflection. And she prays often--for help and in thanksgiving.

“I pray to praise God, to thank him for all his blessings and mercies,” she says. “I also pray . . . to seek help in challenging moments and ask for his guidance and wisdom.”

*

Elizabeth Dole is having some challenging moments now, as her husband is some 20 percentage points behind Clinton in most polls. She will have more challenging moments if Bob Dole somehow wins the election and she becomes the first first lady to combine that full-time job with another.

If she moves from their cramped two-bedroom apartment in the Watergate complex to the family quarters of the spacious White House, she plans to return to her $200,000-a-year job at the American Red Cross. She will also lead a movement to increase charitable giving in America, she says.

But while she insists she will be a different first lady from the woman she wants to replace, she will be far from mute on the running of the nation.

“Because I’m blessed with a beautiful marriage and we respect each other’s views, we talk things over, of course you have an opportunity for input,” she says.

“And I have background I think would help me to make a contribution, certainly just as now I’m involved in all that’s going on. . . . I would continue to certainly have a role, because he’s going to ask what I think, and we’re going to talk things over.”