A Tale of Glass Houses and Stones

Now that Bob Dole’s surrogates have put the “Clinton character issue” into play, it seems only fair to raise some questions about their man as well. After all, Dole did not just rise out of a foxhole to run for president the way his campaign ads suggest. World War II was half a century ago and since then, most of Dole’s life has been spent in Washington feeding heartily at what conservatives like to call the public trough.

As the Wall Street Journal noted in a front page report last week, “A look at the former majority leader’s portfolio shows the many financial advantages that flow to powerful politicians but are unavailable to ordinary citizens.” Among the perks revealed when Dole recently released 30 years of tax returns is that many of his personal expenses, including most restaurant meals, vacations in Hawaii and various expensive gifts to friends and relatives, were paid for out of congressional and campaign expense accounts.

Dole took in $1.6 million from lucrative speaking engagements before special interest groups, leaving the Journal to anoint him “long the Senate king of honorariums.” After the Senate banned that practice over Dole’s repeated opposition, his second wife Elizabeth began appearing, for a high price, before many of the same groups.

The newspaper also reported that Mrs. Dole profited $50,000 in 1986 from a deal arranged by Kansas businessman David Owen, who was lobbying her husband at the time. Owen, who was a key Dole advisor as early as 1968, remained in Dole’s inner political circle and served as the national finance chairman in Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign. Owen was also the manager of a blind trust for Dole’s wife. According to the Journal, during the three years that Owen managed Elizabeth Dole’s trust, its value increased by an impressive $429,000.

“Sen. Dole, meanwhile,” the newspaper reported, “helped land an Army contract for an Owen-affiliated company that later bought half of an office building from the Dole trust, producing a $100,000 gain for Mrs. Dole.” Owen claims that Dole was aware of the details of this transaction, but he denies it.

The 20-year relationship between the Doles and Owen ended with Owen being kicked out of the 1988 Dole presidential campaign after stories about his alleged financial improprieties surfaced. As a result of subsequent investigations, Owen served six months in a federal prison.

All of which should have left the Doles quite sympathetic to the plight of the Clintons as they attempt to unravel the financial peccadilloes that their one-time friends may have led them into. Instead, Dole is playing a duplicitous game, claiming to take the high road but permitting his surrogates to drag in Whitewater whichever way they can.

Let’s take this matter of a presidential pardon, which Dole brought up in the presidential debate and which his campaign proponents keep mentioning. Clinton, in response to a reporter’s question, had failed to categorically rule out the possibility of any pardons in the Whitewater affair. Are we supposed to forget that Dole, as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1972, provided cover for the Nixon administration as it thrashed its way down a trail of lies and deceits that make even the worst-case scenario against the Clintons seem like child’s play? Or that it was Dole who vociferously defended Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon all through the 1976 presidential campaign when he was Ford’s running mate? In his recent book, Dole writes admiringly of the Nixon pardon that “Ford’s move was as courageous as it was politically risky.”

In September 1973, Dole introduced a motion to end the Senate’s televised Watergate hearings, saying, “It is time to turn off the TV lights. It is time to move the Watergate investigation from the living rooms of America and put it where it belongs--behind the closed doors of the committee room and before the judge and jury in the courtroom. We must get on with the country’s work. Time and the rest of the world will not stand still while America squeezes the last drop of anguish and printer’s ink out of Watergate.” Substitute Whitewater for Watergate, and Bill Clinton couldn’t have put it any better.

Not that I am enamored of Clinton, whose definitive failure of character was exposed when he signed the welfare bill, that most odious achievement of the Gingrich-Dole Congress. But the president has just not spent enough time in government to rival the collection of political opportunism, financial perks, special interest trading and partisan chicanery that is indelibly a part of Dole’s legacy.