George Pyle, Editor, Salina Journal, Salina, Kansas. He earned notoriety in Kansas from Dole's statement that he thinks he's got most of the Kansas vote, "except that liberal editor from Salina."
Interviewed May 1, 1996
FL: David Owen , very briefly what happened.
PYLE:
David Owen was a very important man in the Kanas Republican Party. He was the
man with the Midas touch. He raised money for everybody, very well. Sometimes
maybe too well, according to some people who thought he did it in ways that
weren't exactly kosher. Finally, after he got in trouble once too often, Bob
Dole just cut him off and he didn't even have the guts to do so himself
apparently. From what we've read, he sent his wife, Elizabeth, to tell Dave
that their friendship was over and his usefulness to the Dole campaign was over
and that was it. And Owen later went to jail on a charge that was not related
to the Dole campaign, but probably a bigger wound to him than a year in Federal
prison was the fact that his great and good friend, Bob Dole, whom he'd saved
more than once, won't speak to him anymore.
FL: Does that raise questions for you?
PYLE:
Well, yeah it raised questions for me. I think a lot of people, people in
Kansas who respect Bob Dole and have voted for him, and will always vote for
him, still kind of feel that was not a good thing that he did. This man, Dave
Owen, worked for him, did everything he asked, did some things that even Owen
didn't want to do. Did it out of loyalty to his friend Bob Dole and when the
going got rough and Owen became a liability, he was cut off. I think there
are times when maybe leaders hang onto their friends too long and maybe suffer
as a result. People need to, if you're going to be a leader, sometimes you're
going to have to fire people. But there's a difference between separating
someone from their official capacity when they're not doing their job right and
stabbing an old friend in the back. And I think a lot of people feel that's
what Bob Dole did to Dave Owen. Even people who support Bob Dole and feel that
maybe for his own long term political survival he needed to separate himself.
But maybe he didn't need to do it quite so cruelly.
FL:
The Bill Roy campaign, what is that story....
PYLE:
This was Bob Dole's closest call. This was the closest Bob Dole ever came to
political oblivion was the 1974 Senate race. He had been in Congress, he had
one term in the Senate and now he was running for reelection. Kansas is a
Republican state. Bob Dole is very popular. The idea that the would be in
trouble was a surprise to people. But Bill Roy was a popular Congressman,
moderate Democrat from Northeast Kansas, and this was right after Watergate,
right after Nixon resigned and Bob Dole had been loyal to Nixon, maybe longer
than he should have even people in Kansas would say. Right after Ford's pardon
of Nixon, Democrats were coming on strong in a lot of places. It was the fight
of Bob Dole's life. The race was very close. For a long time, Bill Roy was
actually ahead in the polls. Which had never happened to Bob Dole before.
The campaign got very nasty. And to some people that was the turning point
for Bob Dole when he came to the point of saying, "I will do anything I have
to do to win." Most people, if they remember one thing from that campaign,
they remember the debate. It was at the State Fair grounds. It's traditional
in Kansas to have a debate during the State Fair which is always in early
September. And it was Bob Dole, Bill Roy, one on one, Lincoln-Douglass style.
I watched it on TV. A lot of people were there. It was broadcast live even
though there was a K. State football game on at the same time, which shows you
how interesting this race was. People were giving up the K. State football
game to watch this. All anybody remembers of that debate is about the last
three minutes where Bob Dole, who really felt that he was on the ropes, just
walked up to the microphone and asked Bill Roy, who was an obstetrician by
training, how many abortions had he done in his life. And Bill Roy was not
prepared for that question, and he kind of stammered a little bit, and then the
debate was over. And that was it. The show was over. TV plug was pulled.
The crowd of Kansans, who had known Bob Dole for years, were offended by that.
A lot of people were offended by that. That's the only time in his political
career that Bob Dole's ever been booed off the stage in Kansas. Immediately
afterwards, Roy's poll numbers went up. He was seen as a victim in that
debate. Bob Dole was seen as having played dirty. But after that the poll
numbers, Roy's numbers started to go down and Dole's numbers started to come
back up. Dole ran a campaign spot that was a picture of Bob Dole being pelted
with mud. Some people thought it wasn't mud, some people thought it was
something a little more of a barnyard origin. And Bob Dole got whatever
benefit you can get out of attacking Bill Roy for attacking him. Then he
pulled the spots and got whatever benefit you can get from saying, "Oh, I'm
above that sort of thing. I'm not going to do that anymore." Bill Roy
wouldn't run negative spots, even though he was encouraged to by a lot of
people and in the end, Bob Dole pulled it out. Two percentage points. Largely
by pulling a lot of votes from the few Democratic areas in Kansas where there
are a lot of Catholic voters who were concerned about the charges that Bill Roy
was some kind of an abortion mill doctor, which he was not. He was an
obstetrician. He had delivered thousands of babies. His only abortions that he
had performed had been in cases where they were clearly therapeutic. But he
didn't want to talk about it. Those were personal things. He didn't really
defend himself from it very well and in the end Bob Dole pulled it out. And
since then he's coasted to reelection every year without a significant scare.
Bob Dole, I think, has told people that that was the low point of his political
career. That was the closest he came to seeing it end. Other people look at
it and see it as the turning point where he completely went over to the dark
side of the force and became the kind of nasty politician that he has a
reputation for being.
FL:
People close to him say that was a turning point for a somewhat new Bob Dole.
Do you see that?
PYLE:
Well, I don't really see that much of a change. I think he's been consistent
through the years. The fact that he's a very ambitious person, that he's
seeking to move up the ladder in the same sense that you would move up the
corporate ladder. And you go by whatever way is the current way in the
organization to move up. When the way to move up the organization was to be
loyal to Richard Nixon, he was loyal to Richard Nixon. Later when the way to
move up was to separate yourself from that, he separated himself from it.
People in Kansas knew what he was doing. They didn't really discredit him for
it. I mean that's the way the game was played. But he's always been the one
to move up the organization and further his own ambition in whatever is the way
to do it at the time. After the Roy race, without any significant political
opposition in Kansas, the reputation for nastiness sort of faded. Then he ran
for Vice President with Gerald Ford and he became the hatchet man of that
campaign and they started drawing him as looking like Nixon and carrying
buckets of mud. After that was over it kind of faded again, until the night in
New Hampshire when he said, "Tell George Bush to quit lying about my record."
Well, George Bush was lying about Bob Dole's record. And again, that became
the kind of point where every once in a while it's brought up to Bob Dole that
politics is a dirty business and if you're going to survive in it you have to
be kind of dirty yourself.
FL:
Could you pursue that, evaluating Dole's career and how he started out as an
underlying theme.
PYLE:
It seems to me that Bob Dole has been pursuing politics as a career in the
sense that people pursue working for General Motors or Amoco as a career. You
start out at a low level, you do what you're supposed to do, you schmooze the
right people, you move up. Maybe you enter the corporate life with some great
vision of the thing that you are going to accomplish. Something other than just
making a lot of money. You're going to make the world's best car. You're
going to cure cancer. You're going to do all kinds of things. In order to
move up the organization, even as you hold that vision of what you're going to
do, you have to fit in with the culture. After a while fitting in with the
culture becomes the only thing you do. It's the only thing that's important.
Your high moral dreams get pushed off further and further back. And it's true
that if you're going to accomplish anything you have to hold some power,
whether it's in the corporate world or in the political world. With Bob Dole,
the disappointment is, I think for a lot of people in Kansas maybe sometimes
unspoken, is that the getting along, the moving up, the corporate climbing, the
political ambition, has crowded out everything else that might have been there.
Any vision he might have had for a direction in which he would lead this
country. There's some question as to whether he ever had it, but if he ever
did have a vision other than Bob Dole's advancement up the structure, it's been
very hard to see what it is.
FL:
You've initiated this Dole watch. This particular part of his career that
offends you. And you've also gotten famous for that Dole watch and famous as a
seasoned and balanced, but nonetheless, Dole critic. And you've even gotten
letters from Dole's sisters.....
PYLE:
In the spring of '95 I started an irregular series of editorials and I called
it the Bob Dole "suck-up watch." It's a name I stole from The New Republican.
But whereas they keeping track of nice things people were saying about people
in power in order to get noticed, I turned it on it's head and started keeping
track of the things that Bob Dole was saying in order to suck up, mostly to the
right wing of the Republican party which was going to have a lot to say about
who the Republican nominee was going to be. So he was going around speaking
against Hollywood movies, he blocked the nomination of Henry Foster to be
Surgeon General, things that I and most people in Kansas don't think he really
cared about very much. These were just things that you had to say to win the
endorsement, or at least not the opposition of the Christian Coalition and
others to move up, to fulfill your goal.
So the suck up watch was an account of blocking Henry Foster's nomination,
speaking out against Hollywood. Talking about how Hollywood ought to put
principal ahead of profits when he certainly wouldn't say that about any other
industry, that they ought to put principal ahead of profits. And I got up to
like part 18 of the suck up watch, early in '96 before it finally kind of,
before it kind of fizzled out after he cinched the nomination because after
that there was less and less of a need for him to go out of his way to try and
pretend to be a true believer in the right wing which he isn't. And which the
true believers in the Christian Coalition have never accepted him as a true
believer. They know better. They know what he's doing. But it's sad. It's
sad for him to think that he needed to do that to move up. It's sad to think
that he needed to trump up these issues and say things that I don't think he
really believes or really cares about one way or another to achieve his goal.
FL:
At the risk of psycho-babble, what sort of way back in his life would make him
so risk adverse?
PYLE:
His family certainly had things taken away from it, and he certainly had things
taken away from him. More so than any Kansas experiences, the Depression/Dust
Bowl experiences of his family. They moved into their own basement and rented
out the top floor so they could make some money. His father had opened a
restaurant and it failed. He had plans of being an athlete and a doctor, both
taken away from him by his war wounds. He had to struggle to come back to even
do anything at all. He had his dreams taken from him. Literally, violently
taken away from him at one point in his life. And he's not going to allow
that to happen again. He feels that he's worked for this, he's earned it, he's
paid his dues. He's done what he's supposed to do. He's done the heavy
lifting. And he's entitled. And he's not going to do anything that will risk
having that taken away from him. It is a characteristic that you will
frequently see in Kansas Republican politicians who are secure, you would
think, in their reelection for as long as they might want it and yet they still
feel the need not to offend the far right, not offend in many cases such
organizations as the NRA, as if those organizations can bring them down. They
can't. They're secure. But they don't want to take the risk. They want the
power. Sometimes for it's own sake. Sometimes for the good they want to do.
But they want to hang on to it. And in Bob Dole's own life, he's lost big.
He's lost things. Part of the reason that maybe the campaign against Bill Roy
got so personal, some people theorize, is that Bill Roy was what Bob Dole had
wanted to be. A successful doctor, well off financially, well respected. Bob
Dole had wanted to be that. Couldn't after he came back from Italy. He wanted
to be many things. Couldn't. His family wasn't rich enough to send him to the
East Coast universities. He had to work his way through college. He started
college, the war pulled him away. Then he had to go back. He was going to be
an athlete. He was going to play basketball for Fogg Allen at K.U. I mean
that's nirvana in Kansas. It was taken away from him. He's very sure that
he's not going to have things taken from him again. But unfortunately in
seeking that he may have given away the unquestioned ability he had probably to
actually accomplish things and leave a legacy other then just served many years
in a position of power.
FL:
Include many other things besides Hollywood. There's a whole range of issues he
doesn't seem to have commitment to.
PYLE:
I think he's concerned about keeping. He wants to keep the Republicans in a
majority in the Senate so he can be the Majority leader. And now he wants to
be President. In order to do these things he seems to feel that he needs to
speak out against gun control to placate the NRA, he needs to speak out against
abortion to placate the Christian Coalition, he needs to speak out against
Hollywood movies despite the fact that he's a big recipient of money from Time
Warner and various other people. He needs to do all kinds of things to make
him look like somebody he isn't really. I don't know why he seems to need to
do that but he does. The Henry Foster nomination. Normally he's a person who
says the President is entitled to make whatever nominations he sees fit. He
shot that down because it came at just the right point for him to score some
points in the Republican nominating process. It's just the long series of
things if he'd been another hack politician nobody would have noticed. But
because he is a skilled and experienced and influential member of the Senate,
you think he wouldn't have to do these things. And that's why it becomes a
suck up and that's why it becomes so disappointing to people who might
otherwise support him. I think to a lot of people in Kansas. I mean people in
Kansas who voted for him over and over again were telling me, "Gee I wish he
wouldn't act to partisan." "Gee I wish he wouldn't just be picking fights with
Clinton just for the sake of it." "We sent him up there to do some good, and
he's just picking these meaningless fights. Why is he doing that?" They ask
me like I know. I don't know. I wish I did. I wish he wouldn't do it.
FL:
If you look over the entire record in Congress, what are his great legislative
victories or are there not many at all?
PYLE:
In terms of legislative accomplishments there are two that stand out. One of
them is food stamps which is a way of getting assistance to people who need it
that is more resistant to fraud than just simply handing them cash, and it was
a deal he made with George McGovern, the most liberal of Senate Democrats, in
that it served the poor and the needy population that George McGovern was
particularly worried about and it served Bob Dole's constituency, Kansas
farmers. Sell more food. The perfect deal. The deal, the political deal in
the service of actually serving people, actually doing good things for people.
He's very proud of it and I think he deserves to be. The other one is more
recent. It's the Americans With Disabilities Act. Even though Bob Dole goes
around say[ing], "There's too many government regulations and government is involved
in our lives too much," the Americans With Disabilities Act is Bob Dole's
creation. And it's because of what happened to him, he has a special empathy
for people with disabilities and the barriers that society puts up to people
who want to work. People with disabilities who just want to make their way in
the world. They don't want welfare. They don't want a handout. They want a
job. And through this Act requiring employers to make reasonable
accommodations for people with disabilities people can now work and make their
own living. He stuck to that, he was proud of that. He deserves to be proud of
that. Why there aren't more of those -- with the power he has, with the
ability he has, with the smarts he has - that's the disappointment.
FL:
Revealing emotion, not revealing emotion, style, prose. Describe the landscape
and the fact that you're from Kansas.
PYLE:
I've lived in or very near Kansas all my life. It's a very harsh landscape.
It's the weather, goes to great extremes. It's one of those places where for a
lot of people you seem to feel that because it's so flat you don't want to be
the one that stands up too tall because you'll get cut down. It's extremes of
weather. Dreams have been killed here. Crops have been blown away. Towns have
been destroyed in a night by a storm. You can be real disappointed dreaming
big dreams in Kansas. It's said that the people who came through Kansas who
were dreaming big dreams went on to California and Oregon. People who stayed in
Kansas were the merchants, the bankers, the sod busters who were just after
efficiency. They were just going to stay here and hunker down and get the job
done. And I think there's a lot of that in Bob Dole's character and I think
there's a lot of that in the Kansas character. There's a, this is a landscape
without adjectives and so we don't use a lot of adjectives when we speak.
Short sentences. Digs. Insults as humor. Insults as a way of expressing
affection. It can really, you get in a situation where you don't really want
to expose yourself. You don't want to leave yourself open to the weather or
even to your relatives who will use it as a way to dig at you. It's, it can
be [a] hard place to live. It can be a good place to be from, but it's killed a
lot of dreams. And it can lead you to be the kind of person who will hold on to
your dreams very jealously and very fiercely to make sure it's not taken away
from you again.
FL:
Could you talk a little more about the emptiness and the affect it might
have.
PYLE:
Well, Kansas. The wide open spaces. Some people find it freeing. Some people
find it liberating. Some people find it intimidating. There's no horizon.
There's nothing to see. Some people can't wait to get away from it. Those who
stay, I think, become comfortable with it. They deal with it. They're here,
they cope. We're the kind of people, you ask us how we are, we say, "We're
fine." I mean we could have just been run over by a truck but you ask us how
we are and we say "We're fine." We don't want charity. We don't want a lot of
help. But people will help you. Every year, every newspaper's got a story
about the farmer who broke his leg at harvest time and all the neighbors came,
brought their combines and harvested his wheat for him. They weren't asked.
They just showed up. They were thanked. Maybe with a meal. And they all
went back to what they were doing. It's just expected. Not a lot of emotion.
Not a lot of crying and hugging and I was just thinking the other night, when
you have Bill Clinton going around saying, "I feel your pain." In Kansas, we
will give you money so that we don't have to feel your pain. So that you will
go away and take care of yourself. We don't want to feel your pain. We may
understand it, we may even empathize with it a little bit. But we don't want
to feel it. We got enough of our own. Thank you. And more than the
landscape when you're talking about Bob Dole. You're talking about the
generational thing. You're talking about the Depression. You're talking
about the Dust Bowl. You're talking about things that modern Kansans, people
my age and younger, even can't identify with even if we've lived in Kansas all
our lives. With communication we're all more connected to the rest of the
country. Kansas is less different than it used to be because of modern
communication and modern comforts. It's as simple as air conditioning. I mean
it's not as harsh as it used to be. But people of Bob Dole's generation, life
was hard. They don't see any other way of living. They don't expect life to
be easy. They don't expect government to make it easy for them. It's hard and
it's going to remain hard and you'll only survive if you're just as hard.
FL:
What about Dole's humor? It's singular quality and how it's an expression of
this Kansas culture.
PYLE:
Bob Dole's pretty much known for his sense of humor and it's often very
cutting, very dry. Some people think it's mean. In Kansas sometimes, that's
kind of a way that you express affection for people without being caught at it
is to get in whatever dig that you can get in. And if you think of one on
yourself, you say it before the other person can say it. A lot of Bob Dole's
humor is very self deprecating. He, my favorite joke is the one after he and
Elizabeth became well known as a power couple in Washington and People Magazine
did a story about them and their Watergate apartment. And there was a picture
of the two of them making the bed. And some old guy from Bob Dole's
generation in Kansas wrote him a letter and he said, "I'm in trouble now at
home. There's this picture of you helping Elizabeth make the bed. Now I'm
expected to help make the bed at home." And Bob Dole wrote back and said, "The
only reason Elizabeth was helping me make the bed was because the People
photographer was there." And so that's the kind of joke on himself that Bob
Dole tells all the time. You go to any coffee shop in Kansas and I don't know
that this is unique to Kansas you'll see a lot of seventy year old people
sitting around, drinking coffee, insulting each other. It's kind of the way
they express their affection for each other. But you can't say "I love you
man" in Kansas, you say, "Boy, that's an ugly truck!" Or, "Where did you get
that tie?" Bob Dole has raised that to a higher level, but that's kind of the
Kansas sense of humor is to just get in the next shot before somebody gets it
in for you.
FL:
Bob has said that working at that drugstore was really a way of honing skills
for the Senate. Talk a little bit about what you could learn in a Kansas drug
store about people and about life and sports and the weather and cut deals...
PYLE:
The drug store in Russell, there was only one, and everybody came through there
at one time or another. And you had to serve everybody. And you had to deal
with what everybody wanted. And if you were going to be successful, then you
had to start remembering what everybody wanted. So they would sit down and you
would put the cup of coffee, or the ice cream soda or whatever it is they
always ordered in front of them. And to be successful, you remembered that.
You didn't wait to be asked. And you were always ready with a joke. And that
survives to some degree to this day. Although you don't see it at McDonalds,
even in Kansas. But it's the idea that you're going to serve everybody, you're
always going to be quick with the joke, you remember them, you call them by
name. You remember what they want, you remember how they like it, put on a
little show for them. Being a good soda jerk is a performance. So is being a
good Senate Majority Leader, I guess. It's a lot of the same talent. It's,
but it comes down to the thing of it's a talent but it doesn't really matter
whether you're jerking sodas, or passing legislation, or selling cars. It's
the same talent applied to whatever you're in. The disappointment sometimes
is, that's all it is. Instead of any kind of grand accomplishment it's just
selling sodas in a more expensive suit, in an older building.
The analogy that's often used for Bob Dole is that he's Darth Vader. And people
don't realize how apt the analogy is in many ways. If you really see the films
and you know the story you know that Darth Vader was once another person who
was a good person and he was looking for ways to do good things so he would
require more power, and more power and then after a while he turned to the Dark
Side of the Force. The easy way to power, the way to hang on to power, the way
to develop it, the way to not lose it. But soon, then you find out that
instead of you controlling the power, the power controls you. And you can't
give it up. You're trapped in it. So whereas the name Darth Vader has become
this generic term for a bad person, I think it's more apt for Bob Dole than
people realize. Some people think that the day he turned was the debate with
Bill Roy. Other people think it was the night in New Hampshire when he said,
"Tell George Bush to quit lying about my record." It was the point where he
went from dealing with power and the dark side of power, but remaining on the
outside of it, to embracing it and stepping into it and becoming a
personification of the exercise of power.
FL:
Could you talk about the money theme. The possibility of this implicit quid
pro quo.
PYLE:
If Bob Dole does anything well, it's raise money. He's raised millions and
millions of dollars for himself, for others, for his PAC's, for his Campaign
America. And he will go anywhere, speak to anybody, to raise money. He's
excellent at it. The question is, the people who are giving that money, what
are they getting back for that? And Dole has never claimed that they're just
giving him money out of the goodness of their heart. He understands, and he's
been very honest about the fact that people expect something when they give him
money. Whether it's just access or whether it's a specifically, narrowly drawn
tax break to benefit the Gallo family, or the people who make ethanol, I don't
think that Bob Dole sees anything wrong with that. Because he's in a culture
where that is the rules. That is the way things are done. And anytime anybody
criticizes him for it, he just, he feels that these people are incredibly
naive, they don't understand the way the game is played. He doesn't feel
that he's deprived anyone of anything by giving to the people who have given to
him, and it's a recurrent theme. People give him money, he gives them a speech,
he gives them access, he introduces a rider in a tax bill to
their benefit, and he doesn't try to hide what he's doing, he doesn't try to
deny what he's doing. I think he feels other people in the Senate are being
hypocritical when they criticize him for it, because they do the same thing.
Or he knows they would if they had his skill and his power. It's another
example of just adapting yourself to the culture you find yourself in and
playing it for all it's worth. Without any moral qualms about it whatsoever.
FL:
Final accounts. In the book, "Buying the President," and in other watch
groups, Clinton is even better at it.
PYLE:
Clinton and Dole are much more similar than people realize. The phrase
"brothers under the skin" really applies. They're both very good at soliciting
contributions from all manner of people who may or may not be the kind of
person you would expect them to be allies with. At holding out the hint and
sometimes delivering on the promise that these people will get something in
return for their contribution. I mean sometimes it's no more than being able
to sit at the head table with the important guy. Other times its legislation
or rulings that favor them. It's not something that either one of them tries to
deny that they're doing. It is the way the game is played. It is how you get
ahead. And if you do have any desire to serve the people of America, it is
what you have to do to get, and to stay, in power. I think it would be very
easy once you get into power and you start playing these games, to rationalize
to yourself, to be able to look yourself square in the eye in the mirror, and
say, "This is the kind of stuff that I have to do, in order to stay in power,
which I have to do in order to do anything good. And I'm not really hurting
anybody and the people who are whining are just the people who want to do what
I'm doing but can't. Go buy your own Senator. I'm playing the game the way
it's supposed to be played." I don't think he sees anything wrong with it.
FL:
You also talk about other similarities between them. Even the women they're
married to.
PYLE:
Bill Clinton and Bob Dole have so much in common in so many ways. They have
independent and powerful women that they're married to that have, or could
have, their own careers. What's interesting I think, because of the careers
they've chosen and the success they've had in their careers, are constantly
moving around people who have a lot more money than they do. Business
executives, corporate CEOs and such. And they go into a room where they're
supposedly the most powerful person in the room, but they're also the poorest
person in the room. Even the rich people start to feel sorry for them after a
while. And that's where you get the friend who gives you advice on cattle
futures or the person who let's you buy in to their television production
investment at no risk. And you get this big payoff from it. They want to
preserve their political friends in a style to which they would like to become
accustomed so they can comfortably move in these circles, so they can hold
their own. And they may not even be thinking about the fact that that leaves
them beholden. That leaves the politician beholden to the corporate person
who's set them up for this. Sometimes there's genuine sympathy for this small
state governor or this small state senator who's fighting the good fight and
not having any financial rewards for it. But then you start to move in those
circles and you start to see that as normal life. Whereas there are people
here in Kansas and down in Arkansas who would have loved to have gotten in on
that cattle futures deal. And it's not because the Doles and the Clintons are
less moral than anybody else, it's because the opportunity is before them when
it's not before any of us.
What you tend to wonder about both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole is why? Why do
they want this power? What do they want to do with it? Why are they bending
over backwards and cutting deals and doing things that even they, so many years
ago, would think they'd never do. What do they want out of it? I think both
of them have at their core have some sense of morals, of things that they won't
do and some sense of sympathy for people who aren't as well off as they are.
Dole really is concerned about everybody from disabled Americans to besieged
Bosnians. And I think Bill Clinton is sincere when he wants to stand up for
whatever minority, whether it's gays that want to serve in the military or
women who are seeking abortions, I think he really is concerned, but that's not
their driving force. Their driving force is to move up the corporate ladder, to
acquire and hold power, and sometimes when you ask them why, you get the
feeling that they don't know why. That's just what people do. Anybody who's
ambitious in whatever field they've chosen, success is judged by whether you
move up. In the military, in some police departments, if you don't move up,
you're pushed out. And that's kind of the thinking that dominates here. You
move up. Even if you have to leave behind some of whatever idealism you may
have started with.
[Re: cutting deals] Bob Dole when he works on something very seldom will he
stand up and say, "I'm going to invent food stamps." "I'm going to end
discrimination against the disabled." He works over a long period of time,
counting votes, making deals, giving what he has to give to get what he can
get. And as a result he has probably more successes that he can point to, not
of the monumental scope, but he's able to tick off a laundry list of things
that he's done, or things that he would have done if it weren't for those nasty
Democrats who got in his way because he doesn't promise something way in
advance of his ability to deliver it. That's a good Senate Majority Leader.
Whether it would be a good President, I'm not sure. But it again goes back to
the idea of the art of the deal and the process maybe being more important than
whatever you are trying to get accomplished.
FL:
The "art of the deal." What's involved in that kind of deal?
PYLE:
What Dole seems to excel at is just the encyclopedic mind of keeping track of
what the other 99 Senators want, what they have to have, what they have to have
to get elected, to get reelected, what they have to have to take back home to
their people to show that they accomplished something. And he's able to keep
track of that, give the Senators what they want, even Democratic senators. Give
'em what they want so he'll have their vote on what he wants. And I can see how
this can become seductive. How to play this game and play this game and play
this game better then anybody else. And he does play it as well or better than
anybody else. You don't get to be the leader for as long as he's been the
leader unless you can do this. People who stick to their own personal visions
and fail to compromise and fail to scratch the other Senator's back don't rise
to leadership positions. They remain mavericks, outside the mainstream,
getting very little done. Maybe making a lot of sound bites but not actually
accomplishing any legislation. And Bob Dole is able to do that. The concern
is when it becomes, is he so enamored of the deal and the game, has it become
such inside baseball, that for those of us out here in Kansas we go, "Well,
what have you done for us lately?" And he's unable to articulate what he's
done because we haven't been able to see the long process of getting it all
worked out. I mean he's seen the cow made into the sausage and he thinks it's a
pretty neat trick. And he has a right to think it's a pretty neat trick. We
just see the end product and we're not quite so impressed.
Probably the funniest Bob Dole joke wasn't actually spoken by Bob Dole. It was
spoken by Dan Ackroyd doing Bob Dole on "Saturday Night Live" during the 1988
campaign. They were all playing the various Republican candidates on
supposedly some panel discussion and Ackroyd as Bob Dole had had it up to here
with Pat Robertson and his holier than thou attitude and he said something to
the effect of, "If you're in so good with God, why don't you heal my right
arm." And the audience loved it. I think that was kind of cruel humor, either
making fun of Dole's disability or picking on someone's religious belief. The
audience went nuts. They loved it. And I have heard from, various people have
claimed to be the one who showed Bob Dole the tape of that bit, and supposedly
he loved it and his wife loved it and they all loved it. And people in Kansas,
I thought, loved it. I loved it. I thought it was hilarious. Problem is,
in real life Bob Dole didn't stand up to Pat Robertson that way. And I think
everybody in Kansas, not everybody, but a lot of people would have been very
proud of him if he did. Because people call me and say, "Bob Dole is sucking
up to the religious right. That's nothing new. Kansas is the Bible Belt. Isn't
Kansas dominated by the Pat Robertson types?" No it's not. Kansas
conservatism is a live and let live, you live your life and I'll live mine and
if you want to be weird, just don't do it in the street so I have to watch it
kind of conservatism. It's just like in the old Westerns and the phrase is,
"You do as you please. I'm going to do this." And old fashioned Kansas
conservatism doesn't have a lot of room for the Pat Robertsons of the world,
for the Christian Coalitions, for the people who want to impose their own moral
order on anybody. Kansans just mostly want to be left alone and they will
leave you alone in return. And that's Bob Dole.
Russell is a real place. It may become less so if Bob Dole becomes President
and the media descends on it and the Presidential Library goes there. But now
and in the past, Russell is a real town, with real people, ecking out a living
as best they can without a lot of airs, without a lot of pretensions. And if
there is a core to Bob Dole it comes from there. When he comes back to it he
changes. People who have watched him, who have watched him in Washington, who
have watched him on the campaign trail, then they follow him to Russell, and
they look at other Kansans, and they say, "Who is this man and what have you
done with Bob Dole? Who is this person standing here?" He carries that with
him. He has a real affection for this town. And he knows very well what they
did to help him when he was down and needed their help and they raised money
for him to go through the horrible rehabilitation that he had to go through.
They contributed their money. But they do it in a Kansas sort of way. You
know, real low key. You pay for your lunch at the diner, you get some change,
you throw it in the cigar box. They don't do big telethons and raise a lot of
money. And you still see that in Kansas in convenience stores and cafes.
There's frequently a little jar raising money for someone who needs a lung
transplant, someone who needs a kidney transplant. And we still put money in
them. And we still raise a lot of money that way. Now in this different media
age they also bring in country music stars and do a concert, but it's the same
kind of thing. We look out for each other. We stick up for each other.
It's like the Frank Capra movie, "It's a Wonderful Life", it's a little town
where the people when the going gets tough will stick up for each other.
Mostly they live their own lives. They don't bother you. You don't bother
them. But they know who their neighbors are. And they care how their lives are
and they're proud of them when they accomplish things. You know George Bailey
never left. And even though he kept wanting to. Bob Dole did leave and to
the extend that he may have gone down the wrong path, it's the separation from
Russell, Kansas. So if anybody doesn't like Bob Dole, don't blame Russell.
Blame Washington.
Somehow I seem to have developed the reputation as the little kid who points
out that the emperor has no clothes. The Dole Suck Up Watch, the editorials, I
endorsed his no-name opponent the last time he ran for reelection to the
Senate. To some people it's a real telling of family secrets and you don't
talk about those things. And his real family has managed to cancel their
subscription to The Salina Journal more than once. They get tired of me
pointing out where Bob Dole has not lived up to the expectations that I think
the people who vote for him have. I don't speak to him directly. I'm in a
position where I'm in my office mostly reading and writing. My reporters talk
to him and he will send me messages through them as in, "Tell that Louis Lefty
that I beat him again." Or he will bring a lot of money to something that's in
Salina, or in our area and be very proud of the fact that he's brought a lot of
money and he wonders how much money I've made for the people of Salina. Not
very much. And he wants to make sure everybody understands that. So I don't
think it's, some people talk about how he can get really mean. I don't think
he's been really nasty about it. He's just giving as good as he gets. But
yeah, I have kind of developed this reputation as being the Dole critic
back home in Kansas. It's really very easy to do.
A long time ago many people, and Bob Dole was among those given credit for
coming up with this, referred to the Hutchinson News as the "Prairie Pravda"
because he thought it was rather too far left for something in the middle of
Kansas. And in recent years as I've been writing the things I've been writing
criticizing Bob Dole and George Bush and Ronald Reagan before him, I was kind
of hoping that maybe The Salina Journal could get the title of the
"Prairie Pravda" but I asked him that through a reporter and the reporter
brought the message back that, "No, the Hutchinson News will always be the
Prairie Pravda you're just this Louis Lefty rag from down the interstate."
He's apprising me of what I want. That's the way he wins this argument.
FL:
Could we go back --the art of the deal. What do you need to do to be really
good at it as he is?
PYLE:
One thing that he's honed to a fine art, as he pursues the art of the deal in
Congress, is that he will get something, and appropriation for something
specific in Kansas. A program at Kansas State University, something for Fort
Riley, something for McConnell Air Force Base. Instead of going through the
long legislative process, he will wait until an appropriations bill is in a
conference committee to resolve differences between the Senate and the House
and there you can start all over again, you can add anything you want. So if
he's on the conference committee he will do it himself, if he's not he'll call
whatever ranking Republican is on the committee and he'll say, "Oh by the way.
How about $700,000 as defense peace dividend money for this aviation program in
Salina, Kansas. It would really help me out." So they put it on there. No
legislative hearing. No attempt to justify to the Senators from Maryland and
Washington and Florida that Federal tax money ought to be spent on this program
in Salina. It comes out. You can't amend a conference committee report, it's
voted up or down. And so he's, through just making a phone call, he's made
somebody in Kansas a lot of money. Now, these aren't the kind of things like
really weird experiments for tracking the sex life of snails, these are things
that build buildings and buy airplanes and things like that. It doesn't go
through the legislative process...
Congress is a whole different thing than the White House so I'm not sure how
his talents will translate to the Executive Branch. He's never been in the
Executive Branch. In Congress over the long haul you have to be patient. You
have to be able to count votes. You have to be able to give as well as to get
or you're not going to get anywhere. Bob Dole does that very well. He counts
votes, he makes deals, he waits to bring things to the floor until he thinks he
can win. He isn't interested in a lot of filibusters and such things. Even
when he's trying to suck up to the far right, they don't always believe that
he's one of them because if he knows he hasn't got the votes, he doesn't bring
it up for a vote. He waits until he knows what's happening. He doesn't ask the
question unless he already knows the answer. This is the kind of thing that
can consume you. Counting these votes, scratching these backs, thinking this
Senator needs this to stand up to the charge that he's soft on the environment,
so we'll give him this. This Senator is in a tough primary fight so we'll give
him that. And he knows all this stuff, and he sucks it all up, and he keeps it
in his mind. It goes back to the drug store in Russell. Knowing what
everybody wants. Calling them by their name. Helping them out. Remembering
what they said the last time they were here so you can throw it right back at
them. It's a talent. It's a skill. It's a valuable skill in any walk of life.
In any business. The reason I can't make it in politics is cause I can't
remember people's names when I see them from one time to the next. He never met
a stranger. Although I also talked to people who think he goes down a line,
and shakes a lot of hands, he just starting to shake your hand and he's already
talking to the next person in line. Cause he's so eager to get everything
done. It's something that can consume you and it's something whereas the game
becomes everything.
And the worry of those of us who have observed and criticized Bob Dole's career
over the years is that the deal, the game has become everything. With a few
notable exceptions, the Americans With Disabilities Act, Food Stamps, his
pressure to stand up for Bosnia, it's been everything. And he would act
precisely the same way whether the issue was endangered species or aid to the
Contras or declaring some building in San Diego a national monument. It didn't
seem to make any difference. And you start to wonder what's he doing with all
the power and what's he doing with all that skill. He's making deals. Are
they the right deals? Are they the deals we want? Would he even know if he
tripped on one?
FL:
Nixon. What do you think he saw in Nixon?
PYLE:
I think with Richard Nixon, Dole in a lot of ways saw a kindred spirit in the
sense that they were both from poor families in small towns that had come up a
long way. Who worked their way through school, had labored in the vineyards
for the Party, had done the little jobs that nobody wants to do and been
rewarded and rewarded for their hard work. They probably always felt that the
East Coast establishment, liberal or otherwise, media, the Harvard and Yale
graduates, those people - they probably always felt that those people looked
down on them. That they didn't respect them cause they hadn't been to the
prestigious universities. Their accent was strange, they didn't dress well
enough. So they probably had this shared feeling of inferiority among the
East Coast establishment. Bob Dole stuck up for Richard Nixon's past when even
people in Kansas thought he ought to be sticking up for Richard Nixon. And
part of it was probably political expediency and probably it was genuinely
felt. That these two people had come up together, they'd worked together,
they'd been loyal to each other and he was going to continue being loyal. He
accepted the Chairmanship of the Republican National Committee at a time when
it might have been suicide for a lesser politician and it was very damaging to
Bob Dole for a while. But his President called and he took the job. You
wonder what Bob Dole has learned from Richard Nixon and it might be that you
fear what Bob Dole may have learned from Richard Nixon. I think that some of
the meanness that we see in Bob Dole is something that he might have learned
from Richard Nixon. More so than he brought with him from Kansas. The idea
that you better get them before they get you, I think is a legacy of Richard
Nixon that sometimes shows up in Bob Dole. If Bob Dole is elected President, I
don't think you'll see an enemies list. I don't think you'll see challenging
people's broadcast licenses because they give you the kind of coverage, the
way Richard Nixon did. I don't think you'll see that in a Bob Dole
administration. But I do think there's a bit of the residual feeling that
"They're out to get me cause I'm not one of them, so maybe I better get them
first."
FL:
The lessons of practicality.
PYLE:
I can't think too much beyond that. Certainly part of Nixon's problem is that
he didn't cut a few people loose soon enough and he suffered for it later and
that may be why we now see Bob Dole having cut loose Dave Owen, having turned
his back on people when they get in trouble in his service. He will say, "They
may have a problem, but it's not my problem." He may have learned that from
maybe Richard Nixon's failing to do that as soon as he should have with the
plumbers and various other people. But I think he sees where Nixon failed and
I think he's able to draw from that, that Nixon's fabled total inability to do
such things as make small talk and compromise in areas where he should have
compromised, those are not Bob Dole failings and I think he saw where Richard
Nixon just was so paranoid, and so fearful of just meeting people in some
cases, that's not a problem that Bob Dole has. And I think if anything he may
have learned from Richard Nixon not only what to do, but what not to do.
There supposedly was a memo written by Richard Nixon to Robert Dole about how
to win the Republican nomination. Bob Dole says that he's never seen that memo
and that maybe he would like to see it cause there might be something useful in
it. But what's been reported about the memo is run to the right during the
primaries, pick up the endorsement of the Christian Coalition and that element
of the party. Then as soon as you have the nomination sewn up, scamper back to
the center for the general election. And whether Bob Dole is deliberately
trying to do that, whether he's actually following that memo from his
ex-mentor, that's exactly what he has done. He has run to the far right in the
primaries, winning in South Carolina saved him after he lost New Hampshire. He
did that with the backing of the Christian Coalition. And running to the
right. And he knew he was going to have to do that. And he tied up the
nomination so early that even part of The Salina Journal's Bob Dole Suck
Up Watch was the chronicling of him moving back of the center just as soon as
it was apparent that he had no longer any real rivals for the nomination any
more. It's kind of like watching a track in the snow. Obvious turn to the
right, obvious turn to the left. All with this kind of wink to his core
supporters, the people in Kansas, that you know and I know and we all know that
this is just what you have to do to get elected. So why is anybody upset about
it?
FL:
Again, the similarities between Clinton and Dole....
PYLE:
There's this great Tom Tolls cartoon. It's Bill Clinton and Bob Dole sitting
on a see-saw. A playground teeter-totter. And they're sitting in the middle,
not on the either end. They're face to face and each of them is saying to the
other, "Extremist!" It's a perfect illustration of the fact that they're just
not that far apart. There are some issues that separate them, abortion
probably being the most obvious, but they're really very similar in many ways.
They're career politicians. Very pragmatic. There is a little core of values
that they both have but it doesn't always show in their desire to gain and hold
power, and make deals and win successes in the legislature. In the legislative
process. Neither one of them is going out on a limb for anybody. They stay in
the middle where it's safe and only venture out to the left, to the right just
as it's necessary to pick up some votes and pick up some support. Kind of
scary really. It's almost surreal how similar they are in so many ways. The
differences between them are largely generational, rather than ideological. And
the thing that strikes me about the difference between the generations. Bob
Dole had the "Good War". He fought in World War II, severely wounded, fought
his way back. Bill Clinton avoided, some would say dodged, the draft in the
Vietnam war. But it was a different war, it was a different society.
Everybody went to serve in World War II. Bob Dole didn't want to. He wanted
to play basketball at K.U. And I can't believe for a minute that if Bob Dole
was a member of Bill Clinton's generation, and the war he was faced with going
to was the Vietnam war, that he would not have pulled every string and flipped
every switch to get out of avoiding it. The difference is, Bob Dole would have
done it better and left fewer finger prints on that process than Bill Clinton
did.
FL:
Could you summarize again the shaping influences on Dole.
PYLE:
Bob Dole is a very complex person. Many things have shaped his life.
Childhood in Russell. Poor childhood. The extremes of the Kansas weather.
The harshness of the economy at that time. The Depression. The Dust Bowl. I
mean people literally died, choked to death from the Dust Bowl. He saw that.
Dreams of going to college because of his athletic prowess taken away from him
by the war. Fighting back after wounds almost killed him, with the financial
and moral support of his small community. Success in politics without a lot of
things to really point to in having changed the world. It's a very complex
character, a very complex individual. And to sit here and predict what kind of
President he might be is very difficult. I don't know that I'm willing to risk
it.
