Countdown

The Buying of the President 2000

Elizabeth Dole

Not long after graduating from Duke University, Elizabeth Hanford applied for a job at The Charlotte Observer, the largest newspaper in her home state of North Carolina. She’d never worked as a reporter, not even on her college newspaper. What’s more, she’d never studied journalism or even evinced much interest in the field. But she figured that she was ready for the influential newspaper — and vice versa.

“I went in assuming that if you wore the right dress and nodded at appropriate moments,” she later wrote, “your credentials would speak for you.”

The editors, however, figured otherwise. Hanford was not hired. Instead of pursuing a career in journalism, she went to Harvard Law School and became the only woman in U.S. history to hold two separate Cabinet posts in two different administrations. Nonetheless, she recounted the Charlotte Observer story in Unlimited Partners, the 1988 political biography she co-authored with her husband, former Senator Robert Dole. The incident taught her an important lesson. “If you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the case for why you should get the job,” she wrote, “you could hardly expect a prospective boss to make it for you.”

After two decades of toil in her husband’s political campaigns, Elizabeth Hanford Dole spent most of 1999 making the case for why she should be the 43rd president of the United States. Her strongest assets were her popularity and name recognition. For years, Gallup polls listed her as one of the world’s most admired women, and early in 1999 she ranked close behind front-runner George W. Bush in most polls.

But Dole, who dropped out of the race on October 20, 1999, apparently didn’t learn the lesson she laid claim to in Charlotte. Her presidential campaign — like her long career as a Washington insider — consisted primarily of wearing the right dress, nodding at the right moments, and letting her credentials speak for her.

Within Washington, Dole has a reputation as someone obsessed with her own public image. When she was Transportation secretary, her aides marveled as she reironed her skirts after helicopter trips. Before her nationally televised speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention — where she roamed the floor with a microphone — she meticulously coordinated her bright red dress to match the color of the convention hall carpet. Such attention to detail was evident even on her campaign’s website. Ranked at the very top of her most “frequently asked questions” was: “What is Elizabeth’s favorite color?” (Answer: “All bright colors, especially yellow.")

Dole flip-flopped on major political issues so many times that the Washington Monthly dubbed her “the Wallenda of Washington’s big top.” During her political career, she changed her party affiliation from Democrat to Independent to Republican. She went from being a Nader-style consumer advocate to a Reaganesque defender of corporate rights. And while she billed herself as a women’s candidate — appealing to what she called “an invisible army” of female political neophytes — her positions on such issues as abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment were always in flux.

Dole avoided discussing these and other issues on the campaign trail by repeatedly reminding audiences “that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidate with the most money.” This was her way of lashing out at rivals George W. Bush, who had raised 10 times more than Dole by the summer of 1999, and Malcolm “Steve” Forbes, Jr., whose vast personal wealth permits him to spend however much he is willing to spend. “The bottom line is money,” she said in announcing her exit from the presidential race. “It would be futile to continue.”

Dole’s reliance on her resume suggested that she’d learned only half the lesson presented to her in Charlotte all those years ago There’s no doubt that she learned how to make a persuasive case — she made a mountain of money as a motivational speaker — but she appeared oblivious to the fact that she had no journalism credentials back then and had only meager political and executive credentials as a presidential candidate. She had never run for or been elected to any public office. And during her tenures as a Cabinet secretary and as the president of the American Red Cross, she proved herself an aloof manager who was obsessed with her own public image.

Elizabeth Dole tells the same joke dozens of times a year. It goes like this:

”People magazine published a photograph of Bob and I making the bed together in our Watergate apartment. A few days after the magazine hit the newsstands, Bob got a letter from an irate California Republican. The man wrote that he had nothing against a female Cabinet officer. His complaint was personal. ‘Senator Dole,’ he wrote, ‘my wife saw that picture of you making the bed, and now she has me helping make the bed. Please, Senator, you’ve got to stop doing all that work around the house. You’re causing problems for men all across America.’ Well, Bob wrote back to the man. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ my husband replied. ‘The only reason she was helping make the bed was because they were taking pictures.’ “

Crowds love it. And pleasing crowds has made Dole a multimillionaire in her own right. She raked in $1.6 million in speaking fees in 1998 and the first half of 1999, usually netting $40,000 per appearance. She delivered the making-the-bed icebreaker so often that when Bob Dole was scheduled to speak to a group she had addressed the previous day, she left him a handwritten note on their bathroom mirror that said, “Don’t use the joke about the bed — I already used it.”

One reason the joke went over so well is that Elizabeth Dole inherited many of her lucrative speaking engagements directly from Bob. At least five of the 43 organizations she spoke to in 1998 and the first half of 1999 were groups her husband had been speaking to for years. Senator Dole was no stranger to the speaking circuit. He collected $1.4 million in appearance fees from 1981 to 1991 — even though throughout that time Senate rules prevented him from accepting more than $2,000 per speech. In 1993 new rules went into effect that barred senators from keeping such fees. Elizabeth Dole picked up the slack, and began speaking to some of the same groups. From 1991 to 1994 — while her husband was still Senate minority leader — she spoke to at least 16 high-paying organizations that had business pending before the government.

Senator Dole temporarily ceased making paid appearances during each of his presidential campaigns. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley, who collected more than $1.6 million from personal appearances in 1998, took himself off the speaking circuit when he launched his campaign. But Elizabeth Dole didn’t. In the first seven weeks after she formed her “exploratory committee,” Dole made nine paid appearances before various organizations and audiences. Through 1998, she averaged two paid appearances a month; in March and April of 1999, she doubled her speak-for-pay pace even with the added demands of a presidential campaign.

Likewise, Dole used her tenure as the president of the American Red Cross to boost her profile — and fees — as a speaker. Although she was president of the charity through the end of 1998, none of the money for the 29 speeches she made that year went to the American Red Cross. (Dole was prohibited from accepting speaking fees while she served as a Cabinet secretary, though she did take in $100,000 in fees during the year between her stints at the Transportation and Labor departments.) While Dole took large fees for her speeches, her predecessor rarely charged anything. “Most of the time, I didn’t get remuneration,” Richard Schubert, who was the president of the American Red Cross from 1983 to 1990, told the Center for Public Integrity. “If I did, it was in the form of a donation to the Red Cross.”

Throughout the early 1990s, Dole tried to deflect criticism of her seemingly mercenary speaking habits by repeatedly promising to donate the money to charity. But of the $875,000 in speaking fees she earned from 1991 to 1994, only $405,513 — or just .46 percent — went to charitable organizations. The rest went to cover her personal expenses, and to her substantial retirement fund. (In response to heavy criticism in the wake of a January 1996 story in the Los Angeles Times about her tight-fisted giving, Dole blamed her accountant for the errors and made an additional charitable contribution of $75,000.) And the charity to which Dole donated less than half her speaking fees was none other than the American Red Cross, which under her leadership was facing one of the most severe financial crises of its 100-plus-year history.

Dole, apparently, no longer gives to the Red Cross. The proceeds from her speaking engagements in 1998 went into the Elizabeth Dole Charitable Foundation, about which her campaign would provide no information.

Of the $1,136,000 in speaking fees that Dole received in 1998, only $602,458 went to the Elizabeth Dole Charitable Foundation, the Center’s comparison of her financial disclosure form with her foundation’s tax return shows. The rest of the money went to taxes and to another generous contribution to her retirement plan, according to Robert Davis, Dole’s longtime lawyer and another of the foundation’s three directors. The Dole Foundation is a creation of a Cleveland-based accounting firm called Investment Advisors International, Inc., itself a subsidiary of the renowned celebrity agency International Management Group, which is best known for its representation of such sports superstars as Tiger Woods, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky, Andre Agassi, and Arnold Palmer. (The agency has also represented violinist Itzhak Perlman, supermodel Tyra Banks, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.) The Elizabeth Dole Charitable Foundation is controlled by Elizabeth Dole. In 1998 it gave away only $29,157 out of more than $1 million in assets, the minimum required by law to maintain its foundation status.

The Doles are no strangers to the kinds of services that IMG provides. In early 1997 the firm set up a for-profit operation, Bob Dole Enterprises, Inc., to capitalize on the Senator’s name. Dole became a TV pitchman for everything from Visa check cards to Viagra, proving that even if there are no second acts in American politics, there are still commercials after the first one.

After he lost the presidential race in 1996, Bob the Bedmaker became an overnight celebrity. He filmed commercials for Pentax cameras and Air France, appeared on the network TV program “Suddenly Susan,” and popped in on several late-night talk shows. Elizabeth Dole’s connection with IMG suggests that she may have been less interested in moving into the White House than in further feathering her nest at the Watergate. (In the summer of 1999, the Doles purchased the place next door — most recently occupied by Monica Lewinsky — to expand their apartment.) As soon as Dole got out of the presidential race, IMG was poised to help her cash in on her heightened celebrity status and her campaign-financed mailing lists — and, of course, to put her back on the road telling bedroom jokes for a million dollars a year.

Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford grew up in the small city of Salisbury, North Carolina, but it may as well have been called “Mayberry.” Her childhood home came complete with a large attic and an imaginary friend named “Denaw.” Her backyard was shaded by a towering magnolia tree, beneath which she ceremoniously buried a cat named Beauty and a Chihuahua named Penny.

She gave herself the nickname “Liddy” — a name she now, by all accounts, detests. Her father, an affluent florist, gave her just about everything else: summer houses and debutante balls, ballet and horseback riding lessons.

Her most fearsome childhood demons were within herself. She was a perfectionist from the start, obsessed with making a good impression on everyone she met. “When my second-grade teacher sent me home to fetch a forgotten book,” she wrote, “I considered myself such a total failure that I cried all the way down South Fulton Street.”

She followed her much older brother to Duke University, where she joined a sorority. Poised and pretty, she was elected Queen of May and invited into “White Duchy,” an elitist secret society. She was elected president of the student body, and graduated in 1958 with a degree in political science.

Hanford turned down a chance to work in the family business and spent the next few years exploring her options. “A diploma is not a compass,” she wrote, “and the end of my college days found me groping for direction.” She studied education at Harvard University and traveled to England and the former Soviet Union before landing a summer job in Washington, D.C. There, she was impressed by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a popular Republican from Maine and one of only two women in the Senate at the time. In a brief meeting, the aging Yankee advised the young Hanford to go to law school.

Hanford soon enrolled as one of two dozen women in Harvard Law School’s class of 1965. Among them was Patricia Schroeder, who would later be elected to the House of Representatives from Colorado. (They met after Hanford smashed her car into Schroeder’s.) Hanford viewed herself as something of a female pioneer at Harvard, bucking against a male-dominated system. But she relished even more the sense of entitlement that Harvard nurtured. In her own words: “Harvard had come to be known, only half in jest, as the fourth branch of American government.”

In 1960, Hanford worked briefly as a greeter on the Kennedy-Johnson campaign’s whistle-stop tour of the South, a job that required little more than wearing the right dress and nodding at the appropriate moments. She also worked briefly at the United Nations in New York City and the headquarters of the Peace Corps in Washington.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Hanford worked at the Department of Education and briefly in private practice before she landed a job in 1968 on President Johnson’s Committee on Consumer Interests.

Hanford threw herself into the fledgling consumer movement, wearing her newfound activism on her sleeve. Once, when she had a hot-off-the-press copy of a Ralph Nader report, she brought it along on a date. To the dismay of her suitor, she ignored the Washington Redskins game he had taken her to and spent her stadium time engrossed in the report.

Ten months after she went to work in the Johnson administration, Richard Nixon took over the White House. The consumer office quietly backed off from its activism to focus instead on distributing product information and mediating conflicts with manufacturers. Hanford dropped her Naderite loyalties and switched her party affiliation from Democrat to Independent. She was rewarded with several promotions; in 1973 Nixon nominated her to the Federal Trade Commission.

In the early 1970s the solidly Democratic Congress wanted an activist FTC that would bust up monopolies and wage war against the excesses of corporate America. Hanford complied. During her time as an FTC commissioner, she opposed nearly every proposed corporate merger that came across her desk.

Hanford was introduced to Senator Dole in the spring of 1972. She was involved with someone else at the time, and had already turned down several marriage proposals. Dole was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee and had recently divorced his first wife. Their first date was at a Watergate restaurant. Three years later, on December 6, 1975, they were married. She was 39; he was 52. She rehearsed her vows again and again. He just winged it.

“Elizabeth comes from a family of perfectionists, so she has a natural tendency to dwell on what she sees as her own imperfections,” Senator Dole wrote of his wife. “Over the years I’ve tried to convince her that life is too short to worry about yesterday, and perfection is an impossible standard.”

About the same time she changed her name to Dole, she also changed her party registration from Independent to Republican. Her conversion came not a season too soon. The following summer, President Gerald Ford chose Senator Dole to be his running mate. Even while retaining her post at the FTC, Elizabeth Dole went on the campaign trail, charming crowds with her polished style and North Carolina drawl. Ford lost the White House to Jimmy Carter. But the Doles were anointed Washington’s new power couple; Newsweek compared them to Tracy and Hepburn.

Over the course of the Senator’s many presidential campaigns, the U.S. Secret Service — not an organization generally noted for its sense of humor — gave the Doles their most apt and durable nicknames: Ramrod and Rainbow.

With her husband’s help, she lobbied for a Cabinet job in 1980 but was reportedly blackballed by Joseph Coors, the patriarch of Adolph Coors Company, who considered her to be insufficiently conservative. Instead, President Reagan gave her a job running the White House public-liaison office. It was during this time that Dole abandoned her commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment and became one of the most visible defenders of Reagan’s anti-ERA stance.

On a crisp autumn morning in 1986, a well-coiffed Elizabeth Dole stood at the entrance to the parking garage of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Alongside her stood an aide dressed as a crash-test dummy. With a small metal stop sign in her gloved hand, she waved arriving Transportation Department employees over for an inspection. Those who didn’t have their seat belts buckled got a safety lecture from Dole and a handout from the dummy.

The-Dole-and-dummy shtick was but one of hundreds of safety-related photo opportunities Elizabeth Dole staged during her four years as Transportation secretary. After a formidable lobbying effort by her husband, President Reagan appointed Dole to the post in 1983. (Her White Duchy pals congratulated her by sending white carnations.) She quickly dubbed herself the “Safety Secretary.”

On the campaign trail, Dole liked to brag about how she “forced” the automobile industry to begin installing air bags and other passive restraints. She has called the air bag battle the toughest fight of her career. But the truth is that Dole rarely stood up to her famously antiregulatory boss over air bags or any other safety issue. She simply complied with a Supreme Court ruling that directed her agency to enforce the air bag regulations that had been developed by the Carter administration.

Reagan, who complained that industry was “regulated to death,” had no appetite for new safety rules. And without the Supreme Court behind her, Dole crumpled like a cheap bumper. She exempted light trucks and sport utility vehicles from several existing safety standards. She delayed setting a side-impact crash standard for automobiles. And she opposed releasing the results of government crash tests to the public. (Ironically, the crash test results represented precisely the type of objective consumer data she had fought for during her years at the FTC.)

Compared with these missed opportunities, Dole’s list of accomplishments is short. She deserves credit for the 1983 rule ordering automobile manufacturers to install third brake lights, which don’t save many lives but do prevent thousands of minor collisions each year. She campaigned vigorously for higher drinking ages, an effort led by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And she pushed rules aimed at improving airline service. “I was a frequent flier myself and had experienced my share of cancelled flights, misplaced garment bags and nervous checking of my watch,” she wrote. “One of the worst hours of my life was spent at Dulles Airport.”

But it was airline safety — not airport convenience — that became the defining issue of Dole’s Transportation Department. Reagan had fired all 11,400 of the nation’s striking air traffic controllers in 1981, and the nation’s airways were in shambles by the time Dole took the helm. To get the crippled airlines back to their 1981 levels of service, Dole worked Federal Aviation Administration supervisors and their newly hired trainees to the bone. Vacation and sick leave was cancelled; six-day work weeks were mandatory. When the controllers complained, she ridiculed them in public — and openly dismissed the idea that theirs were uniquely stressful jobs.

By 1987, public confidence in airline safety had crashed. Commercial airliners were reporting near-midair collisions at the rate of more than one a day. In May the National Transportation Safety Board warned that the overburdened and understaffed air traffic control system was headed for disaster. Newsweek magazine dubbed 1987 “The Year of the Near Miss.”

Congress begged the FAA to hire more air traffic controllers, but Reagan refused. His “Safety Secretary” never challenged him. “The skies are safe,” Dole repeatedly told reporters. “We have the safest system in the world.”

Management-by-photo-opportunity quickly became the hallmark of Dole’s leadership style. She showed little interest in — and less knowledge of — the agency she headed, leaving the big decisions to her superiors and the rest to her staff.

Her remarkable talent was (and is) her ability to turn an incident that would have been an embarrassing gaffe for a male politician into a cute photo opportunity. Her first steps aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter provided a case in point. Although she often boasts that she was the first woman to head a branch of the armed forces — the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Transportation — hers was hardly a disciplined command: She teetered up the grated gangplank of a Coast Guard cutter in three-inch heels. And rather than politely returning the rigid salute of the rank officer at the end of the ramp, she handed him her purse.

Dole repeated this pattern during her 1989-90 stint as Secretary of Labor. She had little impact on policy, even on legislative issues she claimed to support — such as raising the minimum wage, parental leave, and child-care issues.

On at least one occasion, however, the Dole-and-dummy shtick crashed and burned — literally. In December 1984, Dole invited a crowd of 600 reporters and industry executives to the California desert to promote a new airplane fuel that was designed to prevent deadly explosions during aviation mishaps. Dole and the other VIPs watched from a nearby rooftop as the FAA intentionally crashed a remote-controlled Boeing 720 carrying 75 crash-test dummies, 12 high-speed cameras, and 350 electronic sensors in the cabin. After slamming into the Mojave Desert near Edwards Air Force Base in California, the old Boeing was engulfed in a fireball three times the height of the plane. The fire burned ferociously for another 19 minutes, until a radio call for help came from technicians closer to the crash site: “We’re having some problems putting this fire out.”

By the time the startled reporters turned to her for comment on the miserably failed test, Dole had vanished. FAA Administrator Donald Engen was left to field the embarrassing questions. Dole’s office said later that she had another appointment that conflicted with the $11.8 million FAA demonstration.

Elizabeth Dole has never lacked for money. She and her husband are worth at least $7 million, a large part of which is invested in the stocks of such blue-chip U.S. companies as Microsoft Corporation and Walt Disney Company. She has always had considerable personal wealth independent of her husband’s, especially after she received her family inheritance following her father’s death in 1981. In spite of these advantages, her financial life has been peppered with questionable business dealings, several of them engineered by longtime friend David Owen.

Owen stepped into the center of Dole’s life in 1974, when Bob’s first Senate reelection campaign was faltering. The retired rodeo-star-turned-politician didn’t seek reelection as Kansas’s lieutenant governor, took over the Dole campaign and rustled up a narrow victory. Owen remained Dole’s main fundraiser throughout the 1980s, and he was the national finance co-chairman of Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign. He once estimated that he had raised more than $10 million for the senator.

Owen did far more than raise money. After joining the Reagan Cabinet, Dole put her money into a blind trust. In 1985, Owen was hired as the trust’s investment advisor. He had power — indeed, the responsibility — to make investment decisions without apprising Dole of them. Owen’s stewardship of the trust followed a familiar pattern for the Doles: time and time again, their personal fortune would either provide benefits to, or directly benefit from, their political careers.

In 1982 Elizabeth and her brother were on the receiving end. They bought a beach home at the exclusive Seaview condominium development in Bal Harbour, Florida. Although neighbors such as television newsman David Brinkley and former Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker, Jr., paid full price, Elizabeth Dole got her condo for only $150,000 — tens of thousands of dollars below market value. The seller in this sweetheart deal was another Seaview neighbor, Dwayne Andreas, then the chairman of Archer Daniels Midland Company, an international agribusiness giant that has received billions of dollars of government subsidies as a result of programs pushed by Senator Dole. The “frequently asked questions” page on Dole’s campaign website listed Bal Harbour as her favorite vacation spot.

In 1979, when Bob Dole was running for the Republican presidential nomination, their personal fortune came to his political rescue — though through a circuitous route. Dole’s campaign was running out of cash. Owen wanted to loan money to his old friend through a Kansas bank he controlled, but the campaign most likely didn’t have the assets to support such a loan. So Owen arranged for Elizabeth to use her personal assets as collateral for a low-interest $50,000 loan, the proceeds of which she immediately loaned to her husband’s campaign. The Federal Election Commission investigated the loan in 1980. Lawyers at the FEC believed that the transaction violated federal campaign-finance laws, which limit contributions (and loans) from individuals to $1,000. But the agency’s politically appointed commissioners later voted not to pursue the case.

Early in 1986, Dole’s blind trust, under the direction of Owen, paid $1,350,000 for a drab, two-story office building in Overland Park, Kansas, a well-to-do suburb of Kansas City. Before the year was out she sold the building — to herself and a partner — for a $63,000 profit. Her partner in the purchase was a company owned by John Palmer, a former aide to Senator Dole. To facilitate the transaction, the Dole trust had loaned Palmer part of the money. With the senator’s help, Palmer received a no-bid contract to provide $26 million worth of food service at a U.S. Army base in nearby Missouri. (The chairman of the House Small Business Committee later branded the contract “replete with appearances of improper activities.")

Of course, such sweetheart deals have added to Dole’s considerable wealth. Like many of the well-to-do, she’s been willing to shield some of the investment income she’s received by taking advantage of tax loopholes. In 1983 she invested in a tax shelter called Altenn Associates Limited Partnership. (Altenn’s name was derived from its ownership of real estate in Alabama and Tennessee.) Altenn was set up to lose money for 15 years, thereby enabling its 49 limited partners to reap far more in tax breaks than the investment they risked. The Doles, for example, received more than $300,000 in tax write-offs over five years, for an investment of $14,651 in cash and $156,780 in the form of a note. In 1996, the Center reported that the shelter had reduced the Doles’ taxes by $150,000. They would have received even more in subsequent years, but Congress cracked down on such loopholes in 1986. Ironically, Senator Dole was one of the most outspoken critics of such tax shelters.

Ever since news stories about these and other questionable investments began surfacing during Senator Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign, Elizabeth Dole has repeatedly said that she had no knowledge of Owen’s investments on her behalf.

Owen was forced to resign from both the trust and from the Senator’s 1988 campaign after his handling of the couple’s finances led to a minor scandal. After lengthy state and federal investigations, Owen was convicted on two counts of tax fraud. He served a one-year sentence, and then went back into the investment business in Overland Park.

Dole’s tenure as the president of the American Red Cross echoed her performance at the Transportation and Labor departments. She remained uninvolved in the day-to-day operations of the $1.9 billion-a-year charitable organization, and attempted to manage a staff of 31,000 primarily through pronouncements to the press.

When she took over the century-old charity, the world’s attention was focused on the crisis in Kuwait and the ensuing Persian Gulf War. In March 1991, as soon as the fighting was over, she flew to the front to be photographed with Red Cross staff and the troops they were supporting. After touring an understaffed children’s hospital in Kuwait City, she told the cameras that her organization would send doctors and supplies. Her unilateral gesture offended Muslim factions within the fragile coalition of organizations that makes up the international Red Cross and Red Crescent movement. On the job barely three months, Dole’s May Queen style of diplomacy had already initiated a minor international incident.

Dole’s stump speeches were filled with references to her proudest achievement at the Red Cross: “a seven-year, $287 million transformation of the way the organization collects, tests, and distributes half of the nation’s blood supply,” or almost 6 million units of blood a year. But as was the case with air bags, it took a court order to force the action for which Dole now takes credit.

During the 1980s, the Red Cross and other organizations had been slow to begin testing for new blood-borne diseases — including AIDS — and the public was losing confidence in the blood supply. By the time Dole was hired, testing costs were climbing, donations were falling, and the organization was slipping behind on reforms promised in a 1988 agreement with the Food and Drug Administration. Congressional hearings were focusing national attention on the Red Cross’s failures.

Dole responded with a press conference. On May 20, 1991, she announced a two-year “transformation program” that would rebuild the Red Cross blood-supply system from the ground up. Twenty-eight separate computer systems would be replaced by one national computer, which would contain the medical histories and test results of every donor. Dole called her plan “the most dramatic and far-reaching public safety step the Red Cross has taken in its history.”

Congress and the media responded warmly to Dole’s pronouncement. But much of her own staff was shocked. Few of them heard anything about her plan until they read it in the newspapers. And many feared her sweeping reorganization — which called for temporarily shutting down every Red Cross blood center in the country — would risk leaving too many patients high and dry.

By 1993 — nearly two years after Dole’s sweeping pronouncement — the Red Cross had consolidated some of its testing laboratories, upgraded its computer systems, and begun providing better training at its blood banks. But the FDA still wasn’t satisfied. So the Justice Department sued the charity on behalf of the FDA. The lawsuit, United States v. American National Red Cross, accused the charity of distributing “adulterated” and “misbranded” blood and blood products. The government promised to file criminal charges against Red Cross executives — including Dole — if the organization failed to meet a new set of deadlines.

Dole wasted no time in responding. First, she sent her lawyers back to the FDA to negotiate a new consent decree that didn’t hold her personally responsible. Then, in a move perceived by many to be the ultimate expression of how distant she was from her own senior staff, she assigned two longtime associates to investigate what her people were doing and report back directly to her.

The blood-supply system was eventually rebuilt. But Dole’s leadership style remained unreformed. She continued to insulate herself from the organization through an inner circle with deeper connections to Republican politics than to the work of the Red Cross. The members of Dole’s palace guard included: Jennifer Dorn, her top aide at the Transportation and Labor Departments; John Heubusch, who went on to become the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Mari Maseng Will, a speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and Bush who had worked in all of Senator Dole’s campaigns; and Robert Davis, her private attorney. Her reliance on this shadow staff of consultants was singled out for criticism in a 1996 review of the charity by the auditing firm KPMG Peat Marwick.

At times this inner circle put its own interests ahead of the Red Cross’. In 1995, for example, the Red Cross was putting the finishing touches on a pamphlet, posters, leaflets, and videotapes to be used by instructors in its AIDS-awareness education program. Funded by a $5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Red Cross program sends trained instructors to schools, churches, and civic organizations to teach people how to protect themselves from HIV, the virus associated with AIDS. The carefully edited materials advise sexual abstinence but also illustrate the safe use of condoms. It is the largest AIDS education program in the United States, reaching two million people a year — half of them youth.

But release of the AIDS awareness supplies to the charity’s 1,300 local chapters was delayed for months so that the language — which had already been carefully reviewed by the Red Cross staff — could be further scrutinized. Dole’s husband was running for president, and her political advisers feared that the materials’ frank discussions of sex might upset the senator’s delicate courtship of Christian conservatives. Dole’s allies re-edited the materials, playing down the use of condoms and instead stressing abstinence. Never before had there been such high-level interference in the AIDS program.

Dole’s final act in her $185,000-a-year job was her most transparent use of the charity for her own political ends. She gave herself the starring role in “The American Red Cross Celebrates Real Life Miracles,” a nationally televised Christmas Eve extravaganza produced by Dole’s media adviser and paid for by the Red Cross. The 1998 special featured long scenes of Elizabeth Dole glowingly describing the Red Cross’ accomplishments, as well as shots of its Washington, D.C., headquarters, which bears a remarkable architectural resemblance to the White House. An estimated 3.6 million viewers watched the show, which urged viewers to call and donate to the Red Cross via a toll-free telephone number. The show raised $25,000 in pledges — at a production cost of $1.3 million.

Dole’s 2000 presidential campaign was a continuation of her long-standing management style. She breathlessly delivered her standard 20-minute stump speech, ticking off one-liners as if racing through a checklist. She referred to “the Republican nominee, whoever she may be” and concluded many talks by appealing to her supporters: “Let’s make history.”

At least a dozen women, however, sought the White House before Dole. Among them were Democratic Representative Patricia Schroeder, her Harvard classmate, who ran in the 1988 contest but dropped out in frustration after reporters repeatedly ignored her positions on issues to ask her what it was like to run as a woman.

Throughout her speeches and public appearances, Dole repeatedly promised to “tell it like it is.” Her stump speech was basically a long list of “important issues” that she told her audience she wanted to talk about.

She avoided reporters whenever possible, scheduling few in-depth interviews and waving off most in-the-field questions with a joke and a smile. When cornered — as she was by NBC News’ Tim Russert on the morning after her impressive third-place showing at the August 1999 Iowa straw poll — she answered in nonspecific platitudes. When Russert, the host of Meet the Press, asked how she would keep her promise to shut down illegal drug traffic from Mexico, she said only that “there are a number of options” a president could consider. Russert asked whether she agreed with the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to strike evolution from the school curriculum. Dole replied she would leave that important decision to the states.

Dole raised only $3.5 million through the first half of 1999. Her husband’s prestigious Washington law firm, Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and Hand, is the top patron of her current campaign, with $38,750 in contributions from its partners and their spouses during the first half of 1999.

Dole also tapped into the connections she made at the American Red Cross. The Andreas family and executives at Archer Daniels Midland were among her top patrons. So were Red Cross directors Charles Heimbold, Jr., the chairman and chief executive officer of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, the pharmaceutical giant, and Jon Huntsman, the chairman and chief executive officer of Huntsman Corporation, which manufactures chemicals, plastics, and packaging products. Heimbold and Huntsman, in fact, co-hosted a Washington fundraiser for Dole that brought in $500,000.

But even Dole’s supporters didn’t seem to take her candidacy seriously. Her campaign listed Earle Mack of New Jersey and Howard Wilkins of Washington as members of her finance committee. Mack’s office has said that he’s supporting Bush. Wilkins has said that he’s raising money for Dole and Bush, but mostly for Bush. Many of her husband’s generous law partners also gave money to the campaign of Democrat Albert Gore, Jr.

Even her husband raised doubts about Dole’s candidacy, telling a reporter for The New York Times that he was thinking of contributing to the presidential campaign of Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona. As her campaign boasted about her third-place finish in the electorally insignificant Iowa straw poll, her husband pooh-poohed the event. “Only one-tenth of one percent of the Iowa Republicans are voting here,” he told reporters. “I don’t think it will determine the outcome.”

Dole repeatedly denied that she was really running for vice president. But the fact that she had to do so at campaign stop after campaign stop suggested that even her supporters saw her as a candidate for the No. 2 job. That job, after all, would allow Dole to do what she’s always done best: wear the right dress, nod at the right moments, and let her credentials speak for her.

Top Ten Career Patrons

1.  Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and Hand, Washington
$38,750

2.  Galpin Motors, Inc., North Hills, California
$22,500

3.  American Financial Group, Inc., Cincinnati/Lindner family
$15,000

3.  Tiger Management, New York
$15,000

5.  Kirk Kerkorian and business interests, Las Vegas, Nevada
$13,000

5.  NJK Holding Company, Bloomington, Minnesota
$13,000

7.  Archer Daniels Midland Company, Decatur, Illinois
$11,000

8.  Reppert family, Saint Petersburg, Florida
$10,000

8.  Ruan family and business interests, Des Moines, Iowa
$10,000

10.  Wachovia Corporation, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
$9,500

This list is based on individual and PAC contributions to Dole’s presidential campaign through June 30, 1999.
Sources: Federal Election Commission, Center for Responsive Politics.

5. Includes contributions from Kerkorian, employees of his Tracinda Corporation; and PACs associated with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.; and MGM Grand, Inc.
8. Includes family member contributions from Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Missouri.
9. Includes contributions from employees of Ruan Corporation, Iowa Import Export, and the PACEG PAC, which is supported by employees of these two companies.