When Bob Dole Said No

[RedEarth]

They want me to head Veterans," Bob Dole said. "They" meant the Bush White House. His tone said there were things he would rather do.

I asked him whether he was going to do it -- take on the campaign role of going after the veterans' vote. "Probably have to," he said, although he added that he knew the Bush campaign would want him to attack John Kerry, and he didn't intend to do that. He didn't have anything against Kerry, he said.

The conversation in my old friend's Pennsylvania Avenue office took me back decades. In the 1970 off-year elections, Bob Dole, freshman senator from Kansas, campaigned so aggressively for Republican candidates that he was awarded the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee. It looked like one more giant step forward for the man whose war wound in April 1945 brought him near death on three separate occasions and kept him bedridden for years while other young veterans were starting careers. When he finally learned to walk again, he did it with a vow: "I'm going to get those years back," he told his brother Kenny.

But the RNC job was a poisoned apple. It came from the White House, and Dole was expected to pay an extravagant price for it. I was, in the way of things, the bill collector. For a brief period, I worked for Charles Colson. Chuck was one day to found an important prison ministry, but before his pilgrimage took him there he styled himself a hatchet man for Richard Nixon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34024-2004Aug25.html