Whatever

With no effective response on the air, the $30 million Democratic ad blitz attacking ““Dolegingrich’’ had taken a toll. The members of one focus group referred to Dole as ““Newt’s Uncle.’’ ““We’ve got to make this guy seem compassionate,’’ said pollster Bob Ward. Maybe they could do it by his choice of vice president. Somewhat wistfully, Ward began referring to the still unnamed veep nominee as ““she.''

In June, the campaign tried to come up with a catchy slogan. After endless discussion, Dole’s advisers settled on ““A Better Man for a Better America.’’ The campaign also selected ““message modules’’ that were supposed to summarize the themes of the campaign: ““More secure jobs. Smaller government. Stronger families.’’ At about the same time, the Clinton-Gore campaign went up on the Internet with its own home page. Fabrizio called Ward. He asked if he had seen the Clinton-Gore Web site.

““No,’’ Ward said.

““Log on,’’ said Fabrizio. ““Are you working late tonight?''

““Yeah.''

““Screw it. Go out and get drunk.''

AS SOON AS WARD LOGGED ON TO the Democrats’ Web site, he could see why Fabrizio had recommended the bottle. The Clinton-Gore themes were almost identical to theirs, including such phrases as ““strengthen America’s families,’’ ““take back our streets from crime, gangs and drugs’’ and ““making government work better and cost less.’’ Ward could understand what the Democrats were up to: both sides were finding the same results in their polling and research. The difference, Ward thought, was that Clinton used his polling and research. The Dole people ignored theirs.

The campaign was drifting. Dole had failed to take advantage of the emotional lift from his resignation speech in May. Because his staff had been caught by surprise, there was no plan to follow up. Dole ended up wandering aimlessly around Florida the weekend after his resignation, as much vacationing as campaigning. There was no attempt to coordinate the ““air war’’–the paid ads–with the ““ground war’’–Dole’s speaking schedule. The schedule drove the message, instead of the other way around. If Dole was supposed to appear in Milwaukee, then someone would think up something for him to say there.

On June 12 Dole and Elizabeth embarked on a three-day swing through the heartland that was supposed to unveil the new ““Citizen Dole.’’ (His campaign plane was no longer the ““Leader’s Ship’’; from now on it was ““Citizen’s Ship.’’) Campaign aides told reporters, ““If you go on one trip this month, this is the one.''

The trip was a disaster. Dole left out his best lines bashing Clinton as a ’60s liberal and, as usual, wandered from the prepared text. ““We went through a tough primary. Spent all our money,’’ he said, prompting a round of stories (fueled by the Clinton campaign) that his campaign was now exceeding the federal spending limits. Instead of concentrating on Citizen Dole, he reminisced about the Senate. ““I understand the government does good things. I’m not out to destroy it,’’ he said. He joked about being out of work. ““I’m going around the country to see where they have the best unemployment benefits,’’ he said in Toledo.

Dole couldn’t understand why the reporters, his friends when he had been a senator, twisted his offhand remarks into serious stories. Asked how he planned to resolve differences in the party over abortion, Dole shrugged and said, ““Piece of cake.’’ He was just kidding, trying to make light of the hard job of unifying angry right-to-lifers and pro-choice advocates. But the next day The New York Times built a whole story around the comment. The reporters on the plane, Dole groused, had not ““an ounce of humor.’’ He would not have been amused to know that reporters were calling his plane ““the Sinking Ship.''

That wasn’t the worst. As he and Elizabeth cruised down the muddy Ohio River aboard the steamer Belle of Louisville, a local reporter asked if the FDA should regulate tobacco as a drug. Dole wondered aloud, ““Is tobacco addictive? To some people smoking is addictive. To others, they can take it or leave it.’’ The press accounts immediately made Dole into the tool of Big Tobacco or a retro figure or both. Dole felt he was just being honest and personal. He had once smoked and quit. He didn’t think that he had been addicted–what was nicotine after all the morphine shots he had taken to numb his war wounds? Stubbornly, he refused to back off. “‘We know it’s not good for kids. But a lot of other things aren’t good.’’ He mentioned milk as one of those ““things,’’ thereby creating a new flap.

The Democrats gleefully piled on. Dole was soon dogged on the campaign trail by ““Buttman,’’ a succession of Democratic volunteers wearing a cigarette costume. The press played along. Dole was exasperated with a New York Times story on June 29, DOLE RE-ASSERTS HIS DOUBTS THAT TOBACCO IS ADDICTIVE. That’s not what I’m trying to say at all, Dole grumbled. He felt he had been intentionally misrepresented. His frustration spilled out in an interview with Katie Couric on the “‘Today’’ show. The ostensible topic was “‘Unlimited Partners,’’ the book he had written with his wife, but Couric kept pressing him on tobacco. Dole’s brow lowered. He attacked Couric and the rest of the media for being ““biased.’’ He suggested that Couric was violating the campaign-finance laws by ““sticking up for the Democrats.’’ He further suggested that NBC and Couric were hypocrites because they, too, took tobacco money.

The time had come for a refresher course from Jack Hilton. Arriving at Dole’s Watergate apartment on July 14, the speech coach was blunt: Dole could not sail off from his basic message to get into silly arguments with reporters. ““You’re never going to get a message through to the electorate if you allow yourself to be dragged all over the landscape,’’ Hilton warned. Tobacco wasn’t worth fighting over. ““Why spend your face time with the public on that?’’ Hilton demanded. Dole just listened.

By July, morale in the Republican camp had reached new lows. The Team GOP gatherings with Newt Gingrich and Haley Barbour were suspended altogether. ““There would be fistfights if they held those meetings,’’ said one Dole aide. The speaker was in a huff, complaining that the Dole campaign wouldn’t listen to him. Barbour was sick of hearing Republicans all around the country complain about Dole. At campaign headquarters, paranoia was rampant. When was the next purge? Aides would scurry up to Dole’s closed door, slide his schedule under it and slink away again.

On July 11, Dole pollster Bob Ward traveled to Milwaukee to moderate a round of focus groups. He asked, ““What are you seeing about the presidential campaign?’’

The swing voters mentioned the headlines. Filegate. Whitewater.

““Is this going to affect your vote?’’ Ward asked.

No, the voters said, it really wouldn’t.

Why?

The voters said the controversies were politics as usual. Clinton can’t be trusted, they said. This is nothing new.

““What do you think of Clinton?’’ Ward continued.

He’ll say anything and do anything.

““Then why do you still plan to vote for him?’'

He’s not doing a half-bad job, the voters said. Character doesn’t really matter.

Ward wasn’t surprised. The discussion only confirmed what polling had already suggested. Americans in the ’90s had low expectations of their presidents. As long as they didn’t screw up the world or the economy, they were OK. Since the cold war ended, people were far less concerned about who was sitting next to the red phone. Dole, Ward thought, would have had a much better chance if people were still worried about nukes.

The campaign manager, Scott Reed, labored to stay focused. He tried to catch leakers by setting traps, giving different tidbits of information to different staffers, then waiting to see which ones emerged in print. ““When I catch them, I will fire them,’’ he vowed, though, in the manner of most leak investigations, he never did. Reed told himself that campaigns have peaks and valleys. He pinned his hopes on three events that he believed would turn the campaign around: the economic plan, the vice presidential nominee and the convention in San Diego.

Republicans win when the subject is taxes–or so goes Republican orthodoxy. The logic is not subtle: Republicans want to cut them, Democrats want to raise them. The modern models are Ronald Reagan, who won two terms by putting money back in the taxpayers’ pockets, and George Bush, who was thrown out of office for violating his own ““no new taxes’’ pledge. Dole knew the history as well as anyone, but he had a problem: his own history.

Dole believed in lower taxes, and he voted for the Reagan tax cuts in 1981. But as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he was the one who had to clean up the mess afterward. The massive 1981 cuts opened a gusher of red ink, and because spending was not cut to the same degree, Dole and other responsible legislators were left trying to staunch the flow. Dole was perhaps the most responsible. He led the passage of a $250 billion tax increase in 1982, and had the courage–some would say foolhardiness–to try to nip the annual cost-of-living allowance for Social Security recipients in 1985. President Reagan nixed that attempt at fiscal prudence, and other Republicans taunted Dole. Newt Gingrich called him the ““tax collector for the welfare state.''

DOLE’S POLITICAL INSTINCTS were at war with his good-government scruples. In 1995 Dole embraced a $245 billion tax cut proposed by Gingrich and the House Republicans. But he was hardly a true believer. As he sat in the sun in April ‘96, recovering from his battering in Iowa and New Hampshire, he realized that he would have to come out for a tax cut, and a big one, to win in November. The dilemma was how to propose a big tax cut and still look credible. Dole knew that the Democrats would mock him for a deathbed conversion. Instead of Bob Dole, paragon of prairie virtue, he would seem positively Clintonian in his expediency. Any tax-cut plan, Dole knew, would have to also balance the budget. The numbers, he told his aides, had to add up. To help write such a plan and lend it an aura of legitimacy, Dole called on a panel of notable economists from institutions like Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago. In sober academic language, Dole’s advisers churned out papers calling for a half-trillion-dollar tax cut over six years to boost economic growth. The tax cuts would at least help pay for themselves. Supply-siders base much of their argument on the miracle of ““feedback’’: tax cuts increase economic growth, which in turn produces more tax revenue, paying for the tax cuts. Dole took what he saw as a more responsible position, claiming a ““feedback’’ return of only 30 percent. That still meant that Dole had to find roughly an additional $400 billion in spending cuts to make the numbers add up. His economic advisers were a little vague about how that might be done. Their suggestions included such devices as selling the airwaves to broadcasters and the ever-popular closing of ““loopholes.’’ For public consumption, at least, the big-ticket items–Social Security and Medicare–were not to be touched.

Remarkably, given their animosity during the primaries, Dole turned to Steve Forbes for advice. On May 22, Forbes came to Dole’s private office in the Capitol. All smiles, Dole complimented Forbes on the effectiveness of his ads attacking Dole as a ““Washington insider.’’ Dole understood, he said, the need to take dramatic steps to shed that image. He was thinking about a tax cut–15 percent across the board.

Forbes was taken aback, but he enthusiastically joined in. Why not just repeal the tax hikes of 1990 and 1993? The problem was that those increases had fallen mostly on the rich. Repealing them might look like trickle-down economics of the most flagrant kind. Forbes countered by suggesting that middle-class taxpayers should be able to deduct their payroll taxes for Social Security. Too complicated, argued other advisers.

This debate, and endless wrangling over timing and scale, rattled on for weeks. Dole had originally wanted to announce his economic plan in June, but the schedule kept slipping. Some of his handlers suggested that he wait until after the convention. It would be better to undercut the Democrats with a splashy announcement on the eve of their convention in late August, suggested Mike Murphy, one of Dole’s consultants, who proposed that Dole then embark on a whistle-stop ““Tax Cut Express’’ to Chicago. John Buckley, Dole’s communications director, exploded that Murphy was crazy if he thought Dole could get through his own convention without announcing a plan. ““We are teetering on the edge of farce here,’’ Buckley seethed.

At each meeting, Dole’s advisers would search his face for a hint. Did he favor rolling back the earlier tax hikes? Or making a 15 percent slash? His aides began grumbling that he was at it again, dithering and procrastinating when bold action was called for. There were the usual leaks and recriminations. But Dole bided his time. To him, this was just like cutting a deal in the Senate. You listen, listen some more, find the middle ground. He wasn’t betraying his deficit-hawk principles to bribe the voters with a tax cut. He was searching for a responsible compromise.

Dole’s hesitancy may have reflected some private misgivings. The clearest sign of this was his long-running dance with Sen. Pete Domenici, the earnest chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Dole very much wanted Domenici’s support and his respect. He risked losing it with a $550 billion tax cut. ““As you prepare your economic plan, you are aware that your credibility is at stake,’’ Domenici warned Dole in a private memo on June 25. The veteran deficit hawk was dubious about the tax cut. ““Neither of us over the years has been able to produce credible spending cuts of the magnitude that would be required to balance the budget by the year 2002 and execute such a tax plan,’’ Domenici wrote Dole.

Yet in the end, Domenici supported the full tax cut. How Dole managed this was a subtle matter of winks, nods and unstated assumptions. The biggest assumption was that in the end Dole would do the right thing, no matter what he promised to get himself elected. Domenici was encouraged that Dole’s economic plan called for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. Such a straitjacket would force fiscal responsibility. Domenici also knew that Dole would be willing, if need be, to make the tough choices–to cut Medicare and maybe even Social Security. For the record, Dole insisted that he would balance the budget without touching those sacred cows. But privately, he signaled Domenici otherwise.

When Dole’s plan was finally announced on Aug. 5, the reception was skeptical. Reporters asked what had happened to the old Dole. Even The Wall Street Journal editorial page, a cathedral of supply-side faith, wondered whether Dole was being overly optimistic in his assumptions. The early opinion polls registered disbelief. Most people seemed to dismiss the plan as election-year politics.

During the first two years of the Clinton administration, the press heaped derision on the White House for its clumsy and indecisive appointment process. Reporters would have been just as scornful if they had known the inside story of Dole’s selection of a running mate.

For months Dole had wanted Colin Powell. The retired general seemed like the one candidate who could change the dismal electoral equation. ““Everyone else is third,’’ said John Buckley. ““There is no second.’'

Powell, however, had said he didn’t want the job. In back-channel conversations, Powell’s advisers warned Dole not to offer it to him; the general would just reject it. Finally, Powell agreed to see Dole at a fund-raiser at the Virginia home of Ken Duberstein, a skilled Washington fixer who was close to Powell. Powell and Dole met in Duberstein’s ““ego room,’’ lined with photos of Duberstein with various Washington personages, on the evening of June 8.

THE TWO MEN TALKED ABOUT A variety of subjects–national security, affirmative action, the congressional agenda. Powell was coolly genial, Dole respectful. Dole did not mention the vice presidency, and so Powell never had a chance to say no. But he did talk about his wife Alma’s fear that if he ran for office, some crazy person would try to shoot him. Dole had picked up on the general’s body language: he had been pleasant enough, but he had never sat forward in his chair, the way a politician does when he really wants something. When the two men emerged after half an hour to smile for the photographers, Dole had changed his mind. Forget him, Dole said later to Scott Reed–he’s off the list. According to Reed, Dole had found Powell too liberal. Dole wondered whether Powell was a true Republican.

Scott Reed felt oddly relieved by Dole’s decision. They couldn’t afford a running mate who wasn’t 100 percent with the program. But if not Powell, who?

The Dole campaign had erected a thorough, if cumbersome, process to help Dole choose. There were flip charts and flowcharts, decision trees, check-off lists, a vetting system designed to expose the smallest foible. Rod DeArment, a Washington lawyer and old Dole adviser, had designed a questionnaire with more than 60 entries. It incorporated the search criteria for the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church (the church was good at ferreting out sexual peccadilloes) and lessons learned the hard way by earlier candidates. There were detailed questions on business investments (Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton), drug use (Bill Clinton), military record (Clinton, Dan Quayle), ““bimbos’’ (Clinton, Gary Hart) and hired help (Nannygate).

On the morning of July 5, Dole met with his vice presidential search team on the roof of his campaign headquarters behind Washington’s Union Station. Dole missed ““the Beach.’’ Now he had to make do with a view of some railroad tracks and a parking lot. As Dole sunned himself, his top veep searcher, Bob Ellsworth (another Washington lawyer and old friend), ran through the prospects. There were governors and former governors: John Engler of Michigan, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, Jim Edgar of Illinois, George Voinovich of Ohio, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, Carroll Campbell of South Carolina. A couple of senators: Connie Mack of Florida and Don Nickles of Oklahoma. An elder statesman: James A. Baker, former secretary of the treasury and of state in the Reagan-Bush administrations. All good men. But none seemed like he could make a difference on Nov. 5.

““We ought to figure out a way to get Elizabeth on this list,’’ said Ellsworth. ““She’s number one on everybody’s list,’’ said Dole. Everyone laughed, but they weren’t kidding. Except for the fact of her husband’s name at the top of the ticket, Elizabeth Dole was an obvious choice. A woman who could close the gender gap, but who was pro-life. A two-time cabinet officer who was articulate, attractive and never, ever off message. The campaign had briefly considered New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, but knew that her pro-choice views would stir a revolt by the religious right. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was a star attraction at prayer breakfasts. In early July the campaign had actually looked at the Constitution, which makes it almost impossible for a president and vice president to come from the same state. Maybe Elizabeth could change her residence.

Later that month, Scott Reed and party boss Haley Barbour went so far as to call Ralph Reed at the Christian Coalition for his opinion. Careful always not to alienate the religious right, the Dole campaign regularly touched base with Reed and his boss, evangelist Pat Robertson. Before the primaries, Reed and Robertson had been dead set against Colin Powell. ““If you pick Powell,’’ they had warned Dole that winter, ““it’s over.’’ The party would be torn apart. In May a delegation from the religious right had come to pray with Dole–and remind him to choose a pro-lifer.

Putting Elizabeth on the ticket with Dole ““would be a big mistake,’’ said Reed. ““She would be fabulous, and that’s the problem. People would start grumbling that the ticket should be reversed.’’ The campaign did go so far as to include Elizabeth’s name in a list of possible running mates in its polling. She did well enough; people liked her and thought she was qualified for the job. But they choked on the idea of a husband-and-wife team; it was too much like a monarchy. Dole had known instinctively that they couldn’t do it–““She wouldn’t have passed the smell test’’ was the way Scott Reed put it afterward–and she was quietly dropped from the list.

On July 30, with the convention less than two weeks away, Dole was rid- ing with Bill Bennett in Hollywood; they were on their way to another speech bashing the entertainment industry. Bennett told Dole he had heard that Don Nickles of Oklahoma was on the short-list. ““I think he’s a good man,’’ said Bennett.

““Well, what about you?’’ Dole asked.

““Um, I’m a pretty good man,’’ said Bennett.

““For this,’’ Dole added. The question was as close as he had gotten to asking someone to be his running mate.

““No, no, don’t do that,’’ Bennett said. ““Not now, maybe later. No, thank you very much, sir.''

Dole persisted. ““Well, we need to win this thing, you know. Catholics,’’ Dole grunted. ““Call you tomorrow.''

BLUFF AND FORCEFUL, BENNETT was a marvelous polemicist, with a gift for making vivid the moral decline of America. As education secretary and drug czar under Reagan and Bush, he had first-rank experience with hot social issues. The press liked him. But Bennett feared that he would be too tempting a target if he ran for vice president. The compiler of ““The Book of Virtues’’ was bound to be held to an impossibly high personal standard. Bennett was a good family man. But he had once been a hard-partying graduate student at Harvard. He had even dated Janis Joplin. Who knew what old photos might still be floating around? Bennett refused to fill out DeArment’s questionnaire.

Dole was running out of time. Still, there was one name they hadn’t really considered. Jack Kemp was in many ways ideal. Almost alone among leading Republican politicians, he had standing with African-Americans. An advocate of saving the inner city through the power of free enterprise, he was optimistic, attractive, energetic. He could close Dole’s perceived compassion gap. And as one of the original apostles of supply-side Reaganomics, he was the perfect messenger to sell Dole’s tax cut.

The catch was that Kemp, whose career began as a quarterback for the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills, had never gotten over wanting to play that position. He talked about being a team player, but as HUD secretary during the Bush admin- istration, he was always trying to call the signals, disrupting cabinet meetings and refusing to follow the White House line.

Kemp had been a source of exasperation to the Dole campaign. To give him cover against the flat-taxers on the right, Dole had made Kemp the head of his tax commission in April 1995. Dole wanted some vague promise to create a ““fairer, flatter’’ tax system sometime in the future. But dogmatic as ever, Kemp kept insisting on a single, specific tax rate. He refused to endorse Dole and–worse–backed Steve Forbes instead.

In characteristic fashion, Kemp aggravated the wound. At an Iowa fund-raiser, he said, ““I love Bob Dole. I just hope our party doesn’t come across sometimes as a party of grumpy old men.’’ On July 9, at a pro-Israel fund-raiser, Kemp was asked, ““Why should we support Dole in the upcoming election?’’ Kemp answered, ““I can’t give you a good reason.’’ His wife, Joanne, standing beside him, softly protested, ““Aw, c’mon, Jack.’’ ““No,’’ Kemp charged on, ““Dole hasn’t done enough to make his case to you.''

Kemp was exiled, not even consulted on the shape of Dole’s tax plan. He felt neglected and depressed. He told friends that he was in ““the wilderness.’’ So he was a little taken aback when he heard from his old subordinate Scott Reed on July 23. Reed was just fishing. If Dole approached him to be vice president, was Kemp interested?

““I’d like to talk to Bob,’’ said Kemp. He wasn’t sure if this was a serious feeler.

Reed coolly informed him that wasn’t the way things worked. ““You’re not talking to Bob. That’s not the way we do this. You talk to me, you talk to the team,’’ Reed told Kemp. The chilly conversation ended. Neither man called the other back.

But less than two weeks later, on Aug. 4, Dole’s thoughts turned back to Kemp. ““What about the quarterback?’’ he said. The campaign should at least bring him back on board to sell the economic plan, which was being announced the next day. Campaign communications director John Buckley, another Kemp alumnus (he had once been Kemp’s press secretary), was assigned to make the call.

““How are you?’’ asked Buckley.

““How should I be?’’ Kemp responded. He sounded dejected.

““We’re coming out with a plan you’re gonna love,’’ Buckley told him. It would include a big tax cut. To Buckley’s surprise, Kemp choked up on the phone. He had felt frustrated and ostracized.

““Help us sell it,’’ Buckley asked.

““I’m a team player,’’ said Kemp. He was; that Sunday he plumped for the Dole plan on CNN, the next day on the ““Today’’ show. Dole watched approvingly. Despite his dark-side reputation, Dole had learned not to hold grudges in the Senate. He told Scott Reed to go see Kemp.

““Are you up to this?’’ Reed asked when they met in a hotel room on Wednesday. ““Can you be on the team? Can you be a number two on the team?''

Kemp was bursting with eagerness. ““I can do it, Scott. I can do it. I can do this.''

Kemp and Dole finally met that night at a borrowed apartment at the Watergate. They talked frankly about their differences, but as usual Dole was indirect about what he wanted. He did not offer Kemp the job.

By morning, when Kemp met secretly with Reed and Buckley in a van in the parking lot of the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, the quarterback was feeling ambivalent. How could he work with Dole? he wondered aloud. Why should he give up his comfortable life? His income from the speaking circuit was more than $500,000 a year.

Learning of Kemp’s reluctance, Dole decided to use an old Washington trick. He called conservative commentator Bob Novak and leaked that he was considering Kemp. Sure enough, Novak broke his scoop within minutes on CNN. Within minutes after that, the Republican faithful gathering in San Diego were buzzing about Kemp. Dole knew that Kemp would hear the roar of the crowd.

And yet even then, Dole had not made up his mind. Or at least he wasn’t telling his aides. As reporters gathered in Russell, Kans., where Dole planned to announce his running mate on the Saturday before the convention, he dithered one last time. There was the religious right to worry about. Christian Coalition head Pat Robertson and Kemp had tangled bitterly when they were running against each other for the GOP nomination in 1988. Dole had not called Robertson to pacify him about Kemp, and now Ralph Reed was warning that Robertson was ““bent out of shape.''

DOLE’S AIDES WERE NOT absolutely sure he would go through with it. Kemp, stuck on an airplane, wasn’t available at the agreed-upon time. Dole continued to worry about Kemp’s positions on immigration and affirmative action, which were far more positive than the GOP platform. And he was confronted at the very last moment with rumors of a personal indiscretion in Kemp’s recent past–tales that very nearly sank his chances that night. The campaign had not thoroughly vetted Kemp’s history for potential problems; it wasn’t until reporters started asking about the latest gossip that Nelson Warfield finally went to Dole, assuming that he had already been briefed. He hadn’t been. Neither had Elizabeth, who was even more upset than her husband; the new tale, coupled with others that had followed Kemp for years, seemed to her to suggest a pattern of behavior if they were true.

With the choice hanging in the balance, Dole sent Reed and Warfield to an RV parked outside Dole’s house–Reed to put the question to Kemp, Warfield to act as a witness. Kemp denied the rumors. The two aides trudged back inside and worried the problem some more with the Doles. Warfield thought any potential damage was ““sustainable.’’ Dole ultimately agreed; finally, with contradictory rumors flying and the press holed up in a fetid basement in Russell’s American Legion hall, he placed The Call to Kemp at 10:06 Friday night.

Dole recounted a story from his own vice presidential campaign in 1976. During a swing through Minnesota, he had made a policy pronouncement on milk-price supports. Word came quickly from President Ford: there was only one guy at the top of the ticket, and he would be the one making policy.

Kemp seemed to get the idea. Dole made the offer; Kemp accepted. And Kemp himself called Reed and prevailed on him to mollify Robertson.

The next morning, the 1996 GOP ticket had breakfast together at Dole’s childhood home in Russell. Dole took Kemp down into the cramped, dark basement where he had lived as a boy when the family had to rent out the ground floor to make ends meet. Dole warned him about the loose carpet on the third step.

Kemp could not believe Dole’s generosity. After all the words that had passed between them, he was astonished that Dole would reach out to him, rescue him, really, from the political wilderness. Kemp, a brawny man given to bear hugs, was bothered that he couldn’t embrace Dole without hurting him. ““I can’t even put my arm around him,’’ he told his aides a few days later. At their appearances together, Kemp had been leaping onto the stage and whipping off his suit jacket, as usual, only to notice that Dole was struggling but unable to remove his as well. Kemp broke down as he talked about his running mate. ““I can’t believe the courage this guy demonstrates every single day,’’ he said.

The Republicans were haunted by the memory of the 1992 convention in Houston. The party had seemed harsh and intolerant; some of the speakers, particularly Pat Buchanan, had come across as phobic. San Diego, the party leaders vowed, was not going to be a repeat performance. Instead, the GOP wanted to project an image of inclusiveness. And Bob Dole must come across as warm and humane.

Elizabeth Dole took on the task. If only people knew Bob, she would say. To help them know him better, she would tell the delegates–and the national audience beyond them–his story of suffering and redemption, the personal story he was too embarrassed to tell himself. She was, as ever, well prepared. Her plan–to leave the podium and work the convention floor, chatting with delegates like a kind of GOP Oprah–had all the spontaneity of a sorority tea dance. She had spoken with a lapel mike hundreds of times at local Red Cross chapters, as well as on the campaign trail. She actually felt more comfortable without a podium separating her from the audience.

Elizabeth’s aides were nervous. The campaign was not known for the smoothness of its events, and the logistics of her proposed stroll were daunting. Mari Will, who was informally advising Mrs. Dole (she had given up her thankless job as campaign communications director), foresaw a nightmare scene as delegates in elephant hats rushed Mrs. Dole as she came down to the floor. The technicians were worried that her lapel mike would fail because there was so much radio transmission in the hall; three handheld mikes were made ready, just in case. Elizabeth was a little apprehensive about the 12 steps down to the floor, so a railing was installed. But she turned down offers to pace out the speech in advance. She just needed to know where everyone would be, and she told the networks what path she would take, so cameras could be placed in the right positions.

When she descended to the floor on Wednesday night, the normally bustling and noisy convention hall grew hushed. Her mike did fail, but she grabbed a replacement so smoothly that many reporters speculated that the failure had been staged to show off her poise. The ““Dole Stroll’’ was a hit.

Her husband was proud of her success. And for once he practiced to ensure his own. Dole avoided the eighth-floor conference room in the Hyatt, which had been equipped with TelePrompTers and a model of the convention-hall lectern. He called it the ““torture room.’’ He preferred to prepare for his speech by sitting on the hotel roof, tanning himself and eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream. It was always hard for Dole to accept anyone’s help, even when he needed it most, and now that prickliness began to chafe on his relationship with his speechwriter, Mark Helprin.

Helprin was a romantic. He wanted Dole’s acceptance speech to burn with the flame of bold endeavors, to evoke a time of braver deeds and purer hearts. ““Let me be the bridge to an America that only the undeserving call myth,’’ Helprin wrote in an early draft. ““Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action.''

Dole, not surprisingly, objected to some of Helprin’s flowery language. At first, Helprin didn’t mind. Dole was a Gary Cooper plain speaker; Helprin respected his astringency. The candidate also wanted to soften some of Helprin’s hard lines. The ““undeserving’’ Americans who could not see Dole’s earlier, better America became merely ““unknowing.''

But as they worked on the speech through July, Helprin began to bridle at Dole’s changes. Helprin was proud of his reputation at The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal for being difficult to edit. Editors wouldn’t dare move a comma without his permission. Now, when Dole wanted to change ““the republic’’ to ““the nation’’ to make his speech less lofty, Helprin bristled. Of course, this was Dole’s speech, but the whole world knew Helprin was writing it.

AND DOLE BEGAN TO GROW equally irritated with Helprin. The author would follow him around the hallways at head- quarters, lobbying to preserve parts of the speech. Dole would give him what aides called ““the stiff arm,’’ his left arm extended in a forbidding stop sign. ““I’m giving the speech. Not you,’’ Dole would mutter.

Dole ordered Helprin to add passages on crime and immigration, on his role in legislating Social Security, food stamps and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then he decided this sounded too much like a laundry list, so he told Helprin to take some of these sections out. Later, he reversed direction again, adding bits on terrorism, trade and foreign policy. Dole was also uncomfortable with a barb at Hillary Clinton’s book, ““It Takes a Village.’’ Helprin wrote pointedly that it takes a ““family’’ to raise a child. Dole didn’t want to be seen as attacking the First Lady.

Most of all, Dole was unhappy with Helprin’s tone, which he found too preachy, a sort of eat-your-peas sermon on the need for sacrifice. His political instincts told him to be upbeat, positive, forward-looking. But as usual, Dole was unable to discuss his objections in a way that produced a coherent result.

Without telling Helprin, Dole enlisted his old Senate speechwriter, Kerry Tymchuk, to draft a new ending. Tymchuk had read a bootlegged copy of the speech and been horrified by the harsh tone. He thought the text was misogynistic. Women, already wary of Dole, would flee across the widening gender gap. Tymchuk was also worried about all that ““bridge’’ language, harking back to the past. Shouldn’t Dole be more future-oriented? A backward-looking vision by a Republican candidate who happened to be more than 70 years old would be a dream come true for Democratic image makers.

Typically, Dole compromised without telling anyone. Instead of dismantling Helprin’s bridge to the past, he tacked on a detour at the end of it. Tymchuk and Richard Norton Smith, a family friend who had helped the Doles with their book, wrote a new ending in which Dole pronounced himself to be ““the most optimistic man in America.’’ The sunny, forward-looking peroration hardly squared with the elegiac, backward-looking beginning. But then the author of the first part never discussed the matter with the authors of the second.

In his San Diego hotel room, Helprin was furious when he learned that his speech was being rewritten behind his back. He decided to pack his bags. He left town before the speech was made.

As the delegates disbanded, the campaign’s internal polls showed Clinton’s lead cut to 3 points. The Dole team was ecstatic, but there were a few doubters. Alone among Dole’s pollsters, Fred Steeper had been through every presidential campaign since 1972–including Bush’s losing effort in 1992–and the experience had hardened his natural pessimism. ““Dr. Doom’’ believed that Dole needed to be ahead after San Diego to have a shot at beating Clinton in November. The Democrats were sure to get their own bounce in Chicago. The week after San Diego, Steeper predicted that Dole would be down by 10 points by Labor Day. No modern presidential candidate who was that far behind at the beginning of September had ever won.

On Labor Day Dole was down by at least 10 points in almost every media poll. On Sept. 5, three days later, his own polls showed him 20 points behind, his lowest level yet.