Dole’s Large Legacy Buried in Fine Print

WASHINGTON —  He came to Congress during the same cold, snowy January that John F. Kennedy came to the White House. So long ago that Jimmy Carter was still a peanut farmer, Ronald Reagan was nominally a Democrat--still giving speeches for General Electric--and George Bush was just another Texas oilman.

There had been no civil rights revolution, no Great Society, no Vietnam War. Federal government outlays totaled a mere $92 billion annually, about what it spends every two weeks now, and the budget showed a $300-million surplus.

Thirty-five years later, as Bob Dole prepares to retire as majority leader and senior senator from Kansas, historians can record that he played a part in almost every significant Washington decision made during an era of profound change for the government and the country. As congressman, senator and party leader, Dole had a hand in every battle over taxes and the budget, Medicare and welfare, defense and foreign policy, peace and war.

Ironically, however, unless his current bid for the White House succeeds, Dole’s place in history may be cloaked in shadows: well-regarded by specialists in congressional leadership but little remembered by the wider audience of future generations. He may rank no higher than a Joe Robinson or a James G. Blaine--earlier masters of the legislative game who forged the compromises and moved the ball forward but created no lasting monuments.

“It is significant that there is no major piece of legislation known as the Dole Act,” said Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker. “It tells you what kind of leader he’s been. His mark can be found on so much, but his influence was extensive, not intensive. He became a kind of legislative virtuoso, a master of the process, not a visionary or a high-concept man.”

Said Ron Peters, a specialist in congressional history at the Carl Albert Center of the University of Oklahoma: “Dole’s going to be remembered by historians who write about the Congress. He’s going to be very well regarded as a legislator and as a majority leader, as a Republican leader. He’s going to go down among the best.”

But on the larger canvas, he acknowledged, “it’s when you rise to the presidential level that you get remembered.”

20,000-Plus Votes

Dole’s legislative record by now is immense. As he once told a group of New Hampshire voters: “You take a look at my record. You’ll probably find some votes you don’t like. I’ve voted 11,000 times. There’s some I don’t like.” That was in 1987; by now the number of votes Dole has cast in Congress probably exceeds 20,000.

Three strands form the rope of the legislative career that Dole plans to bring to a close Tuesday:

First, he was an intensely partisan battler, reflecting both his temperament and the status of the GOP in Congress for much of his career.

As a junior member of Congress during the ‘60s, when congressional Republicans appeared likely to be a permanent minority, lambasting the opposition pleased Dole’s overwhelmingly Republican constituents back home and offered an avenue for advancement within his party nationally. And that partisan bent has remained.

“You don’t elect nonpartisan leaders,” he said in an interview with The Times last year.

Second, despite the sometimes cutting intensity of his partisanship, Dole became an increasingly savvy player of the inside game on Capitol Hill. This element in Dole’s record blossomed and flourished during the long period of divided government in the 1970s and 1980s, when, except for the four years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, neither Democrats nor Republicans ever commanded both Congress and the White House.

“I think I’ve learned over the years,” he said. “We do have our debates and we do get mad and we do scream at each other, but then we have to go ahead and do our work.”

Third, in establishing his positions on major policy issues, he has followed the evolutionary path of traditional Republicans, instinctively opposing liberal innovations the first time around but gradually accepting them within some bounds as time wore on.

Thus Dole, who is 72, opposed the creation of Medicare, Medicaid and almost all the other liberal social programs of the Kennedy-Johnson period; but years later he blunted the slashing attacks on those programs by radical ideologues in his own party.

In keeping with traditional conservative economic principles, he also was the prime mover behind the massive 1982 tax increase, the biggest ever relative to the size of the economy, which ended the Reagan administration’s romance with supply-side economics.

Pro-Civil Rights Act

To be sure, Dole has sometimes been among the vanguard. As a young congressman, he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; he was also a co-sponsor of the legislation making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. Repeatedly, Dole has argued that the GOP should do more to open its ranks to minorities.

Dole also played a crucial role in expanding food stamps and other federal nutrition programs for the poor during the mid-1970s--programs that, of course, also benefited farmers from places like Kansas who grew the food. As thoroughgoing a liberal Democrat as former South Dakota Sen. George S. McGovern, the prime mover on such legislation, still speaks admiringly of Dole’s steadfast help in lining up Senate majorities to support greater government effort.

And Dole took a leading role in passage of federal legislation for the disabled. He supported the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 even though many business people and others considered its provisions costly and intrusive.

One chapter in that legislative battle offers a fascinating glimpse of the apparent pull and tug inside Dole: a seeming ambivalence over where to position himself politically and personally on sensitive policy issues, especially those on which society’s attitudes changed significantly over the course of his long life.

During the struggle over the Americans with Disabilities Act, which broadly prohibits discrimination against the disabled in the workplace and elsewhere, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) offered an amendment permitting employers to bar people who tested positive for HIV from food-handling jobs.

Dole initially supported the controversial amendment. When groups representing the disabled expressed shock that a senator who had lost the use of his right arm in World War II should take such a position, he snapped: “They don’t own me. Just because you have a handicap doesn’t mean you have to be for every screwball thing.”

Later Dole reversed himself and helped kill the provision, saying: “Public ignorance has never been a valid excuse for discrimination.”

Republican Fund-Raiser

From the beginning of his career in Washington, Dole made it clear that he did not intend to be an anonymous backbencher. He was elected president of his freshman class and served four terms in the House, from 1961 through 1968.

While in the House, Dole began traveling all over the country to help fellow Republicans campaign or raise money. The ceaseless campaigning contributed to the demise of his first marriage, to Phyllis Holden, a nurse he had met while recuperating from his devastating war wounds. But it also built a network of contacts and obligations that would prove invaluable in Congress and help finance his bids for the GOP presidential nomination in 1980 and 1988 as well as in 1996.

In 1968, encouraged by GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon, he sought and won the Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Frank Carlson.

As something of a Nixon protege, Dole defended the administration’s policies in Vietnam, excoriating antiwar Democrats and Republicans alike. He remained loyal to Nixon during Watergate, though a bruising turn as Republican national chairman during the 1972 election had left him with no illusions about the imperious, stop-at-nothing character of the Nixon White House staff.

On most bread-and-butter issues, Dole was a down-the-line Midwestern Republican, supporting programs that benefited his predominantly rural constituents even if that meant voting for government subsidies. But his devotion to reducing the deficit did once lead him to offer to accept cutbacks in farm programs if other senators would swallow reductions in programs dear to their hearts.

The proposal added materially to Dole’s difficulties in winning reelection to the Senate, without making any noticeable difference in the size of the deficit, but it was an early indication of how seriously he took the deficit issue.

He won appointment to the Senate Finance Committee in 1973 and plunged into what are among the most sensitive and far-reaching decisions made by any government: the writing and rewriting of tax laws. Probably nowhere else in government does so much money hang on the smallest change of word or phrase; nowhere else is the lobbying more intricate or intense.

And Dole, though in the minority until the Reagan landslide of 1980, became a player.

Critics point out that on more than one occasion, he proposed or supported obscure bits of legislation designed to benefit important businesses or individuals--including Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., an agribusiness giant, and the winemaking Gallo family.

Such narrowly focused policymaking has a long history in America, of course, and opinions differ on whether it is all bad. At least so far as current evidence is concerned, the most that can probably be said about Dole is that he played the game as he found it.

On larger issues, much the same is true: He was a loyal Republican soldier most of the time, fought for partisan advantage where he could and, at the end of the day, often looked across the aisle for compromise.

Dole notes proudly that he helped bail out the Social Security system in the early 1980s, though it meant working closely with then-House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) to find a bipartisan solution.

“He’s a guy that sort of adapts himself to circumstances, but in a principled way,” the University of Oklahoma’s Peters said. “He’s a guy who figures out how to respond in the circumstances that surround him.”

Probably nothing illustrates Dole’s melding of principles and pragmatism more than his handling of the 1982 tax legislation.

As Finance Committee chairman, he had loyally helped pass the massive tax-reduction program that was the hallmark of Reagan’s first year in the White House.

In theory, the huge cuts in corporate and personal tax rates were to stimulate such an economic acceleration that Washington would get more revenue, not less. In fact, federal revenue sagged and expenditures soared as the country slipped into the recession of 1982-83, and the deficit began to scale the heights.

Supply-siders still insist that their strategy was not given a fair and thorough test. To Dole and other traditional Senate Republicans, however, the situation was alarming--a threat both to the country and to the GOP.

Democrats, who controlled the House, refused to take the lead on raising taxes. Why should they rescue a Republican president from his own folly, especially when he was sure to attack them for it?

Dole and other Senate Republicans, including Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, stepped forward. They not only had to satisfy Republicans and Democrats and swarms of powerful lobbyists, they had to contend with a White House that was basically unsympathetic to the whole idea.

With Reagan adamant that his basic program of cutting tax rates go forward, Dole took the lead in searching for other ways to raise more money. Initially hoping to do it with a small number of high-yield provisions, he found that approach politically impractical.

Instead, he and others patiently rounded up votes for a huge bundle of relatively inconspicuous changes and loophole closings that eventually added up to $98.3 billion over three years, the largest revenue-enhancement package in U.S. history.

It took every bit of his legislative cunning to keep the bill on track. One provision required restaurant owners to take steps to help the government collect more taxes on waiters’ tips. Restaurant owners lobbied furiously against it and, shortly before the Senate’s final 4:30 a.m. vote on the package, an amendment slipped through deleting the provision.

Dole quickly countered by pushing through an amendment allowing businesses to claim tax deductions on only half the cost of business lunches--the “1 1/2-martini lunch,” it was called. As Dole had expected, the restaurant industry was so horrified at that prospect that it readily agreed to restore the tips provision.

The eventual success of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act may rank as the crowning achievement of Dole’s legislative career. “The real locus of responsibility, the real grown-ups in all that, were Domenici and Dole and the leaders of the Republican Senate,” Peters said.

“I think it was at that period of time . . . that Dole began to establish himself not just as a real player, a guy who could move legislation and broker compromise and all that, but beyond that as sort of a responsible person, a person who was willing to make hard choices; and I think that reputation then carried forward when he became majority leader.”

Emblematic of his success, Dole succeeded Howard H. Baker Jr. as Republican leader in the Senate in 1985, a step upward that was also a step deeper into the overshadowing forest of the legislative process.

As a result, Dole, like 19th century Republican leader Blaine before him, is in danger of being remembered by most people more for what he failed to do than for what he did.

Blaine sought and failed to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1876 and 1880. When he finally captured the nomination in 1884, he lost the general election to Democrat Grover Cleveland.

His popular epitaph is a derisive campaign chant that referred to his brush with a railroad bribery scandal: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine. Continental liar from the state of Maine.”

Only scholars recall that Blaine served as secretary of state under three presidents, helped found the modern-day Republican Party and, as a highly partisan speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875, substantially strengthened its institutional leadership.

“The great parliamentarians tend not to be remembered,” said professor Baker. “Their fate, unfortunately, tends to be submerged.”