Text 1486, 114 rader
Skriven 2004-08-27 14:12:28 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Dole then and now
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washingtonpost.com
When Bob Dole Said No

By Noel Koch

Thursday, August 26, 2004; Page A23

"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.

Colson ran a political operation in the White House, with outreach programs to
various constituencies. My "constituency" was Congress, and my job was to get
Republican members to laud the president and savage Democrats -- particularly
House and Senate Democrats. The idea was to keep White House enemies on the
defensive. Sometimes it worked. When it didn't work, it was because the members
refused to be mustered into Colson's attack machine. They valued their
independence.

No one valued his independence more than Bob Dole, who had struggled for so
long to regain it after years of dependency on others. Colson never understood
that; he felt Dole should pay for the chairmanship, and it was assumed I could
persuade him to do things he preferred not to do -- such as launching
gratuitous attacks on his colleagues. "They want me to get out there and accuse
Teddy Kennedy of all kinds of stuff," he would complain. "I'm not going to do
that. I have to work with the guy. Besides, I like him."

Dole was no shrinking violet; he was willing to attack -- indeed, his
reputation for it shadowed his career for years. But he was not willing to be
manipulated. He refused to be used, and Colson swore Dole would pay for his
defiance. After the 1972 election Dole was fired as party chairman. His
bitterness was palpable: "They invited me up the mountain [Camp David] and
threw me off."

Dole is part of a political generation that took national service for granted.
What separated his service from that of so many of his congressional colleagues
was that he nearly died and then spent the remainder of a remarkable life
overcoming challenges that most people can't imagine -- e.g., simply getting
dressed.

No one is better placed than Dole to know how arbitrary are the fortunes of
war. It is not surprising to hear John Kerry's wounds belittled by men who have
avoided all risk of being wounded. Someday perhaps we will be able to plumb the
neuroses of those who avoided Vietnam and have ever after had difficulty living
with the choice. But it is surprising to hear Bob Dole doing it. Kerry not
hospitalized for his wounds? Bob Dole was not hospitalized for his first Purple
Heart either.

"It was just a scratch," he later recalled. "I think one of our grenades hit a
tree and bounced back." He received a Bronze Star, but that came much later,
and was a bureaucratic exercise having little to do with his service as a
platoon leader in the extraordinary 10th Mountain Division on April 14, 1945,
the day his war ended, in Italy.

Bob Dole knows as well as any person how capricious is the gleaning of medals.
Some men deserve what they don't get; some get what they don't deserve. And who
should know better than he that it is craven to belittle a man's service
because it didn't extend over some arbitrary stretch of time?

Bob Dole spent little time in combat. But as a result of the time he did spend,
he lay on his back for years, recovering, and helping others to recover.

I spent a year in Vietnam and came home without a scratch. My brother served
two tours in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts (and was hospitalized, and
does draw disability -- weird yardsticks used to measure John Kerry's alleged
shortfall), and yet spent far less time than I did in-country. Indeed, his
first "tour" lasted about 15 minutes, ending on the beach near Danang in the
midst of the U.S. Marines' first amphibious assault in Vietnam.

Time in-country, how often a man was wounded, how much blood he shed when he
was wounded -- it is hurtful that those who served in Vietnam are being split
in so vile a fashion, and that the wounds of that war are reopened at the
instigation of people who avoided serving at all. It is hurtful that a man of
Bob Dole's stature should lend himself to the effort to dishonor a fellow
American veteran in the service of politics at its cheapest.

There was a time when he would have refused. I know. I was there.

The writer was special assistant to President Richard Nixon from 1971 to 1974.
He was assistant secretary of defense and director for special planning at the
Defense Department from 1981 to 1986.

+ 2004 The Washington Post Company


 



 

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