The Doles
Bob & Dole, Elizabeth & Smith, Richard Norton
Robert Dole's campaign autobiog- raphy comes with two co-authors. The professional is Richard Norton Smith, a conscientious young historian whose previous books include biographies of Thomas Dewey...
...Probably it was at that point where I realized it was not Elizabeth Dole's frivolity that I objected to, but her seriousness: that bright, garrulous, undirected women are fine by me, so long as they stay away from public (and my) life...
...Some locals, Dole writes, feared oil money would make Russell "a regular little Chicago...
...Dole tells some good stories about the last thirty-eight years of his life...
...There is a new Oxford Movement afoot in America today which is witnessing numerous people discover the "high," liturgical churches in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular...
...These, they say, made him a man of morethan-Republican sympathies...
...The new converts are not attracted to the watered-down Catholicism of the Hans Kiings, the Charles Currans, or those who sign ads favoring legal abortion...
...But the REVIEW isn't just for converts...
...Bob's pastimes growing up included the Owl Show at the Dream Theater...
...It is impossible to imagine Dole burbling, as Jack Kemp does, about the economy as a good shepherd, which will leave not one behind...
...It goes without saying they cannot be intimate...
...After nine hours, he got to a field hospital...
...World War II cut college short, and gave him an intimate acquaintance with medicine...
...According to Boston's Cardinal Law, "What is fascinating about the NEW OX FOR D REVIEW is that it is a sign of contradiction": At a time when, cheered on by the mass media, so many Catholics are grumbling about Catholic teaching and discipline, even leaving the Church, here is a counter-tendency celebrating the fullness of the Truth (without falling victim to the fanaticism that has characterized some converts in the past...
...The forum for the new generation of converts is the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a monthly magazine that takes its name from the 9th-century Oxford Movement in England...
...Before you can know where someone wants to go, you ought to find out where he's coming from...
...He is overcast to her sunshine...
...She married Dole in 1975, and took to the hustings next year when he was tapped to be Gerald Ford's running mate...
...Dole did not emerge unscathed...
...You had to be there...
...That's not the only reason to dislike it...
...Does anyone else feel that there is something un-civic in our fascination with candidates' families...
...Dole enlisted in 1942, passed through officer candidate's school at Fort Benning, and went to Italy to join the 10th Mountain Division in December 1944...
...Out of nowhere appeared twenty pretty girls dressed in identical red felt skirts and matching handbags...
...Most of our writers are cradle Catholics and a significant minority belongs to various other churches...
...A lovely old magnolia tree shade[d] a yard spacious enough to have served as a pet cemetery for numerous small creatures, none of whom went to their Maker without such funeral rites as a small child could devise...
...Campaign biographies should not be confused with Boswell...
...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue) SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS ..$14 (regularly $19) oyed, or retired per-$12 (regularly $16) I=1 One-year Canadian or foreign subscription .. . . US$17 (regularly $22) Payment must be drawn in US Dollars ^ Sample copy $3.50 O One-year subscription ^ One-year student, unempl son's subscription Two-year subscription...
...Earlier...
...I even experienced a bit of consumer woe myself when furnishing my apartment...
...They divorced in 1972, casualties, he explains, of the stresses imposed by politics...
...I suddenly got a hankering to visit the Soviet Union...
...One evening E.E...
...Dole's parents owned a three-room house...
...In two months, he was in a hospital in Topeka...
...They needn't have worried...
...Unable to see or move my arms, I thought they were missing...
...But since no act can be carried off unless it is substantially true, Dole's formulation is also sincere...
...The most significant factor in Dole's campaign and his life is the pull of his past...
...I'm often asked," Dole writes, "to describe what happened to me on April 14, 1945...
...When finally laid down, the carpeting was too small for my carefully measured rooms...
...school sports...
...There is also a description of an early Dole rally which makes me proud to be an American, and a democrat...
...Duty took both men into the jaws of death...
...But the best writing, and the deepest feeling, is expended on the parenthesis, Kansas-Italy-Kansas...
...This is partly an act, oratory left over from Iowa where Dole campaigned as a neighbor who was "one of us...
...There...
...Later...
...Certainly Dole's behavior in 1982 when, to universal applause, he pushed through his catch-all tax hike, was that of a man enjoying himself hugely...
...H er husband's tone is equally distinctive, and totally different...
...I wonder...
...They were accompanied by a quartet of "Bobolinks," led by a ukelele-playing songstress . . . a football player riding a tricycle, a middle-aged farmer wearing an elephant's head, and a group of pallbearers transporting a mock coffin containing the Frankenstein monster, who held a placard reading: "You have nothing to fear with Dole...
...Where did I throw in the towel...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Like George Bush, Dole thinks along the lines of duty...
...Finally, she found her way to Washington, where she settled into "consumer affairs...
...What happened there was that, in trying to take out a German machine gun in a farmhouse, Dole was raked in the upper right back by shell fragments...
...The professional is Richard Norton Smith, a conscientious young historian whose previous books include biographies of Thomas Dewey and Herbert Hoover...
...Elizabeth Hanford was born in...
...Among them, it may be hoped, is another Chesterton, another Maritain, another Newman, another Ronald Knox, another Dorothy Day, another Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Walker Percy — converts all...
...My only phobia from the years when I lay flat on my back is a fear of fire...
...Among the converts to the "Roman Obedience" who write for the REVIEW are Paul C. Vitz, George William Rutler, Sheldon Vanauken, John C. Cort, Thomas Howard, L. Brent Bozell, James J. Thompson Jr., and Peter Kreeft...
...To be honest, I've always thought that telling old war stories is like showing slides of the family vacation...
...Dole's liberal admirers put his hard boyhood and his wartime trauma to political use...
...It is the tone of the gusher, Southern belle division...
...Pastoral Renewal says we're "sharply written...
...listening to "The Shadow" on the Philco...
...A national political campaign, with all its potential for growth as I discussed issues across the country with the press and the public, would be an unparalleled learning opportunity...
...Journalists," he notes, "always ask candidates for office to outline a vision of the future...
...and the Library Journal predicts we will "doubtless command increasing attention...
...It is to his credit, I suppose, that he held off the bows until an issue came along on which the gallery, for fortuitous historical reasons, seemed to share his saturnine vision...
...No, they are attracted by the Catholicism of the ages — by the Magisterium, as well as the inspiring leadership of the current Pope...
...Dole inserts many a passage ("poor people don't have lobbyists") to encourage this view...
...Suspicion, then, and maybe, after all these years, an urge to be liked...
...With The Doles: Unlimited Partners, Mr...
...What we get from them are revelations made along the way, and a tone of voice, like the pitch of a tuning fork...
...He was born in Russell (originally Fossil Station), Kansas, in 1923...
...Salisbury, North Carolina, to a prosperous florist...
...The tires on his car were threadbare...
...Cummings [sic] read his modernistic verses before an only slightly puzzled East Campus audience...
...Things are tough, and so is he...
...Elizabeth Dole's tone drove me nuts for a hundred pages, until finally I gave Richard Brookhiser is covering the 1988 campaign for National Review...
...The Doles deserve credit for being blunt about it...
...Dole's other co-author is Mrs...
...Russell started a Bob Dole fund that collected $1,800 to send him to Chicago for operations...
...They tend to be dully written (the candidates' participation accounts for that...
...At a time when Protestant fundamentalism is making inroads among Catholics, here is a counter-movement proclaiming that you don't have to leave the Church to find a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ...
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...rr he wound was one sharp blow...
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...After his acceptance speech at the 1976 Kansas City convention, she told him, "You usually do better...
...The 10th was grinding its way through the Apennine Mountains north of Florence to Bologna...
...The Doles write alternating chapters, or sections of chapters, a format pioneered by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter...
...Dole went to the University of Kansas, hoping to become a doctor...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 41...
...Dole instead poses another question...
...When tempers flared up, as they do sooner or later in most households, he would slip out the front door, a half-smile on his face...
...He speaks here as he speaks on the stump, in the brusque cadences of a man impatient with crap...
...She graduated, and traveled: through various graduate schools, and through Europe...
...That the prominence we give wives, children, and now mistresses, is more appropriate to I Claudius than to the annals of a republic...
...And we cover the full range of issues of concern to today's reflective and believing Christian...
...Except towards his fellow handicapped and his townsmen, whose steadfastness genuinely moved him—he wept when he campaigned in Russell in 1976—Dole seems to me to have taken suspicion rather than sympathy as his lesson from life...
...He couldn't even take a family argument too seriously...
...Here's what others are saying about us: Newsweek praises our "childlike exuberance...
...What's more, contrary to the myth that Catholicism is a superstitious religion for the befuddled, an unusually high proportion of the new Catholics consists of writers and intellectuals...
...In 1947, he married an occupational therapist at the hospital he was in...
...But now, a new wave of converts is entering the Church — including people like Malcolm Muggeridge, Lewis Lehrman, and singer John Michael Talbot...
...Politics was what he turned to in place of the blasted career in medicine...
...Smith stakes out an unshakeable claim (unless someone moves quick and snatches William Scranton) to become the Homer of Republican losers...
...General Sherman reached the sea faster than two rolls of carpet ordered from an Atlanta store reached my front door...
...He still has trouble looking in mirrors, from his first post-injury glimpse of himself at 70 pounds underweight...
...Eternity (the evangelical monthly) finds us "influential...
...If you feel inundated by "bad news" about the Church, if you are tired of all the dissension within her portals, if you want to recapture the excitement of when you first really believed, or if you are searching for a "face" of Catholicism that is spiritually vibrant, intellectually incisive, doctrinally sound, and socially engaged, it's time for you to subscribe to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Political writers, and Dole himself, trace his sardonic and detached temperament to his war experiences...
...re-1 covery was a series of them, three years long...
...His father ran the Fairmont Creamery Company (a dairy and egg store cum cafe...
...Maybe it was all those news stories about Sputnik and spy planes that sparked my curiosity...
...Hell, I knew he was a fiscal conservative," an early supporter remarked...
...Here Come The New Catholics Over the last quarter century, the number of converts to Roman Catholicism slowed to a trickle...
...Dole's THE DOLES: UNLIMITED PARTNERS Bob and Elizabeth Dole with Richard Norton Smith/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Richard Brookhiser 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 mother seems to have been the supportive one, but even her support was stern...
...Amazingly, while the REVIEW is a lightning rod for "papist" pilgrims, it is also ecumenical in spirit, affirming all that is good and true in other Christian traditions...
...But so it is...
...My experience might easily be dismissed as a comedy of errors, but unfortunately it was being repeated in thousands of other American homes...
...When staying in hotels, I prefer the ground floor...
...An hour later he'd be back, having put the time to good use by raking the lawn...
...More traditional rites led up to the selection of a May Queen...
...She went to college at Duke...
...His mother taught sewing classes and sold sewing machines...
...I find more than a trace of it in this curious description of Dole's father...
...The year was otherwise marked by an outbreak of pink eye, a Klan rally that flopped, and an oil strike...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
