Bob Dole’s Sentimental Tour of Duty

EL DORADO, Kan. — He didn’t have to come, and neither did they.

Preoccupied with his Beltway life, Bob Dole has more important things to do than take the old highways he once rode deep into small-town Kansas over four decades in Congress. And the people who once voted for him have their own lives to get on with, routines that could do without interruption from an idled former senator no longer beholden to them.

But sometimes, when a public life winds down, the human connections made over its course still glow like embers. More than a year after his presidential campaign loss, Dole has returned to Kansas’ back roads to stoke those coals one last time.

Flying in several days a month from his lucrative work as a Washington lobbyist, Dole, 74, has embarked on a “thank-you tour” through each of Kansas’ 105 counties. His sentimental journeys home, which started in January and are expected to take a year to complete, amount to a gesture of appreciation to the state’s residents for “all they did for me.”

In prairie towns like El Dorado and Arkansas City, Delphos and Miltonvale, Dole and the Kansans turning out by the hundreds are celebrating the ordinary in American politics. For 37 years, Dole’s punishing expeditions into remote counties to glad-hand at Rotary clubs, Legion halls and county fairgrounds were an indelible feature of Kansas’ civic landscape. Even in a state where officials pride themselves on a common touch that is fading elsewhere, Dole’s prodigious memory for names and faces and his Spartan ability to endure road life remain legendary.

The tour is an unspoken farewell to all that, a final reunion for Dole and his now-aging supporters--and a tribute to the countless coffees, ladies club meetings and chicken dinners that cemented the bonds of a political life.

“It’s important for towns like ours to know that we matter. Bob always made sure we felt that way,” said El Dorado jeweler Richard Trombla, 78, a World War II veteran who came to a roadside motel meeting room recently to hail his old friend. “If this is the last time, there’s a lot of people who want him to know how much his coming all those years meant to us.”

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In a Methodist church in the town of Augusta, a teenage choir serenaded Dole with a full-verse version of “America” while an insistent group of Republican club women tried to feed him cookies shaped like GOP elephants. In Arkansas City, just north of the Oklahoma state line, an old veteran stood to praise Dole for “helping us get that old howitzer outside the bank.” Dole shook hands for an hour as 400 well-wishers crowded around him in a Rotary club in Winfield, then posed for snapshots with janitors long after the hall had emptied. Peering out at his audiences as he joked about his campaign loss and Monica S. Lewinsky, his “next-door neighbor” in Washington, Dole searched for faces of old friends and political allies. He noticed how much they had aged--and how their ranks are thinning.

“I didn’t count on the emotions of it,” Dole said over a bowl of ice cream after a long day of touring. “People come up and say: ‘Oh, Dad died.’ Or ‘My husband died.’ You didn’t know about it while you were running all over the country, but these were people I came up with. I saw a couple of old friends out there today, and they’re a lot grayer and frailer than I remember them. Made me realize . . . how much time’s passed.”

Looking like a reincarnation of Col. Sanders--oversized black glasses, white hair, tapered goatee--Trombla hove into Dole’s view in a ragged reception line in El Dorado. Trombla and his wife, June, 78, had decked themselves out in Dole campaign pins so ancient Dole himself was unable to date them.

They have been acquaintances since Dole’s days as a county attorney in Russell in the 1950s; he and Richard Trombla had attended dozens of veterans conventions together. Dole always made sure to see the couple when he came through El Dorado. Once, Trombla said, Dole shaved in the bathroom of their jewelry store. Trombla even fashioned the war hero a replica of his Purple Heart medal--with diamond chips at both ends.

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El Dorado lies 40 miles west of Wichita, a highway junction of 12,500 people. It barely registers on a road map, but Dole always made sure to pass through several times a year during most of his congressional career.

“It was always a big thing when he came to town,” Trombla said. “It wasn’t just Republicans either. He’d come in and shake everybody’s hands--dishwashers, desk clerks, everybody.”

When Dole slid out of a Lincoln Navigator at 8:30 on a Friday morning, there were 100 well-wishers waiting inside a Best Western meeting room--”as good a crowd as you’re going to get in El Dorado this time of day,” Trombla said.

Filing past a bank of beeping video game machines, they held old campaign posters for him to sign, books to autograph. Lynn Creed, a 70-year-old retiree, wanted to thank Dole for helping his son get a West Point appointment 24 years ago. Marv McCown, an official with the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce, was there to praise Dole for saving the entire town.

When El Dorado’s largest employer, a Texaco refinery, made noises about pulling out in the early 1980s, Dole leaned on the oil company to stay, saving 500 jobs. “We’d have been a ghost town without him,” McCown said.

Dole grimaced, embarrassed by the praise. He had come to thank them, not to accept theirs. He fell silent a moment, clutched by the sort of self-consciousness that wells up at retirement luncheons.

“Sometimes you have to say thank you,” he said earlier. “There’s no heavy lifting. I can’t vote for ‘em or against ‘em. It’s not rocket science, just plain sense.”

It was a sense of duty impressed on him by the plains Republicans who schooled him at the start of his career. “A person’s name is important to them,” he was told.

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Dole tended his small-town roots. He shook hands while others ate. He traveled extra miles to always get in one more political function. He took care to send notes of appreciation to his loyalists--a necessity for an office seeker whose bruising ideological campaigns sometimes left opponents bitter years afterward.

“These are the things any smart politician does,” said Kansas state Sen. David R. Corbin. “We all do it. He just did it better than the rest of us.”

Cultivating loyalists required long days on the road. As a young congressman in the 1960s, Dole represented the western half of the state, a 50-county expanse that could be covered only in wearying car trips. One of his drivers from those days, Jim French, recalls campaigns that took them to as many as “six towns a day, each one 30 miles apart. We survived on peanuts and pop.”

An awkward writer with his left hand because of the shattering war wound that withered his right arm, Dole trained his memory to remember the names and faces of those he met on the road. The more he honed that machine-like recall, the more his small-town audiences responded. Cathy Mowry, a longtime Republican committee member in Riley County, near Topeka, recalls a 1968 Senate campaign meeting when Dole “introduced every one of a hundred people by name. People never forget a moment like that.

“He’s always had a remarkable rapport with people. When most politicians leave the scene, the silence is kind of deafening. Not with Bob. He got his start on the road, and it’s kind of fitting he’s back out there now,” Mowry said.

When Dole made his first trip home in January, Jim French, now 80, was there to make arrangements. The retired florist was too old to take the wheel, but he could still wield a telephone. He set up a lunch at a Rotary club and another at a local college.

The two men caught up with each other in a Holiday Inn lobby. As Dole strode off to a lunch date, he noticed French was lagging behind, out of breath. It was not just age. French explained bashfully that he was recovering from heart surgery. Dole was stunned. He had not known. His trips into Kansas’ interior had dwindled as his busy life as Senate majority leader had taken precedence. Then came the whirlwind of the 1996 presidential campaign. Old connections frayed.

“These folks were part of my life for so long, and you lose touch the more you’re in Washington,” Dole said. “Takes coming back like this to remember how important they are.”

He had planned to make his homeward jaunts last year after emerging from months of inactivity following his loss to President Clinton. A two-month bout with shingles forced him to postpone the tour. “Didn’t want people to think I had some kind of disease,” he said. More delays came when he hired on with the influential Washington law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand, joining former Senate colleagues George J. Mitchell of Maine and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as a globe-trotting lobbyist and deal-maker.

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Finally, leaning on old Senate staffers to round up the faithful, Dole flew back in January, penciling in his tour around lobbying trips to South Korea and Taiwan. He pays for his own flights, said Joyce Campbell, an aide at his law firm. No longer bound by a public official’s stickling ethical concerns, he allows Kansas firms to defray the costs for his use of private airport runways. The towns he visits ante up for the doughnuts, cookies and luncheons along his route.

There had been talk in some Kansas political circles that Dole had an ulterior motive for the tour, that he might bring along his wife, Elizabeth, to test the waters for the presidential race in 2000. But although he teases crowds by wearing an “Elizabeth 2000” cap, he flies in alone.

Dole hoped to use the trips to catch up with old warhorses like French and a legion of Republican stalwarts who had helped him in the past--the ladies who poured cans of Dole pineapple juice at his earliest rallies, the Bobbettes and the Bobolinks, who crooned Dole’s homespun campaign songs.

“The Bobolinks are still around,” he said, “but they’re probably not bobbing much.”

He doesn’t want the tour to be seen “as a farewell thing.” It sounded like retirement, and Dole is too busy for that. But aside from obligatory visits home for commencements and speaking engagements he expects to make in the coming years, this is his last opportunity, he realized, to return to parts of Kansas he will probably never see again.

“I’m just not going to have the time,” he said, “to get into all those small places I went to all those years.”

As the last well-wishers drifted out of the El Dorado, Dole and the Tromblas stood there, waiting as if one more group of old friends might barge in.

No one else was coming. They said their goodbyes.

“Just like old times,” Dole murmured to himself as they headed for the door. “Just like old times.”