Early in the 1996 race for the White House, the senior leadership of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign noticed something that troubled us: It seemed no matter how carefully we crafted his talking points, Senator Dole would go off script.
Often way off script.
So we considered the possibilities: Maybe at 72 years of age, Mr. Dole’s eyesight was the problem. But when increasingly larger type didn’t have the desired effect, we decided somebody had to go to the Senate majority leader and raise the delicate question of whether he could see the words on the papers we handed to him.
That somebody was me. As his press secretary, I had the unenviable task to ask a man who was first elected to Congress in 1960, the year I was born, if his eyes were giving out.
Mr. Dole pondered my question for a moment and replied: “No, I can see just fine. I can’t hear worth a damn. But my eyes are fine.”
Like a lot of things I’d hear him say across the year and the hundreds of thousands of miles I spent at his side as his campaign press secretary, it took me a while to understand there was more in his answer than his trademark dry humor.
Mr. Dole, who died on Sunday at age 98, could hear perfectly well. It was we in his campaign team who had trouble listening.
Over and over again, in speech after speech, he told his campaign he was going to say what he wanted. We thought that was a problem. Looking back, I think it was a treasure.
See, Mr. Dole didn’t want to be packaged like a product or traffic...
Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/politics/bob-dole-death.html
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