Same Substance, Different Style

By Margaret B. Carlson

They should certainly not be invited to the same dinner party. Even the Senate chamber is a bit confined for George Bush and Robert Dole. For that matter, the entire country sometimes seems too small a place to absorb the personal antagonisms of the two front runners for the Republican presidential nomination.

Theirs is hardly a tension born of ideological differences. On substance, Bush and Dole differ so little that in debates they seem like two wrestlers faking it for the crowd. If Dole gets exercised when Bush charges that he would raise taxes, it is precisely because he knows their views on taxes are nearly identical. Both are pragmatic conservatives, men molded by political realities rather than burning convictions.

But the similarity in outlook only heightens the deep differences in personality and style. In manner, temperament, perspective on life -- that amorphous bundle of characteristics that define a person -- Bush and Dole are like aliens from separate planets despite years traveling in the same orbit.

It is no accident that the two sit at opposite ends of any platform; any closer, and the friction could set the place on fire. When Bush lapses into his gee-whiz optimism, that rosy outlook that comes from having everything dropped into his lap, Dole looks as if he wants to stuff a sock into Bush's mouth. When Dole makes one of his sardonic asides that let observers know he is above the low company he is temporarily keeping, Bush appears so offended by the impropriety of it all -- no one made sharp remarks at the Bush family dinner table -- that he is momentarily speechless.

Bush and Dole have reached the very pinnacle of Republican politics by vastly different paths. Bush's road was smooth and privileged, Dole's unrelentingly difficult. While Bush was being chauffeured to Greenwich Country Day School and going off to Andover and Yale, Dole was walking to the public schools of Russell, Kans., and working his way through the University of Kansas at Lawrence and Washburn University of Topeka. As Bush went to prove his manhood in a West Texas oil field with a family stake of $500,000, Dole was serving as county attorney of Russell, where an unhappy part of his job was approving welfare payments to his grandparents.

Bush has seldom been without a safety net. When he gave up his congressional / seat in 1970 in an unsuccessful bid for the Senate, Nixon made him U.N. Ambassador. Other appointments followed: the Republican National Committee in 1973, liaison to China in 1974 and director of the CIA in 1976. In fact, it was Dole who had to move aside as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973 to make room for Bush.

Even heroism came to the Vice President at less of a price. Bush received the Distinguished Flying Cross after being shot down during World War II. A harrowing experience to be sure, but he was soon rescued and left the service with no disabling wounds. Dole too was decorated in World War II, but the war left him crippled. He spent three years in hellish convalescence, moving from one hospital to another, without therapy for so long that the injury to his right arm became a disfiguring handicap.

Little wonder, then, that Dole has a dark side and that Bush, with his perky optimism, tends to bring it out. Dole has tried to suppress his brooding bitterness following his hatchet-man performance as the vice-presidential Republican candidate in the 1976 campaign. Since then, he has gone through two political make-overs designed to improve his body language and soften his style.

Dole's hard knocks have in some ways made him more appealing. Unlike Bush, he has a forceful personality, an appearance of calm that inspires confidence. Dole's sense of humor can be savage, sarcastic and sardonic. Sometimes, when he has it under control, he can direct it gently at himself. At other times it merges with his mean streak.

Dole's gregarious public persona does not have a private counterpart. Humor comes from the head, the ability to form attachments with people from the heart. Dole seems to trust no one entirely, least of all his staff. Staffers complain that he seldom takes their advice and they frequently do not know what he is doing. He fires aides abruptly and often.

One former aide describes Dole's management technique as peppering staffers with numerous questions until they cannot come up with a reasonable answer, then giving them a withering stare. He expects his staff to keep his own punishing 14-hour-a-day, six-day workweek. Building staff morale seems to be for sissies. Says another former aide: "You don't go to his house to have Thanksgiving dinner or watch football on television."

In contrast, Bush has solicited and taken advice from virtually the same team for seven years. He stays in touch with most of the politicos he's met and worked with. Unlike many politicians, Bush actually cultivates close personal friendships. He spends much time writing notes and making phone calls. He is, in a word, nice.

Dole's family seems to be an adjunct to his driving ambition. He left his first wife one day without any explanation. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hanford, a Democrat turned Republican from North Carolina who was serving as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, seems more like a merger. He is curiously distant from his only child Robin, a daughter from his first marriage; when he arrives at a podium, he will give his wife a kiss and his daughter a handshake. Dole and his second wife, who have no children, live in his former bachelor apartment at the Watergate. They rarely have time for dinner together, and when they do it tends to be a microwaved frozen meal.

The tightly knit Bush family, on the other hand, is clearly a source of joy and strength to the Vice President. When the three generations gather at their summer home in Maine, they spill off the veranda like an all-American tableau. Barbara Bush, mother of five, grandmother of ten, helpmate of 43 years, has the expectant look of a First Lady in training, holding the Nancy Reagan gaze before there was a Nancy Reagan gaze.

The only question that seemed to stump Dole on a recent Sunday talk show was what he did in his spare time. The Senator finally listed reading newspapers and magazines, and watching TV news shows. Almost as an afterthought, he added having dinner with his wife. When the Doles travel to their Florida apartment, they socialize little and participate in few activities other than tanning by themselves. When Bush and his wife go to Florida to visit their son, they see old friends and political leaders. Bush likes to pursue his hobbies, which tend to be of the upper-class sort, such as sailing boats and fishing with flies.

Dole charges, with some justification, that Bush tries to look decisive but that in his years as Vice President he has made only one real decision: to support Reagan on every issue. Dole, on the other hand, has been a forceful and decisive legislative activist, taking risks when necessary but also knowing when to compromise.

Dole's main challenge now, as it has been for years, is to keep his dark side under control. Aides joke about his demeanor. Playing off Doonesbury's conceit that George Bush has an invisible "evil twin" Skippy, Dole staffers joke that their candidate has an invisible "happy" twin. Even after Dole knew he had won Iowa, he was slow to celebrate. When he finally accepted his victory, breaking into a genuine smile, Iowa voters must have got a special lift, having made this sad man happy for a moment. Before the week was out, the happy twin had again disappeared.

Speaking at the University of New Hampshire, Dole humiliated a student who was asking him about South African sanctions. There's also little sign that Dole can be gracious in defeat. As he sat watching those red-white-and-blue hats piling up on the NBC delegate tote board last Tuesday night, he could not resist snapping at the Vice President for "lying."

Bush faces a far different challenge: overcoming the impression that he has never been truly tested, that he knows little about the earthy struggles of daily living and that he has been sheltered from life's hard knocks. Where Dole projects a brooding quality, Bush sometimes exudes a disconcerting shallowness. He is almost stunningly incapable of expressing himself emotionally. Walking through Auschwitz last fall, he made jarring comments like "Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?"

But Bush's problem seems to be less a lack of feeling than a well-bred inability to effectively express it. In the latest version of his stump speech, Bush says his failure to articulate his emotions does not mean he lacks deep passion. When it comes to family and friends, Bush's loyalties run deep. But in a broader sense his passions do seem to lack resonance, partly because his life has been so soft compared with Dole's.

The campaign is not likely to become any less intense. For Dole at 64 and Bush at 63, this may be the last chance to run for the office they so desperately want. Having overcome all the adversities life has thrown at him, Dole sees the presidency as one more challenge to conquer so as to make the pain go away. Bush, for his part, sees a President every time he looks in the mirror, and has ever since he was a schoolboy.

Campaigns, according to the civics texts and good-government groups, are supposed to be about issues and ideas, ideology and vision. Focusing on personality and manner is trivial. Yet this year, the fight for the Republican nomination involves something far more important than artificial differences on oil-import fees or taxes. It is a struggle between styles and temperaments that go to the heart of the kind of President each would be.

With reporting by David Beckwith and Alessandra Stanley/Manchester