THE HARD WAY

By Richard Stengel

It was time to go and he knew it. Not just because he was faltering in the polls (although that played no small part), not only because he was getting trampled in the battle of Pennsylvania Avenue (a skirmish in which he seemed to shrink rather than grow), but because every morning when Bob Dole walked into the well of his beloved Senate, he could lose himself in the mechanics of legislation, forget for a while that he had a greater task remaining before him than cobbling together a Republican majority for a cloture vote.

Bob Dole had to quit as both majority leader and Senator in order to make the presidential race real to himself. Only by surrendering something he loved could he prove to himself--and to the voters and to Beltway know-it-alls--that there was something he valued even more. Only by giving up everything could he show he was willing to risk everything. As the song goes, now he had nothing left to lose.

In a low-ceilinged room in the Hart Senate Office Building that was as dreary as his speech was soaring, Bob Dole, his prairie voice thick with emotion, said, "I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people and nowhere to go but the White House or home." In front of his Senate colleagues, with whom he is far more comfortable trading quips about subcommittee chairmen, he sounded positively Reaganesque. While his colleagues looked on in sadness, Dole announced that he would resign on or before June 11, "and I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man." He said he would do it his way, the hard way. "For little has come to me except in the hard way, which is good because we have a hard task ahead of us."

Official Washington was caught off guard by the announcement, not only because few had thought the crusty majority leader would give up the perquisites of office but also because even fewer had believed that Dole had such a bold stroke in him. They were surprised that Bob Dole could surprise them. The announcement came just as various Republican muckamucks around town were talking about doing something radical, but none counseled anything quite as radical as what Dole himself concocted. In the past when Dole campaigns flagged, he fired staff members. This time he fired himself. Noted former Senate aide Lawrence O'Donnell: "Psychologically, Dole could never take walking out on the Senate floor as a mere Senator. He had it in him to resign but not to take a demotion."

In the latest TIME/CNN poll, conducted in the 48 hours after Dole's speech, the soon-to-be-ex-Senator's favorability rating jumped from 43% to 51%. But while a majority of Americans approved of Dole's action, more than three-quarters of registered voters said it would not affect how they would vote in November. Yes, they cotton to the old campaigner a little more now, but still not enough to vote for him. Bill Clinton held a formidable 22% lead over Senator Dole, a margin that suggests Dole was not exaggerating when he said he had a hard task ahead.

Dole's reconfiguration of that task began about four weeks ago while he was refurbishing his tan at his Florida retreat. It was there he resolved that he needed to shake things up dramatically, perhaps make a clean break with the Senate. When he returned to Washington, he discussed in a vague way the pros and cons of such a move with campaign chief Scott Reed. Then on April 23, the day of a desultory telephone conference call to the G.O.P.'s "Team 100" fund raisers, Dole sat in the sun outside his office with novelist and Wall Street Journal contributor Mark Helprin, whose writings on Dole had made an impression on the Senator. Helprin broached the idea of Dole's quitting everything--and realized that Dole was a step ahead of him. "When I raised it," Helprin recalls, "he was looking out over the Mall. His eye seemed to be fixed on a vector between the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian." As though talking to himself, Dole said, "If I'm going to run for President, I'm going to have to run for President."

The following day Dole conferred with Reed in his Senate office and without preamble said he was going to resign. From the majority leadership? Reed asked. No, the whole shooting match, Dole replied. Reed recognized the "transformational" power of such a move and encouraged Dole to go with his own instinct. As a candidate unencumbered by office, he could follow his own version of triangulation, distancing himself from Newt and attacking Beltway Bill.

That same day Helprin was meeting with John Buckley, the new communications adviser, at Union Station, when Buckley got a message for Helprin to phone Dole. Helprin called from a pay phone, and Dole asked him to take a shot at writing a resignation statement. For the next few weeks the two talked every couple of days, with Helprin faxing Dole versions of the speech. Helprin came up with the allusion to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology whose strength was replenished when he touched ground. Dole liked that. But there was much he didn't like. They went over the speech word by word at least a dozen times. Editor Dole, Helprin says, had "the compression of age."

But matters slowed after that. One brake on the strategy was Elizabeth Dole. At the outset she was concerned that her husband would be diminished without the mantle of majority leader and that he would be forsaking the limelight of the Senate for the uncertainties of private citizenship. But she was coaxed onto the bandwagon.

By early May, however, party leaders were losing patience with Dole, who seemed to be getting trapped in a legislative spider web of the Democrats' making. Internal Republican polls showed independents tilting dangerously Democratic (only 28% of registered independents said they backed Dole in a recent TIME/CNN poll). Even voters who were disappointed with Clinton were not moving to Dole but shifting to undecided. In a series of private meetings and at various dinners, Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour declared that Dole had to focus on the presidential campaign "to the exclusion of all else," a phrase he repeated so often it became a mantra.

On May 4, Dole took Barbour aside and told him he was going to resign both jobs. Barbour was as relieved as he was astounded. Reed pushed Dole to make the announcement on May 7, but Senate business intervened. Instead, May 15 was chosen. Dole, Reed and Helprin all agreed that the speech should be short and poignant. Dole discussed with them whether to include a section contrasting himself with Clinton, but then demurred. Although he was resigning, he had come to praise, not to bury.

The morning after the speech, Dole opened the Senate (old habits die hard), then lit out for the territory--first stop, Chicago. He boarded the plane in his Senate uniform, dark suit, starched white shirt, sober tie, and then--Honey, get me wardrobe!--emerged in Chicago in khakis and open-neck shirt. "Quick-change artist," Dole quipped. Clothes make the new man. It was Bob Dole, Unplugged and Untied.

In Chicago, Dole gave a reprise of his "what I did for love" speech (choking up at the same points) in front of an audience of 500. But it was not just an elegy; he also attacked Bill Clinton as "the champion of the Great Society status quo" and defended the 104th Congress--"We kept our promises. He vetoed them." The event was one of the last pure Dole campaign events paid for with campaign funds. Dole is down to his last $200,000, and from here on out, he will go almost exclusively to state and local fund raisers so that his travel tab can be picked up by those groups. Dole will piggyback on the R.N.C. wherever he can and worry about spending violations when the campaign is over.

Bill Clinton hadn't believed Dole was resigning until he heard it himself from Dole by phone. The official White House response was muted, gracious; Clinton advisers treated it as a bittersweet retirement party for a distinguished elder statesman. Behind the scenes, however, they cast it as an act of desperation by the loser in the battle for Pennsylvania Avenue. "It affects our plans not a whit," says senior adviser George Stephanopoulos. They know Dole will get a bump in the polls and a push from the press. "The press will be determined to give Dole this moment to tighten up the race," press secretary Mike McCurry says slyly, "because they're so pathetically bored right now."

Voters don't cast ballots because of a single speech--or a change in wardrobe--but a speech can make people sit up and take notice, give a guy another chance. That's what Dole's speech accomplished, at least with fellow Republicans and Washington pundits who were already planning their post-November career moves. But when voters give Dole another look, they must see more than a quick-change artist. Dole's defining moment will instantly become a nonevent if he does not live up to his rhetoric. "Once we had a 73-year-old majority leader with no message. It won't work if in a month we just have a 73-year-old ex-majority leader with no message," says Republican strategist Bill Kristol. His message cannot be: I've quit the job I really love, so give me a better one.

Dole's transformation represents the third "new" Bob Dole of this campaign year. After New Hampshire there was Battlin' Bob Dole fighting for the soul of the Republican Party. Of late there has been Bob Dole, a Doer not a Talker, and now we have Bob Dole, Just a Guy Without a Tie. But Bob Dole, Citizen, may be the real thing, suggests Dole biographer Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes. "His resignation," Cramer says, "puts him in touch with the younger Bob Dole, the Dole of the Russell High basketball team who would go and pat everybody on the backside when they were losing in the fourth quarter, the never-give-up guy."

It will take more than just the doffing of a tie to make voters see Bob Dole, Kansan, instead of Bob Dole, Capitol Kingpin. But there is consolation if they don't. Now that he has, as he put it so eloquently, left "behind all the trappings of power, all comfort and all security," he can ascend to what Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called the highest office in a democracy, above even that of the presidency: citizen.

--Reported by Michael Duffy, J.F.O. McAllister and Eric Pooley/Washington and John F. Dickerson with Dole

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY, J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON AND JOHN F. DICKERSON WITH DOLE