BOB DOLE: FACING THE AGE ISSUE

(4 of 7)

For his part, Dole has tried to allay conservatives' doubts about his convictions with lunges this spring to the right on gun control and his attack on Hollywood. He reminds the fervent budget cutters that back in 1985 he engineered the only across-the-board cut of federal programs (including a freeze on Social Security) that the Senate has ever passed-only to be undercut by Ronald Reagan. Last week Dole tried to push through one of his pet projects: easing regulations on business, a measure that is designed to appeal to conservative hard-liners. But when it comes to meat inspections and water-quality standards, his party is on the wrong side in the polls, and Democrats had the votes to force Dole into setting the bill aside.

The fate of that reform bill revealed the danger of running the Senate and running for President at the same time. Dole's dual role is both enviable and impossible: he can place himself right in the middle of any issue he wants to address, demonstrating wisdom and leadership while denying his rivals the chance to advance their campaigns from the Senate floor. But he also has more to lose; his tough regulatory bill was a hit with conservative New Hampshire voters, but not with enough moderate Senators to prevent the embarrassing defeat. A watered-down version might have passed but would have unleashed New Hampshire editorial writers who call him "Bob Cut-a-Deal Dole."

It was in the midst of those exhausting battles last week that his New York ally Senator Al D'Amato pulled Dole aside and asked him the question that's on the mind of his friends and enemies alike: "Are you taking it easy? Are you taking care of yourself?"

The concern was natural. Dole has a grueling job even without the monstrous demands of a national campaign, demands he knows well from bitter experience. After he lost to Bush in 1988, Dole figured his chances at the White House were shot. As a loyal Republican, he couldn't imagine challenging a sitting President in the 1992 primaries. Then came the diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1991; he underwent surgery in December to have his prostate gland removed. Finally, Clinton's victory in 1992 seemed to herald a Democratic rebirth that would leave Dole sniping from the sidelines in his position of Senate minority leader.

But as Clinton's fortunes fell, Dole reviewed his position one more time. He sought advice from his old mentor Richard Nixon the year before Nixon died. Nixon gave Dole hope of turning his age into an advantage. "Your critics," Nixon wrote, "will try to focus on the age issue. However, after four years of Clinton and his baby boomers, age may not prove to be a liability ... Most important, you have not lost any of your mental sharpness. Looking back over the years, I vividly recall that De Gaulle, Adenauer, Yoshida and Zhou Enlai were all in top form mentally in their 70s."