FIRST BLOOD: HOW THE RED CROSS WOUNDED A RESUME

The scene repeats itself over and over on the campaign trail. Elizabeth Dole stands by, beaming, while her host, using talking points prepared by her staff, praises her work as president of the American Red Cross--in particular her role in leading its "most ambitious" effort ever, the "total transformation of the way the Red Cross collects, tests and distributes one half of the American blood supply."

While no one expects full disclosure on the campaign trail, there are crucial elements missing from this image. One of them is that Mrs. Dole's heroic restructuring campaign was largely forced on her by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration after its inspectors found the Red Cross to possess dangerously little control over its blood operations. Another is that the FDA became so fed up with the lack of progress in the first two years of her administration that the agency went to federal court to compel the Red Cross to clean up its act. In this juxtaposition of spin and reality lies an example of the image-burnishing skills that have helped Mrs. Dole survive jobs under six different Presidents.

Mrs. Dole took the helm of the Red Cross in February 1991, after resigning as George Bush's Labor Secretary. "I had looked at it very carefully," she recalls. "I had a couple of people go in ahead of me and look at what the challenges were going to be." Indeed, she encountered a deeply troubled organization--far more troubled, according to a source close to Mrs. Dole, than she appreciated. Since the mid 1980s, in response to the onslaught of AIDS, the FDA had begun to toughen its inspection of blood banks. In the process, its field inspectors found widespread and potentially dangerous problems with the way the Red Cross tracked blood donors and tested blood for infectious agents. In 1988, under FDA pressure, the Red Cross agreed to assert tighter control. But by the time Mrs. Dole arrived three years later, the organization had made little progress. Dr. Jeffrey McCullough, then serving a temporary stint as senior vice president for biomedical services, remembers vividly the meeting where he told Mrs. Dole that they were in the midst of a crisis. "Elizabeth," he said, "what I'm trying to tell you is we're not getting far enough and fast enough to get on top of this."

But Mrs. Dole recalls things a bit differently and casts them in a more take-charge light. She insists she fully understood the gravity of the situation. "What I recall is asking Jeff to come up with a program, because I knew before I went in that we were going to have to take very bold action. And I asked him to come up with a program we could move on very quickly."

Mrs. Dole considered several drastic options, a senior Red Cross official says, including a proposal to sever the Red Cross's historic link to the nation's blood supply by setting up the blood unit as an independent operation. Instead, Mrs. Dole announced a sweeping campaign to modernize and centralize blood operations and improve the training of blood staff, a revolutionary effort that threatened to bankrupt the blood operation--the equivalent of a $1 billion company--and alienate its outlying blood banks, accustomed to a high level of autonomy. At a time of great worry about the blood supply, the bold plan drew widespread praise; at first glance, it seemed another example of Elizabeth Dole's bureaucratic magic at work.