Dole-ing It Out

Robert Dole of Kansas, was not even Richard Nixon's second choice for G.O.P. national chairman. But he ingratiated himself with the White House as an effective sniper, and since his appointment this January, the upstart Senate freshman has earned a reputation as the Administration's No. 1 gunslinger. In a season when the President has chosen to lower his partisan profile, Dole has stepped into the breach as party defender and cheerleader, spraying shot and zapping Democrats with Agnewesque zeal.

To be sure, the Vice President, currently in the statesman-like pose of revenue-sharing salesman, has not completely abandoned polemics (see THE PRESS). Dole insists that he is not trying to replace Agnew as what he calls "the No. 1 chopper and gut cutter." Yet in a sense, he is the new Agnew.

When Dole, 47, succeeded the hulking, amiable Rogers Morton it was, according to a White House aide, a little like a hungry Doberman pinscher taking over from a St. Bernard. Dole is articulate and often abrasive, a four-term former Congressman who suffered a World War II wound that has made his right arm virtually useless. He has been the President's most vigorous and consistent champion in the Senate since he moved up to that body in 1969. With the political woods now full of potential Democratic contenders, he has had no trouble finding new targets.

Jugular. Dole is fiercely ambitious and aggressive. His instinct for the jugular and the groin is well matched by his top aide and "communications director," Franklyn ("Lyn") Nofziger, a former Ronald Reagan secretary who is currently on loan from the White House. Should Dole miss a target, Nofziger, also the "editorial overseer" of the party newsletter Monday, is there to pot it. Together they have breathed new life into the party apparatus.

Dole averages a speech a day. The subjects of his partisan assaults in the Senate and from rostrums around the U.S. have run the gamut of Administration hobgoblins:

VIET NAM. "The same political party that brought American combat troops into a shooting war in Asia is now trying to tie the hands of the President who has undone the wreckage they left behind them in 1969."

THE ECONOMY. "Those whose guns-and-butter economics led us into an inflation that has robbed the purse of every person in the nation continue to call for the kinds of programs and spending that will only refuel that inflation."

SENATOR EDMUND MUSKIE. "A political Rip Van Winkle who awoke from his long political nap and started attacking President Nixon."

RAMSEY CLARK. "A left-leaning marshmallow" whose defense of the Rev. Philip Berrigan exemplifies "what is wrong with the Democratic Party today."

Br'er Rabbit. That last charge embarrassed even Dole. Still, under Dole's approving eye, Nofziger continues to zero in on such Democratic weak points as Muskie's temper tantrums and Hubert Humphrey's vice presidential stance on the war. In a recent "analytical piece" on opposition candidates, for example, Monday damned Humphrey for being "as wrapped up in the blunders and errors of the Viet Nam War in the '60s as Br'er Rabbit was in the Tar-Baby."

For all his acerbity, Dole has a first-rate sense of humor, even about himself. He likes to tell a yarn about how he came to be party chairman: "I was going through the White House one morning with the rest of the tourists, and the President spotted me. He said: 'Aren't you from Russell, Kansas?' I said I was, and he told me he'd always wanted a national chairman from Russell, Kansas. That's how I got it."

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