Sailing Against the Wind

By Alessandra Stanley/Washington

Like Captain Ahab, Bob Dole seems driven by his quest

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it . . . I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time . . . ?"

-- Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Robert Dole would not give in. Looking ghastly, his eyes glittering behind a sallow mask of TV makeup, Dole began a last-ditch 30-min. appeal to the voters of Illinois. Minutes into the live broadcast, the screen went black. Like Captain Ahab, who laughed when a freak storm reversed his ship's compass, Dole remained eerily serene. Adversity and bad luck had become so familiar they were almost old friends. He kept on going.

Dole's personality has always been the real problem underlying his candidacy; his complex presence overshadowed his policies and views on issues. Even before George Bush trounced him last week, Dole's campaign had become a psychodrama: How far would he go in his relentless quest? In Washington, Senate colleagues delicately urged him to be "positive"; they didn't want the brilliant and witty minority leader to come off like an obsessed sea captain stalking the Great White Whale.

Dole had never been able to mask his anger: his valid arguments against Bush kept getting ensnared in personal discontent. Advisers who implored him to stop missed the point. He couldn't. On the campaign trail, he had trained himself to describe his crippling war injury so matter-of-factly that people forgot how deep a psychological scar it had left. His all-consuming political drive had been forged in hardship, pain and solitude. Fiercely independent and iron-willed, Dole really trusted only his own judgment. Not surprisingly, he failed to assemble a first-rate organization. "It's not that we're falling apart now," said a veteran last week. "It's that we were never together."

When Dole came close to carrying New Hampshire, he briefly seemed transformed. For one week, he wore the radiant, goofy smile of a young man in love. His campaign badly miscalculated, and Bush prevailed instead. Neither Dole nor his shaky organization recovered. Soon after, Dole mocked himself, joking that he had worked on his Inaugural Address instead of strategy. Along with his sense of humor, Dole regained his fatalism, resentment and mistrust: those instincts, at least, had never let him down.

Dole began teasing the press corps about David Owen, the friend who resigned after questions arose about Elizabeth Dole's blind trust. He developed a comic riff, joking that Owen was secretly dividing up his wife's trust fund with General Noriega. There was an edge: Dole was brooding that he had been forced to sacrifice his friend while even after Iran-contra broke, the Vice President had held on to staffers with alleged links to the scandal. The comparison became another haunting symbol of life's unfairness.

After the crushing Super Tuesday defeat, several senior aides prepared for a dignified withdrawal. Dole wasn't ready to quit, and he fought it furiously. "Others may be advising you," he snarled to reporters in Madison, Wis., "but they haven't been advising me." No one dared tell Dole directly to get out. He is not a man to be confronted.

Last Wednesday morning, after his defeat in Illinois, Dole returned to the Senate floor, too proud to appear vulnerable or idle. When colleagues warmly welcomed him to their fold, he snapped, "I'm not back." Serenity has never come easily to Dole. "If you're out there and you've been twisting in the wind for six or seven months and you start to smell a little," he said in Chicago, "then maybe somebody has to cut the rope."