All About the Story by Leonard Downie Jr

Author:Leonard Downie Jr [DOWNIE, JR., LEONARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

I HAD A MUCH MORE DIFFICULT DECISION TO MAKE AFTER REPUBLICAN U.S. senator Bob Dole of Kansas was nominated to challenge President Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential election. By that time, it was becoming routine for the Post to examine both the private and public lives of candidates for high public office, especially the presidency.

Over the past several years, we and much of the rest of the news media had been investigating reports that Clinton had engaged in extramarital sex with women besides Gennifer Flowers while he was governor of Arkansas, sometimes with the assistance of his state troopers. Hanging over the 1996 campaign was the question of whether Dole would make this an issue. His Republican supporters had portrayed Dole, a war hero and respected senator, as an honorable alternative to Clinton. But Dole himself had steered clear of Clinton’s private life.

In August, as part of our biographical profiling of Dole, we published a long front-page story by reporter Kevin Merida about Dole’s unusual 1972 divorce from his first wife, Phyllis Holden. He had married Holden, an occupational therapist, in 1948, after she helped him cope with a permanent disability from World War II combat wounds that severely limited his use of his arms and made handwriting difficult. Holden helped Dole get through college and law school by writing notes and exams for him from his dictation.

Merida reported that Dole, as a congressman and then as a senator beginning in 1969, had worked increasingly long hours and spent more and more time away from his family home in suburban Virginia. Dole completely surprised Holden in 1971 by telling her that he wanted a divorce. He began sleeping in the basement when he was home.

With nominal participation from a bewildered Holden, the divorce was rushed through a Kansas court by lawyers and judges who were friends of Dole. In 1975, Dole married Elizabeth Hanford, a federal trade commissioner who would later become a cabinet member and a U.S. senator herself. As we later wrote in our 2002 book, The News About the News, my managing editor, Robert Kaiser, and I decided that how Dole handled his first marriage and the divorce, leaving both his wife and daughter, Robin, in the dark, was revealing about the character of a man seeking to become president.

What we did not expect was that Merida would be contacted by several readers who told him that he missed part of the story. They said Dole had had an affair with a Washington woman for several years before asking his wife for a divorce.

Bob Woodward and another Post reporter, Charles Babcock, interviewed the woman in question, who eventually agreed to confirm her relationship with Dole. She showed the reporters datebooks that noted when she and Dole got together, mostly at her apartment, in 1968. Woodward and Babcock found friends and neighbors who remembered Dole coming to visit her. After a few more meetings during the next two years and only telephone contact in 1971 and 1972, the woman said she ended the relationship when Dole’s divorce did not bring them together.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.