Elizabeth Dole

Elizabeth Dole with friend and mentor Virginia Knauer. Mrs. Knauer ran the White House Office of Consumer Affairs in the Nixon Administration, where Dole served as a deputy assistant to the President.

Dole, who had campaigned for the Kennedy–Johnson presidential ticket in 1960,[10] began working in 1967 as a staff assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.[11]

When many Democrats left the White House following Richard Nixon's replacement of Johnson, Dole did not. From 1969 to 1973, she served as deputy assistant to President Nixon for consumer affairs.[12] In 1973, Nixon appointed her to a seven-year term on the Federal Trade Commission.[8]

Dole first met her future husband, Bob Dole, in the spring of 1972 at a meeting arranged by her boss and mentor, Virginia Knauer.[13] The couple dated, and she became his second wife on December 6, 1975, in the Washington National Cathedral.[14] They have no children, though she is stepmother to Bob's adult daughter Robin from his first marriage of 24 years, which ended in divorce in 1972. She attended individually, and later with her husband, the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., before joining the National Presbyterian Church in 1996.[14] Articles at the time reported that the Doles stopped attending Foundry in 1995, finding the pastor at the time, J. Philip Wogaman, too liberal.[15]

In 1975, she became a Republican. She took a leave from her post as a Federal Trade Commissioner for several months in 1976 to campaign for her husband for vice president of the United States, when he ran on the Republican ticket with Gerald Ford.[8] She later resigned from the FTC in 1979, to campaign for her husband's 1980 presidential run. During the 1970s, Dole was a self-described member of the Women's Liberation Movement and helped reform laws to ensure equal credit for women. She was also a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution.[16]

She served as director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, from 1981 to 1983 and as United States Secretary of Transportation from 1983 to 1987 under Ronald Reagan. She was also appointed by Reagan to chair task forces that sought to reform federal and state laws to ensure equal rights for women. She was the first woman appointed Secretary of Transportation. In this role, she was the first woman to have served as the head of a branch of the United States Military, as the United States Coast Guard was under the Department of Transportation at the time. Dole's appointment was "particularly irritating" to conservative activists, since "though at least nominally opposed to abortion, [she was] viewed by the right as [an] aggressive feminist."[17]

The official Department of Labor portrait of Elizabeth Dole

First Lady Nancy Reagan greets Dole and other Senate wives in the Blue Room. 1988

During her tenure, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, mandated the installation of a center high-mounted stop lamp on new cars; these are sometimes called "Liddy Lights" in her recognition.[18] She worked with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) to pass laws withholding federal highway funding from any state that had a drinking age below twenty-one. The state government of South Dakota opposed the drinking age law and sued Dole in the case South Dakota v. Dole, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Dole. She oversaw the privatization of the national freight railroad, CONRAIL. She initiated random drug testing within the Department of Transportation. By 1984 Dole had stopped trying to get Reagan to support the Equal Rights Amendment. She was quoted in the press that year saying, "He's not going to change on that."[19]

Dole served as United States Secretary of Labor from 1989 to 1990 under George H. W. Bush; she is the first woman to serve in two different Cabinet positions in the administrations of two presidents. Her tenure as both U.S. Transportation Secretary and U.S. Labor Secretary focused heavily on improving public safety and workplace safety and health.

In late December 2001, Dole shifted her official residency from the Doles' condominium in the Watergate complex to her mother's home in Salisbury to seek election to the U.S. Senate.[27][28] The seat was made available by the retirement of Republican Jesse Helms. Although Dole had not lived regularly in North Carolina since 1959 and had been a resident of the Washington area for most of the time since the mid-1960s, the state and national Republican establishment quickly cleared the field for her. She handily won the Republican primary with 80 percent of the vote over a lesser-known candidate, Dr. Ada Fisher. In the November general election, she defeated her Democratic opponent Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton, by an eight-point margin.

Her election to the Senate marked the first time a spouse of a former Senator was elected to the Senate from a different state from that of her spouse. (Although Kansas Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum married former Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, the marriage occurred after Kassebaum and Baker both had finished their service in the Senate.) Dole was criticized by Democrats during her first Senate campaign over the fact that for over 40 years prior to her nomination, she had not lived in North Carolina.

In November 2004, following Republican gains in the United States Senate, Dole narrowly edged out Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota for the post of chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She is the first woman to become chair of the NRSC. During her election cycle as chairperson, her Democratic Party counterpart, Senator Chuck Schumer raised significantly more money, and experienced more success in recruiting candidates. In the November election, Dole's party lost six U.S. Senate seats to the Democrats, thus losing control of the U.S. Senate. Dole was replaced as NRSC chair by Senator John Ensign of Nevada following the 2006 midterms.

Dole was initially a heavy favorite for re-election, especially after several potential top-tier challengers such as Congressman Brad Miller, Governor Mike Easley and former Governor Jim Hunt all declined to compete against Dole.[29][30] Ultimately, Kay Hagan, a state senator from Greensboro, won the Democratic primary election against Jim Neal and became Dole's general election opponent. Reports late in the campaign suggested that Dole suffered from Barack Obama's decision to aggressively contest North Carolina in the presidential election,[31] while Hagan received substantial support from independent 527 groups lobbying/advertising against Dole,[30] as well as the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which spent more money in North Carolina than in any other state during the 2008 election season.[30] Dole undertook an eight-day "ElizaBus" tour of the state in the days leading up to election day.[32]

In late October, Dole released a controversial television ad attacking Hagan for reportedly taking donations from individuals involved in the Godless Americans PAC, a group that advocates for the rights of people who do not believe in God. The ad also included a female voice saying, "There is no god." Hagan's campaign said the ad sought to put inflammatory words in their candidate's mouth. Hagan, who was a member of the Presbyterian Church and a former Sunday school teacher,[33] condemned the ad as "fabricated and pathetic," and, according to Hagan's campaign website, a cease-and-desist letter was "hand-delivered to Dole's Raleigh office and to her home at the Watergate in Washington, DC."[34] Hagan also filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court accusing Dole of defamation and libel.[35][36] The ad met significant criticism from some members of the public as well as national media outlets. After the first ad Hagan received over 3,600 contributions, including major donors as well as individual support from a range of persons who believed in the right to participate in civil government free of religious orthodoxy requirements. Following the second ad Hagan's lead doubled according to some polls.[37]

In the 2008 election, Dole lost by a wider-than-expected margin, taking 44 percent of the vote to Hagan's 53 percent – the largest margin of defeat for an incumbent Senator in the 2008 cycle. It has been speculated that the outcry over the "Godless" ad contributed to Dole's loss.[38] Hagan trounced Dole in the state's five largest counties – Mecklenburg, Wake, Guilford, Forsyth and Durham. Hagan also dominated most of the eastern portion of the state, which had been the backbone of Helms' past Senate victories. While Dole dominated the Charlotte suburbs and most of the heavily Republican Foothills region, it was not enough to save her seat.

Dole's voting record was somewhat more conservative than that of her husband, though slightly less conservative than that of Helms. She has a lifetime rating of 92 from the American Conservative Union.

Dole worked with other senators such as Chuck Hagel to draft and attempt to pass legislation reforming housing financing regulation; the bill did not go up for a vote.[39]

In September 2008, Dole joined the Gang of 20, a bipartisan group working towards comprehensive energy reform, which pushed for a bill that would encourage state-by-state decisions on offshore drilling and authorize billions of dollars for conservation and alternative energy.[40]

As a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Dole is credited with helping to prevent any closures of North Carolina military bases despite threats from the Department of Defense.[41] In 2007, she sponsored legislation which would have granted federal recognition of a North Carolina Native American tribe, the Lumbee based in Robeson County.[42]

Dole was a member of the following U.S. Senate committees:

• U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services
  • Emerging Threats and Capabilities
  • Personnel
  • Readiness and Management Support
• U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
  • Financial Institutions
  • Housing, Transportation, and Community Development
  • Security and International Trade and Finance
• U.S. Senate Select Committee on Aging
• U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

• Dole, Bob & Elizabeth with Richard Norton Smith (1988). The Doles: Unlimited Partners. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60202-0. The book was first released during Bob Dole's presidential candidacy.[50] (re-release) Unlimited Partners: Our American Story. Simon & Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0-684-83401-4
• Dole, Elizabeth (2004) Hearts Touched by Fire: My 500 Most Inspirational Quotations. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-1428-X

• Lucas, Eileen (1998) Elizabeth Dole: A Leader In Washington. The Millbrook Press. ISBN 0-7613-0203-4
• Wertheimer, Molly Meijer and Gutgold, Nichola D. (2004) Elizabeth Hanford Dole: Speaking from the Heart. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0-275-98378-1 online