Word: dole
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When the job of Secretary of Transportation opened up in the Reagan Administration, she lobbied for the position and got it. It didn't hurt that the Reagan Administration had recently been assailed for its lack of senior women. As Secretary of Transportation, Dole is credited with two significant advances in auto safety--a brake light nicknamed the Dole light, and air bags--as well as a savvy p.r. campaign in which she billed herself as the "Safety Secretary." (She once greeted employees in the parking lot with a stop sign so that she could check if they were wearing...
...says she had no epiphany, no revelation, but found solace in a theological solution. The restless, driven heart can find peace only when focused on God, and that is what Elizabeth Dole attempted to do. Now, on the campaign trail, she travels with a turquoise leather Bible that she tries to devote 30 minutes every day to reading. Says Robin Dole, the Senator's only daughter, who has been a regular on the road: "God is the most important thing in her life...
...Dole cites her maternal grandmother as her spiritual archetype. "Grandmother Cathey read us Bible stories," recalls Liddy's brother John. "I would go around the block to avoid them, but Liddy ate them up." Her grandmother practiced what she preached. When her son was killed, she used the insurance money to fund a new wing for a mission hospital in Pakistan...
What triggered Dole's spiritual rebirth remains shrouded. In an interview, her sister-in-law Bunny, who is married to John, is asked whether it had anything to do with her not having children. Bunny, who is religious and also childless, says softly, "We've discussed this off and on. She loves children, but she took not having them in stride. She never breathed the idea that God had another plan." Bunny pauses before finishing her thought, adding, "But women's arms are made to hold children. There's always an emptiness." When asked the same question about her daughter...
Whatever its provenance, Elizabeth Dole's Christian commitment also yields political dividends. Charles Black, former chairman of Senator Phil Gramm's presidential campaign, affirms that "she has tremendous appeal to Christian conservatives and people in the evangelical movement because they know she's active in the movement." They may have doubts about Bob Dole, who sometimes seems to regard God as a junior Senator from an unimportant state, but they don't harbor any about his wife. Even within the Dole household, politics and religion have not mixed perfectly. When a new minister joined the Foundry Methodist Church...