Word: dole
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Though she has been in public life for nearly three decades, Elizabeth Dole remains a kind of political cameo, not a full-fledged portrait. Few people know her well. She has no children. No house. No hobbies. Her 95-year-old mother is her best friend. She has little interest in cultural events. None in entertaining. "We don't have time to have little dinner parties," she says. Or the space. The Doles still live in the four-room, first-floor bachelor pad at the charm-free Watergate complex that he first moved into after his divorce. Decorating? Mrs. Dole...
Elizabeth Dole knew how to network before it became a verb. In her first job after Harvard, she joined the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and buttonholed its Secretary in the halls to ask ingratiating questions about Washington. Next she set her sights on consumer advocacy, lobbying James Goddard, head of HEW's Food and Drug Administration, to put her on President Lyndon Johnson's Committee on Consumer Affairs. In that role, she helped the committee's chairwoman, consumer advocate Betty Furness, write new laws demanding truth in packaging...
When Richard Nixon took office, Dole stayed on at the consumer office, which had moved to the White House, though the new President's policies were oriented more toward manufacturers than consumers. The enterprising Dole visited the home of the new director, Virginia Knauer, and gave her a detailed, unsolicited briefing on the department. Knauer made Dole deputy director of the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, where she looked for common ground between consumers and manufacturers, and helped persuade supermarkets to date products for freshness...
Knauer took a shine to her unmarried but very eligible deputy, and in the spring of 1972 arranged for Elizabeth to meet a certain recently divorced Senator from Kansas. In her memoir, Mrs. Dole remarks that she found the Senator "awfully attractive" but he didn't call her and she wouldn't call him. She ran into Dole again at the 1972 Republican Convention, and this time he did call. Their romance progressed with all the speed of an omnibus budget resolution wending its way through committee, and they were married in 1975. Elizabeth finally had her trophy husband...
...Doles have always endured good-natured ribbing about the antitrust implications of so powerful a merger as theirs, but those barbs seemed real when Dole was named Gerald Ford's running mate in 1976. Mrs. Dole took a leave from the ftc to campaign for him, and returned to her job after Carter's victory. She resigned in 1979 when her husband ran for the 1980 election, and campaigned vigorously for Ronald Reagan after Dole dropped out. Some feminists have criticized her for suspending her own career to help her husband's. Her response: "What we women fought...