THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 28, 1996 TAG: 9610250034
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: ANN SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: 75 lines
Tie your writing hand behind your back and wear a glove on your other hand.
Now, go about your ``normal'' life.
This is what Robert Joseph Dole instructed his biographer Jake Thompson to do for 24 hours. For this is how the former Kansas senator lives every day. Virtually without arms, in a constant state of ``differentness.''
Differentness can give rise to innovation and creativity, ideas undreamed of in a state of commonness or conformity. An appreciation of differentness leads to empathy, compassion, a broader perspective of humanity.
But, sadly, in this presidential campaign, Dole's ``differentness'' became a liability. An embarrassment. It shouldn't have.
True, the GOP candidate himself and his image ``handlers'' are largely to blame, but so is the American public. We want our politicians packaged in familiar paper, and we don't want to do much unwrapping.
``Unwrapping'' is not Bob Dole's strength.
Dole was a strapping 6-foot-2, 194-pound jock on April 14, 1945, when a shell ripped through his right shoulder and fractured his neck and spine. Face down on the Italian battlefield, he thought his arms had been shot out of their sockets. The Army sent the 21-year-old 2nd lieutenant home in a plaster cast, boxed like furniture.
Dole's World War II injury and his 39-month hospital rehabilitation are known to most people. He has a useless right arm, 2 1/2 inches shorter than the left, and sensation in only 1 1/2 fingers on his ``good'' left hand. He also lost a kidney.
But few people, it seems to me, perceive the injury's significance beyond the ``war hero'' honor it bestowed. It not only shattered Dole's life goals - he had wanted to be a doctor - but redefined his cognition, the process by which he experiences the world and communicates in return. The process by which he is who he is.
Dole, in short, remade himself.
He went through a second infancy, learning again how to walk, eat, bathe, use the toilet, all the basics of self-sufficiency; but even more important, he taught himself how to study, think and learn, without the vital aid of writing.
The result: short, punctuated thoughts and short, punctuated speech. This may have been his tendency before his debilitating injury - he didn't become much of a reader until his convalescence; his parents were doers, not talkers - but it became his necessity after. And his public-relations curse.
Unable to do more with his mostly numb left hand than scrawl short messages, Dole learned to listen attentively and to economize words. To pare down, not expand outward.
In law school, he tape-recorded the lectures and each night painstakingly transcribed them. While classmates filled exam books with pages upon pages of grandiose reasoning, Dole encapsulated complex legal issues in outlines.
This intense focusing helped him later in the Senate to keep five meetings going simultaneously, without missing a beat.
He didn't need notes. He retained all that he heard. And he silently calculated.
Yet, as disciplined as Dole's mind must be, he couldn't satisfactorily answer questions during the two national ``debates'' with President Clinton. He nervously short-circuited ideas, haphazardly associated thoughts, rigidly and repetitively stuck to the dull ``message'' his handlers had spoonfed him.
As he often does, Dole spoke in shorthand, a kind of code. When he wanted to talk about ethics he said: Files. Bouncer. Indonesia. These remarks are cryptic when the listener doesn't know the code. Next to the glib, charismatic Clinton, Dole seemed inarticulate. Confused.
Painfully different.
During this campaign, I would have liked to have seen Dole in his element. I would have liked to have felt not Dole's pain but his survival. His intelligence.
With my writing hand tied behind my back and my other hand gloved, I'm an anxious, fitful mess, cut off from my identity, my voice.
Different. MEMO: Ms. Sjoerdsma, an attorney, is an editorial columnist and book
editor for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB