Nixon Had Dole Ousted As Gop Chair Nixon Documents Relate Struggle With Dismissal

Getting rid of Bob Dole isn’t easy, according to records from the Nixon White House that were made public Thursday.

President Richard M. Nixon orchestrated Dole’s dismissal as chairman of the Republican National Comittee after the 1972 elections, but the senator from Kansas did not depart without a struggle, according to the records. They were among some 28,000 documents released at the National Archives after years of wrangling with Nixon’s representatives and review by a special board of archivists.

Dole believed at the time, according to one biographer, that Nixon still liked him and that he was simply the victim of a “spineless few” in the White House who were out to get him.

It was Nixon, however, who ordered his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to “have some others put the heat on” Dole and make him step down.

“Have M (attorney General John N. Mitchell) build the fire so we don’t have to take the heat,” Haldeman’s handwritten notes quote Nixon as telling him Nov. 19, 1972. “(S)tir up some people in key states.”

Nixon won re-election by a landslide that November, but the congressional results were far from encouraging for the GOP.

Nixon told Haldeman there was “need for full-time paid organizer for RNC.” As a senator, Dole would soon be preoccupied with his own re-election.

Nixon had a successor in mind, too, telling Haldeman the next day, Nov. 20, that he wanted then-ambassador to the United Nations George Bush to head the party and instructing Haldeman to “talk to Mitchell” about it. Bush resisted. In a note later that day, Nixon observed that “George Bush would be gr(ea)t - but won’t take it.” The president instructed Haldeman to “listen to Dole & his plans & intentions.”

Other documents that might shed light on Dole’s thorny relations with the White House and his dismissal as Republican national chairman have been sent back to the Nixon estate under rules keeping “private and political” as well as “private and personal” papers out of the public record. Other papers have been withheld on grounds that disclosure would constitute an “invasion of privacy.” Of the 42,191 documents Nixon sought to keep from being made public in 1987, some 14,000 remain secret.

As a result, the best glimpses of Dole’s 1972 crisis appear to be in Haldeman’s notes. Nixon said on Nov. 21 that he wanted Dole to be told plainly to step down, apparently by Mitchell.

Well into December, to Nixon’s “great surprise,” Dole was still resisting. “Dole taking bad bounce - turned 180 degrees,” the president said Dec. 7. He told Haldeman to call House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., about “Dole prob(lem)” and see what Ford would do.

By Dec. 11, the matter was settled. Dole announced his resignation, and Nixon named Bush his successor.